NetEase graciously accommodated me when I had more questions for the new game they’ll be releasing in Japan for mobile and PC, and will soon follow a global release. That game is called Sword of Justice. Which has apparently been available in China for the past two years, they asked me not to record my game session, as their current PC platform release was a fairly basic port at the time I tried it out. Getting back to my brief sit-down situation with them, I’d like to share the questions they were asked and the answers they provided.
I was originally expecting it to be some sort of press conference, where I would share the floor with a set of other media people when asking questions. The truth turned out to be quite different, where I was instead in a small room with two of their senior developers and an interpreter. So I ended up having to think on my feet. I hope readers out there find this exchange substantial. So here we are, me and the developers of Zhurong Studio; Mystia Ma – Senior Game System Designer and Heng Zhu – Senior Game Numerical Designer, answering my questions as I try to make sense of what I just experienced.
(Note: I’ve paraphrased the conversation to make the points clearer)
Q: “What sort of game is Sword of Justice? There seems to be a lot of personalization, like it’s an MMO. Is it an F2P gacha game? What is the model of the game I’m looking at here?”
A: “We’d like to call this a ‘New Era MMO’, where you can play this either solo or play with others whenever you like. Most of the games’ content can be played either way.”
Q: “The next thing I noticed is that the material seems to be based on things I’ve seen in old Chinese movies that were about immortals, mystical martial arts, and all that. What sort of lore is this game based on? (I’m not familiar)”
A: “Actually, this story is based on Ancient China, about the Northern Sung Dynasty (might also be called ‘Song Dynasty,’ online sources seem to vary), hundreds of years ago. There’s actually an ancient novel called ‘Sword of Justice.’ We have based the narrative of this game on one of the Four Constables.”
At this point, I’d like to point out that there are quite a lot of Chinese folk stories, many of which I honestly don’t know about. I wouldn’t be able to draw out anything from that specific response. So I decided to move on.
Q: “When it comes to Chinese stories, they tend to be quite overwhelming in terms of the number of characters, the amount of dialogue, or understanding the specifics of the setting. This isn’t automatically bad, but global audiences tend to appreciate more brief stories. Is there a plan to maybe bridge that gap? To help people get through so much text, so much talking?”
A: “This is actually not only an issue for international players, even in the Chinese player base, they don’t have time for so much talking. So far, we’ve added the feature to speed up these scenes up to three times the speed. If you’re just not interested at all, players can simply play other content within the game.”
Q: “As the player, how are you interacting with the story? Since you pointed out the story isn’t really necessary, is your own character taking a role among the fabled characters in Sword of Justice?”
A: “For this game, we’d like to focus on player freedom. So they can make one or more characters and interact with the story as they like. The players’ choices will affect how the story will progress and how certain NPC characters will perceive you, and even other players. For example, if you do something good, the NPCs will call you a hero (or something similar). We want to make the narrative interactive that depends on the players’ choices.”
This response suggests that there will be some sort of alignment system for the characters you create as you progress through the story, or at least for quests and the NPCs affiliated with them. One of the developers further details that the customized choices you make with the characters you create (job class, combat role) will also be integrated into how you will interact with the story.
Q: “I will be moving on to other systems now. I noticed that there’s a lot of customization you can do with the moves you can use in combat, and that you can mix and match from different styles. So I’d like to figure out the focus here, is it more on PvP or PvE? Focused on Raids? Will there be custom-tuned skills for PvP?”
A: “Basically, we’re going to reiterate that we want to be able to present you with various types of gameplay. If you want to focus on PvP, you can work on that and even level up through doing just PvP. But if you’re just interested in the game’s story and PvE, or something more leisurely, or focus on some other story or adventure, you can do that too. Any of these modes will allow your character to progress.”
Q: “I noticed that you can also have customized looks, like skins. Is this going to be the focus of the monetization model you have for Sword of Justice?”
A: “The bulk of our monetization will come from cosmetics and fashion. Features like specific facial features, or dyeing clothes or hair in a specific color. In China, these customizable cosmetics are very popular. Not everyone likes to fight, and they just focus on making great-looking characters that get popular. They would craft character appearance, or costumes, and other accessories.
We’d like to emphasize that not all cosmetics are exclusive to cash shop items only. We would release some free sets on occasion and offer ways for F2P players to be able to grind for other cosmetics. But there will still be items that can only be attained through direct purchase. Even if you plan to buy directly, we don’t plan to charge high prices for them. It will all be affordable.”
Q: “Since you mentioned ‘Chinese Server,’ I’m now curious. How old is the game? How long has it been available in China? Since there will be a separate global release, how long will it be lagging behind Chinese servers?”
A: “Sword of Justice has been running for about 2 years. For the international server, we will be starting from Version 1.1.1. While yes, it will be lagging from the Chinese server, we’ll be carrying the optimizations that we learned to make from our current experiences directly to it. We won’t be flooding the global release with too much content at one go so as not to overwhelm the player base.”
Q: “Since you mentioned optimization, I noticed that the graphics on the PC platform are clearly a port from the mobile game. Is there an intention to maybe have a separate PC client that can showcase better graphics?”
A: “Having a graphically improved PC version is already in the works, actually. However, we want to make sure that running a separate client won’t open us up to new problems like game stability. Our development focus is to make sure that cross-platform play will work seamlessly.”
Q: “Is there a current idea on when the release window would be for the international version of this game?”
A: “There’s still a lot of work to do, so we can’t commit to a release window just yet. But we’ll update you as soon as we do!”
Q: “Last question, will there be a difference in content between global and Chinese versions, such as events, or cosmetics?”
A: “We’ll actually have to take into consideration the local culture, so we may localize events or customize events according to the norms of the locale in question. Possibly do collaborations with IPs popular with that region as well!”
With that, I ended the interview, hoping to hear again from them soon.
In review, I’m a little concerned about how Sword of Justice aims to be a game that appeals to such a broad audience. My experience with reviewing games tells me that it will either end up as a lopsided experience, where one way of playing feels particularly great to play, and others aren’t as impressive. Or that despite its many offerings, none of them feel meaningful to play. Another concern is how some of the questions were answered vaguely. It could be simply the language barrier at work, or that the development is still too early in the works to be able to commit to making definitive statements. However, this doesn’t change that the image they had illustrated for me to perceive this “New Age MMO” is murky, at best.
At the moment, I find it hard to recommend the title as the final product is still a long way from where I saw it. But given NetEase’s track record in the past few years, they may see something great in this game that my short session with it and its developers has yet to uncover.
Sword of Justice launches on November 7 for PC and mobile.