Beckett Massive Online Gamer

Coming to North American shores this spring, Perfect World International’s Battle of the Immortals is another import from overseas that’s generating some buzz in the MMO community. But if you’re thinking this is just another free-to-play, cash-shop-fueled grindfest from Asia, you might be surprised to learn about some of the things PWI and the Chinese development team behind the game are doing to make the game more palatable to gamers on this side of the Pacific.

We recently had a chance to talk with a BoI's Product Manager Jon Belliss and he shed a lot of interesting light on both the game itself and its unique import process.

“The dev team for this game is really putting forth a strong effort to make this game work internationally, and this is something that’s really lacking in the international market,” Belliss told us. “I’ve worked for other companies porting games to North America, and their attitude is usually, ‘We’ll bring this over to America, and if it works, great, if not, too bad.’ That’s not what’s happening with Battle of the Immortals. For a team to realize that there’s a difference in cultures and realize and change, that’s great. For as successful as they are in China, it’s great that they’ll revise the game and make changes for a North American release.

“In China, Battle of the Immortals is a glorified chat room. Monsters don’t aggro; you can walk right by them and they won’t bother you. If you do choose to attack in bersion, the monsters do little or no damage. The challenge of the game is very light, and the game is very bot-heavy. Players use bots to grind up through the levels while chatting in the game world.

“That’s not going to work in North America, so we’ve made a lot of changes. Monsters can aggro, and we’ve increased the monster difficulty tweaking their HP, damage, etc. It feels a lot more action-RPG-ish now.”

PWI recently delayed the closed beta for BoI, as well, which raised some eyebrows, though Belliss says it was for very good reasons:

“The main reason for the delay is because our Shanghai studio (this is our first game that’s not being produced by our Beijing studio) recently released an expansion for BoI. It was going to be released late April in China, but they finished it way ahead of schedule, at which point we went over there and talked to the dev team. At the time, we were localizing and cleaning up a version of the client for North America, but upon seeing the new expansion, we saw that it had a lot of features and flexibility that we felt we needed to have the best possible impact in North America.”

Belliss went on to explain a few other reasons for the later dates, such as proper localization, both for language and for UI considerations (“In Asia, a lot of stuff can be said in three characters, but English is longer, so we need more room for things like skill buttons.”), coding to make sure the game worked on all operating systems, general gameplay tweaks and bug-squashing, and, in what should be good news for North American gamers, a complete overhaul of the monetization structure for the game. As with most Asian MMOs, BoI will be free to play, with a cash shop in place for premium purchases, though the model for the cash shop in North America will be very different from the one utilized in China.

“One of the big things in the game is the gem-socketing system that you put in your gear. In short, the gems can be combined to achieve higher-level gems that you put in your weapons and armor to enhance their abilities. In China, you have to buy gems of level four and up from the cash shop, and a typical level four gem adds about 2,500 hit points to your character. A typical level 100 character has a base of about 10,000 HP and you can socket up to 16 gems in your gear – and the gems go up to level eight! So you can see how that raised an alarm with us.”

“We stressed to the dev team in China that in North America, gamers are willing to pay for convenience but not willing to pay for power. They were very receptive to the feedback, especially considering that the gem sales in the cash shop make up about 60% to 70% of their revenue.”

As a workaround to this prickly issue, PWI came up with a solution that would be more palatable to North American gamers. The higher-level gems can drop as rare drops in dungeons or from bosses, and you can try to combine them to make even higher-level gems, but it’s not automatic that you’ll succeed. However, you can buy an item from the cash shop to make it automatic. This way, a player with more time can accumulate more gems to combine and will eventually get what he needs, while a player with more money than time can pay the “convenience fee” of the cash shop to get the gems he needs.

But there’s more to Battle of the Immortals than just the cash shop and other monetary issues. The game itself boasts five classes, robust PvE and PvP, pets, mounts, and some of the coolest-looking weapons and armor you’ll see in any game. We’ll dive more into the gameplay details in part two of our interview tomorrow.

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (1)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

..., The only way that's going to happen is if they up d

February 19, 2010     

The only way that's going to happen is if they up drop rates (XP, money, items), because as it stands, Asian MMOs are just major grindfests with a few quests tacked on; Western MMO players do not like to grind...the problem is that companies that bring Asian MMOs to the West like to keep the game the same as it was in Asia and that's the problem. It's the same, more or less, back in the '80s & '90s when game companies refused to bring a lot of RPGs to North America, stating that there was no market for that sort of game here, etc.

mlauzon | 99.231.133.143 report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +2