Greg Street, better known as Ghostcrawler, is an industry veteran who worked for many years on WoW at Blizzard Entertainment as Game Designer and then Lead System Designer until the Warlords of Draenor expansion.
Street, who’s also credited as Designer on the first three Age of Empires games, later joined Riot Games to work on League of Legends. His real passion is the MMO genre, though, and he became the lead of Riot’s League of Legends MMO in late 2020.
Earlier this year, Street departed Riot to build a new studio of his own. The veil has been lifted today, revealing that it’s a fully remote development team called Fantastic Pixel Castle and funded by NetEase.
The triple-A MMO project is codenamed Ghost. It is targeting a PC launch (with plans for consoles, too) and will be set in a brand-new fantasy universe. The official website includes the first details on the setting:
You are one of the survivors of an apocalypse lost to memory, and the rebuilding of the world now lies on your shoulders.
In Ghost, you travel to world shards to power up your characters, bring back resources, and build your fledgling civilization by growing and supporting the city’s diverse and ever-changing factions. In turn, you’ll see the city grow and evolve over time based on the choices and actions of players just like you, as an epic story unfolds season over season.
The World of Ghost is an original IP designed from the ground up to create rich and immersive gameplay. It is a fantasy world of heroic adventure, where you seek clues to uncover the mysteries of the world and engage with allies and enemies who have diverse motivations, actions, and secrets.
Albeit a fantasy MMO with magic and axes and crossbows, Ghost will not feature certain staples of fantasy, such as elves and orcs. Fantastic Pixel Castle also revealed that their goal is to bring back social gameplay in MMOs, whereas recent titles focused too much on solo adventuring.
Structurally, Ghost will offer private ‘Blue’ shards and public ‘Red’ shards. The developers expect players to travel between them with their characters.
Blue Shards play a bit like a survival game – you and your friends can gather resources, construct bases, and adventure out into the wilderness. Blue Shards are extremely variable, ensuring a place full of new discoveries and challenges, guaranteeing that you’ll never see the same Blue Shard twice. Because the Blue Shards belong to you, your effects on them are persistent and permanent. If you prefer a more competitive experience, you can host or join Blue Shards focused on guild rivalry, or even guild-versus-guild PvP.
Red Shards are crafted by some of the best world artists and encounter designers to provide a signature massively multiplayer experience with many players at once. Red Shards are some of the most challenging places in the game to survive, so your group will need to band together with other groups to defeat world bosses, collect critical resources, and even open the gates to the end-game raiding instances.
Fantastic Pixel Castle promises ‘dozens of classes’ available in Ghost. Combat-wise, it sounds like the game will be a hybrid of tab-target and action combat, as the studio promises updated control schemes and UI while retaining classic targeting and strategy.
There’s no release date yet, of course, though the official website says the game will be available for testing early on. However, Greg Street promised to reveal even more information about Ghost in an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session live-streamed on November 8 at 2 PM Eastern Time via Twitch.
