The NCsoft web team has been busily working away, and recently launched redesigns for a couple of our game web sites.
The first is for our City of Heroes superhero game (shameless plug: 14-day free trial available).
This project involved combining the content from two previously separate sites — City of Heroes and City of Villains — into a single site and applying a more contemporary and exciting design.
We also made much better use of game art assets throughout the site.
As well as a visual refresh, it entailed a major overhaul of the IA which had grown organically over the years without much thought for the overall user experience.
In order to develop the new IA I used Websort to conduct initial card sorting studies to help me with the organization and categorization of the site.
We also used Flowplayer to create a pretty nice video player for all of our game videos and trailers.
When you manage multiple web sites, it’s a really good idea to standardize as much as you can when it comes to common web site elements. For example, we use Flowplayer as our video platform and JQuery as our JavaScript library.
Lineage
The second redesign was for our Lineage game web site, which had been neglected for far too long.
The new site, although straightforward in structure (most game web sites have fairly standard major elements), represents the aesthetic of the game much better.
We were under a pretty tight timeline as the launch of the site needed to coincide with a major game content update.
The new site also provides the game team with a scalable foundation to grow the content according to the players’ needs.