Dreamlord: Q&A With Jon Selin, Lockpick Entertainment
TE: You seem to be leaning on your community a lot (especially with the Wiki for documentation). Is there a reason you took that approach? How much of a role do you want the community playing in Dreamlords?
JS: We have a great respect for our community and for communities in general. In most games when you are searching for advanced information regarding something in the game you generally don't go looking at the official site, but rather some specialized fan sites. We want to give the proper tools to our community to create a consolidated knowledge base. Having a Wiki is something that I look upon with enthusiastic optimism; it allows players to share their tips and tricks in an easy-to-use framework. Furthermore, a MMOG is only ever as good as its community, and we have been blessed with a very mature and easy-going one as far as communities goes.
TE: Tell me a bit about the gaming business scene in Sweden. I don't know a whole lot about it. What kind of environment do you guys work in? Is it competitive, is everyone supportive, who are some of the major players, etc.?
JS: It's a very exciting place to be developing games. There are a bunch of big names around, like Massive, DICE, Starbreeze, Avalanche. If you don't recognize the names of the studios I think their games might ring a bell: Ground Control, World in Conflict, Battlefield, Chronicles of Riddick, The Darkness and Just Cause. Over in Norway we have Funcom with Age of Conan lingering around the corner and a bit further out in the ocean there's the Icelandic CCP with their hit game EVE Online. We have the makers of Hitman over in Denmark and the creators of Max Payne a bit to the east in Finland. All in all, we are in good company and it's a very friendly environment. We run into each other on various expos and conferences from time to time and talk about what we are working on and exchange experiences. But more often than not it's just a great opportunity for the whole lot of us to get [drunk] together.
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JS: We have a great respect for our community and for communities in general. In most games when you are searching for advanced information regarding something in the game you generally don't go looking at the official site, but rather some specialized fan sites. We want to give the proper tools to our community to create a consolidated knowledge base. Having a Wiki is something that I look upon with enthusiastic optimism; it allows players to share their tips and tricks in an easy-to-use framework. Furthermore, a MMOG is only ever as good as its community, and we have been blessed with a very mature and easy-going one as far as communities goes.
TE: Tell me a bit about the gaming business scene in Sweden. I don't know a whole lot about it. What kind of environment do you guys work in? Is it competitive, is everyone supportive, who are some of the major players, etc.?
JS: It's a very exciting place to be developing games. There are a bunch of big names around, like Massive, DICE, Starbreeze, Avalanche. If you don't recognize the names of the studios I think their games might ring a bell: Ground Control, World in Conflict, Battlefield, Chronicles of Riddick, The Darkness and Just Cause. Over in Norway we have Funcom with Age of Conan lingering around the corner and a bit further out in the ocean there's the Icelandic CCP with their hit game EVE Online. We have the makers of Hitman over in Denmark and the creators of Max Payne a bit to the east in Finland. All in all, we are in good company and it's a very friendly environment. We run into each other on various expos and conferences from time to time and talk about what we are working on and exchange experiences. But more often than not it's just a great opportunity for the whole lot of us to get [drunk] together.
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