Hello, snarkie! Whatever happened to the first round of characters for Petpet Park, who were all Neopets? Why was the decision made to swap them all out to be petpets?
snarkie
Not a robot... probably.
Heya, Dave.
I’m not sure I remember what you’re talking about (past me would be hugely disappointed in current me) so please jog my memory! There were the Neopets from the launch plot that happened on the Neopets site, but I feel like that’s not what you’re talking about? Got a link to any old images or anything?
(I feel like I know what the answer would be anyway… probably a lore clarification/world separation thing. But I want to be sure. Plus, maybe I can be even more specific if I remember the actual circumstances.)
Here’s a few examples:
https://bookofages.jellyneo.net/characters/1563/
https://bookofages.jellyneo.net/characters/1565/
https://bookofages.jellyneo.net/characters/1567/
It seemed that during the beta, there were numerous Neopet characters in the Park itself, but by release all of those characters were replaced with Petpet species instead.
Ah! I vaguely remember these. Thanks!
It was just to stay in line with the established lore and keep the worlds separate, yeah. I hope I’m remembering this correctly…
There was a point at which Petpet Park was actually in Neopia, and even though the Petpets were running around talking and gaming and wearing silly hats, the Neopets wouldn’t know. Basically Toy Story. The select few Neopets that did know where those NPCs. But that felt really off, especially when trying to write quests and such where Neopets and Petpets were interacting. Just… it got weird. Why did only a handful of Neopets know, when this park was smack dab in the middle of Neopia? Did they stop dancing and talking when Neopets showed up and if so, wouldn’t that have been all the time? How did no one else find out and the news spread and everyone realised their Petpets were people? It would have changed Petpets as we knew them in Neopia and we didn’t want to do that. So we pulled back. We’d already established Petaria in Wand of Wishing so we altered course and went with that, setting it in Petaria, keeping it mostly hidden from Neopia (and removing all the Neopets, which I guess happened in beta but I don’t remember that specifically). And I think we even established that Petpets lost intelligence when they came over. I.e. magic portal that separated the two worlds and you were different if you crossed because Petaria was its own thing born out of the wand. But that might be deeper lore we never made official.
Plus the separation just made management and general player understanding of the two worlds easier. If things were happening in one world, the other world wasn’t affected. Each could do their own events for players to worry about and Petpet Park was free to break all but the very basics of established Petpet lore over in another dimension. Content for both sides didn’t have to worry about any changes to characters owned by the others (aside from some NPC Petpet species which we felt pretty safe including in the Park). Marketing didn’t have to get approval from both teams. Etc., etc.
We did still need a way for some Neopets to know about Petaria so we could tie the worlds together in the overall Neopian lore and cross-promote. So, PPL turned into more than they seemed. They knew about it and kept the secret, protecting Petpets who chose to come across to Neopia. Much easier to explain why it wasn’t wide-spread knowledge when you have a secret agency hiding it all.
At least, I think that’s how it went down. We actually changed the lore quite a few times before launch and the Toy Story angle was really brief so I might be misremembering. I mean, at one point the game wasn’t related to Neopets at all! And I’m not even sure who I could ask to help verify because I think by that point I was the only one who was that obsessed with establishing official lore that made sense with everything else and they just let me figure it out. 😛 But I think that’s the gist so there you go! I hope that explains it.
Nice! Figured it was some sort of last minute decision… very intriguing to see the thought process that went into establishing it all!