Vice President of Marketing Fred Howard talks with us about the new in-game quest featuring actress and singer Selena Gomez, the upcoming Celestia update and the game's two-year anniversary.

ZAM: Wizard101 is a free-to-play game, but you do offer some subscription packages. One of them is actually a family package, so it seems that you're attempting to give family members a reason to play together.

Fred: We are. That actually came from our community. Marketing was in charge of pricing when we first launched, and my theory at first was misguided. I thought that since each account comes with six wizard slots and not many families have more than six people that are going to want to play the game, that meant not many families would want to have premium access for more than one account. When we went live, we had a massive uproar of families saying it's not that we have six wizards, it's that we want to play together. They said it doesn't make sense for them to have four full-price subscriptions for our premium content and they needed a discount for family game night.

One of the other aspects is technology. Josef Hall, our vice president of development, pushed early on for really low-end specs for a system. When you think about it, it was based on the premise that a lot of our players aren't going to be playing on a super high-end computer. They're going to be playing on dad's 10-year-old machine that got handed down to the oldest kid and is now sitting in the youngest kid's room. Wizard101 is playable on very old machines. It plays on most netbooks. That has helped expand the audience and the number of people that can play at a time in a family.

ZAM: Approximately how many players do you have?

Fred: We were up to 10 million registered players back in June. I'll tell you that July was bigger than June, and basically every month that we've had has been record-setting for us.

ZAM: You explained what sets Wizard101 apart from games like World of Warcraft and Age of Conan, but what sets it apart from the other kid-friendly free-to-play games out there?

Fred: There are a lot of things. KingsIsle is a heavily story-driven company. When you come into Wizard101, it's not so much the traditional sandbox MMO where you get quests and run around and do your thing. It's very story-driven. There's a lot to do within Wizard101, but you're also going down the path of a very well told story. We have full voice acting for all the dialogue in the game done by professional actors and actresses, which is pretty impressive. It really brings the story in the game to life. I think that's a big factor.

Another major factor is the ease and simplicity of the interface in Wizard101. It has the depth of a lot of MMOs but it doesn't have the complexity that a lot of them have. You're not mashing keys and you don't have an inventory interface on your screen that you need to be an industry expert to understand.

Probably one of the primary factors is that it's just really fun. The design, the dialogue, the quests, everything you do in the game is fun. A combination of a lot of things has led to our success.

ZAM: On that note, why don't we jump into some content-related questions? What can players expect to find in the world of Celestia?

Fred: We're excited to get it out. It's actually the largest world that we've launched to date. It's a huge world. It brings a lot of new functionality to the game. It has swimming for the first time, although not all of Celestia is underwater. For the first time we're launching three new schools of magic. They are secondary schools that players can use to augment their characters.

We're launching our first ever level cap increase from 50 to 60, and with that we're launching new high-level spells for the grand masters that are in the game now. So in addition to the new schools of magic, there will be new spells in the existing schools of magic for high-level players.

ZAM: So there's definitely a lot of new content coming with the launch of this new world.

Fred: That's exactly right. It's actually starting an entirely new story arc. We talked about the depth of the storytelling in Wizard101, but when players finish Dragonspyre and defeat Malistaire, they will have completed the story arc that we launched the game with. With the launch of Celestia we're introducing a whole new story arc and new bad gal, Morganth the Spider Queen. So not only is it launching swimming, spells and new schools of magic, it's also launching a new story arc with a new enemy to go after.

ZAM: Do you have a tentative release date set?

Fred: Pretty soon!