From the first, Fantastic Pixel Castle’s level of transparency with its potential player base has been incredibly refreshing. In an industry that is, sometimes detrimentally so, way too secretive, having a major studio not just talk about their upcoming MMO super early but show it off is welcome indeed.
“To some extent, it’s common sense to me,” Fantastic Pixel Castle’s studio head Greg Street told us in an interview last week. “This is what I’ve always done in my career, even from Age of Empires. I was like, ‘Let’s ask players what they think.’ And that was such a radical concept at the time - it’s still somewhat radical, depending on who you talk to.”
Today, Fantastic Pixel Castle is showcasing more early gameplay from a recent Milestone test, giving a real early glimpse of actual players testing Ghost, with Street in the video setting expectations early: expect some “rough edges.”
Partner With Players
One of the mantras we’ve heard from FPC since the start is the idea of partnering with players. This idea stems from a desire to include players in the conversation around the development of Ghost from the jump, both as a way to keep prospective players in the loop about what’s going on, but also a way for the team at Fantastic Pixel Castle to react to feedback before it’s too late.
“If players don’t like an aspect to the game, wouldn’t you rather know that before?” Street asked in our interview. He continued, explaining the reasoning: “So many MMOs release and have this awesome level-up experience and people are like, ‘Okay, this may be my next game,’ and they hit end game and they run out of stuff to do and they churn. And so we want to play test the end game. We want players to tell us, like, ‘Hey guys, there’s not enough here yet.’ Or ‘Yea, you built this awesome raiding experience, but we totally short circuited it by doing PvP because it has better rewards.’ We’d rather deal with that before we launch rather than begging players to come back to patch 2.0 where we tried to fix it.”
We’ve seen that scenario time and time again, from Final Fantasy XIV’s 1.0 launch and subsequent A Realm Reborn rebirth, to the more recent few years of New World: Aeternum’s development, where it has largely felt that team has been more reactive than proactive. This isn’t to say that reacting to player feedback is a bad thing, it’s definitely not. But time spent fixing issues that could have been discovered if players were in the know early on could better be spent building kick ass content that will both entice players to continue playing as well as let developers do what they do best: create compelling worlds we all want to live within.
I have to say, too, that as someone who gets to peek behind the curtain at games in development as part of my job as a critic, this is by far the earliest I’ve seen a game. And, not to overuse a word to describe this, but “refreshing” keeps coming to mind as I think about the past year of development updates from the FPC team. And while this transparency has been a north star of the team since the start, that doesn’t mean it makes the team any less nervous when sharing their early work with the world, but it hasn’t seen them start to turn away fro that strategy.
“We haven’t discussed pivoting [from] that strategy,” Greg explained. “I think even people who join the company and are nervous about that quickly drink the Kool-Aid, and once they see play testers having fun they get it. I mean, we’re nervous about releasing that video, like it’s only going to take one bad actor to show things out of context and say, ‘Oh, this game looks like crap, why would I play this game?’”
Ghost is only a year into its development, and despite the big name at top and NetEase’s investment, the studio is still rather small - Greg says it’s twenty-five people working on Ghost so far. And he’s not wrong about the concern of context being lost, especially as people take the footage and start commenting on it, whether it be here on a traditional media website, a TikTok video, on YouTube and so on.
The footage is rough for sure. Anyone watching the gameplay can see that. But it’s meant to be rough - the test on offer isn’t to gague the visuals of what will become Ghost but rather to help solidify the game design philosophies the team has been building since the beginning before going full swing into pre-production.
Shaking Things Up
One thing Greg says in the video that stood out to me was how the team isn’t really trying to change what they love about MMOs, but rather are looking to solve problems MMOs have historically had. The loop will see players gathering a central hub city and, from there, choose whether they want to venture into the more traditional MMO world and spaces offered by Red zones, which will be fully bespoke, hand-crafted maps that feature players everywhere and have dungeons, raids, world bosses and more.
“Red zones, they’re MMO zones. Everyone knows what those are, and we think that’s really core to the experience because you want to see other players. Ideally you’re with a group. Even if you’re not with a group, it’s awesome to see other people, even if you’re not coordinating, just having other folks around is the whole part of the MMO experience.”
Blue zones, however, are where much of the experimentation is coming into play by Fantastic Pixel Castle.
“What we were really trying to add on to of that was to solve some of the peoples that the genre has had forever, like that uncanny valley of when you’ve played MMOs for a while you know that [you] can’t interact with anything. It’s all scenery. Like, I’m not going to be able to knock down a tree or a wall because the other players are going to need it. If I kill a boss, it’ll come back in a little while because other players need it.”
In a sense, much of the interactability we have in modern MMOs is fake, when you get down to it. Even MMOs with a high degree of world interactivity, such as New World: Aeternum where you can literally chop down a forest, is in a way an illusion. Those trees will grow back. The Elder Scrolls Online, where you can pick up anything from a sword on a weapon rack of a guard’s sweet roll will see those items reappear over time.
Blue zones effectively offer an instanced world for you and a small group of friends to explore, quest, gather resources, and more, all within an environment that reacts to your actions and doesn’t have those fake elements.
Drawing on his time working on Age of Empires and how the RTS handled random maps to shake things up, Ghost’s Blue zones will feature random terrain - but the bosses, the monsters, the points of interest, those will all still be handcrafted by the team. This isn’t a No Man’s Sky situation where each world, its flora and fauna are all randomly generated, but in many cases, it can be largely boring once you start exploring them. Blue zones will still retain that handcrafted feel, even if the map changes each time you plunge into one. This isn’t meant to offer near-limitless replayability, either, but rather a reason to explore a Blue zone, especially if you’ve been away from one for a while.
“So our approach has been: the terrain is random, but the things you find are not; they’re handcrafted,” Street explained. “Rather than go for infinite replayability, we’re like, ‘It doesn’t need to be infinite.’ It just needs to be like, ‘Well, I haven’t see that before.’ Even ‘I haven’t seen that lately.’ And so far, you know, knock on wood, we’re early, but it seems like its working and that players enjoy both the sense of exploration and the problem solving, even as simple as ‘We need to get over that next hill. What’s the way to get there?’
You can’t just open the map and find the way, and you certainly can’t go to a wiki and say, ‘Hey, I’m level 45, what path should I take?’ You kind of have to figure it out, and that’s been really fun.”
Emergent Gameplay
In the tests, while they have been small in terms of player count, have been a font of information for the team, and some of that problem-solving in the Blue zones has shown some incredible glimpses at real emergent gameplay, even this early on in development.
Street described one situation where players had to figure out how to get over terrain that had been transformed thanks to a nearby undead which spreads damaging terrain wherever they go. Since there are building mechanics in the Blue zones, players would build bridge platforms over the terrain and use them to shoot the undead. Another example revolves around the world’s design of floating shards in the sky, with a group needing to get to a nearby island.
“In our playtest, we’d see players, if they want to get to a different island, they would build a bridge to try to get to the island. Or they’d build a tower and jump off the tower and then try to hang glide down to the other island.”
I’m a huge fan of emergent gameplay. I mean, I’m a long-time EVE Online player; I really enjoy sandbox survival games and MMOs where emergent gameplay is king. I have sunk thousands of hours into games that allowed me to effectively accomplish a task however I want - it’s what keeps me coming back to them week in and week out.
Hearing that even in the Milestone testing phase, this type of gameplay is naturally occurring is exciting to me and makes me wonder what the possibilities will be like as Ghost ramps up production, fleshing out both the game mechanics and the game world in a way that provides even more opportunities to affect and interact with that game world.
For those worried that the building mechanics will mean these Blue zones are nothing more than survival games like Valheim or Minecraft, where you’ll spend a large chunk of your time gathering resources to build a base from, don’t. Street mentions that the building mechanics are there more to help with problem-solving than base building.
This emergent gameplay isn’t simply tied to getting over decaying terrain or seeing who can hang glide the longest - it can come into play when taking on a boss, for instance. Because of the nature of these Blue zones, Street said his team has had to come to terms with the idea that they won’t have as much control here as they would elsewhere.
“[O]ne of the things that the team, our development team, had to come to terms with early on is we’re not going to be able to control this really well. Like, if players chopped down a tree and the tree falls on the boss and kills it, we should celebrate that rather than immediately trying to Band-Aid it, which we would have done on World of Warcraft. ‘Oh, you can’t kill bosses that way; we have to patch that.’”
Instead, it feels like these Blue zones are idealized as a way for players to flex their creative muscles. Want to kill a boss by luring it into a den of monsters who also want to kill the boss? You can do that. The goal is to ensure it’s not “the only way to solve these problems.”
As far as how to keep players going back to these instanced zones instead of spending all their time in the more traditional MMO locations tucked behind Red zones, Street very simply said it’s down to the rewards players will get in the Blue zones.
“You have to go here to get these rewards you can’t get anywhere else. That’s the time-honored way to do it.”
It's also worth remembering that these Blue zones aren't meant to take up all of your time. Rather, they can act as palate cleansers when you need a break from those more traditional MMO activities. Want to just relax and chill with a few friends while gathering resources? Blue zones can offer that. Want to take down a boss without having to deal with potentially hundreds of people around you? Jump into a Blue zone, and so on.
Keeping That MMO Feel
In the video, Street reminds viewers that the team at Fantastic Pixel Castle love MMOs, and while the way Blue zones work as small group content doesn’t exactly sound like an MMO, those elements they love about the genre will still be present in Ghost.
This is going to the hub city, and then onwards into a Red zone comes into play. The hub city, which is the only social hub planned for Ghost by design, acts as the link between the two zone types. This hub might be the only one, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be a static city for years to come.
“That was a really deliberate choice of we want one hub city because we don’t want players to ever go back to it and find it empty. Now what we’re going to do is update it over time. And by update it that could mean anything from, I always use this example as well, you come back and your favorite tavern, the tavern keeper has retired and now his daughter is running the tavern and she’s made some changes. It’s not worth it to a World of Warcraft to do that, they’ll just make a new city with a new tavern keeper and then the old one is just kind of stuck in time.”
This idea of coming back to a city and finding it empty speaks to me, as MMO ghost towns are some of the more depressing results of content and power creep in MMOs. With theme park MMOs, the content always drives you forward, not necessarily backwards. As a result, as the player community levels up, those hubs towards the end game are super busy and popular, while the entry level zones and cities are wastelands.
My favorite MMO, The Lord of the Rings Online, suffers from this, especially in places like Esteldin, Hobbiton, and, to an extent, even Bree-town. This isn’t to say those places are effectively dead - you will always find at least one or two players rummaging around the Prancing Pony or the Party Tree, but it isn’t nearly as active as it was early on in the game’s lifetime - or if there isn’t some sort of festival happening.
I like the idea of this central hub where you are almost guaranteed to find a large gaggle of players at any time. The Red zones themselves should also be a hotbed of traditional MMO gameplay, with world bosses, quests, dungeons, and raids to tackle, all surrounded by other Ghost players.
Feedback Is King
At the start of this, I highlighted the fact that Ghost is being shown in such an early state that it’s practically unheard of in our industry otherwise, and one major reason for this was for Fantastic Pixel Castle to be able to actively work on addressing player feedback while they were still developing the MMO. Already, they are hard at work applying what they learned from these tests to future playtest builds.
One example Greg gave was the Tank class, which was recently added with the last playtest. Greg described an idea of Ghost’s Tank as being a player who maybe doesn’t “lock down the battlefield completely,” but rather a player who jumps in and solves emergencies.
“Already we’re getting a little bit of feedback from players saying, ‘When I’m a Tank and that happens, I feel like I’m failing. I feel like I’m not doing my job,’” Street explained. “So that’s something we’re actively talking about. Well maybe we did take it too far and we need to reel it back in.”
As far as the tests themselves, Greg says the team considers the tests in 2024 as a “validation of our core thesis.” As for what’s to come, 2025 should see the tests expand in size and scope, though even then that presents its own host of challenges. From server infrastructure needs to just ensuring no one can really break the system, there’s still a lot to be added before wider tests can begin.
One area Greg mentioned was the need for better player management tools in the game. One of the playtesters in these friends and family tests realized there wasn’t any real limit on what a character name could be, and they took advantage.
“So we had this one story where a play tester - you get to name your character - and the play tester copied the entire script of The Bee Movie as their player name,” Street said with a chuckle. “And, you know, that’s not the kind of thing you bulletproof early on, so it worked, and his name took up the entire screen. And one of the designers [was] just like, ‘Hey, go change your name.’ Like, before we bring in a ton of random people, that’s the kind of stuff we have to bulletproof a little bit more just to make sure the experience is okay.”
As an aside, this transported me back to 11th grade US History, where instead of doing weekly definition worksheets, I would fill out a line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail in place of a term’s definition. This went on the whole year, and when the final worksheet was given back to me after being graded, there was a message at the bottom from my teacher saying he “really enjoyed reading these.”
It’ll be interesting to see how things progress in 2025, especially as the Unreal Store assets start to get swapped out for the team’s own artwork, showcasing the vision of the world that will become Ghost. I’m excited to see where things go as well, and this is fueled by the knowledge that I’ll have a better idea with how Ghost is progressing than, well, nearly any other MMO I’ve followed, both as a fan and as a journalist.
That said, with the tests done for 2024, I get the sense that the team's work at Fantastic Pixel Castle is just beginning.
“We think the blue zone, red zone design is going to work. So now we just have to build it.”
