We had the opportunity to chat with the developers last week at Gen Con, and if you're curious as to what the fuss is all about, you're in luck. We discussed the the game's past, present and future, and gained a great overview of what Kingsisle hopes to accomplish in the coming months.
Follow along after the jump to see what we discussed!
What is Wizard101 all about? Is it strictly a kids game? The Wizard101 team avoids the term "family-friendly," because it gives an impression of being for children only, and simply acceptable to their parents rather than being something that the parents actively want to participate in. The goal of the game is "family entertainment," a game that adults and kids can enjoy together. "It's similar to the Pixar movies. When a new Pixar movie comes out, it's really designed for a younger audience in its core delivery, but you have a tremendous of pop culture references, and humor that the younger audience doesn't get but the adults get, so it's playing at multiple levels. We found that's really a great market."
Speaking of markets, the minds behind the game have been looking at social games such as those on Facebook with a more positive view than many people. "It's actually opening a huge population of gamers. What we're seeing is that they're not social games, but games on a social network, so there's not that interaction, but it's bringing a whole new population to knowing about the enjoyment of gaming and what you can do online. We're seeing a translation from there to games like Wizard101, that was designed to be approachable for both a younger audience and a casual gamer." The game's core setup follows this pattern of being very accessible and friendly to the younger and casual gamers. The free-to-play business model and the ability to stream the game rather than relying on lengthy downloads keeps the barrier to entry very low.
That younger audience is one that Kingsisle is interested in keeping, and for that reason, Wizard101 players will find a handful of tools in the game designed to keep out the more "adult-oriented" discussions. Most gamers who have experienced MMOs and virtual worlds geared toward a younger audience have seen menu chat, a system that allows players to communicate via an extensive menu of canned phrases and sentences.
Black lists -- lists of words that the game won't allow you to say to others -- are also familiar tools. Kingsisle has implemented a slightly more intricate set of features with Wizard101's white list: "It's a list of five or six thousand words from the dictionary, all words from the game, that we made and said 'there's no reason you'd have a conversation in Wizard101 that didn't encompass those words.' So that was our white list, and on top of it we have another layer of protection to prevent players from putting together safe words to create offensive combinations. It's been a very successful mechanism."
The Celestia expansion for Wizard101 is set to release in "late summer or early fall," so it's just around the corner, and there's no better time to check the game out if you haven't yet!
