We chat with Gameloft’s Arnaud Bonnard – Online Executive Producer of Order & Chaos – about bringing this ambitious MMORPG to the AppStore…
Say what you will about the originality of Gameloft’s library of games, but there is no denying that they have found their niche. That niche is looking at games genres available on consoles, and then reverse-engineering those game experiences and bringing them to iDevices. They have successfully done so with first person shooters, racing games, sports games, platformers and real time strategy. It was only a matter of time then that they tackled the massive multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) genre.
The frequency of Gameloft’s releases is impressive. While we happily lap them all up, I expect we spend little time thinking of the effort put into their creation. Here we do just that, with the insight of Gameloft’s very own Arnaud Bonnard, the Online Executive Producer of Order & Chaos. We find out what’s involved, and how much work goes into creating such a game.
TG: What brought about the idea of going from what are predominantly Action and FPS games, into the MMO genre?
Arnaud: It’s been a while since Gameloft started to think about developing a MMORPG on mobile. Only the recent devices and connection performance allowed this project to even be considered. Plus, there is no equivalent, no serious competition yet on the Apple or Android stores. It was then our objective to bring the 1st real full 3D, real-time, open world MMORPG to smartphone devices. We love challenges, and this one was really big: how do you make the huge world of a MMORPG fit into a small mobile devices, while retaining high quality graphics and content? Hopefully, we’ve been successful in this exercise.
TG: Are you MMO fans yourselves? If so, what games did you look to draw inspiration from?
Arnaud: Absolutely we’re fans, yes. But there was not one standout inspiration. We studied the codes of the genre that can be found in all the good MMORPGs: quests, loots, levels, groups, guilds, mails, etc. Those features are mandatory in any high quality MMO today and our objective was really to bring all the core features that you can expect on PC to mobile devices, to offer the best multiplayer experience on the device.
TG: The scope for an MMORPG, such as this, is huge. How long has the game been in production from its initial concept, to being released on the AppStore?
Arnaud: What we can tell is that it’s been the longest, biggest, craziest project we’ve ever worked on here at Gameloft.
TG: How many people were on the team for creating Order & Chaos?
Arnaud: About 30 people in the core production team – but that doesn’t include all of the people in QA (Quality Assurance), support, etc.
TG: Tell us a bit about the concept process. Do you brainstorm as many ideas as possible? Or did you have a specific plan from the outset?
Arnaud: MMORPG is still a genre that is really specialized on PC, dedicated to hardcore gamers. So we knew from the beginning that we would set Order & Chaos in a heroic fantasy world – it’s a universe a lot of people are familiar with, since Tolkien books and related movies, Dungeon and Dragons board RPG and Warhammer tabletop war games, and a very suitable atmosphere to live epic quests, huge battles, and seeing heroes rise and villains fall.
Then it has been constant work all throughout the game production, to define the game features, but in the limits of a mobile device. Challenges are somewhat different – just look at a PC MMORPG screenshot, and then an Order & Chaos iPhone screenshot: you’ll understand all the work that has been done to optimize the game interface to make it comfortable for palm-sized gaming and touch-screen input.
TG: Speaking of controls. MMORPGs generally require a whole host of keyboard shortcuts. What were the main challenges to bringing a game like this to a touchscreen device? And how did you eventually come to the solution of the combat wheel?
Arnaud: My first objective since the very beginning was to bring all the core features of a MMO into your mobile, but without covering the whole screen with icons and interface. So we immediately understood we had to think “modular”. That’s why we put all the windows (quests, character, bag, etc.) into the in-game menu, and we added arrows to unwind more advanced abilities (channels, more slots, different size of the mini map, etc.). It required a lot of testing and experimentation. In the end we just choose what worked best!
Regarding the wheel specifically, we’re quite proud of it. We first tried a system similar to Dungeon Hunter 2’s icons, but it wasn’t enough for the many skills required while playing a MMO. Then we thought about putting it on a circle, to improve ergonomics … and that’s how the idea to transform it into a turning wheel came to us!
Both this wheel and the extra slots work well. I wouldn’t be surprised if we find it back in future games (like the D-pad and camera move dragging by the finger: first imagined by us in the first Brothers in Arms for iPhone).
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