Balanced PvP is critical and now has priority over balancing PvE content. Pocket Legends’ PvE gameplay got balanced before PvP – under the assumption that PvE is more important to casual gamers than PvP it sounds logical but according to Barnes this was a huge mistake. Something Spacetime Studios defintely want to do differently in the future is the way they approach balancing the game. Suddenly the developers saw themselves confronted with players asking for deeper and more immersive content. And while they indeed liked the instant access to the action in the game it became obvious that many of them also played the game for several hours straight. However, this casual RPG audience soon cried for tougher challenges in the game. A lot of players picked up the game and liked it. It turns out that the studio was right at aiming at the casual RPG audience. After all the mobile gaming audience wants instant access to relevant content and short meaningful play sessions, right? So the plan was to create a game for the casual RPG audience, have simple game systems and encounters, often with an obvious and easy path to success. Features were engineered to be flexible and dynamic. The product was supposed to evolve over time. Functionality and stability at launch are more important than breadth of content and game systems. I thought I would share the most notable.īarnes told the audience that the studio decided to keep the focus on what’s the core of an MMO and what can be done on mobile platforms.

In the Spacetime Studios case, some assumptions about how MMO’s should work on mobile platforms were spot on, some others were surprisingly wrong.

Surely a key factor of this success is delivering a quality product in a niche (it won’t be a niche much longer but while competition is getting tough on iOS, there is still a bit more room on Android) and getting the gameplay right for the audience. As you might know, it is working out quite well for them, not just on iOS, especially expanding into Android territory gave revenues a huge boost. A couple of weeks ago at GDC 2011 in San Francisco Cinco Barnes from Spacetime Studios talked about their experience with Pocket Legends on iOS and Android devices (the complete summary of the session is here).

Pocket legends