Free Realms Creative Director Laralyn McWilliams: Designing an MMO That’s as Fun to Play as it is Easy to Quit

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Steve sits down with Free Realms Creative Director Laralyn McWilliams to discuss SOE’s recently released kid-centric MMO.

Topics covered include the surprise of hardcore players trying out the game–and liking it–and the difficulties in designing a game that is at once both fun to play, but also easy to stop playing any time you want.

The MMO Gamer: The game’s been out now since the end of April. How’s it been meeting expectations, pre-release compared to now that’s in the hands of actual players?

Laralyn McWilliams: It’s always interesting when you’re making a game, you’re sort of placing bets on what you think people will like, and what you think people will do.

To some extent, it really exceeded our expectations because we hit over two million registered players before we’d been out a month, and we’re past three million, now.

So that’s really been tremendous. We’ve been getting great reviews, so we’re really happy about the response from that perspective.

From the perspective of the players in the game, that’s where it really gets interesting for us because we get to see where we were making the right bets and where we really weren’t.

We get feedback, and then we start responding to it. So we’re generally really pleased. We’re working out some technical issues still because 3 million is a lot of people to accommodate all at once.

But I think we’re doing pretty well, and I think people are really enjoying the game.

The MMO Gamer: I would think that too many people to accommodate would be one of those good problems to have.

Laralyn McWilliams: It is, actually, and we’re getting a lot of press as well; there’s a great New York Times article. It’s just been really fascinating for us as a team to watch and really exciting because for a long while we were the sort of little game nobody had heard of.

We were SOE’s small project, and so it’s really great for us to finally get it done and get it out in front of players and then have players enjoy it as much as they are.

The MMO Gamer: We talked briefly outside, before we sat down for the interview, and you said that the types of people playing the game actually surprised you… more of a hardcore demographic than you were expecting.

People bringing their WoWWow reviews guilds over to play in between raid lockouts, things like that.

Laralyn McWilliams: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s what’s really interesting to us because when we first released Free RealmsFree Realms reviews it was out for a couple of weeks before the TV ads started to run and all of that. So the people who had most heard about the game before we launched were MMO players.

MMO players are really quick to try every new game that comes out. And I’m one of them too, right? So I buy every new MMO that comes out, and I always try all of them.

So it was great for us was to get these MMO players – some of them in our beta, some of them not – really see them stick with the game and enjoy it.

It was great, for example, we launched very late in the evening on our launch date; I think it was probably 11:30 at night, the night of launch when we finally launched. And even though we’re on the West Coast, so obviously the furthest behind time zone other than like Hawaii, there was still a ton of players who had been waiting all night to play the game who just poured into the game as soon as we opened the doors.

So reading that people are…it’s interesting because we didn’t place a lot of focus going toward launch on some of the features that established MMO players really latch on to, because our primary focus was getting the mechanics fun [?] and getting the base of the game to play there.

But now we’re getting a lot of feedback from those more hardcore players of that they love the game and they want guilds and they want to be able to have more incentives to group and those sorts of social activities; which we always plan things like an auction house which we had always planned to do and in fact were developing before launch.

We just were focusing our priorities in making the game as solid as possible and as bug-free as possible.

The MMO Gamer: So there wasn’t really any, “Please put in a dragon to kill, and some epics, please!”?

Laralyn McWilliams: No, we’re actually not getting any of that, and it’s funny because some of our fans are our biggest supporters on the forums.

So every time there is a post from somebody on the forums saying, “I’m already level 20 on this job. I feel like I’m done,” somebody else says, “Have you tried racing? Do you have a pet? Have you tried cooking? There are so many different things to do, stop being so focused on trying to race to the maximum level as fast as possible, that’s not what Free Realms is about!”

And it’s really not; it’s really not about the race to the highest level possible. It’s all about doing what you want to do, and having fun. If you want to play and max out one job at a time, that’s cool. If you don’t want to do that, you don’t have to.

Even for the players who get all the way to level 20 there are all sorts of leader boards, which then becomes another race to get to the top of those.

The MMO Gamer: You said a very strange word in that answer: “fun.” Can you explain what you mean by “fun” in an MMO? I’m not very clear on the whole concept.

Laralyn McWilliams: [laughs] That’s really the heart of Free Realms.

Looking at all of the different things that you can do in the game, and not just providing you with variety but also making sure the activity itself is fun.

Our goal was that the activity you’re doing to level up is so fun that leveling up is just a side effect. You just want to play the game.

We’re seeing that now with a lot of our players. For example, a lot of the more casual players and some of the parents who play the mining game, which is sort of a BejeweledBejeweled reviews, match three-style game, some of them are sort of accidentally leveling up because they just like playing the game.

So some of them will be level six or seven and then somebody will say, “Have you done this quest?” And they’ll be like, “There are quests?” Then somebody just turns them on to the idea of, “You mean there’s some dude who’s going to pay me to do this. Really?” And now they’re getting into the quest line.

The TCG is the same way, a lot of people play the TCG a lot and say, “What? There are scenarios? I can challenge NPCs?” That’s a whole new thing for them cause they just like playing the TCG.

That’s a part of what’s really revolutionary about Free Realms, creating a progression system and persistent characters around things that are actually genuinely fun to play.

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