Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street talked about the design of the classes in his new MMORPG codenamed “Ghost”. He presents an exciting alternative to MOBAs like League of Legends.
Who is Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street and what has he revealed? The development veteran served as Lead Designer and spokesperson for Blizzard for several years, guiding the direction of World of Warcraft before working for Riot Games on the new MMORPG for League of Legends.
In the past year, he founded the studio Fantastic Pixel Castle to work with other veterans on a new online role-playing game codenamed “Ghost”. Recently on X, he discussed the class design of the MMORPG. Here are the key insights:
- “Ghost” should value your time and be very Twink-friendly.
- For this reason, the classes of the MMORPG must not be generic, like: Here you have the fighter, and there the wizard.
- On the contrary, “Ghost” aims to offer 20 different fighter and wizard classes that play differently across the board.
- This is only possible if they specialize strongly, similar to the champions from MOBAs like League of Legends. The difference being that the characters in “Ghost” carry your name, are created by you, and do not represent fixed predefined hero figures.
- As further sources of inspiration for the class design, “Ghostcrawler” mentions games like Gloomhaven, Pathfinder, or Darkest Dungeon.
In further posts, the developer reiterates that “Ghost” will provide the holy trinity of tanks, healers, and damage dealers. Hybrid classes, which can take on multiple roles, are currently not planned due to the focus on specialization.
With this trailer, Greg Street introduced his new studio:
Concepts that are slowly becoming reality
What else do I need to know about “Ghost”? Even though Greg Street often speaks a lot about his new MMORPG, the project is still very early in development. This is underscored by his latest post on X about class design:
Much of this is still on paper at this point. We have mostly implemented it in the software, but the variety of playable classes is still very low at this stage, so we may need to change some ideas. This is all part of discussing things so early.
Greg Street via X
However, it is already quite clear where the journey is generally headed due to the lively exchange. The foundation of “Ghost” consists of the floating land masses that cover the sky of the game world. There are two variants of this.
- The red zones resemble traditional areas from MMORPGs like dungeons and raids, with aggressive monsters, world bosses, and foreign players.
- Blue zones, on the other hand, function more like a sandbox. Dynamic events should take place there, and every visit is different. These zones could even serve as a private area for you and your friends, with the possibility to define your own rules or to improve and customize your area (keyword: housing).
The combat system is intended to settle somewhere between New World and Black Desert on one hand and WoW and Final Fantasy XIV on the other. Controller support is planned in addition to the usual PC control via mouse and keyboard.
The perspective is to be third-person, just like in WoW and similar games. Community addons will only be supported if they enhance comfort or accessibility or change the interface. Mods for combat are not allowed.
The MMORPG is being developed in Unreal Engine 5, and the developers are placing a high priority from the outset on the integrity of the client as well as protection against exploits and bots. A Buy2Play payment model without microtransactions is planned.
If you want to take a first look at the current prototype of “Ghost”, you can do that by the way! However, keep in mind that this is a very early version made of placeholders. The actual assets need to be developed first: Former WoW lead shows his new MMORPG after only 4 months of development
