Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millenium Online Interview

Strategy Informer was in attendence at last week's GamesCom, during which they sat down with Vigil Games' Tim Campbell and David Adams for a lengthy Q&A about Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millennium Online. The usual excerpts:
Strategy Informer: Every MMO tends to have a theme or a particular mechanic they like to focus on, whether it be PvP, PvE, Story etc... what is the one thing you're focusing on with Dark Millennium Online?

David Adams: We want to focus on the moment to moment experience of the game, like what are you doing, what a re pressing, how are fighting, interacting... that's what's really important to us. At the end of the day, we think of an MMO ultimately as a game. I know it sounds a little trite, but I think some people forget that sometimes.

The joke here is that if you take the Nuts and bolts of an MMO, what you do, how you fight etc.. and put them in any other genre, people would laugh at it because it's so simple. It's like what RPG's were like 15 years ago before they really tried to up the ante in terms of effects or animation and all that.

It's funny, because I used to work on MMO's and I left because that's what I didn't like about them. I would look around and think (wow, console developers are way fucking better than we are). They do stuff that we wouldn't even know how to do, and their level of just pure craft skill was much higher than ours.

I mean yeah, as an MMO developer you're good at managing a lot of assets, and there are some intricacies to managing an economy and systems like that, but in terms of pure craftsmanship I felt like I was falling behind. So we (Vigil Games) have done Darksiders, we've done a console game, and now we want to apply that superior craftsmanship to an MMO. It's something that will just up the game for everybody else.

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Strategy Informer: Coming back to combat, another staple of the 40K universe is the vehicular element. Everything from a speeder or a tank all the way up to a Titan take part in these ferocious 40K battles will that be represented at all?

David Adams: We have three different classes of vehicles in the game: personal craft that you use to get around the world, public transport that everyone uses, and combat vehicles. Take tanks for instance multiple characters will be able to jump into them, they'll drive, man the turrets, vehicles will have physical interactions with the environment. They're going to use what we call 'Cart racer' physics, the fun side of physics so you don't need an advanced degree just to control them. You won't have to worry about tipping over or getting stuck, but you will be able to go over things.