Laralyn: It's a combination of things. Every job can be solo'd, if you want to. You have the opportunity, as an individual player, to really broadly explore your jobs. You can level each job, each job plays differently, so it's like rolling a new character in any other MMO. If you're playing with friends, yes you can all take on different roles, but they're not as rigidly defined as in other titles. That allows them to solo well, but it also lets players make a personal choice. If you're playing with a buddy and he's maxed out his warrior and really want to play his healer that's fine because you probably have a melee class you can work on. Or, that said, you can both play a healer and you should do fine.
We've talked about gear here today, and in the CES videos you showed off some impressive-looking items. How big a factor will gear play in the game? Are gamers who do choose to solo going to be missing out on that component of the game?
Laralyn: All of the content in Free Realms will be playable solo. The only difference, other than personal preference, is that in some battles there are NPCs that only spawn if you are in a group. That's to keep things more challenging, but also to offer up Easter eggs for people who will jump into a group. The battles are a bit harder too, obviously, to keep things challenging. As of right now the only tangible differences are additional NPCs.
So, playing in a group is really primarily about that social experience and occasionally seeing a bit of additional content?
Laralyn: Yes, but saying additional content makes it sound more extreme than it is. It literally is just a few extra NPCs. There's one scenario where playing as a group means an extra NPC will spawn that will buff and shield the enemies, to make things even more challenging. In another you'd get the same number of enemies as if you were soloing, but they're backed by a mini-boss. It's just the case that ladling on more enemies isn't always really fun.
Soloing and accessibility are obviously big priorities for the developers. Can you talk a bit about the Mailman and Adventurer classes, maybe getting into some content that we haven't really seen in MMOs before?
Laralyn: The Adventurer has changed a little bit, actually. It's the class you start off with now, so he doesn't level up by consuming content anymore. We do have postman, and miner, and blacksmith, and demolition derby driver, and you can level up all of those. Each of our jobs in Free Realms is associated with a mini-game, and job progression for that profession is done by earning stars.
Sometimes it's by playing against other people, some can be done entirely solo, but either way earning stars nets you the capacity to level up.
To follow up on that, are you still going to have the capacity for players to level up a class that just wants to see the world? That was one idea that we really enjoyed ...
Laralyn: Ah, that's the Explorer. It's actually not really clear right now, we have the Explorer and the Treasure-hunter both and we don't know if they're going to be in immediately at launch. They may have to wait for an expansion soon after launch. We don't know where they're going to slot in, but they are really important to us. We do have a lot of rewards already in the game for exploring, like collections and the Free Realms equivalent of wandering monsters.
There are some roaming, rare enemy encounters that you can only find if you go wandering through the wilderness. There are some rare mining nodes as well. We just don't know if the classes associated with that concept will be in at launch.
So from ranging abroad to something closer to home; the housing system was something that in previous discussion sounded like the development team was very keen on. Are we going to see a fairly robust representation of that at launch?
Laralyn: At this point Housing is going to be after launch. We have some really great long-term plans for it, and it's important to create the architecture for that system (no pun intended) in a certain way. We want to set it up in a way that will support some really cool plans we have for down the road ... that I can't go into. You can sort of draw conclusions from pets, if you want to figure out where we're looking. Think about our pets vs. typical MMO pets.
Our pets are better than typical MMO pets, but we think they're in the running with products like Nintendogs and Fable 2. We want the same for housing. We want to be better than typical MMO housing, but more than that we want to be compared with something like Animal Crossing ... probably not better than The Sims because that's just crazy. But we're aiming really high with that system. It was important to us that we have the time to make a great foundation for what we want to do in the future.
You mentioned collectibles earlier, which is something we've seen earlier and found really engaging. How robust will that system be when you hit your launch window?
Laralyn: Some of those collections are a part of housing. Gardening, for example, but others you'll run into out in the wilds. Mushroom collecting, for example. Gardening is actually pretty robust, and that's one of the reasons housing is moving past launch. Collections are definitely still important to us.
Do those still tie into the web-facing element that you have planned? Your plans for that were very robust, we seem to remember?Laralyn: That's looking pretty good. We have the profile pages up now. We're still working on it because we're not to launch yet, but it's getting there. As of now I can play my character, get updates on leveling and quest progress ... it's making good progress. We now have live in the game the ability to capture video straight from the game to your hard-drive! We're doing a lot of things with the web component, and we've moved forward even from where I think we were back when you last saw it. We want you to be able to share your experience with other people.
Will players be able to upload that video directly to YouTube?
Laralyn: I can't make a commitment to that right now, but I can't imagine we won't get to something like that.
So as a final question, we know that you are hoping to have a lengthy Beta period ... when do you think we'll be able to jump in-game for the first time?
Laralyn: We're preparing for internal closed Beta right now. We're really close to that – you could probably number that in days. Then we'll be readying the external Beta for some time soon after that. Couldn't be more than a few months.
The hope is still to launch sometime this year?
Laralyn: Yes, we're hoping to launch sometime during the second quarter. It's looking really good for that.
That is really good to hear. It's great to get an update on where the game is. Thanks for your time.
Laralyn: Thank you.
