Inside Asian Gaming

August 2016 inside asian gaming 37 Tech Talk “The player now has many exciting features, including banker and player progressives and a large mystery jackpot.” In Multiline Baccarat, players can play a whopping 239 hands of baccarat at the same time in a highly slot-style game. Among the game’s features are two bonus pay tables allowing players to win either extra credits or a progressive jackpot. Baccarat 88 plays a little more like traditional baccarat, providing up to three hands of baccarat at a time and multipliers of up to 88x on winning hands. Importantly, both games are easy to follow and manage to retain the core elements of baccarat that so appeal to Chinese players. “We believe these games will appeal to both slot and baccarat players,” says Kelly. “These games were tailor-made to the Asian market and we were very careful in our design process to ensure an enjoyable player experience. “One of the things we focused on was to help the table game player feel comfortable with how the game plays on the slot machine. “We conceived the idea of bringing the fun of baccarat to slot machines and adding the entertainment of slots. It is our belief that by bringing the game into the slot space we could create more excitement for the players.” Aristocrat’s Asia Pacific Managing Director Vincent Kelly Our goal was to make the game feel fun and exciting and to provide a sense of the Aristocrat brand they already love or will get to know.” So how did Aristocat achieve this? According to the company’s Senior Director of New Game Concepts John Daley – the brains behind this particular operation – it came down to an exhaustive process of trial and error. “Trying to recreate the feel of table play into a slot machine is always a challenge because you want the table game player to feel comfortable with how the game plays on the slot machine,” he explains. “We knew it was important to have both baccarat and slot experts on the team to ensure we incorporated the important features of both types of games. Once we had those experts assembled, we carefully analyzed what aspects of baccarat players love and what could we do to keep those features, while also adding some new features that would appeal to those players. “After a number of brainstorming sessions, we narrowed the initial ideas down to the best of them. Once we had games to target, we built the concepts out to a point where we could get a better feel for how they played. From there we chose the ones we felt were the best to start with. We are very excited about the end results.” Aristocrat’s initial rollout of Multiline Baccarat and Baccarat 88 will be restricted to Asia with the possibility of expansion to other markets should future interest warrant. But if early feedback is anything to go by, there is every chance these titles will go down as some of the company’s most successful ever creations. “The game has been generating a great deal of excitement and anticipation to get these titles on casino floors,” says Kelly. “That is really important to us. We are pleased to know that we have provided what looks to be another great game for our operator partners that their players will enjoy.”