Executive Producer David Webber talks Sword of the Ultimate Destiny: Battle of the Three Kingdoms 9

By Steven Crews | April 1, 2010 | | Filed under: Features, Interviews

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Steve sits down with David Webber, Executive Producer at SpriteBox Studios to discuss their inaugural title, Sword of the Ultimate Destiny: Battle of the Three Kingdoms 9.

Topics include the process of importing Eastern games into the West, resolving culture clashes, and what may well be the ultimate incarnation of real money trading.

Read on for the transcript.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what it is you do at SpriteBox.

David Webber: Sure. My name is David Webber, and I’m the executive producer for Sword of the Ultimate Destiny: Battle of the Three Kingdoms 9.

What that means is I’m basically in charge of the day to day operations here at SpriteBox, bringing the game to the American market.

The MMO Gamer: Do you have any sort of official abbreviation? That title is a bit of a mouthful.

David Webber: Internally we like to call it SotUD:BotTK9.

The MMO Gamer: How about just SUD?

David Webber: I guess that could work, too.

The MMO Gamer: Alright, could you start things off by telling us a little bit about the game? I admit that I hadn’t seen much of it before I was assigned to do this interview.

David Webber: Absolutely. SUD is a brand new massively-multiplayer online role-playing game, originally released in China in 2004 as Battle History Warrior: Romance of the Three Kingdoms 9.

We didn’t feel that our primarily male, 18-35 year old demographic would necessarily gravitate to a game with “History” or “Romance” in the title, so that was one of the first big changes we had to make, once we received the license.

The MMO Gamer: I’m sorry… but doesn’t the game being six years old no longer make it “brand new”?

David Webber: Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s like those commercials you hear on the radio for used cars with 5,000 point factory inspections. We went over every line of code in this game with a fine-tooth comb, to the point that it’s now better than new.

Not only that, our localization team is second to none. We don’t want players to feel like they’re foreigners in their own living rooms the first time they log in.

The MMO Gamer: Could you go into a bit more detail on that? Localizing games from East to West is a subject I enjoy discussing with companies like yours.

David Webber: Sure. The biggest example of that I could give would have to be the game’s setting, the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history.

That lore, the backstory, was originally what attracted us to SUD when we were looking for a game to bring over.

You want to talk about source material? The Chinese have written so many books about this stuff it’d make Tolkien die of shame—if he wasn’t already dead.

But, the problem we ran into early in the alpha was that something an Asian player might immediately recognize as a cherished part of their history, an American player would just think is some kind of Babelfish translation error.

I mean, Wei, Shu, Wu? Who ever heard of these guys in Arkansas?

So, we had to make some hard decisions in order to ensure the game was accessible, and that was when we came up with the idea of “fantacization.”

The MMO Gamer: …Fantacization?

David Webber: Exactly. It’s like Westernization, only better.

We looked at each of the Three Kingdoms, and decided on a theme for them that American players could more easily relate to:

For instance, Wu is always portrayed in the narrative as the evil, war-like nation… and we  just had a light bulb moment and were like; hey, that sounds a lot like traditional fantasy Orcs!

Then we figured we’d use Shu for the Elves and Wei for Humans, add in a little magic, move the action from China to a planet named Mythadon… now that’s a game a Western player can understand without even looking at the manual.

And our partner studio in Shanghai already had several dozen published fantasy games under their belts, so it was all just a matter of asset swapping, at that point.

The MMO Gamer: So you’ve taken a historical Chinese MMO… and turned it into a fantasy Chinese MMO?

David Webber: I prefer to say that we took the Three Kingdoms backstory as a base, and built upon it to create a rich, original fantasy world all our own.

The MMO Gamer: To be blunt, there’s an awful lot of competition out there in the free-to-play Asian fantasy game market these days.

What could you possibly do to set SUD apart from the herd?

David Webber: I’m glad you asked me that, because SUD has a huge number of innovative features that we think are really going to make it stand out from anything out there on the market, East or West.

The MMO Gamer: Such as?

David Webber: Well, our microtransaction model, for one.

The MMO Gamer: I assume like most East Asian import titles, you’re going with the free-to-play cash shop model?

David Webber: The game is free-to-play to a point, yes. You can log in and stare at your naked level 1 character all day long without ever paying us a dime.

But, if you really want to play the game, well, then things get a bit more complex.

The MMO Gamer: Complex?

David Webber: How much is your time worth to you? Ten dollars an hour? Twenty? Fifty? Think about how many hours it takes you to get that suit of epic armor, or that top rank in the PvP tournament.

When you’re getting around a hundred hours /played, it really starts to add up.

Our core philosophy is that time is money.

Why should anyone have to go grind out rats, and spiders, and goblins for days or weeks at a time just to get to the meat and potatoes of what they really want to do?

We think that all these games like WoW that are moving toward a softer leveling curve are missing the point entirely.

In SUD, you can reach the maximum level five minutes after you first log in… as long as you can afford it.

Continued on next page…