Did that make a lot of work for the development group?
I'm the director for the U.S. release of Phantasy Star Online 2 Meseta the Xbox version in addition to the Asian launch of PSO two, which was released before this U.S. version. So I am sort of the localization specialist. Can it be a relief now that PSO two is finally out in the West, for most of the English-speaking PSO fans who've been asking for it for ages? There's a feeling of relief [because] there was lots of planning that went to the development; for instance, Sega U.S. and Sega Japan took polls in the fans about what they wanted from the match. However, as an online game, I feel the true challenge will be in keeping the service going forward. In February, we had the beta, and there was an unusually high number of participants. We heard a great deal of players say they have been waiting eight long years for this launch. So we were very happy about that.
Is this one reason the Western servers are different from the Japanese servers? So you can roll out the later episodes at the right rate, rather than dump all of the Western players onto the same servers as players in Asia, who have experienced all that content already?
It is a tiny bit of either. The main reason why we place it on a different server for your U.S. release was to control the rolling from the stories and due to server capacity. The simplicity of play is one of the selling points of this game, and also the space of the servers to the gamers affects latency, so we knew we wanted to have the servers physically closer to our players in North America. And although there are hardcore fans [who'll play frequently and explore all of the articles ] in the North American region, there are still many who aren't familiar with the franchise, and we didn't believe it would be fair to release eight decades' worth of articles at once. Can it have to do with the microtransaction system and buy meseta pso2 in-game buys being very distinct for Japan?
English
Arabic
Français
Español
Português
Türkçe
Dutch
Italiano
Russian
Romaian