38 Studios Creative Director Blogs on Project Copernicus

Ex-38 Studios creative director Steve Danuser has penned a brief blog post on the ill-fated Project Copernicus MMO, which touches upon the marketing plans for the game, its story arc “driven by participation” and also includes an internal fly-through video of one of the title’s locations. Here’s an excerpt:

There’s a lot more I’d like to tell you about the game, such as how our fully planned four-year story arc was driven by player participation. How the theme of choice and consequence permeated our systems, content, and world design. How the choices players made during our chapter-based story arc would cause permanent and lasting changes to each server changes that could be different from other servers. How expansions to the game world had already been mapped out and were tied into that chapter storyline, so the world would grow in a very organic and logical way rather than feeling like expansions were tacked onto the core game by a new team that was bored with the work that had been done before. How our storyline had a real conclusion because you can’t tell a great story without an ending.

But I should probably keep my mouth shut. The glorious state of Rhode Island now owns the assets and code that would have been our game, and some company might come along and buy it. though anyone who does won’t be releasing the same product we had planned to put out only a pale imitation of it.

I wish you could know what we were shooting for during the years we labored to build Copernicus. a game that was loving crafted, that was starting to show how fun it would be, and that absolutely did have members of the dev team playing it, no matter what anyone else might tell you.