Guild Wars Developer Talks MMO Concepts
By Shawn on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 2:20 PM PST In Game Companies, Games Industry, NCsoft
Gameindustry.biz is hosting an interview with NCSoft Europe’s Director of Development Thomas Bidaux where he discusses the 
MMO market in light of the “Tyrannosaurus Rex” that is World of Warcraft. One of his key points in the interview/article is about the fact that MMOs need to target certain gaming “ecosystems” to remain viable. GuildWars obviously took a different approach with its instanced world and card game like battle system but Bidaux stressed that survival in the competitive market was all about finding and growing your audience. Among other hints, he suggests MMO developers should investigate nontraditional game types like sports to leverage the online play field. NCSoft demonstrated a few nontraditional MMOs at E3 2006 but we have not heard much about them since.
What do you think? Can sports MMO’s fly in America?
The interview was conducted at Sweden’s Nordic Game expo earlier today. He also propped up CCP, publisher of EVE Online as a great example of MMO design done right thanks to the game’s seemingly ever expanding fan base. The full article can be found here.
