Hello PWI Community,

PWI: Riptide is almost here! After giving you a preview of the new undersea map and the power-enhancing Star Charts system, we had the chance to meet and interview Zhang Wei, PWI’s Chief Designer who’s been working on the new content awaiting you.

He managed to clear his busy schedule for us and we are very grateful for the time he took to answer our questions. We hope you will enjoy this interview as much as we did!

Zhang Wei, PWI Chief Designer

Tell us a bit about yourself and what you do on PWI.

Hello everyone! I’m Zhang Wei, Chief designer of PWI. My role in PWI is to lead and supervise the conception and creation of in-game content and mechanics.

After seven years, PWI has evolved in many ways. What are some of the most notable changes and how have they improved the experience for players?

Many updates are very important and each change is aimed at improving the gameplay experience for players. For instance, we classified the overstaffed quest system to allow a better focus on daily quests. Most of the optimizations were aimed at increasing gameplay.

With the Riptide update, PWI gains a new underwater play area. Tell us a little about the lore of this area and the important characters players will be interacting with.

This expansion focuses on the Primal World story. Perfect World players found more relics and remains there, but also brought a terrible war. Public quests will feature hordes of awful sea monsters and it will be a lot of fun!
 

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The Star Chart system brings a change to character progression. Tell us a bit more about its benefits and how it will affect leveling and gameplay.

The Star Chart system allows players to reinforce their stats, and also adds new types of attributions aimed at making characters more powerful. More importantly, growing your Star Charts is a step by step process that lets your switch between different Star Charts depending on the situation, it is very flexible.

Can you tell us how the Blademaster and Stormbringer classes have been changed? What other changes to combat balance can players expect with this update?

We’ve added high level skills for Nightshades and also made some balance improvements for formal skills in order to make skills casting easier, smoother, and more adaptable to the current game environment. The new class is in a weak position right now, so we improved its strength to make it more competitive.

With such a unique setting for the Riptide update, which challenges did you face while bringing underwater gameplay to PWI?

This map is a fully underwater map. Being a three-dimension natural environment, we carefully handled a lot of details in every section of this map in order to keep the gameplay fluent. This three-dimensional space will affect the gameplay experience, so we put a lot of work on stories and quests design.
 

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Among the new content we haven’t mentioned yet, which new aspect do you think is the most exciting for players to look forward to?

There’s another boundary level in this version. We have increased the boundary limit to help players grow even stronger. It is also connected with the other content updates.

With this update hitting our servers soon, what kind of innovative settings or themes could we see in PWI’s future?

We will base on different playstyles to add and improve more game content and systems in the future. We will have cross-server faction war in the upcoming version and a whole new system in the expansion that will come later this year. We are looking forward to it and to having fun!

Thanks a lot Zhang!

And thanks to you for reading! As you can see, Riptide will bring its share of novelty and PWI still has many good years ahead of it. Stay tuned to learn more in the upcoming days!