World of Darkness Interview

While the interview focuses primarily on their PS3 shooter DUST 514, it's worth noting that at least a couple of the questions in Ten Ton Hammer's interview with CCP CEO Hilmar Pétursson and chief of marketing operations David Reid zero in on World of Darkness - where it stands in development, the amount of resources they currently have allocated to it (60 developers sounds reasonable), and what their overall vision is for it. The related questions to follow:
A lot of World of Darkness fans were put on edge by the amount of CCP resources that seem to be flowing into DUST 514 and EVE Online. Can you say anything to calm their fears?

David Reid: There is no shortage of commitment here to making World of Darkness awesome. I dug deep into that before I came on board and remain absolutely convinced that this is going to be a huge, huge thing based on the resources we're putting behind it.

Hilmar Pétursson: Specifically, we have a kickass team of sixty rockstars from across the game industry and CCP, and they're making fantastic progress.

David Reid: I don't think anyone has to worry about our commitment to making World of Darkness a transformative experience. Despite what you hear from us about DUST and EVE, there are more people working on World of Darkness here at CCP than there are working on triple A titles at other companies I've worked at for the stage of development it's at.

Everyone here realizes what a tremendous opportunity we have. To do what's been done here with EVE the economy, the persistence, the Machiavellian politics that players do to construct their own content imagine what that can be like in a modern era intellectual property, in something everyone understands. We don't all know how to pilot a spaceship, but we all know how to kill a vampire. And that's the case even if we haven't played Vampire: The Masquerade.

...

Is your vision for World of Darkness to make its persistent universe a platform for game development, as you're doing with EVE Online with the advent of DUST 514?

Hilmar Pétursson: I would more describe our vision for World of Darkness as taking all of our experience as CCP, all the history and refinement of the Vampire: The Masquerade IP in the last two decades, and combine these two things into something the world has never seen before.

David Reid: Part of the opportunity and challenge for me in my discipline is to make sure that people understand that it's not so much that CCP is shipping a new game this year, it's more that CCP is dramatically expanding the EVE universe this year. We think of World of Darkness as that second universe.

There is an amazing base of battle-tested technology here a single shard that runs Tranquility, that has held Guinness World Records for peak concurrency taking the tech, the human intelligence, methodology, and experience that we've got, and building that second universe with a very different flavor of moment-to-moment gameplay.

World of Darkness is less of a new platform and more of a new universe, with all kinds of ways to tunnel into it as whatever sort of gamer you happen to be, in a way that is much more accessible than the EVE universe tends to be for someone whose not a science fiction person. Everyone's a modern era person. When they see what we're able to do with that new universe and that intellectual property. well, it's a really big opportunity.
There are probably a thousand MMOs in development right now and this is one of the only titles I'm personally excited about. Get it right, guys. Please.