Horizons: Empire of Istaria Interview, Part Three

GamersInfo.net has published the third installment of a new interview with Artifact Entertainment’s David Bowman in which they discuss the future of MMORPGs, the recent Chapter 11 proceedings, the present and future of Horizons, and more. A taste:

Q: We’ve talked briefly in the past about making it possible for the European and US players to play together. I’m sure that’s very difficult with everything that’s going on right now, but it would be big deal…

A: It will be a big deal because it will happen. Right now, all we’re concentrating on right now is let’s get the consolidation completed. Let’s get the ripples from the change cleaned up. And Europe, today, they’re down while they combine. So, all of the stuff that we did, it’s happening to their worlds right now. They’re going to come up and they’re going to find some problems in that because there’s no way of testing the impact in Europe with a full shard with all these changes until it’s on a full shard in Europe! We’ll find something we didn’t see on the shards here in North America.

The Europeans are some very hard-core gung-ho players, too. So they’ll find some great stuff. And I want to support them better than we’ve been able to do. And Game Network (the European publisher) is a smaller company than we are in their ability to support Horizons. And working in two time zones which are SO opposite, we being in MST and they in CET, but they’ve got passionate people that care there, too – about the product and about the people who play the game. Late tonight I’ve got a phone meeting scheduled with them about getting together. How DO we make that happen?

It’s worth trying and once again, when we launched there were come complications because we had multiple parties involved, it wasn’t just Game Network and ourselves. We’re still not a mass-market phenomena yet, at all. In North American, Final Fantasy XI has 500,000 worldwide. So you’re looking at 100,000 as a benchmark of success because you’re making a lot of money at that number but 500,000 is the number we work towards.