Jagex Talks War Of Legends Page 2

20 Jan 2010 at 12:12:15 by Tim McDonald

Stepping back a bit, how did Jagex actually get involved in War of Legends, and why did you decide to pick this up in particular?

AT: We worked with a company in China to help do a small number of our graphics for the Runescape HD update that we did last July, and the company is a third-party games developer and outsource company based in Shanghai. We worked with them for that, and subsequently from then we familiarised ourselves with what they do and their game development angle. Our chief executive and our founder went out to Shanghai, played the game, and really, really enjoyed it.

Jagex is all about making fun, and that's what we want to guarantee. If we enjoy something and we're confident that our users will enjoy it, then we're willing to make big business decisions to put money behind that. War of Legends was a game that we felt would be of particular interest to our users. It shares the same values as we do in terms of being a truly accessible game. We saw the game and thought it would be really, really successful, and we're conscious that the free-to-play area is getting very big and very crowded, and the RTS market is very big and very crowded as well. There are a lot of games coming from the east which are just being translated into English – sometimes very poorly – and shipped and expected to do really well. What we've tried to do with War of Legends is try to make it as western as we can while still staying true to the Chinese story, but also making it so that it's not a totally foreign experience for users in the west. We've culturalised it where we can, but we've set a really hard task for the developer is to make sure that the graphics are as strong, the game is as polished and as well-translated and as accessible as it should be, so that players in the west won't realise that they're playing a game that's traditionally from Asia. Apart from the storyline!

The mythological Chinese setting is rare in that it hasn't been done to death in mainstream games. Are you hoping it's something that's going to appeal quite a lot to Western gamers because it's something different?

AT: We hope so. With Runescape we've had a lot of success with a medieval, Tolkien-esque, Dungeons & Dragons fantasy genre - as have Lord of the Rings Online, World of Warcraft, and so on. It's a very comfortable and safe and understandable storyline that people feel familiar with. What we've been able to do with War of Legends is take a little bit of Chinese mythology and culture, which is very much based on Chinese dynasties, but also it's still very fantasy. There's magic and spell elements to the game, so it's not completely foreign. It's just that dynasties and empires are something slightly new, that people aren't necessarily so familiar with. We've tried to adapt the game so that people can jump into that – or, indeed, jump out of that – as much as they wish. If they're really keen on learning more about it, there are plenty of resources and tasks they can do within the game to involve themselves in that storyline and really get deep into it. On the other hand, if you're just there to build an empire and work with others, and take over other towns and empires, then that's something you can do as well, and the storyline doesn't necessarily fit, but it's an overlay that's always there, and we hope it will appeal to our players.

Is War of Legends an MMO in the traditional sense, in that there are hundreds or thousands of players playing together at the same time, having an impact on each other, or is it a smaller game focused on more individual players?

AT: One of our key strengths in the game that we've developed so far is the ability to have MMO functionality in our games. Community and community-building are key strengths, and something that we spend an awful lot of money and time and effort on. We actually have 150 player support staff who are very community-focused, to drive that within our games. From an MMO point of view for War of Legends, you can have up to 2,000 active people per server, and one of the very early things we do in the game is encourage people to join an alliance with other players. We're taking the functionality that we have from other Jagex games such as the chat facilities, the friends facilities, and the clan aspects, and we've put that into War of Legends. You can be as sociable or as anti-social as you wish within the game. If you really want to join an alliance and work with other people and trade with other people to build your empires, or work as a sort of commonwealth with other people to share resources, harvest resources, and then build armies and attack other players, you can. If you're more interested in management and tactics, you can focus on building the best cities you possibly can and defending them to the hilt, so you can enjoy the game because of that aspect. We would say very strongly that it is a multiplayer game. There are NPCs, of course, that you can go and attack and harvest from, but essentially there is a big community and multiplayer aspect to the game.

How different are the two versions? You're essentially localising the Chinese version, but is the western release going to have its own unique tasks and quests and so on, or is it going to run almost parallel to the Chinese release?

AT: I think a lot of that is down to how our players take to the game. I mentioned before that we want to be a developer's publisher – we want to work with the developers to improve the game and to make sure it's as relevant and enjoyable and as popular as it can be. We've got the sway to be able to take our users' experiences into account to build future updates for the game as our players ask for them. Obviously, we'll have to work along with the developers for that, but we can certainly use our experience and our vast community experience within the game to make War of Legends that best that it can be.

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