One of the creators of White Knight Chronicles, the upcoming PlayStation 3 role-playing game, just wanted to know how long their game was. âSo, that was the point of the question,â Yoshiaki Kusuda said through a translator, laughing. Not really.
Level 5, the studio behind White Knight Chronicles, is an RPG juggernaut in Japan. They make the top-selling Dragon Quest games these days, are working with Studio Ghibli on a major adventure and have the Dark Cloud and Rogue Galaxy RPGs to their credit.
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âWhen we start developing an RPG we start from a story,â Kusuda explained. âThen we divide the story into the parts where the player should play and the parts that would be just shown. Based on that, we create kind of a flow chart and then decide how many hours should be allocated to this part where players are supposed to be in the story, to make sure we keep a good balance.
Level 5âs next RPG for the U.S., White Knight Chronicles, has an online-enabled quest system that auto-matches players interested in group missions. That affected how long this game would be.
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As soon as Kusuda told me this, Sonyâs producer on the game, Kentaro Motomura, chimed in: âI have spent 1,500 hours online and I donât feel i have finished doing everything.â
Shaken from my original line of questioning, I had to follow up. I asked Mr. Motomura if he did anything other than play the game?
âEvey moment I can spare and every break time I have, I play White Knight Chronicles,â he told me.
Ask for one secret to be revealed and you get another. But at least now I have a little better sense of how RPG-makers figure out how long their games will be.
