The MMO Gamer: What would you say the number one lesson you took away from the launch was, in terms of things that worked, and things that didn’t work with the game?
Jeffrey Steefel: Well, there are big things and little things, big surprises, little surprises.
We’ve been hearing an awful lot about solo play from our players, which has been a surprise to us, because we thought we built a game that was incredibility soloable. But, what we’re finding is that people at all levels of the game want to have more solo experiences. That was a little bit of a learning experience for us.
Smaller surprises like the music system, which was just something they were fooling around with for fun before launch and put up, and ended up being something people went nuts over, so we kind of put more time into that and built it up.
There haven’t been a lot of over-the-top kinds of surprises, because we got our big surprises during beta. We spent a lot of time during beta listening to what people were telling us and putting those changes into the game, and pushed on the things that we thought were going to have the biggest impact for launch.
I don’t mean to sound like we actually know what we’re doing, but we got a good sense of it in beta, and I think that really helped us a lot towards launch. So, there haven’t been as many surprises as I might have thought we would have had.
