The future of Soulworker (Director's Interview)

    I was going to post this earlier last week, but forgot to so anyways here it is. This seems very important especially for those who have been playing soulworker for a while and are heavily invested in it. Recently, I came across an interview of the new director of soulworker (the old one stepped down after the Violent Sun controversy more details below), but considering the entire information was compiled by somebody else, I'll leave the link below. For those who don't want to browse through Reddit you can just read it here:


    Background on the former project director


    The former project director received a lot of criticism this summer for his response to the Violent Sun controversy. He believed that the biggest problem with SoulWorker was the lack of long term goals and that players overly focused on short-term goals. This basically manifested as the paywall which was known as Heroic armor and the director doubled down on trash drop rates as a meaningful sense of accomplishment. This basically led to a bunch of players leaving the game and a lot of other controversies such as "this developer doesn't play their own game." The director stepped down last month allowing for the new director to take his role. He still remains in the company and I do not know if he can still influence the SoulWorker Team. He's apparently now working on some larger role with managing Liongames' future. He used to have a decent reputation for listening to the playerbase but that changed with VS. He was SoulWorker's second director and was in charge of the game during its live service.


    Background of the current director

    • Joined LG in 2014
    • formerly part of the Art Team
    • Nominated by the Art Team and Effects Team leads to take over the role
    • Worked with developing Chii Aruel and Ephnel personalities
    • Responsible for event design, merchandise, directing, and art
    • Considers themselves to be the best person to deliver the content that the community wants
    • Wants to focus on adding the content that is missing (Previous PD considered adding anime-trope content to be more important; aka fanservicey stuff)


    Costumes

    • Will try to make more costumes for Chii and Ephnel
    • Ephnel's Modern Casual was popular so they will try to make the set for everybody
    • Will try to make clothing closer to everyday clothing over themed outfits
    • Costume release cycle will continue as is
    • Some technical issue with adding more costumes with emotes
    • Will consider selling emotes separately

    Future Content

    • Acknowledges that current game content is lacking
    • One new character annually is Liongames' limit (Backpedal from the previous director statement of one every 6 months)
    • Will try to end Season 1 by summer 2021 (Backpedal from the previous director statement by summer 2020)
    • Next "Large" raid will conclude the story (Summer 2021)
    • Corrupted Records Jin and Iris planned
    • Chii Aruel and Ephnel side stories planned
    • Season 2 starts in Eastern Cloudream
    • Avon and the Blood SoulWorkers will play a larger role in season 2
    • Considering another revamp of Trisha mechanics and Akashas (in respect to overburdening new players)
    • Guild content will be added later on but will focus on improving overall game content first
    • Will try to avoid the same raid design as Violent Sun
    • Will need to rethink the farming structure
    • Will try to revamp abandoned content (examples given was dailies and Corrupted Records, dailies have been revamped to the Season Pass/Battle Pass system)
    • Big updates planned until March (No idea what big refers to;a lot of big content for 2020 have only been temporary event updates)
    • New story updates from March to May
    • Revamp of collectible items such as SoulSequences in September and October
    • Considering adding things that might help explain the story and universe more
    • Will try to make events as permanent and improve overall event quality

    Other

    • Considers part of the in-game universe to be lacking
    • Coronavirus canceled the player convention
    • Considers 2020 to be a hard and unfortunate year of many faults and regrets
    • grateful and regretful to the players who supported them and criticized them
    • 1st day of KR launch was most memorable. Good and painful memory. Lately, development has been a series of regrets and there are now more things that must be done compared to the past
    • 4th anniversary video will have more characters talking instead of Stella, Chii and Iris (3rd Anniversary video where the Publishers/Developers make fun of their embarrassing updates and prior mistakes;highly likely that they'll make fun of everything that went wrong in 2020)
    • Considers players to understand mechanics better than the devs
    • The devs play the game in their offtime and are "high ranked" (keep in mind devs are not publishers)
    • Ruin Fortress Revamp planned so players can progress through it faster
    • Will try to be considerate with designing new Akasha (Kant Akasha controversy; Kant basically powercreeped every Akasha in the current content and was not available for f2p players for about 4 months)
    • Will try to make a dedicated forum section for direct developer communication (in response to the devs do not listen)

    About that one anime game that released in September

    • Interesting work
    • Learned a lot from it
    • considers that it will help expand the anime game fanbase expects short-term player loss but expects it to help improve overall interest in developing anime games and overall playerbase
    • That game is that game, and our game is ours


    Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/soulw…oject_director_interview/

    Sources:


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    There are a lot of implications here and can mean a lot of things. New director can lead to bad or good things, but things will definitively change from now on. And, yes this can affect the Gameforge version which is not limited to slower content or worse performance than before. What exactly will happens remains to be seen.

    dddd

    Of course, I am grateful to you for the work done, but the decisions of the company for us players is just a repetition of the phrase we are negotiating with Lions Game. "But in fact, the company just does what is most beneficial for it in the first place. Whoever changes from the leadership composition, for us ordinary players it does not matter.

    Simply put, if future ideas in the game have been moved even further ... then we will also have to shift everything ... and we will wait for updates even longer.

    Are you perhaps one fo the gameforge employees? xd

    I knew of the Violent Sun controversy but no idea regarding Kant/Akasha issue. But I like the new direction. Quite frankly I wasn't a huge fan of some of the previous additions in the game.


    Some of my thoughts on the new direction:

    I'm glad they are shifting away from fan service. It's getting ridiculous how lewd and blatant some of the new designs and outfits have become. Glad they are focusing on more important stuff. Maybe we will finally get a new male character. But considering he is from the art department, I doubt it. I would imagine the art department is partly responsible for how fan service all the new characters are.


    I'm not sure about selling emotes separately. I like that so you don't have to wear the outfit to use it, but I worry that we have to pay for both if separated? It would nice if the emote is included in the outfit pack, but also sold separately at a lower price for those that just want the emote.


    Even more friendly Trisha and akasha mechanics would be nice. I opened 395 high-quality, 200 normal, 373 inferior akasha from farming 7 characters on the grutyroshka event and didn't get a Tenebris. A pity would be nice because that is just stupid. Upgrading equipment would also benefit from some form of pity.


    About time we got guild content. There's really no real benefit to being in a guild atm. I mean there are some minor ones but nothing substantial. Well the guild i'm in is basically dead anyways.


    Content is lacking indeed. The problem is that every update we get ONE end game dungeon. Or maybe two. There's ever only one or two things that's worth farming. It's just not diverse enough. People will get bored in a month. Also looking forward to how they change the farming mechanics because farming is very repetitive.


    I was also complaining to my friends how the game basically forgot about hidden quests and dailies. I mean they are pretty useless, but if you are going to have a tutorial side quest specifically for these features and have them for the first 4 cities, at least keep it consistent and add them to the new maps. Or revamp/remove it if it is such a failure. They really shouldn't be leaving incomplete features in the game.


    I also hope they make the side quest and raid quests fit a bit better with the continuity of the main story. I'm happy the new director recognizes that the in-game universe lacks in several aspects.


    I actually like the promised new direction. But I have very little faith for Gameforge at this point so we might not ever see these changes.