Action has ”not been a priority” for other MMO developers he says, and they don’t want people to ”instantly know” it’s an MMO game from ”20 feet away”.
”You just pretty much hammer on the number keys. They’re the same mechanic over and over again,” commented Vigil Games’ Dave Adams on the common MMO.
”There’s a lot more finesse in what you do in a console game. The moment-to-moment, the weight of the animations, the response, the effects. It’s really all about the pace.” Vigil Games’ last project was the action-tastic Darksiders, which came to PC too.
Adams and his team don’t think much of what other studios have done to invoke action in their MMO spaces. ”It’s just not been a priority for them. A lot more attention is put into console games: if you sit down and you play an MMO, and you actually compared it to a triple-A console game, a lot of the stuff would never fly,” he argued.
”A lot of developers see that as an opportunity to cut that corner because there’s so much to do on an MMO. They think people care about X, Y and Z. They don’t really care about the feeling of the combat.”
”That disparity isn’t going to be tolerated for too long: eventually someone’s going to do it and everyone else is going to have to follow suit. We want to be those people, and that pushed us toward a more action- oriented formula.”
”If you see an MMO 20 feet away you know it’s an MMO. There’s a million icons on the screen, the interface is the same. They’re so predictable. Our goal is when some guy’s walking past DMO they won’t instantly know it’s an MMO. That depends on a minimal interface: it’s not a full FPS but it looks more ‘actiony’,” added Adams.
WH40k: Dark Millennium Online was announced at E3 this year but so far hasn’t received a date although THQ is confident it will earn a million users when it launches.
