Interview: En Masse Entertainment COO Patrick Wyatt on Bringing TERA to the West

At GDC 2012, I interviewed En Masse Entertainment COO Patrick Wyatt on bringing TERA, a Korean MMORPG game, to the West (North America, Europe).

Here are notable segments from our conversation:
1:02 respective roles of the developer (Bluehole Studio, BHS) and the publisher (EME)
2:08 specific changes being made to the game for the West. In terms of process, BHS owns making the game code changes, and EME facilitates this process by designing the changes to be implemented and synthesizing feedback from the community
6:27 how BHS is making different versions of the game for different locales
8:30 Patrick confirms that the core combat mechanics remain unchanged for the West
9:24 the hitbox implementation. Range/reach across hitbox sizes has been normalized, so a Baraka and Popori have the same reach for attacks. Character size does influence easy it is to be hit or healed
10:56 decision to go with Frogster as the publisher for EU TERA
11:42 establishing EME as a premier game publisher, in terms of their relationship with game developers and the community
17:02 EME's analytics capabilities to understand what players are doing

Let me know your questions and feedback!

For more discussion about this video, please check out the following threads:

Cheers,
Taugrim

Twitter: @taugrim

[taugrim]

En Masse has their act together. I was very impressed with Pat Wyatt and the other team members that I spoke to.

Their intent is to build a premium brand as a game operator because the space is pretty wide open, and they have the understanding of what it will take to make that happen.

[Bernsong]

Thank you Taugrim for asking the right questions from a player's perspective rather than what we are used to.

[DeAdmiralPanda]

you should do more interviews. its rare to see someone as articulated and well-informed ask questions that actually matter to the players. great video!

[moneda]

Highly appreciate the long-form interview style, Taugrim.

[taugrim]

@Lillaru thanks for taking the time to post your feedback. You and the other folks who have. In the future when we have the opportunity we'll try to have in-depth conversations with developers like this.

[ImSoGonzo]

Finally an interviewer who isn't completely clueless on games and the questions the community wants to ask.

[CopperWhiskers]

Liking the well thought out questions. Interesting to hear about things I would never have thought of.

[Avellar]

Really good interview, covered a lot of topics that I hadn't thought of but liked knowing the answers too. This game is really fun and I hope that it has a great launch and can keep producing for a long time.

[taugrim]

@screemish what Patrick said, and Chris Hager also reiterated to me after the interview, was that the reach of abilities was normalized via adjusting the animations, so that for example a Baraka Slayer and Elin Slayer would have the same effective reach when using the same ability

[taugrim]

@Soujiro89 I spoke with Pat after the interview. EME is thinking about the right things in terms of building out the infrastructure and operational capability to be a premium publisher. E.g. they have been automating the process taking the code builds they get from BHS, making the appropriate configuration changes, and deploying the code to the servers. And as Pat said in the interview, their target is 24/7/365 customer support, which is impressive.

[Sedeena]

Something I can attest to, their customer service IS better than any I have experienced before.

[taugrim]

@Talis116 every game or product platform requires a significant amount of build out before you can launch something on it. You have to build out your infrastructure (data center / network / analytics, etc), automation for build packaging and deployment, customer support, billing, marketing, PR, web site / forum, etc. And for a specific game you need to build the relationship with the developer and localize the game.

BHS founded EME so they knew all this going in.

[smnie]

Great Interview, answered a lot of my question... and my tera fix until the next beta weekend ;)

[Soujiro]

Don't like the game in general, but the interview was really detailed and the COO really took time and dedication to the answers, which shows interest in mantaining a nice relationship with the customers.

[taugrim]

@Jontesmorsa there are tradeoffs between going with BoP loot vs BoE loot.

My impression is that EME is taking steps to disincent gold farmers from coming to TERA, e.g. via BoP, via being able to effective trade real currency for virtual currency via Chronoscrolls, etc.

Gold farmers tend to be an annoying presence in a game (especially bots and such), so it will be interesting to see how EME's approach works when the game goes live.

[taugrim]

@Mystrym the codec conversion from TwitchTV to YouTube causes a significant loss in video quality. I may start uploading TwitchTV highlight videos over to YouTube anyway, because people like you are asking about that.

I'm playing TERA in CB3. We missed CB2 due to our trip to Florida.

[Suzumebachigr]

dude the customer support is GREAT and FUN...they reply in humorous ways...i tell you even if those guys launched TETRIS i would buy it cause of the customer support.

[jiritsu]

@taugrimtaugrim This just what I want and enjoy :) There's no such thing as too much information when it's not trivial or completely off topic. Even the length of the video is great. Thanks for the interview!

[taugrim]

@Dualtowin you have half of that correct. Size does not influence your ability to hit a target. Size does influence your ability to be hit or be healed.

I confirmed this with Patrick and Chris Hager.

[taugrim]

@HalobravoJJ in PVP there are good reasons for rolling a "big" race for Lancer, with the collision detection and ability to "hide" friendlies behind you.

For DPS and RDPS, going smaller for PVP probably makes sense.