Interview: SOE’s Laralyn McWilliams Discusses the Design and Concept Behind Free Realms

The MMO Gamer: You mentioned that, while 9-14 is your target demographic, you think the game might have broader appeal than that.

Do you see parents playing with children, older siblings playing with younger siblings, or something else?

Laralyn McWilliams: We really see a lot of families playing this game together. One of the biggest casual games, for example Bejewelled, that sort of thing, is moms.

You can actually level up your character in Free Realms by playing those sorts of casual games. For older brothers you can level up your character playing combat.

For your sister she can level up her character playing with her pet and teaching him new tricks. Because of that variety in gameplay, that’s why we expect a lot of different people to play Free Realms.

We even have action-based games like racing, and demolition derby. Those really help everybody feel like there’s something interesting to do in Free Realms no matter what mood you’re in, no matter who you are.

The MMO Gamer: Free Realms is one of a number of “kid-centric,” let’s call them, MMOs that have been announced both this year and in previous years; Club Penguin, Toon Town Online among the others.

What do you think is behind this trend? Is it just opening up a new demographic, or is it that the 18-49 market is so saturated that now companies are starting to look beyond that?

Laralyn McWilliams: I think great props go out to some of the early adopters of that demographic, so to speak. For example, RuneScape and MapleStory really proved that kids want to play MMOs, and that kids want to invest time and get rewarded for it.

I think that they proved that the market is really strong. It’s also, from SOE’s standpoint, an opportunity for us to make a game that people can play with their kids, even in the company.

And it’s also an opportunity for us to kind of lighten up a little bit. Free Realms is not the kind of game where we have big arguments over how pointy an elves’ ears should be. It’s just not that kind of game.

It’s really a mixture of things… we have a lot of respect for the people who have been in this market for awhile. For us, Free Realms is a really important title. We’re investing just as much in this as we are in Agency and DC.

The MMO Gamer: This is one of those Devil’s Advocate questions:

In your personal opinion, do you think we should really be getting children involved in what is arguably a very addictive genre?

Laralyn McWilliams: One of the fundamental aspects of Free Realms is that it’s gameplay in bite-sized chunks.

We had a couple of reasons for doing that. One of the reasons is we recognize that kids are not the masters of their own time. If mom says it’s dinner time, it’s dinner time. You stop playing right now.

But, the other reason is because we really want you to experience a lot of things in life, and Free Realms is just one of those things.

It’s the kind of game where you log in, and you spend 15, 20 minutes, or an hour—I’m going to water my plants, I want to finish this Ninja quest, I want to bathe my dog because I haven’t had a chance to give him a bath this week. Now I’m done, I’m going to do something else.

If you want to invest a lot of time in it, you can. But because it’s not the same kind of item-driven grinding experience that a lot of MMOs are—it’s actually easier to play in smaller chunks.

I think that really helps make it more easy for families to fit into their schedule, as well.

The MMO Gamer: Cutting out the grinding and item hoarding, that doesn’t leave much left to the standard MMO model.

What do you work with from there, having lost those two key pillars of the genre?

Laralyn McWilliams: We do have levels. Every class levels up independently. We also do have items that can be pretty meaningful. It’s that they are driven more by player goals and desires than they are by the mechanics of the game.

As an example, when you’re playing—and I’ll use EverQuest 2 as an example—when you’re playing EverQuest 2, if you don’t acquire new items periodically your character becomes much more vulnerable in combat.

In Free Realms there’s not that same impetus. I have my Ninja outfit, and I have my Ninja weapon, and that could probably suit me for all of my levels, if I wanted it to.

But, there’s also this cool gold-plated Ninja suit, and there’s this—if I want to be all Girl Power—there’s this cool looking pink Ninja suit. If I really want those, I might do quests to get them, or pay microtransactions for them, or have players craft them for me.

There’s a lot of different ways to get stuff.

So, it’s more about me figuring out what I want in life, and not that anyone is telling me that I’m going to die if I don’t get that pink Ninja suit.

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