PAX 2008: Twin Skies

Without a doubt, the free-to-play MMO market is booming right now. The creators of Neopets have formed a new company, Meteor Games, and decided to throw their name into the hat with their new social network and MMO hybrid, Twin Skies. This new development studio hopes that their dark fantasy (think Labyrinth) MMO can carve out it’s own niche through it’s heavy social emphasis and neat browser-client crossover technology.

I got the chance to sit down with Tom Mannino and Jeff Pellegrin and take a deeper look at Twin Skies. Read on for the full scoop!

We’ll start out with the game itself. Twin Skies is a fantasy-based MMO, somewhat in the vein of Warcraft or Fiesta, but with a heavy dark fantasy slant. Big influences for the game were Labyrinth, Dark Crystal, and James and the Giant Peach. The storyline focuses on these two planets, linked together by some mysterious force. You’ll create a character by choosing one of the seven races and a class (out of twenty). Each race will have their own unique classes. As you might expect from the guys that brought you Neopets, you’ll have your own virtual pet. Each race has three pets to choose from. Some fight alongside you, others give you buffs. You will have to spend some time taking care of them, they are a little more interactive than your average MMO pets.

The development team wants to ensure that no two characters look alike. Your avatar is defined more by their iconography than what piece of armor they are wearing, and there are a ton of customization options to change your appearance. You’ll even be able to dye your hair or get colored streaks. There is no real “endgame” to speak of and you won’t have to grind for hours to get that one piece of loot. You advance your way through the game in two ways, by completing quests or earning achievements. In general, quests are intended to advance the storyline and achievements are for advancing your character. You won’t get a quest asking you to kill ten wolves, but you still might get an achievement for doing so. As Twin Skies has a heavy social focus, many achievements are being added to facilitate that. One example given was that there is an achievement for getting a group of people into a tango line. Many of these achievements are hidden, and the first person to find one is immortalized in the game’s achievement database.

The trade skills in Twin Skies are founded on the basis of “opt-in complexity.” By picking and practicing your trade skills, you will slowly open up layer after layer of detail. For instance, if you are a merchant, you will open up a huge economic market that the average player might never be aware of. At times, players will stop by a shop and sell their goods. They might buy a few items. Those shopkeeper NPCs actually have a limited supply of goods, they must maintain a local market and order goods from international markets. To facilitate cash flow, those NPCs will often resell the goods that players sell to them. As a merchant, you can see this whole process and interact with it. Merchants can put in purchase orders, and can get items from non-local markets (as long as they can pay the shipping). As you level up your merchant skill, you’ll open up new economic frontiers. Similarly, artisans can create all sorts of in-game content with their crafting skills. At first, they can paint homes and armor in different colors. Eventually, they’ll be able to create actual artwork to sell. Truly skilled artisans will actually be able to “paint” spells.

One of the goals Twin Skies is to get rid of the stigma that other games attach to the term “pick-up group.” Twin Skies is intended to be a social MMO, one where you never play alone. Every player has a Facebook-like profile on the main website. All of the features of a social network are there, but slightly altered to facilitate in-game communication. You can set up quest meetings and parties on the website and invite your in-game friends. You can also leave messages, check your auctions, and change your equipment through your profile page.

In the game, there are huge advantages to working in groups or meeting new people. If another player shares a quest with you, an icon will light up alerting you to this fact. If the quest involves collecting items, all group members share those items. You won’t need to collect thirty spider heads per player. In the world of Twin Skies, guilds are called “Clubs.” The main difference between Clubs and the guilds of other MMOs is that players can join multiple Clubs at the same time. You’ll be able to simultaneously chat in all of your Club chatrooms at the same time, and you can subscribe to quest-related mailing lists for your Clubs.

The browser-based interaction doesn’t end with the social network. In fact, one of the coolest features of Twin Skies is the crossover between the browser and the game client. Your actions on the Twin Skies website can have vast consequences in the game. The simplest form of interaction comes in the Flash-based minigames. One of the games online now, “Very Hunger Junkworm,” is a snake-like game where you feed a worm. If you get a high score in the minigame, a giant Junkworm will spawn somewhere in the game world labeled with your name. It will wander around and eat people, and you’ll get notices each time that it does. In the “Legends of Laundry” minigame, you’ll help a girl wash loads of clothing. This girl actually exists in the game. If you’ve recently played the browser game, she might thank you for your help. If you do particularly well, she’ll give you a quest in the game that gives you a new tool to use the next time you play the minigame.

During our demo, I got to see a couple of more complex ways for the browser to interact with the game world. In one of these tech demos, the web browser showed a 2D version of what was actually happening in the game. The same characters appeared in both and moved at the same time in both. Tom, who was administering the demo, cast a spell in the browser version and that same spell was cast in the game client. In the other demo, a slider on the webpage changed the time of day in the game. Although both were intended to show off their technology, the sheer potential of such a crossover is stunning.

The core game of Twin Skies is free-to-play, but a premium subscription option will be available to hardcore players. For somewhere between five to eight dollars a month, premium players will get more bags, a bigger house, and more customization options. The developers also plan to make money through microtransactions. Players will be able to spend their money on clothing and extra pets. All non-free goods will be purely aesthetic, you won’t be able to buy your way to power. Although they didn’t say anything, I’m pretty much 100% sure that they will put out merchandise based on their cuter monsters. It would be a wasted opportunity if they didn’t.

The core development mentality of Twin Skies is “release early, release often.” They want to get some content out there as soon as possible, then build it up over time. They hope to involve the players in the tweaking of the game. Their input will shape the future of the MMO. Weekly patches are planned, with content updates in most of them. New quests and achievements will be added on a regular basis, and the level cap will increase at a steady rate. Rather than spending millions on a huge ad campaign, they hope that grassroots efforts and word of mouth will advertise for them.

Several of the minigames and parts of the social networking portion of the game are online now at the official webpage. A full launch of the game client is planned for the first quarter of 2009. While their success in the crowded MMO market is far from assured, I can’t wait to see what they do with their cross-platform technology.