Horizons: Empire of Istaria Interview, Part Two

GamersInfo.net has published the second installment of a new interview with Artifact Entertainment’s David Bowman in which they discuss the future of MMORPGs, the recent Chapter 11 proceedings, the present and future of Horizons, and more. An excerpt:

Q: I imagine that you’re probably short on labor for all of this. You’ve produced more with a smaller team in the previous 2-3 months than you did in your first 6. Eventually, people will start dropping from exhaustion, yourself included.

A: The team as of last week has been able to start working much more reasonable hours. The majority of the work that we did over the last 2 1/2 months has been to build a sustainable framework. What we had before was good but required intense labor for a lot more people. We’ve changed how it’s structured so that we can now to support it without having to work an 80-100 hour workweek. I would lose any of the staff here – and I don’t want to lose any of them, these are wonderful people who work for the love of the product, they believe in the game – it’s not my intent to burn anyone out, least of all myself. I think we’re in a sustainable position now. If we had kept going the way we were before it wouldn’t have worked. Now we have things structured so that we can produce new content, get back on schedule for our events. We interrupted the events in order to take care of this “great” event of combining all these worlds – that was a huge event! We could have made it easier on ourselves by leaving out role-playing and context and just saying “you’re all here and you’re stuck with it, you lose your property, etc”. What we’ve really tried to do through the whole process, which was a burden on ourselves but an essential burden, was to take a look at all the investments that players had made and try to preserve the investments wherever it is possible.

It’s also an opportunity for changes to happen. If we’re going to make the changes that we need to make for this game to be sustainable, for the events to return in full force and be able to achieve the goals that all the players want – I think the players want the Ancient Rite of Passage; I think the players want to choose to give rise to other players or not – if we can put these things in the players will say “yes, this is what we were looking for”. Players want the ability to put furniture into their structures. I want to be able to paint my walls! I want to have something besides an empty shell; I want functionality in all of these structures.

We had to break a bunch of things in order to mend them. So we’ve done that, we’ve broken them at this point where people are shifting from one world to another. But, at the same point we are fixing them coming out of this and coming into it we preserve people’s ability to buy property – we’ve actually increased their ability. Anyone who owned property before receives a token that allows him or her to participate in the auctions. If you owned property in the old worlds you receive a token for the value of the property in Imperial value (not the value you may have paid to another player). That token is now used in an auction – we’ve more than tripled, I may have to check my numbers because I think we’ve more than quadrupled the number of plots in the game – players will bid on these plots using a token or cash. Now, a token trumps any cash bid. If you owned a piece of property before you’re very likely, unless you choose not to, to get a plot. In fact you’re guaranteed to get a plot if you bid. So, if you’re to bid on all of the plots in the game you will get a piece of property if you choose to.