The MMO market is infamously tough to burglarize – though Gower has fairly some pedigree and experience behind him – so I question exactly how Brighter Shores wants to stand apart and bring individuals in. Gower factors that selection continues to be important to the category, and believes that a mix of his MMO understanding and today’s innovation can produce a refined and engaging experience.
“One of the things that I’ve really focused on, again, which is totally new for me, is really thinking about how the balancing works,” he states. “Vast numbers of spreadsheets. Everything has got – it sounds very dry – but everything internally has got a sort of mathematical basis as to why it is. And you can’t tell when you’re playing, obviously, it just feels right. But every single bit of it, we’ve gone, why does this work this way? How does this user experience this? How is this not going to break the economy? A lot of things I’m aware of. For example, you can make a bit of content obsolete when you’re updating these things. We’ve sort of sat down from the get-go and gone, how can we avoid these problems that the genre typically suffers from?”
“It’s a lovely game,” he states excitedly. “I’ve been playing it a lot myself in the evening, and it’s beautifully easy to get sidetracked. And it’s fun to get sidetracked. You’re doing one thing and you set yourself a goal. I’m going to do this. And then because of the way everything’s linked together, you think, actually I’m just gonna go off and get some fish first, because it’s gonna make this other thing that bit easier. So I’ll do that. So you’re off and you start getting some fish, and you think, oh, actually, I’ve got these fish, so maybe I should just cook them here and do this thing. And before you know it, you’ve got four or five different goals all on the go at once.”
This kind of plunging goal-setting will certainly seem acquainted to RuneScape followers, and it likewise resembles the secret sauce behind most of the very best open-world games. But it’s the name, Brighter Shores, that’s possibly the very best representation of Gower’s goal right here.
“We wanted this, or I wanted this, to be a nice, relaxing escape from reality,” he states. “Something you can do when you’ve had a long day at work, or a long day at school, you just want to sit down and not engage your brain too hard and just enjoy playing a nice, fun game. The title of the game very much reflects that.”
Gower states his brand-new MMO does not need to bother with capitalists: “There’s no publishers, no one breathing down my neck … I want people to enjoy my game.”
Source: gamesradar.com