Домой United States USA — Cinema Lightforge’s Blizzard And Epic Vets Raise $5 Million For Player-Led RPGs

Lightforge’s Blizzard And Epic Vets Raise $5 Million For Player-Led RPGs

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The new studio’s CEO talks about its new vision for role-playing games.
Former leaders from Blizzard Entertainment and Epic Games announced today they have raised $5 million to launch a new studio, Lightforge Games, which will create player-controlled role-playing games. Chief executive Matt Schembari was previously Blizzard’s lead software engineer for user interface, and was the former director of UI at Epic’s Fortnite platform team, handling the in-game interface and a variety of other game elements. His leadership includes veteran developers with experience from Epic, Blizzard, Riot, Bioware and Zenimax Online, working on games including World of Warcraft, Diablo III, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Hearthstone, StarCraft 2, Overwatch and Elder Scrolls Online. The $5 million in funding comes from Galaxy Interactive, NetEase Games, Dreamhaven, Maveron,1UP Ventures and angel investors. We caught up with Schembari for an interview about the new venture. Heather Newman: What was it that made you feel like this venture was the next step you needed to take? Matt Schembari: We founded about a year ago with five of us, with this kind of blended DNA between Epic and Blizzard. We all were at a point in our careers where we really wanted to start something new, and we have this deep passion for highly creative, highly social games. It ended up being a really fast conversation, to be perfectly honest. A couple of us started getting together and brainstorming on, “What are some of the cool ideas that we’ve got that we want to pursue?” The five of us kind of realized pretty quickly that we had this shared vision for how to rethink RPGs. Newman: What is that vision? Schembari: We’re not talking specifics of the game at this point, but we love games when people come together and can weave their own narrative, can create their own worlds, get really in control of the gameplay and where it goes. Everything from Minecraft to Dungeons & Dragons — that’s the spread of games that really just bring people together to create. That’s the kind of thing that we’re looking to do. If you look at the history of the RPG over the last 30 or 40 years, it very much started with a very flexible, very spontaneous version back in the tabletop days. Then, because of the limitations of technology and things like that, the computer RPG went down a different path of evolution. We want to go back to the original version, utilize the latest advancements in technology and culture, and bring that all together into a new kind of RPG experience. Newman: Are you envisioning this as a group gathering to explore an experience, or are you seeing this more as a traditional tabletop RPG experience where you might have one person who’s acting as a content creator or a dungeon master? Schembari: What is really important to us is this idea that there is no real boundary between creation and play. We really love this idea that no matter what you’re doing, you’re creating and playing at the same time. I think Minecraft is such a good example of that — when you’re making something in Minecraft, are you creating or are you playing? It’s kind of the same thing. Newman: So what are some of the challenges you face? There’s a reason why there’s pretty much one Minecraft. Part of that has to do with the complexity of building that element of creating right into the game itself. Schembari: It’s all about UX [user experience] in a lot of ways. This is something that is deeply important to me and a lot of people on the team. I’ve spent a good chunk of my career specifically focused on UX and UI, and so has a good chunk of the team. This is something really important in game development in general, even separate from what we’re doing. UX and user experience and thinking through what the player feels, why the player is doing something, what their motivations are, what their frustration points are — that’s how you ultimately make a game that really resonates with players. So we’re viewing this as primarily a UX challenge, presenting something that has a lot of flexibility, possibly even infinite flexibility, in a way that still has to be interacted with on a game pad.

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