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Phantasy Star Online's script writer had never played an online game before working on PSO
Phantasy Star Online is still one of the most highly-regarded online games that ever released, and fans still hold memories of that title near and dear. It managed to pull off some unbelievable achievements, especially for the console space at the time. Those achievements are only more impressive when you realize just how inexperienced some of the staff were.
In an interview with Polygon, script writer Akinori Nishiyama is asked to look back on the experience 20 years since its inception. This is when Nishiyama reveals that he actually had no experience with online games when taking on this project.
My impression is that we challenged ourselves to do something new. The Dreamcast, at the time, shipped with a modem installed, but nobody had come up with the idea to make an online role-playing game. It didn’t occur to me that it was something “new.” It was a groundbreaking idea, but I didn’t understand this fully at the time and was just scrambling to make the game. To look back now — and I find myself doing so quite often — I realize that I got to work on a truly pioneering game, and it makes me very proud. There’s been a lot of online RPGs since then, but I feel proud that I was able to work on the very first online RPGs for consoles. [...]
Before working on PSO, I had personally never played an online game, and I made assumptions about what online games consisted of, making it up as we made the game. Nowadays, I play online games on consoles and on my cellphone, and have been making online games [at Sega]. In order to keep players engaged with the game, it’s common sense now to provide additional content, downloadable content, etc. after the release of the game. But at the time, it didn’t occur to me that that was necessary. To me, PSO was a whole, complete game, and I had written the scenario in such a way that the game included an ending to the story within the packaged product.
In Japanese, we say “kishoten-ketsu.” It refers to the structure of a narrative. I wrote the scenario so that as you progress through the story, the tension builds and there’s a climactic ending. One day, Naka came to me and said that they were going to add an update to the game that would take place between stages three and four. So I had to come up with a new stage in the middle of the game. I was stubborn at the time and resisted, explaining that I had strategically structured the story and couldn’t just throw another stage into it. I remember getting in a fight with Naka over it. In hindsight, I should have just added something and accepted that added content was necessary to keep the players interested in the game. Nowadays, it’s just common sense, and I wonder why I couldn’t see that. So, that happened.