The Netease Games HQ in Hangzhou, China, feels like a well-oiled machine. Two sprawling campuses sit in the middle of the massive city, each almost its own ecosystem with thousands of employees working, grabbing meals at the mega canteen or the many ‘Netease Coffee’ branded cafes, visiting the gym for a quick workout in between answering emails, or wandering its plant-filled quads on a break.
It’s fitting that such huge grounds house Joker Studio, a team hard at work creating an equally massive virtual world in its upcoming free-to-play behemoth Sea of Remnants. It’s a project of almost unprecedented scale in the free-to-play space, featuring more than 400 named non-player characters (NPCs), each with their own unique storylines that can be directly impacted by the player, in addition to a meaty branching main story - it sounds like the promise of Fable but on steroids.
As I sit down with Sea of Remnants product lead Innis, it’s the logistics of just how all of this is going to be achieved that I’m most interested in.
All aboard
“So production-wise, our NPC pipeline, with those who are in charge of writing the narratives and branching stories for each of those NPCs, is independent from our main narrative writing pipeline,” he explains. “They do not have a shared resources pool, and are not limiting the development of each other. The NPC team are simply going to keep on working on the 400 narrative lines, even though we know that to complete it might be a very ambitious long-term target.”
Although managed by its own team, these NPC stories are still going to impact the overall world - with a range of possible outcomes and environmental styles depending on your choices. “Not just the narrative itself, but also the branching choices you make with those NPCs is going to have an impact on the world,” he adds, going on to highlight the fact that the player has the option to kill many of the game’s characters, leading to a more desolate and decaying environment.
Conversely, he reveals that there are more prosperous outcomes “if the player encourages most of the NPCs to do business out on the ocean.”
Despite this rather segmented setup, collaboration is still important and has shaped the trajectory of the project so far. “Internally we often say that each of our pipelines shall not just work on their own,” Innis says. “Whenever teams have any new ideas, they are encouraged to bring in some colleagues from other pipelines to discuss whether there are new possibilities generated from any of the new changes there, whether we should design some new branches, and so on.”
Discussions within the studio are responsible for everything, right down to the puppet pirate theme. “We didn't actually start off with the pirate theme. We started with a few keywords like ‘memory’. When discussing ‘memory’, we decided that we wanted to convey an attitude of living life to its fullest, or living in the moment, and also relaxing when facing difficulties and challenges. Those are the key points that we wanted to convey with our game, and that was far before the pirate theme was determined. Starting from those keywords, we then decided which artistic visual style we wanted and what theme we wanted to have,” he begins.
“When we do our development internally, we have a term called 'emergence'. In the process of development, especially in the initial stage, sometimes new ideas would come to the surface and emerge. That's the time when we want to add new things to the project, for example, that visual direction and the pop elements we want to put into the designs. The pirate theme was one of the things that emerged in that process.”
Sea-RPG
Given its focus on player choice and the wide-ranging impacts of decisions, undoing past decisions by having your character forget them is a major feature that emerged during development. Innis compares the Sea of Remnants experience to that of a Computer Role Playing Game (CRPG) where players “get to have lots of variety in choosing their own crew, as well as having their own builds.”
“But with CRPGs, especially single-player CRPGs, there’s a problem,” he continues. “When I play them, every time we want to try a new setup, it requires me to start the whole game over, or at least start the battle again from the beginning of it to select a new team. We wanted to solve that kind of problem, so in our design of the world and the systems with numbers, the values of stats and properties, we have designed everything in such a way that we can leverage amnesia mechanics to formulate a very unique process where you can leave imprints and an impact on the world, while still allowing players to try out new possibilities.”
For Innis, the core of any RPG is being able to experience the impossible: “Sea of Remnants is still an RPG game, and with RPG games, it's all about offering players things that they only get to experience in the game, not anywhere else, not in their real life, not in any other games.”
After more than 10 hours hands-on, I feel confident in saying that Sea of Remnants is on track to deliver when it launches for PC, Xbox and PlayStation consoles, and mobile later this year. For a run-down of how well it all works, learn why it’s shaping up to be one of the most ambitious games ever made in my full hands-on preview.
Alternatively, see my interview with another Sea of Remnants developer on building the ultimate open-world pirate playground or learn about the staggering amount of post-launch support that’s already planned.
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