Shaiya producer Eron Garcia and the rest of the team behind Shaiya - Etienne Grunenwald, Michie Hara and Siavash Shenavandeh - gave an exclusive interview to GameBorder about this new fantasy mmorpg. 

Q: Congratulations for the launch of Shaiya. Shaiya client is one of the most downloaded file on GameBorder and other websites. Are you happy of the closed beta results so far?

A: The Closed Beta launch definitely gave our team a boost of confidence.
We had more players than we expected in our first week. The bulk of the things players reported were localization issues we were aware of, but we got some solid feedback and great suggestions for the future. We're pretty excited and are planning for an explosive Open Beta.

Q: How many players are currently playing the game?

A: We have yet to crash the server by overloading it w/ players but currently do run a full server. (We could tell you the real numbers, but then we'd have to... well, you know.)

Q: Why do you think Shaiya Gold could be a success?

A: Shaiya is a very versatile game that has so much potential. Right out of the gate, Shaiya presents players with a little tutorial, and plops them down right next to their first quest, so it's quite user-friendly. Also, we work really closely with the developers and strive to cater to our audiences interests. This provides us with a better consensus of what is actually wanted by the public - versus just input from internal game designers.

Q: The character movement is one of the most complete we found in a mmorpg (jump, side walking, backflip and so on), it's not just point and click, and hardcore gamers really liked this. But is this really useful while playing the game?

A: While much of the movement anims are considered novelty, but being able to sidestep as well as jump and backflip, can help a player avoid a physical hit, avoid certain AOE (Area of Effect) spells, or both if timed correctly. We've wound that avoiding a physical hit is more difficult than dodging an AOE spell.

Q: The graphics is gorgeous, but some users are complaining there is no support for widescreen resolutions (ie. 1680x1050), and the font used is a bit small with large monitors. Are you going to fix it in a future release?

A: Haha, actually these two issues were part of our "fix first" list. We can't discuss the details, but major UI modifications were proposed for post-release including Widescreen support and the ability to set your own text size. We're not sure if they'll make into Open Beta, but they're in our report for future fixes as well.