Anarchy Online - Alien Invasion Wrap Report

High-Level Goals The high-level goals of any MMO expansion are naturally to give extra content to the existing groups of players, while also adding new content to make the game attractive for newcomers.

Since Anarchy Online has been out for quite some time, a large majority of our players belong to an organization (guild). With Alien Invasion, we therefore wanted to focus our primary efforts on this group, since they stand behind a lot of the social structures found in the game. This included guild houses and player-made cities. At the same time, we also wanted to make something for the newcomers, and the result of this was a brand new startup playfield. We know that Anarchy Online is a complex game, and with a new playfield, we feel that it's easier than before to get started. There's other stuff in the expansion as well, which you do not need to be in an organization to have fun with, including new perks (special attacks), social clothes, flying vehicles, the Leet pets for those who pre-ordered, a new tradeskill interface, quests, weapons and items, a playfield and more.

Once again, we wanted to break free of what is considered "normal" in terms of MMO expansion content. We wanted to do something else than just add more playfields, weapons, armor and monsters. We wanted to create something truly new. We found this feature in the alien city attacks, which comprise a new addition to our gameplay on demand system. In all MMOs so far, you and your guild had to go out into the world to find things to fight. In Alien Invasion, the monsters are coming for you. The tide has turned, and the players go from being the hunters to the hunted. Through improving our gameplay on demand system, we could put this feature into the hands of the players, so they could choose for themselves when they wanted to be hunted. You can simply set a time for your guild to gather, log into the game and trigger attacks that lead to large numbers of aliens swarming into your city. Thus our players got the power to trigger large-scale guild raids at their own leisure. We have received great feedback on this feature after some initial tweaks, some even saying it's the best pure gaming experience they have ever experienced in an MMO. ;)

Technology We have continued to use our existing technology for Alien Invasion, while continuing to improving our work-processes and tools to streamline development.

Development Timeline We started full development shortly after we were done with the major post-tweaks on Anarchy Online - Shadowlands. The Alien Invasion project was done according to cost projections. Thanks to a very dedicated development team, and the fact that we put in some massive hours at the end, we finished and shipped it in time.

There was one element that we were not able to finish in time, and that was the player-made shops. This was a feature we were not comfortable with launching as it relied heavy on the players' in-game credits and items. I think it was the right decision to pull them at launch, as opposed to delaying the whole expansion pack.

Changes and Enhancements We were able to fully calculate the development process, and did not make any changes once we were fully up and running. We announced the full feature list in February after thoughtful calculations, and stuck to that throughout the process.

At the very beginning of the project, we did have some other ideas, including real time strategy elements, which we later abandoned. This is normal in any pre-planning phase, I assume. To let you in on what we initially planned, I have attached our pre-Christmas video to this article, since it shows where we were in late November last year. It's a lighthearted video, and originally only meant for a party where each Funcom team presented what it was working on. Since the product has launched, I figured it would be cool, at least for our community, to see where Alien Invasion was almost a year ago.

Anarchy Online - Alien Invasion video 2:30, Bink format, approx. 59.5 mb

Major Challenges When we set out to create Alien Invasion, we wanted to make sure we did something new. We wanted to push the MMO genre beyond what it was known for. Instead of just creating a bunch of new playfields with aliens in them, we wanted to create some massive and immersive for the players to control to a much larger degree. I think we succeeded in doing this.

Another major challenge was to improve the entire gameplay experience in Anarchy Online. Our community is pretty hardcore, and our game is an advanced one. We wanted our next expansion to challenge the advanced players we already had. That wasn't going to be simple. The players have high expectations - as they should - regarding what we deliver, and making sure the expansion was for the hardcore players as well as the more casual players was definitely a challenge.

Best Decisions The best decision we made throughout the development was to commit and dedicate ourselves to a completely new approach to our gameplay on demand feature - in this case, the alien city attacks. The fact that we were able to pull this off in such a great way meant that a whole new gameplay mechanic was added, giving our players even more to do at their own leisure. The feedback is that it has given our players a lot of fun, and nothing pleases me more.