City of Heroes News & Events & Guides

SAN FRANCISCO--Last year, a whole spate of new massively multiplayer online games hit the market, with some of the biggest including Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, Fury, Lord of the Rings Online, and Tabula Rasa. No easy feat, considering the tens of millions of dollars and the multiyear commitments necessary to pull off such projects. However, despite the variety of new entrants, none have come close in terms of popularity to even the shadow cast by Blizzard's World of Warcraft, which itself received an expansion at the beginning of 2007. 

Not-so-massive massively multiplayer panel.
So is the MMOG market healthy? That and other questions played front and center in a roundtable discussion titled "Future of MMOs" held on the fourth day of the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. While MMOGs have had a polarizing effect on many in the gaming industry, the session nonetheless drew a massive audience due to its pedigree of participants.

Squaring off in the sometimes-contentious debate were Jack Emmert, founder of Cryptic Studios, which is currently at work on the recently announced Champions Online; Matt Miller, lead designer of NCsoft City of Heroes/Villains; Ray Muzyka, GM of BioWare, which is currently developing an unnamed MMOG that may or may not involve LucasArts' Star Wars license; Min Kim, director of game operations at microtransaction-oriented Nexon; and Rob Pardo, VP of game design at WOW proprietor Blizzard Entertainment.

The first question posed to the panel involved the recent trend in MMOG development to begin with an established intellectual property, rather than an original concept. Emmert noted that the reason for this is because publishers and investors favor established IP because they come with a build-in market. This was a common consensus among panel participants, with Muzyka noting that an established IP can be both bane and boon because there is a generally a substantial amount of reference material, but the developer needs to completely embrace the backstory. Pardo chimed in, saying that WOW took about five years to make, but it would have required at least a couple more years had Blizzard started from scratch.

Shifting the discussion to MMOGs on consoles, the panel was split over whether it is a surefire trend that will continue. Emmert and Miller felt that it was an inevitability that MMOGs will continue to see console releases, primarily due to the fact that Sony and Microsoft want their consoles to be the all-in-one single box that does everything. Muzyka, Kim, and Pardo, however, all took up the stance that the console is a viable platform for MMOGs, but it is often inappropriate. Muzyka noted that it is important to first understand the type of game that is being made, and then judge where the audience is. Agreeing, Kim said that for Nexon, a console market wouldn't make sense because they target mass-market appeal and therefore need to give the game client away for free, something console manufacturers may not be overly keen on.