Remnant Knights Interview with Brendon Lindsey
By Meredith Watson, OnRPG Journalist
Recently I had a chance to have a chat with Brendon from GameSamba about their excellent customer service and future plans for Remnant Knights. Having recently played Remnant Knights, I was more than curious to know a bit more about this great game.
Tell us a bit about yourself and what it is you do at GameSamba.
My name is Brendon Lindsey, and I’m the vice president of content at GameSamba. Basically, I’m in charge of the games.
For those that aren’t aware or are new to Free to Play MMOs, what is GameSamba?
GameSamba is a free-to-play publisher and developer, located near Seattle. We’re also connected to FUNimation, the largest anime provider in North America.
I have recently been playing Remnant Knights where the GMs are often present with the motto of “If you are online, so are we”. Is that something present in all GameSamba games or specific to Remnant Knights?
We try to make that a key factor in all of our higher quality titles. Being gamers ourselves, there’s nothing worse than needing help, or having an issue that you need support to solve, and having to wait for days, weeks, or months to get a response. Free-to-play especially has had a stigma of being unfriendly to players, so we wanted to go against the grain and offer the kind of support people are used to from big, AAA subscription MMOs.
Going forward, will you be able to maintain that level of customer care when Remnant Knights becomes more popular?
Of course! We have plans in place for all of our games to scale the amount of GM and customer support based on the game’s population.
Aside from excellent customer service, which seems to be a rarity these day, what does GameSamba have to offer the gaming community other sites may not?
I like to think that we’re a lot more approachable than a lot of the other publishers out there. We take fan feedback very seriously, and in games like Remnant Knights where we have very close ties to the development process, we’ve implemented a lot of things that players have asked for.
Our community is also fantastic, across all of our games. They’re a great bunch of people, very welcoming to new players, and a blast to get to know.
Another thing we do is try to focus on games that fill a niche space. For example, Remnant Knights is an anime-inspired MMORPG, but unlike a lot of other ones, it not only has a great mix of PvE and PvP, but it’s also a lot less time consuming in terms of grind. You can hit the max level in 60-80 hours; quicker if you use the XP boosts or GM-run events. Realms is a hardcore RvR oriented F2P game in the style of Dark Age of Camelot. And our upcoming game, JollyGrim, is a really unique mixture of CCG, RTS, and Tactical RPG gameplay.
Remnant Knights has just seen its first anniversary. Are there any long term plans for RK you can share with us?
The first anniversary since beta started! The game itself fully launched in July, so it’s still in that early day mode. However, this year we do have plans to launch the revamped story (with new quests), raid dungeons, and more. Our goal with RK was to create a game that players could max level in with relatively little grinding, and then have a ton of time spent just finishing it off. So the amount of hours of gameplay at the level cap far exceeds the amount of time it takes to get to it, and going forward we plan to continue focusing on those endgame and high level features.
What would you like potential new players to know about Remnant Knights and GameSamba?
I think the main thing that people seem to pick up when we go to shows like Comic-Con and Anime Expo, is that RK may look similar to other anime MMOs, but it’s got things that set it apart. It’s not as kid-oriented as it looks, and players who want to do PvP have just as many options as they would in a lot of the MMOs known for PvP. So if you’re on the fence about trying it based mainly on appearances, give it a try and the content and gameplay may surprise you!
