We love player input at Flying Lab, we really do. We apply player feedback from the various forums (especially “In Concept”) to many different aspects of the game. So when the epic mission strike team started work on Fortaleza da Luz, we were faced with an interesting quandary: How do we apply player feedback to the development of a story, or to the design of a fight, or to the look and feel of a place?

The “In Concept” forum was the first place we went looking for ideas. Obviously we didn’t want to spoil the story of Fortaleza da Luz, so we decided to keep it general. We asked people to share their favorite scary moments from books, movies, games, and real life. We got several pages of responses from the players, and effectively used them as design principles for the gameplay of the mission.

Once the mission had reached a certain state (the state where we can show it to people and not be embarrassed), we started in on the testing of the mission. Major changes often come about in response to feedback from other developers, and from players. Luckily for us, this was the point at which our experience making Bey’s Retreat paid off.

An important reality of game content, and on-line game content in particular, is that it “ages”. This means that any encounter we can make gets easier with time, simply by virtue of being played. Players that are daunted by content the first time they see it find it extremely easy the fifth time they play through it, and that’s if they ignore strategy commentary being spread via the internet or by word of mouth. Our response to this is to have three people playing Bey’s Retreat or Fortaleza da Luz daily (literally every day for at least a month) with the remaining members of the group coming from a pool of people who haven’t seen the content nearly as much, if ever. This way the three people who see it every day get to see the mission age in fast-motion, while the other members of the group provide fresh perspective.

During the final weeks of this phase Fraxl starts working her magic, and we have some players who live locally come in to our offices to see the content. This testing helps us to determine which aspects of the mission are understandable right off the bat, and which are hard to pick up. Bey’s Retreat got three of these tests, and so did Fortaleza. In both cases we had two players from the group of six who played in all three tests, two who played in the second two tests, and a pair of players who would be seeing the mission for the first time as it approached completion. Again, this is due to our fear of “aging”.

So, what changed as a result of players testing Fortaleza da Luz? Many small things, but a few really big ones. We reached a point in the missions’ development where we felt that the difficulty was nearly tuned to perfection, and we were prepared to move on to bug fixing and polish exclusively. We fixed a number of bugs and when our players next played through the mission, they commented on the polish we’d added, but commented much more strongly that the mission was now far too easy. We took a look back at it, and found that the mission had aged far more quickly than we’d expected. A general overhaul of the difficulty ensued.

Another major concern in the creation of this type of mission is pacing. Throughout Fortaleza da Luz, there are pieces of journals with story details scattered throughout the instance. These allow players to piece together the story of the place slowly, and give it a “crime scene” sort of feel. During the course of the testing, we began to see a real disconnect between people who were interested in reading every piece of text they could find, and those who were interested in moving directly on to the next fight. After some thought, we added a new feature to Fortaleza da Luz: A journal that would allow players to collect information from the instance and then peruse it later, unhurried by their groupmates. We’re pretty happy with the solution.

The single biggest change to come out of usability testing was in relation to the loot. During the course of testing, our players weren’t satisfied with the loot their test characters received from the instance. We spoke to them about it in detail, asking them about the avatar builds on their in-game characters and the stat combinations that would appeal to them more. Our discussion with them led to a longer internal discussion about the direction we want to go with loot in the future. That discussion led to a wholesale overhaul of all of the avatar outfitting associated with Fortaleza da Luz.

Fortaleza is the first level 50 epic mission, so the direction the outfitting rewards take is crucial. In any MMO high end gear has a direct effect on nearly every facet of the endgame. The direction we went has been determined, in many respects, by input from players.

At the risk of sounding like a standard boiler-plate conclusion to a press release, I’d like to leave you with this: The epic mission strike team has worked really hard on Fortaleza da Luz, and we really hope you enjoy it. Whether you do or not, let us know. We really are listening.

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