GameBanshee Feature: Horizons Interview

More new Horizons tidbits are coming your way due to David Allen, lead designer of this impressive sounding MMORPG, lending his time for a new interview at GameBanshee. Among the interesting topics discussed:

GB: With regards to the world master system, will their job be entirely devoted to entertaining the players? How large is the staff you have planned for this? Will there be enough of them to go around and keep the players entertained 24/7, or will there be specific times of the day that they will normally work?

DA: Yes, we will have a shift of World Masters that work 24/7 – of course most of them will work during the ‘core hours’, but there will always be somebody available. The main reason for this is that it’s the responsibility of the World Masters to keep an eye on the world, and the entire system that supports that particular world. They will monitor everything from economy to harassment to storyline and dynamic content creation and updates. The exact size of this staff hasn’t been established, but it is a fairly good handful of people.

On an MMORPG tangent:
This market for MMORPGs is expanding so rapidly, so I think the developers have the right idea in creating multiple titles. However, like in any competetive capitalist market, there will be winners and losers. Not profound no, but it should be very interesting to see who they are with so many coming out, and how the Sci-fi MMORPGs stack up with the current fantasy champs. I’m predicting that MMORPG’s will become a favorite past time for the average human at some point… possibly not just MMORPG’s but certainly MMOPW’s (persistent worlds or mini more specific worlds). Our social life is going to be spent chatting, playing games and in a sense living from our favorite chair inside of a virtual world… which is just now beginning. A few promising sci-fi titles are Neocron, Anarchy Online and of course Star Wars Galaxies… in reverse order of popularity I think but not necessarily in gaming goodness.

The fantasy front is where we can expect radical departures from current trends in the near future. DAoC is a lot like EverQuest, but its PvP realm idea is what makes it (hopefully) sufficiently different. Shadowbane has unique ideas as well and the look is somewhat different than any other out there. UO2 or Origin is shaping up to look quite nice (though the face models could use some tweaking apart from the humans).

Finally there are the more undefinable categories, though the alien-centric Atriarch blends more into Sci-fi than to fantasy, but a little of both. And let’s not forget EverQuest 2.