Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Interview

[GameBanshee News]

GameIndustry.biz offers an interview with EA Mythic's Josh Drescher about WAR.

Q: What challenges do you face in developing an MMO, especially in a post-WoW world?

Josh Drescher: As a studio Mythic has actually been developing massively multiplayer games for over a decade, so they're not challenges that are surprises to us, we've been working and innovating around for well over a decade or so.

In terms of operating in the post-WoW world, one of the core things to remember is that since WoW has launched the vast percentage of MMOs that launched after it have been successful.

Obviously no one has eclipsed the 10million subscriber number, but there have been numerous titles that have come out on different platforms and multiple genres all over the world that have been far more successful than MMOs had been previously.

The market is actually much larger now and as a result is much more tolerant of unique and interesting ideas, in the same way that a film industry that is dominated by blockbusters has a lot more room for independent films, documentaries, small foreign films and pictures of that sort.

If you have a major industry leader that gets out there and gets attention it's actually much easier as a developer to then capture the additional attention from that audience.

So the post-WoW world is a great world to be making MMOs in, you don't just have to target their subscriber base as your metric for success.