When Wizardry Variants Daphne, the latest installment in the long-running Wizardry series, launched last October, even its developers at Drecom didn’t expect it to be quite as popular as it turned out to be. “The initial response was nearly double what we expected,” director Keisuke Kanayama told AUTOMATON. Since then, development has, in some ways, become even more difficult than when building the game from scratch.
Although they were confident that the core fanbase would enjoy their work, Kanayama and his team were aware that they were in relatively niche territory with Wizardry Variants Daphne, which reflected in their launch targets for the title. But the live-service dungeon crawler RPG has, despite some ups and downs, seen enduring popularity even as it marks its first anniversary. Maintaining the hit, however, has put development in a tight spot, Kanayama admits.
“We’re incredibly busy. We want to complete the story that leads up to defeating the Ten Greater Warped Ones, but the upcoming new Abyss (dungeon) will only be the fourth. We want to keep releasing content consistently, but both the third Abyss, Guarda Fortress, and the next one ended up being delayed past their planned update dates.”
The reason, Kanayama explains, is development resources being spread out between new content and service upkeeping. “We have to handle operational tasks, fix bugs, and respond to player feedback, all of which scatter our efforts. We’re trying to keep the overall balance between live operations and new development, like adding new Abysses, but it’s quite difficult.”
It’s a dilemma typical for live-service games: too many fixes and your players get bored; too much new content and your game starts breaking down. “My workload is maybe down to 80% of what it was compared to before release,” Kanayama says, “but in other ways, it’s even tougher. Before launch, all of our development work simply went into making the game better. But once you go live, it becomes a mountain of tasks, from tuning existing game elements, fixing bugs and creating new Abysses, to managing a larger team (Daphne’s dev staff has more than doubled in size since launch).
Kanayama compares the ongoing development cycle to the game’s own dungeon crawling. “It’s an Abyss,” he says. “I thought that once the game launched and started earning revenue, I’d feel happier, but we’re still at the bottom of the dungeon.” Still, he finds the process ultimately rewarding, and his goal is to keep Daphne’s development process sustainable while raising player satisfaction.
For its major anniversary update, Wizardry Variants Daphne got a Bounty Bill system for hunting powerful enemies, expanded Compendium system, and revamped Auto-Battles with customizable commands. Preparations are already underway for year-end events.
Wizardry Variants Daphne is available for PC (Steam), iOS and Android.
