The Executive Producer of Pirates of the Burning Sea is back with his fourth developer journal. In this log, he talks about his time in Asia and that market. Along with this article, we also have four exclusive screenshots of the Korean Turtle vessel.
;) I’m filing this dev log from Beijing, which is the fifth Asian country I’ve visited in three weeks. So far, I’ve hit Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. Along the way, I’m doing 29 presentations of the game, which makes it a very busy two weeks! The purpose of my trip is to find domestic partners who will bring Pirates to their territory. Ever since the numbers in Asia started exploding, American companies have dreamed of moving into this space -- but other than World of Warcraft, few have done so successfully.
There are a couple of problems, but the biggest one is making the game right for the market. I don’t just mean localization here, I mean the feature and content changes that take a Western game and make it into one suitable for Asia. A common example of this is a simplified avatar face. Western games typically go down the Everquest 2 model, which tries to make the avatar faces as real as possible. Asian games tend to have simplified, stylistic faces for their avatars (such as those seen in World of Warcraft). But there are more issues than just the cosmetic. For example, smoking is very prevalent here and players like to be able to play MMPs one handed so they can smoke with the other. The list goes on and on. While some of these are easy tweaks, others can require deep architectural changes. |
You can read the full journal here.
