Tag Archives: console mmo

Turbine’s Craig Alexander confirmed during his keynote at GDC Austin that the firm is currently at work on a console MMO.

The VP of project development revealed that it has been in-house for a year and a half and the staff is working to release it on PS3 and Xbox 360.

There are also plans to develop one for Wii in the future.

So far, over 20 million dollars has been spent on the title, and while still mum on what exactly it entails, the targeted release date is early 2011.

During his speech, Alexander stated his opinion on console MMOs, and went so far as to claim PC versions of the genre will be surpassed by the console versions.

Thanks, Massively.

Console MMOs clearly aren’t easy. Which is probably why there are hardly any of them. Why? Blizzard’s Rob Pardo reckons the main culprit’s the pad.

“I’d say challenge number one is the input device,” he told IndustryGamers.

“So if you’re going to port a game like WoW how does that work? Do you ship a keyboard and a mouse? Do you try to make a game that [adapts] to all the different controls and buttons? That’s a porting issue.”

Pardo said that advances in Cloud gaming may overcome some of the lesser tech issues involved.

“The bigger issue would be things like hard drives. I think WoW now is about 10 gigs and we’re always pushing out more content. That’s something cloud computing could eventually solve, but in the current generation of consoles that’s a lot to deal with.

“You’d have to eat almost the entire hard drive, and there are Xbox consoles [sold to consumers] that don’t have hard drives. So that’s a big issue,” he said.

The next major console MMO is likely to be Cryptic’s Champions Online, releasing for 360 later this year.

Speaking to Destructoid, Turbine comms chap Adam Mersky’s confirmed that the firm’s console MMO project is for 360 and PS3. A bit obvious, but there we are.

“We’re looking at creating, hopefully, the first MMO that really works,” he said. “Right now we’re looking at if for the 360 and the PS3.

“We’re not going to rush to be first so-to-speak, but clearly we’re leading the way. We’ll ship something when it’s ready, and when it’s something that’s going to work on the platform.

“Clearly there are a lot of hurdles. We’ve been working for awhile, ploughing through the majority of them, and we’ve got a lot of work still to do.”

More through the link.

A few rumours have been knocking around in the past day or so saying LotRO developer Turbine was working on a console MMO, and they turned out to be true. Speaking to Kotaku, comms boss Adam Mersky said that the company is “actively developing a title for console.”

“We’ve hired over 60 people since the beginning of the year,” he added, saying that 40 more job postings for the project are currently waiting to be filled. “The people that invested in us, Time Warner… one of the media giants, getting into the MMO fold, and that’s obviously a big deal,” he said. “They also have a huge distribution network… that may bear fruit for us.”

More through the link.

Speaking to CVG, EA Mythic creative director Paul Barnet has predicted that a leftfield company like Nintendo will be the first to popularise MMOs on consoles.

“You would have to build something very console centric from the get-go,” he said. “I think probably the best chance of someone doing something like that is Nintendo – doing something crazy that no one expects.”

Barnet’s currently working on Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning for EA, and believes traditional MMO developers are chasing a WoW-shaped goal, one that obviously doesn’t fit on consoles.

“The number-one problem of a developer of an MMO these days is it’s very hard to be creative and keep your eye on the target when almost everyone has only ever played one of these games and it dominates their thinking,” he said.

Quite why no one’s made a “proper” console MMO yet is completely beyond us, frankly. Sort it out, development people. Also, why did Nintendo never do a Pokemon MMO? Mental.

NCSoft’s American president, Chris Chung, has admitted that factors such as variations in TV set-ups have made the migration of MMOs from PC to consoles a slow and painful process.

“I think there are a lot of causes that factor into good MMOs on a console,” he said. “These are elements like ‘does the person have a standard definition TV or an HDTV?’ You don’t have a good a resolution on regular TV, and a lot of games were hurting for that.”

NCSoft has a deal with Sony to develop MMOs for PlayStation 3, so it’s not surprising the whole subject is on Chung’s mind.

“Ultimately, we have to really optimize for consoles; we have to create an experience that’s suited for the [PS3] and supports the MMO element,” he added.

NCSoft is yet to release an online game for PS3. The full interview can be found here.