Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street has announced his new fully-remote game development studio, Fantastic Pixel Castle. They are currently working on their first title, an MMORPG codenamed "Ghost" and are funded by NetEase Games.

Quote From Fantastic Pixel Castle

Hello!  We are Fantastic Pixel Castle, a new games studio making an epic AAA MMORPG codenamed Ghost. To learn more about our studio and vision for Ghost, visit our website at http://fantasticpixelcastle.com.

One of our studio's core values is to "partner with players", and in that spirit, we want to start talking with you and hearing your perspectives from the beginning.

While we know many players will want to tune back in when we can share gameplay footage and hype trailers, for those of you interested in learning more about our starting point, we invite you to join us at https://www.twitch.tv/FantasticPixelCastle on Wednesday, November 8 at 2 pm ET.

The World of Ghost

The official site has let us know a bit more about the world.

Quote From Fantastic Pixel Castle

Imagine standing on the weathered cobblestones of an ancient city. In the sky above you are seemingly endless shards of broken worlds, a cornucopia of biomes that promise unlimited adventure and mystery. You are one of the survivors of an apocalypse lost to memory, and the rebuilding of the world now lies on your shoulders.

In Ghost, you travel to world shards to power up your characters, bring back resources, and build your fledgling civilization by growing and supporting the city's diverse and ever-changing factions. In turn, you'll see the city grow and evolve over time based on the choices and actions of players just like you, as an epic story unfolds season over season.

The World of Ghost is an original IP designed from the ground up to create rich and immersive gameplay. It is a fantasy world of heroic adventure, where you seek clues to uncover the mysteries of the world and engage with allies and enemies who have diverse motivations, actions, and secrets. You will fight with axes and crossbows and magic, but we do want to avoid the tropes of fantasy that you've already seen hundreds of times. For example, there are no elves or orcs in Ghost. We are pouring our passion into our IP development early, in order to build something that you can enjoy for decades to come.

The Shardlands

Ghost will have "Blue Shards" and "Red Shards" which are private and public realms, the former being for you and your friends and the later the typical MMO experience.

Quote From Fantastic Pixel Castle

In our game, you will alternate between private realms that we're calling "Blue Shards" for you and your friends, and more public "Red Shards" that deliver a more traditional massively multiplayer experience.

Blue Shards play a bit like a survival game - you and your friends can gather resources, construct bases, and adventure out into the wilderness. Blue Shards are extremely variable, ensuring a place full of new discoveries and challenges, guaranteeing that you'll never see the same Blue Shard twice. Because the Blue Shards belong to you, your effects on them are persistent and permanent. If you prefer a more competitive experience, you can host or join Blue Shards focused on guild rivalry, or even guild-versus-guild PvP.

Red Shards are crafted by some of the best world artists and encounter designers to provide a signature massively multiplayer experience with many players at once. Red Shards are some of the most challenging places in the game to survive, so your group will need to band together with other groups to defeat world bosses, collect critical resources, and even open the gates to the end-game raiding instances. We expect some of you may prefer Blue or Red Shards, but the core way to play Ghost is to travel between both regularly as well as to Ghost's central city.

Different Types of Players

Quote From Fantastic Pixel Castle

We know there are sweaty raiders out there who will be excited to invest hundreds of hours in Ghost. Awesome! You'll have plenty to do, including making new characters, discovering new Blue Shards with different and game-changing rules, and of course raiding.

We know others of you out there want to play lots of other amazing games in addition to Ghost. Our story unfolds in chapters, so when you finish a chapter, that's a great time to take a break and know you won't get left behind when the next chapter comes out.

We also understand that many of you play with a group of friends that you take from game to game. MMOs are notorious for throwing up barriers to playing with friends, whether that's factions, servers, power levels, class mechanics and so on. Ghost is designed so that the moment you first log in you can be playing with friends both new or old.

In keeping with the spirit of giving you lots of ways to play, Ghost is extremely alt friendly so that time invested in one character benefits all of your characters. And this matters, because there are dozens of character classes in Ghost. Our hope is that you can find a class that really speaks to you. There will be many ways to fill tanking, healing and damage-dealing roles, some of which will be iconic and some of which will be a little weird. While you will have several class options when Ghost launches, even more will be available as rewards within the game. Having a new class to try out is a great way to play with different groups of friends.

Ghost's combat combines updated control schemes and UI with the classic targeting and combat strategy that we love from RPGs. While not every challenge will need to be overcome with violence, we get that great combat is critical to RPG longevity, and we are investing a lot of effort and playtesting in this core gameplay feature.

Who is Greg Street?

Greg Street is a Marine Biologist turned game developer when he joined Ensemble Studios to work on Age of Empires Rise of Rome. After Ensemble, in 2008 he was hired at Blizzard Entertainment to work on World of Warcraft and the Lead Systems Designer, a role he held until November 2013. His role oversaw class, item, profession, combat, PvP, encounter, UI and major feature design, and played a major role in shipping three expansions. A big part of his role though was the community outreach he performed. Greg was always communicating with the community via the official WoW forums and his X account, talking about upcoming changes to receive feedback.


Street on the Fantastic Pixel Castle website.

He left Blizzard to join Riot Games for just over 9 years, starting out as the Lead Gameplay Designer for League of Legends, providing strategic direction and vision for gameplay and managing the designers who were creating and balancing champions. In 2015 he was promoted to the role of Design Director, which worked with other game leads to define the long-term strategy of the game and managed the design and narrative departments. 

After a brief stint as Head of Creative Development, Greg moved into the role "VP of IP and Entertainment" which he cites working on Riot Music, Arcane, Comics, and Riot Forge. This was his penultimate role at the company, which lead into "VP and EP MMO R&D Project", a game we don't know much about as Riot has not released any details yet, outside of the confirmation it exists.

If you were going to pick someone to run a studio developing an MMORPG, Greg is clearly a great fit!

Who Else is on the Fantastic Pixel Castle Team?

The team has experience coming from World of Warcraft, League of Legends, Guild Wars 2, Fortnite, Overwatch, and Valorant. Here is their team, their current job title, and their past experiences.

  • Bart Tiongson
    • Principal Concept Artist
    • Age of Empires, Halo Wars, Orcs Must Die
  • Brian Holinka
    • Gameplay Design Director
    • Homefront, Transformers, World of Warcraft
    • His time spent on WoW was with Combat Design
  • Cam Dunn
    • CTO
    • Meta, Apple, League of Legends, Guild Wars 2, Setec Astronomy
  • Candace Thomas
    • Content Design Director
    • World of Warcraft (13 Years), Diablo IV, Lord of the Rings MMO, New World, Riot Games MMO
  • David Kubalak
    • Art Director
    • Age of Empires, Orcs Must Die, Wildcard
  • Ed Altorfer
    • User Experience Director
    • League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, Riot Games MMO
  • Graham Berger
    • Principal Game Designer
    • World of Warcraft
  • James Doverspike
    • Engineering Leadership
    • World of Warcraft, Diablo II: Resurrected, Fortnite
  • Jamie Vitale
    • Operations Director
    • Cryptic Studios, Meta
  • Jon Spector
    • VP of Business
    • Overwatch, NBA, Boston Consulting Group
  • Kristina Swanenburg
    • VP of Product
    • League of Legends, Arcane, Riot Games R&D
  • Lisa Ohanian
    • Production Director
    • Valorant, God of War, Dungeons & Dragons
  • Shanti Blees
    • VP of IP
    • Riot Games

Why An MMO?

Quote From Fantastic Pixel Castle

As players, we are deeply in love with MMOs for their promise of social worlds. But we also feel that the genre has lately struggled to provide a community that you care about while still making your character feel heroic or special. We believe MMOs have moved too far toward solo adventuring, where other players often just slow you down. We want to bring back as central pillars of the MMO experience both playing with friends and building a community. We want to bring back the chance to impact the world around you.

Quote From Greg Street

The whole reason I wanted to make a new studio is because I believed we could move really fast with a veteran crew. And so far that is exactly what is happening!

We'll be following the development of "Ghost". Fantastic Pixel Castle is going to be doing an "AMA" livestream on November 8 and we'll be covering it live so stay tuned.

What do you want to see from "Ghost"?