The MMORPG project “Ghost” by Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street and other former WoW developers focuses on red (theme park) and blue (sandbox) zones for world design. The team now provides new insights into the creation of the blue zones.
What defines the blue zones? When “Ghost” was announced, lead developer Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street (formerly at Blizzard and Riot Games) explained that the world of the MMORPG will consist of blue and red zones.
- The blue zones are procedurally generated and are intended to invite exploration (sandbox). They are private for each player or group and affect the world.
- The hand-designed red zones are public and offer many of the contents known from theme park MMORPGs like WoW.
Ghostcrawler explained in October 2024 that while the blue zones are randomly generated, they should feel hand-designed. To achieve this, there will not be an infinite number of areas that you would never get to see.
Instead, the focus will be on a limited number of biomes that are particularly well-developed and have a mature ecosystem. By ecosystem, Street means the interplay of gameplay features, creatures, stories, factions, and NPCs that should convey a sense of “everything fits together here.”
When you leave one zone and enter an area with a different biome, the new area should feel and play completely different. The mob spawns in a zone will be simulated accordingly so that bandits and nobles respond appropriately to each other in a region. The different zones should guide you through an overarching story, ensuring you always have a goal in sight.
Recently, the first class for “Ghost” was introduced:
Roguelike instead of Survival
What are the new findings? In a new developer post on fantasticpixelcastle.com, Greg Street reveals that the design of the blue zones was initially too influenced by their enthusiasm for the survival game Valheim. However, this led to a problem.
Exploration of the blue zones is intended to play an important role. Survival games, however, tend to penalize players for venturing too far from their safe camp too early. Moreover, it would feel very repetitive if players were to build a safe base in each of the countless blue zones first.
According to the developers, the core idea has not been completely discarded. The airships that take you to the flying shard worlds effectively serve as a mobile base.
Furthermore, the developers have moved away from the idea of designing large blue zones that could take weeks to fully explore. This would, however, rarely provide the beautiful moment of first entering a blue zone. These moments are special because each blue zone is supposed to feel distinctly different from all the others.
So what is the current plan for the blue zones?
- The blue zones are intended to be relatively small, so that you can see and discover everything in about an hour.
- Instead of bases and crafting buildings, in the blue zones, you build things like towers or bridges that can be very useful in certain situations. You will establish a large base elsewhere.
- The blue zones incorporate an element from roguelikes, where you have to choose from a selection of skills and upgrades repeatedly throughout the game.
- Each blue zone has a specific victory condition. To ensure that players cannot just aim for this immediately and ignore everything else, they first need to strengthen themselves in the zone to be able to fulfill the zone’s goal.
- A current idea, for example, is to have shrines distributed across a zone where you can choose from 3 talents each. There might be a total of 5 of these shrines. And with a bit of luck, synergies are possible, allowing you to become completely overpowered within the zone.
- At the same time, there should be an overarching character progression between the zones, through standard level stages, equipment, and similar means.
- A touch of roguelike also comes from the random generation of the blue zones. The final design of such a zone is not fully defined upon entry but is further influenced by your choices and actions during gameplay.
Will all of this ultimately be fun? “Ghost” is still in a very early conception phase. Recently, the first class was introduced, reminiscent of the Knights of the Round Table and focusing on large two-handed swords: Former WoW developer designs the first class for the MMORPG Ghost, inspired by a villain from Elder Scrolls Online
