Our agenda was simple. Stefan and I were to head to Seoul and meet with the Bluehole Production team and discuss such trivial issues such as closed beta, PvP servers, end game content, the Western leveling curve, and production status. In other words, it was a very important trip. Our first meeting revolved around the scheduling and features necessary to run a successful closed beta in North America. This is a key difference between territories in the operation of betas and the eventual launch of a product. Some of our time was spent discussing the “why.” It’s important in Westernizing a game that you never assume someone else understands your reasons. Simple things we take for granted—like the lead time required to create a game box—are not always obvious (especially in a country where there is no boxed product). The rest of the meeting went pretty well in determining feature specs and making sure we can make our timeline for insert beta start dates here (sorry, still no announcements).
Believe it or not, this was the first time I ever had a Big Mac—always been a double-quarter-pounder-with-cheese guy. Then we caught up with the localization crew, and we all high-fived because things are going so smoothly. The major take-away from that meeting was “Let’s not rock the boat, cause we rollin’!” Next, BHS treated us to a day in the life of a level 60 in TERA. We talked endgame for a good 2 hours, and came away quite happy with what’s in store for a max level player. After this we rolled by a programmer’s cube and he quickly compiled the latest TERA client to show us a console controller in action. Controller support is even better than I’d hoped, and integration for utilizing the UI has been implemented. Pretty slick. I asked the programmer if he had ever integrated a controller into a game before—everyone laughed because in Korea, keyboard-and-mouse is king.
Our first day-two meeting kicked off with a development status update. We went over some of the big changes in the next version, talked about release timing, and fired off a bunch of questions about current and future content. It was all very informative. From there we went right into the discussion of Western leveling curve adjustments. We’ve agreed for some time now that a different curve is necessary for the West, but until this meeting we hadn’t put numbers to it. We discussed all the details of a change as substantial as this, and Mr. Park, the head of the development team, was understanding. We’ll continue to talk over the next few weeks and hopefully nail down the right pace for the Western market.
Our last meeting was a discussion about PvP and PvE servers for the west. Korea will just have one server set, so we needed to think through the changes necessary for our market. This was a great collaborative effort, as we each brought up points the other side wasn’t aware of. More work and research to do on this front!
We rounded off the night with some more Korean BBQ for dinner, then drinks and Karaoke for dessert. Yes I have pictures; no I won’t post them 🙂 Instead I will leave you with our beloved Stefan Ramirez kicking it at the palace the next day before our flight.