As the year slides along like a big hungry caterpillar, Fantastic Pixel Castle is laying out its forward-looking plans for its developing Ghost MMO in its latest developer roundtable podcast.
After about 14 minutes of preamble, the devs outline where Ghost is at the start of the year, saying that it’s at “the beginning of pre-production,” meaning that the basic foundational features are being worked on. Greg Street himself further promised that transparency for the project will continue as pre-production moves forward and that additional things will be added in, such as original models and art, environments, a continued focus on developing its randomly generated blue zones, and more content once development pipelines are set up.
A large part of the podcast discusses laying that pipeline and preparing to add things, including a talk about how to balance reused models, managing feature creep, how recent layoffs has benefited a small studio like FPC, and the job of production team members such as managing “work streams.”
From a design standpoint, the devs talk at length about loot systems in Ghost, which effectively wants to toe a line between seeing rare drops out of nowhere and making sure better gear can be earned in a more guaranteed manner. Overall it sounds like an unanswered question currently.
There’s also a point when the devs offer a self-described “elevator pitch” on the hand-crafted red zones: Street once again describes them as the most MMO-like portion of Ghost, with a design to make them a large open playground full of challenges that will require players to come together to surmount. Given examples include an objective where multiple large parties have to interact with different idols scattered throughout the map in order to summon a world boss that takes “an army of 30 to 40 players” to burn down, or a massive resource node that requires larger groups to harvest.
Finally, there’s some general talk about character progression in Ghost, with vague plans to build out story, collection, alt, and gear progression; it all sounds like it’s still in the napkin notes stage, but there was word of the first vestiges of progression systems coming in the MMO’s next playtest.
