Varför Early Access?

“Fantasy Tales Online is already the length of a full title with over 50 hours of content for your first play-through. However the expectation for a MMO title is much higher and early access is the next stage in our development process. We’re ready to grow the community and take on a larger player base of early adopters to join and help us shape the game.

A key policy that we have always stood behind is that players have a voice in helping bring our game to life. We have already stood behind this throughout numerous testing phases and are now ready to begin to scale our product with additional players. There are a lot of different gameplay features that require us to have a larger audience to help fine tune mechanics and gameplay.”

Ungefär hur länge kommer det här spelet att vara i Early Access?

“As long as it takes. We take your feedback seriously and want to make sure we’re proud of this game. We understand the complexity that goes with releasing an MMORPG title especially with a smaller team size. Because of this we want to ensure that we gather as much feedback as possible in order to properly balance and polish the game before we release.

We will release once your feedback is confirming that the game is as polished as we envision it to be.”

Hur är det tänkt att den fullständiga versionen ska skilja sig från versionen i Early Access?

“Here’s our roadmap for features we’d like to introduce, complete and polish:

• New boss fights that you would expect in a AAA MMO title requiring players to strategize to tackle large obstacles.

• Continue to raise our level cap by adding new zones, quests and unique items.

• New puzzle elements and dungeon mechanics.

• Improvements to the random dungeon generator.

• Elaborate expedition quest chains such as sieging instanced towns.

• Extended the crafting system recipes to allow crafting top tier items.

We’re also looking into giving users access to tools to create 3rd party servers where they can create their own worlds. We believe that 3rd party server can bring an incredibly creativity and diverse content to a game.”

Hur är det nuvarande läget i versionen med Early Access?

“All the core MMO mechanics are already in place. We’ve got classes with unique builds, a rich item system, quests, guilds, engaging combat and party system all in a persistent world. We’ve had a public test available for the last year while we continued to add content for players. Already our users have logged a combined year of play time with several users singlehandedly clocking in between 100 to 200 hours.”

Kommer spelet att prissättas annorlunda under och efter Early Access?

“Fantasy Tales Online is a free-to-win title and will remain that way. Early Access will feature a discounted Frontier bundle for early supporters.”

Hur planerar ni att involvera gemenskapen i er utvecklingsprocess?

“Keen players can watch our progress in (semi) real time by watching and engaging us on:

• http://twitter.com/ftostaff - We post updates for most player visible changes as we queue them for the next content patch.

• http://www.twitch.tv/ftostaff - Watch us code the game live. Players love to quiz us on combat, drop and mechanics during our steam :D. A great place to discuss balance changes

• http://reddit.com/r/fto - Updates straight to your front page

• http://forum.fantasytalesonline.com/ - Sign up and join our forums

Or get a summary of the changes as they go out by watching our patch notes on our Steam Page or tumblr (patcher) page: http://fantasytalesnews.tumblr.com/”