ZeniMax Online Studios Interview

ZeniMax Online’s Matt Firor took a moment to chat with The MMO Gamer about the progress they’ve made on their unannounced game over the past year, the technology they’re building it with, the MMO industry in general, and much more.

The MMO Gamer: What do you feel is the single greatest success of MMO genre in the last ten years?

Matt Firor: WoW. Absolutely. There were lots of us that came before WoW, but they’re the ones that really took all of what we did, in the pre-WoW days, and made it better and made it slicker and made it easier to play and more fun. So, they’re definitely the success story.

The MMO Gamer: And, to bookend that, what do you think is the single greatest failing of the MMO genre?

Matt Firor: There are many ways to answer that question. Obviously, there have been tons of failures. There have been failed games as well as games that could have been better than they were. I think the failure of MMOs, at least in my mind, right now, is that they are marketed purely to the hard-core gamer.

Even if the game isn’t hard core, the fact that they’re PC based and the fact that you almost always need some crazy graphics card to play them – like, say, Age of Conan – it’s like you’re restricting your user base so much by doing that.

And WoW has shown that you don’t need high graphics capability on your computer to have a great looking game and I don’t know why people, or developers, try to aim for the Crysis market with MMOs because it’s two totally different things. Crysis players can spend lots of money on their PCs, but MMO players – you want a large user base.