Pus la colţ, torturat şi ameninţat cu distrugerea Porche-ului personal, Jean-Charles Gaudechon, lead producer NFS World a răspuns la o serie de întrebări care ardeau pneurile celor de la tentonhammer.com.
Ten Ton Hammer: You have the advantage of having the Need for Speed franchise behind you. There are tons of fans out there for the franchise. This leads to an interesting point. From my understanding, the game is going to be free to play. There’s going to be microtransactions. Can you outline some of the additional services that will be available as microtransactions and what’s included free in the game as well?
Jean-Charles Gaudechon: It’s a hybrid model. It’s going to be free to download; you’ll be able to download the client for free and you’ll be able to play the game for ten levels, but there’s going to be a starter pack which will unlock the whole game. When we say it’s free to play, you don’t get a free trial; you get to download the full client and you can play the full game for, let’s say the first 10 to 15 levels. We’re not making you only be able to play for two levels and now you have to pay. You can choose to stay at level 10, for instance, and keep playing like that. Basically, it’s free to play, then becomes a hybrid. Once you buy the starter pack, it becomes a microtransaction model, which we call the “SpeedBoost,” which is the currency we use for microtransactions.
For some examples of microtransactions, we want people to be able to choose high level cars as fast as they can, but we didn’t want to kill the progression that the players go through. So some things that we have for microtransactions are being able to rent a high level car for a certain number of days. You might be level 5 and your friends might be level 15 and you want to join them for the Porsche Cup for the weekend, so you can rent a Porsche for two days for a few cents or a few dollars. We want to keep the prices low. Renting cars is one example, if you don’t want to go through the whole progression thing if you don’t like grinding. I’m not saying the game is about grinding, but there’s always a bit of grinding in these cases when you want to hit next level. You can bypass that by playing SpeedBoosts. Something important though is that we don’t want to break the balance of the game. If you rent a Porsche and think you’re going to drop into a level 5 race and kill everyone, that’s something that we’re looking to avoid. We’re going to keep it fair and balanced, whether you’re using a SpeedBoost or not. I digressed a bit, but it’s important to mention this when talking about rental cars.
Citiţi cu atenţie. Toată bucata asta de text înseamnă că adevăratul conţinut, ala tare, cu bolizi licentiaţi si sute de cai putere e pe bani. Vai, dar doar câţiva cenţi. Dacă 3 milioane de oameni dau câţiva cenţi, cât câştigă EA? Asta presupunând că se vor aduna atâţia jucători, măcar pe termen mediu. Desigur, cică există şi partea gratuită… dar ce fel de gamer eşti dacă n-ai Ferrarri?
Ten Ton Hammer: Yeah, and that touches on this question too. How much of the content is single player versus how much is multi-player?
Jean-Charles Gaudechon: It’s roughly the same, perhaps a bit more for a single player. Every race can be run either single player or multi-player; you can play multi-player competitive or play multi-player with some friends. That’s something that’s not in right now, but will be in an upcoming release, where you can invite your friends and just race with them. Every race gives you this option. Some sprints, some circuit, and if you add the pursuit to that, it’s also single player experience for now, but we’re going to push hard for multi-player modes.
Ideea asta de single player într-un MMO a mai fost testată şi pe drept cuvânt are avantaje pentru EA. Sunt o grămadă de oameni cărora nu le place să se amestece în grămadă, preferă o experienţă mai… intimă cu jocul. Aşa că posibilitatea de a juca totul singurel, cu bani sau fără, personal o consider o idee excelentă, conexiune la net să fie.
Toată discuţia, inclusiv cu răspunsuri grase despre gameplay şi acumulare de experienţă, urmăriri cu poliţia şi level-up, aici.