World of Darkness Development Progress Update

World of Darkness senior producer Chris McDonough has once again dropped by the WoD News forums to address concerns that the promising MMO is being “scaled back” following the layoffs over at CCP Games. In short, such concerns are valid, but the reduction only affects “redundant content”:

Hey Guys,

Just drifting by now that some of the madness is over. What is really happening here is that we are slowing our progress until DUST ships so that we are not focusing on too many things. We had staffed up as if we would be able to be production ready at this time and we simply are not. The World of Darkness team has spent significant time working on EVE over the last 2 years and much of the tech we were going to used was delayed while to company focused on flying in space features. That is why it took so long for Incarna to get released. The simple overhead that goes into maintaining a growing game like EVE is huge and was underestimated by us as a company. And before anybody comlpains about EVE, I would remind folks that the ONLY reason there is a World of Darkness MMO coming at all is because of EVE. That and the fact that CCP believed in World of Darkness so much. The stuff that we plan on reducing on World of Darkness is mostly redundant content that is expensive to make. The core of the game and it’s features are mostly unaffected.

I’m a big fan of transparency and I will always shoot you guys straight. Doesn’t mean things never change and my words won’t be taken out of context and come back to haunt me later 😉 but this is how things stand right now. By the way, the scope of the game changes all the time. We make frequent changes to accommodate simplicity or the ability to deliver something. This is why I make such a big deal out of saying nothing is set in stone. Set in stone is when it is released and even then, only until we patch 🙂