Interview: Chatting With FPC's Greg Street About Ghost MMO Testing, Blue Zones, And 2025
From the first, Fantastic Pixel Castle’s level of transparency with its potential player base has been incredibly refreshing. In an industry that is, sometimes detrimentally so, way too secretive, having a major studio not just talk about their upcoming MMO super early but show it off is welcome indeed.
“To some extent, it’s common sense to me,” Fantastic Pixel Castle’s studio head Greg Street told us in an interview last week. “This is what I’ve always done in my career, even from Age of Empires. I was like, ‘Let’s ask players what they think.’ And that was such a radical concept at the time — it’s still somewhat radical, depending on who you talk to.”
Today, Fantastic Pixel Castle is showcasing more early gameplay from a recent Milestone test, giving a real early glimpse of actual players testing Ghost, with Street in the video setting expectations early: expect some “rough edges.”
Partner With Players
One of the mantras we’ve heard from FPC since the start is the idea of partnering with players. This idea stems from a desire to include players in the conversation around the development of Ghost from the jump, both as a way to keep prospective players in the loop about what’s going on, but also a way for the team at Fantastic Pixel Castle to react to feedback before it’s too late.
“If players don’t like an aspect to the game, wouldn’t you rather know that before?” Street asked in our interview. He continued, explaining the reasoning: “So many MMOs release and have this awesome level-up experience and people are like, ‘Okay, this may be my next game,’ and they hit end game and they run out of stuff to do and they churn. And so we want to play test the end game. We want players to tell us, like, ‘Hey guys, there’s not enough here yet.’ Or ‘Yea, you built this awesome raiding experience, but we totally short circuited it by doing PvP because it has better rewards.’ We’d rather deal with that before we launch rather than begging players to come back to patch 2.0
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