Earlier this month, we had the chance to sit down and chat with Theo Sanders, the Creative Director at Ubisoft Singapore working on Ghost Recon Online.
The team just released the Arctic Pack, a huge content update for Ghost Recon Online that introduced a wealth of new content including an array of new weapons, a brand new multiplayer map and a ton of body armor and headgear variants for players to outfit their character with.
Arctic Pack has been a lot of fun and we're really enjoying the new map, Tomsk-9. Check out our interview with Theo Sanders below!
For readers who might be unfamiliar with you, Theo, can you tell us who you are and what your role is on Ghost Recon Online?
Hi everyone. I’m Theo Sanders, the lead producer for Ghost Recon Online at Ubisoft Singapore. My main role is to ensure we deliver a great player experience across our game development, service, and technology teams.
So, Ubisoft just released the first content expansion for Ghost Recon Online. What was the development process like on this content update?
The Arctic Pack was a challenge for us because we really wanted to provide the community with some cool new content within a month of launching Open Beta. There was a lot of work put into Tomsk-9 and the new arctic skins. On top of that, we shipped hundreds of incremental improvements to the game in the form of balance tweaks and bug fixes. Building all that content and analyzing the feedback from Open Beta for the fixes led to some very late nights in the studio for the team.
Is it difficult releasing new content, ensuring that the weapons and items are new and fun but also balanced properly with Ghost Recon Online’s hefty arsenal?
Balancing weapons is tricky. We rely on a combination of data analysis and a lot of observation about how players actually use different weapon classes. Weapons also tend to be the most “emotional” of the game systems. When you’ve just been killed a few times in a row by a particular gun, many players draw a quick conclusion that it’s overpowered. So we have to interpret that feedback through the numbers.
Keep reading for the rest of our interview with Theo!
