Toby Ragaini 2021 Q&A/Question 5
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Question 5
Q: Out of all of your contributions to AC, what would you redo if you had the chance, and how would you change it?
A: Asheron's Call paid a steep price for being "different." What hurt us the most was an incomplete understanding of the importance of the new player experience. For example, character classes work because they are an easy but interesting decision for starting players to make. The skill based model of AC front loaded a number of decisions and was overwhelming for many users.
Similarly, I think having quasi-realistic human tribes replacing fantasy races was a shortcoming. It really cut down on the amount of visual difference available to player characters. Having short, burly dwarves and tall, elegant elves provides for instant recognition.
However, in other ways, our willingness to buck the trend paid off. I'm still very proud of the unique backstory and fiction that we developed in AC. It provided us with a degree of flexibility that allowed us to surprise players, and introduce monsters and villains that people would experience for the first time. And of course, we also stood out in that our environments offered vast seamless vistas. This was an enormous technical achievement at the time, and represented an incredible engineering accomplishment.
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Toby Ragaini |