MMOBase

Interview with Oneil Buena (Perfect World Brand Manager)

Let’s meet, Perfect World Philippines Brand Manager, Mr. Oneil Buena

GM T: Hi Oneil. Glad to have you on GM Tristan Online. Anyways, let’s get to the meat of things. A lot of my readers are asking me about the game and are demanding for more info. But first, tell me why Perfect World Gold is different from other MMORPGs of its class? And why is it that whenever someone watches the videos or looks at the screenies, one can’t help but compare PW to World of Warcraft? For you, is this a good or bad thing? and why?

Oneil: It’s definitely a good thing to be compared to something that is available in the market but only in so far as having a reference point to see what Perfect World Gold can offer in contrast to that of WoW. Perfect World Silver has features that can be found in WoW as well but to say that Perfect World Gold is the Asian WoW wouldn’t do as much justice to PW. WoW will be WoW, established, popular and was an international trailblazer in the genre during it’s time, but Perfect World Gold is more than that. True that it has the mail system, seamless map, instance quests similar to WoW but we also offer features that are not available in WoW like the huge city battle system and full customization to say the least.

I think it would be best for your followers to have a table chart of what PW can offer versus that of the other games so that they can see out right what we can offer

GM T: Swell idea, I’ll have that soon! Anyway, let’s move on to over to the PVP aspect of the game. Briefly, please tell me how the PVP system works. I believe there’s also a “city siege” control system, right? How can players join and kick ass?

Oneil: Perfect World Gold has a newbie friendly PK/PVP system where characters are only allowed to kill and be killed by other players once they reach Level 30. Players who are able to reach Level 30 are able to kill players only outside town. Towns are safe zones.

Entering the City Battle map to gain ownership of the land requires a strong clan. This means for an unoccupied city they must be able to kill all 200++ monsters in less than three hours. For occupied cities they must be able to bring down the opposing clan who owns that city in three hours. In essence, the city battle requires full strategy and not just direct brute force which normally happens in other games.

This is just a really brief preview of the city battle.

The full details of the city battle are available in Game Magazine this April.

GM T: So, it’s advisable to have a strong guild to succeed? But guilds can be composed of different races like Humans, Wings and Werebeasts, right? Please tell me more about the guild system *drools*

Oneil: Yes, it is very important to have a strong clan.

Clans can be made up of different races and different job types. What’s critical with the clan is how they balance out strategy within the clan, especially during the city battle system.

Players can create clans once they reach level 20. There are three levels of clans and with it are different population caps.

Level 1 = 50 members
Level 2 = 100
Level 3 = 200

There are also designations within the clan so that each one has a specific role to fulfill to make sure the clan remains strong and united. Gone are the days where the entire management of the clan rests in the hands of the guild master. Here in Perfect World Gold you have officers involved in approving/disapproving members, an assistant to the Clan Master among other things.

GM T: Recently, you and the Philippine Perfect World Silver flew to Beijing for product training. How was it like working with the Chinese this time (since we always coordinated with Koreans)?

Oneil: It was very different and good in a way that we were sharing technologies between companies. They were at the initial stages of expanding to simultaneous territories and it was our first time to acquire a Chinese game. We gave them marketing and community strategies while they gave us inputs on server and ICT strategies. The technologies were really innovative especially on how they handled the Perfect World Silver game on the back end.

Thanks for your time Oneil, this was very informative… Good luck in the CBT and promoting PW!