Horizons E3 Interview

The guys at Warcry were lucky enough to track down Artifact's David Bowman at E3 for a lengthy interview about Horizons and MMORPGs in general. Here's a little something to get you started:
Horizon's December release unfortunately coincided with the release of several other MMORPGs - Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided, Final Fantasy XI, Lineage II and City of Heroes all came out less than six months on either side of Horizon's release date - but Bowman doesn't feel that has hampered Horizon's growth in the least.

"I think that the market is hungry," Bowman said. "I think that there are more customers than there are products that fulfill their needs. Every one of these products has a slightly different feel to it or even in some cases, a major different feel to it. They'll attract an audience [and] they'll keep that audience if it's a good experience for the players. I think there's room for even more product in this space. I don't think that any one product so far has met the needs of everyone, that's for certain."

Some, however, are doing their best to do so. Square-Enix and Sony recently released a version of Final Fantasy XI for the Playstation 2, packaged with a 40-gigabyte hard drive. They allow console players to play on the same online servers as PC gamers. Aware of this trend, Artifact designed its Evolution engine to be compatible with any platform.