The Ghost MMO being developed by Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street’s indie firm Fantastic Pixel Castle, or as I like to call it Big Greggy’s Fantastical Digital Playground Hyper Fighting Edition, is taking a few moments to talk about zones in a podcast. These are pretty important when you’re trying to craft a map of things for MMO players to do, but it’s the blend of crafted and randomly generated zones that is probably cause for fans to follow along.
The devs break their zone concepts into “red zones” and “blue zones” respectively: Red zones are basically the well-known crafted maps that have things like POIs, world bosses, and predictable resource spawns, and they are described as still having value in the game because there is comfort in learning a zone layout. Blue zones, meanwhile, will be where random generation is used, with the promise of dynamic content, location-specific quests or objectives, and a general move away from linear adventuring. In both cases, there are things the team is considering like how to alert players that they’re moving from a red zone to a blue zone and how character progression will work overall.
Speaking of character progression, the Q&A segment of the podcast noted some existing progression systems like those found in Final Fantasy XIV and Star Wars Galaxies as sources of inspiration. This portion also noted the potential ability for different classes in Ghost to take up similar roles in party play.
Overall it would seem as if this game is still very much in the planning stages, which makes sense since the studio named 2024 the year it would focus on prototypes, but if that knowledge doesn’t bother you and you’ve got an hour to kill, the full video podcast awaits below.
