New world, Amazon Games’ inaugural step into a game developer, wasn’t always MMORPG. It used to be a survival horror game. According to Katy Kaszynski, senior producer at Amazon Games, the team has really come a long way on that path. “They made it. It was before my time, but that game was almost done,” Kaszynski told me, shortly after presenting New World development at this year’s Developer Conference. in Brighton. “They really thought it was going to go alpha, launch, and they’d ship.”
A survival horror game quite different from the fun, educationally ambiguous magical fantasy RPG that the New World is today: lush forests, sunny plains, and factions engaged in a Endless war for territory. So what happened? According to Kaszynski, it all comes down to Amazon’s first ‘Leadership Principle’: Customer Obsession.
Whatever my view of Amazon in general – a company that, to me, doesn’t seem like a company and has more mechanisms to send a billionaire to the moon with a rocket powered by the closing of the bookstore – I have no say in it personally, and there’s no denying that New World made an impact when it launched. Even Kaszynski describes Amazon and Amazon Games as special things.
“It’s definitely a weird bunch of people doing really interesting things,” she said. Amazon’s Leadership Principles are the ones you’ll recognize if you’ve ever worked at a big enough company – especially if there’s an office somewhere in North America. They are usually tortured acronyms like SWIFT or SERVE or BIG CHUG or whatever. You forget that they last until the annual review season. Do you understand what I mean. Customer obsession, in real-life parlance, just means working the opposite of what the customer says they want.
The developers noticed that in the alpha of the survival horror version of New World, the more experienced players were just… completely gank new players as they enter the alpha stage. The older players, obviously, love this. Newer players? Not much. Kaszynski notes that if a player is interacting with your game and ends up turning it into a different game than the one you thought you created, that could be fine. It could be better than you imagined, or different in a good way. But the first version of New World, she said, became “quite toxic” in a way that made it clear to them that they needed to change.
“That’s when we took the player’s affection from the players who had fun doing toxic things, and the players who were like ‘Hey this is what I like better’ and figure out how that still works. It fits our vision of the island that’s a bit mystical, and [players] Kaszynski explains are explorers and explorers. That’s when the group made a big move away from the survival horror genre, and Kaszynski joined the group shortly after.
Coming from a dotcom consumer background, Kaszynski served as program director for technical readiness for seasonal peaks. While she describes the move to working on a game as having a vertical learning curve, she says that in general, managing a release for a game is similar to managing the release of all kinds of games. other soft. Working on the site means she also has experience scaling to meet demand, as well as understanding customer feedback. Developers at Amazon Games are encouraged to spend time in-game with players, to see what they’re doing, and to listen to community requests.
This involves figuring out what players really require and how these needs work in relation to Amazon Games’ own goals for New World. It’s a flimsy rope to walk on. “Mostly, we hear something that we like,” said Duh. Why don’t we consider this? And there won’t be many developer hours to complete, what are we doing? “, and then we do it quickly,” Kaszynski said. Sometimes, though, even the players can’t agree on what they want.
In his talk about Develop, Kaszynski gave Attachment as an example, does not exist in the New World (and, if the lore is to be believed, it cannot). The main function of mounts is to get you around the game world quickly, so the developers have included temples of fast travel to cater to this need. But mounts are still something people are asking for, so they’re still thinking about it. The other most polarizing problem is the minimap. “There are people who are so confusing, ‘Give me a mount, give me a little map,'” Kaszynski said, laughing, “and then there are others who say, ‘No, no! I love running around ! How do I know if there’s a dye I can harvest if I’m in the mountains? ‘”
That’s one of the reasons developers are hesitant to catch some of the big mounts: they’re trying to get people excited with exploration, ambushing a mob you come across, or pausing to chop some wood as you are almost done with your next mining skill just point.
This kind of quiet, personal exploration is the bit that Kaszynski likes best about the New World. Her favorite thing is spend time fishing in the game – something she doesn’t like in real life. “The most relaxing thing for me is just having a beer and then fishing on my game,” she says. She told her team this once and they sent her different boxes of beer and fake fishing trophies. She loves to see players do things like this, like the Town Criers, a group formed after alpha who will gather (in-game) news for the day and then go to the settlements. Various residents shouted the news out loud.
Even after developing with the open alpha, the New world is not at player scale, so the team is always getting new and surprising data. Everything, Kaszynski emphasizes, is a conversation. “It’s not just ‘this is the right answer’. It has to be a conversation and you have to provide as much data as you can, so you can do what’s best for your players and your game. “, she explained.
They’re thinking about the future, but Kaszynki won’t be drawn to any specifics, because she doesn’t want to make any promises before it’s in hand, ready to be shipped – which is what she regrets what happened to server switch.
“That’s a promise to our players, and that’s not at all who we want to be. That’s not the person I want us to be.”
“To get into the original shape – which we thought was good, it turned out to be not so great – but to get the shape that we thought was good, we needed more time than we did. initial prediction, and that is now a promise to our players,” she said. “And that’s not at all who we want to be. It’s not who I want us to be.”
However, a major expansion is coming, as you’d expect, but Kaszynski doesn’t know when that will happen. She says the team has things they’re looking at “for the distant future”, some things that will be “extended downline”, but has a lot of plans for the next year and a half. “The job [on the expansion] haven’t even started yet because we’re so focused on developing this game that we have today, for our first day players and for everyone who has joined since . “
