Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

For many individuals, it was actually a surprise to learn that K2 Network was attempting to import a game and charge individuals for retail copies and an eventual subscription fee. This particular point was of interest in our conversation, and Peter made a point to explain the initial reasoning behind the idea. "Sword of the New World was a little different than the rest of the games we had published in the past, and we wanted to make that difference easily apparent to the Western market," David explained. "We felt that in order to bring it to the West, we needed to mimic the models that people were used to, such as the subscription fee. In Asia, they're totally used to free-to-play. Here, that's not the case. So, we thought that if we choose a similar model yet keep the prices low, the game would resonate with them a little bit better. Then as soon as we got all this feedback saying that if the game were free that they would play, we knew we'd made the wrong choice." At this point in the conversation Peter smiled and shrugged his shoulders. "Sometimes you have to take a swing and you miss. I think we just overestimated how people would react if we made this game a pay-to-play game. Luckily it's a lot easier to go free-to-play than the opposite."

Sword of the New World features an amazing stylistic approach based on old Baroque architecture.

But, bringing the game to retail initially may not have been ll bad. In fact, some people would argue that having a retail version of the game actually brought the game more attention than it would have normally received in the general free-to-pla market. "Definitely. Going retail definitely helps," David said. "You get a little more coverage from the media when you have the retail component and there's just a greater awareness of the product than if you merely do a free-to-play model. But in general I think these sort of games still rely very heavily on word-of-mouth sort of references. The more people you have, the more people they tell and as long as they have an enjoyable experience they could pass the word onto their friends to play the game."  

Throughout my experience as a player, a lot of my contentment with a game is hinged on the activity of the GMs running the game environment, whether that's in a story sort of setting or just in general "fun" events that players can take part in. K2 Network has always been fairly active in the event department, hosting 2x XP weekends and all sorts of story events, and I was curious what their latest event schedule was looking like. Phil took this question (being the GM) and explained what players should look forward to. "We've got a lot of events coming up that we're kind of keeping in our pocket," he said. "A number of them - the big ones - are storyline events. We've already held a number of these story-driven sort of instances, and players have been impressed at how we handle the tweaking we've had to do on the fly to make these events run. We're going to start bringing these online really soon along with some holiday events and some of our basic week-long type situations.

"It's funny," Phil continued, "because a number of events that we thought would be sort of 'filler' sort of situations turned into our most popular encounters. We had a couple of interesting controversies crop up." Since this sounded interesting (Ten Ton Hammer is never afraid of controversy!), I asked Phil to give us an example of what had happened in game that they'd had to deal with. "We ran a big story driven event called the Dio's Rising," Phil said. "We were running some lower level situations that pertained to this event, and a few of the bigger guilds decided it would be fun to crash the party, all in good fun. As gamers, you're always trying to have a good time, right? So in this case we had to come up with a way to get them out of this low level zone but also keep them entertained and wouldn't make them upset. Some other companies might have considered just booting all of them for a time, but we didn't. It worked out great for everyone and they had a really great time."

One aspect that may not be known to player unfamiliar with the style of K2 Network is that every event the team hosts is hand done. No event is simple an addition to the game like what you see in many "premium" play-to-play titles. "We try to go above and beyond what other companies do as far as customer service and events go," Peter said.

Unique Player Characters, like Panfilo, can now be acquired through the cash shop.

On the content side of things, most of the new content that's going to be introduced in Sword of the New World in the near future revolves around the cash shop. With so much of the game previously locked away by the need to provide for the subscribers of the game, there was little reason to put any sort of cool content in the cash shop. Now, that's no longer the case.  According to Peter and Phil, the cash shop will now be filled with costumes, potions, and Unique Player Characters for players to scoop up. "When offering a subscription," Peter said, "it's a very fine line between offering items players need and being seen as gouging the player base. Now that we've gone to the free-to-play model, we have a bit more flexibility. The great thing about this is that a lot of these items were already in demand even with the subscription model in place."

According to Peter, since the game has already been released in Korea for some time, players know that there are UPCs available in other countries that aren't yet available in the U.S. and Europe. Now that the cash shop has opened up, players now have a better opportunity to get some of those UPCs that were closed off in the pay-to-play model.

As far as expansion dates go, Peter stated that there was nothing concrete in the books, but they would be revealing more information on the upcoming expansions as it came down the line. The Korean version of the game has already been expanded upon, so its only a matter of time before the North American version gets a large content update. Whether that update is coming sooner or later remains to be seen. When news of the expansion breaks, you can rest assured that Ten Ton Hammer will be the first network to push the news your direction.

With that, we wrapped up our conversation with Peter and Phil. As always, we appreciate the time they took to speak with us and the open and honest way in which they handled all of our questions. If you didn't get a chance, make sure you check out our review of Sword of the New World and now that it's free-to-play, try out the game!

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