Former World of Warcraft and League of Legends veteran, Greg ‘Ghostcrawler’ Street, recently announced an MMO of his own called Ghost. But unlike the slew of ongoing live service games that seemingly beg you to log in every day in perpetuity, Street states that the team doesn’t want to give their player base FOMO as an incentive to come back. Ghost supposedly aims to slot into your life, not take it over.
Street said as much in studio Fantastic Pixel Castle’s first-ever AMA hosted on YouTube. One interested potential player submitted a question about “the soulless quest of optimization at the expense of social decency.” Essentially, they asked how the team planned to keep optimization from destroying the “social fabric of the game.”
In response, Street pulled out his expertise about the genre: “Peeling back the curtain a little bit here, the historical business model for a lot of MMOs was to keep players playing as much as possible, because that’s where the revenue comes from.” Other live service games have since adopted that philosophy with timed challenges, battle passes, and seasonal objectives - but Street thinks that model hasn’t “aged super well.”
He points to one of the year’s biggest releases as an example. “When Baldur’s Gate 3 came out, I wanted to just play a lot of Baldur’s Gate 3,” Street admitted. “And If I had been raiding or something at the time, that might have been an issue for my guild. If you’re a hardcore raider like my friend [user experience director] Ed [Altorfer] here, that may be fine. You may want to raid all the time and we know that the optimization game is fun for some players. They want to try to be the first to beat the boss and then beat their friend’s DPS. We get it.”
The folks at Fantastic Pixel Castle are gunning for a different, more accommodating approach, though. “We are really trying to design Ghost to fit into your life,” continues Street, “and because we’re releasing the story in chapters, if you feel like you’ve seen the end and you want to take a break for a little while, that’s fine – we’re not going to get mad at that, and we’re going to try to make sure all the systems in the game can support that.”
Street previously delved into Ghost’s setting, which he says is hugely influenced by the multiverse-spanning Planescape setting.
