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Chris Taylor on Middle Earth Online

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the hobbits-and-orcs dept.

Recently, GameSpy's Andrew Bub caught up with Vivendi Univeral's Chris Taylor (of Fallout and Starfleet Command) at GenCon to talk about their Middle Earth Online MMORPG which is in the works. A lot of ground is covered, from which parts of middle earth will be in the game, to how they manage to keep track of all of Tolkien's lore, to Tom Bombadil's poetry.

2 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. There's some (bad) name recognition by 0x0d0a · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Yeah, Vivendi. Not exactly a name I'd want to be associated with if I was billing myself as a good game developer...

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    May we never see th
    1. Re:There's some (bad) name recognition by 0x0d0a · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      Vivendi folks are assholes.

      And let's take a look at Blizzard (which does do a damn good job marketing...even if I'm not a fan of their work, I'd want someone like them marketing anything I developed).

      Blackthorne -- boring, stiff movement, repetitive.

      Diablo -- I never saw the point in this game, though *damn* it sold well. You find a monster, click click click, it dies, repeat. Of course, I'd played nethack and zangband before, so I saw it as sort of a pale copy of what's out there -- a lot of folks haven't.

      Diablo II -- Watched, but didn't play. Looked too much like Diablo I.

      Warcraft -- Okay, this is probably one of the more interesting games in their lineup. I didn't ever play Dune 2, so I may be biased, but I enjoyed this, despite the not-so-great unit balance.

      Starcraft -- I'll never understand why so many people like this. It was marketed to *death* ("True 3D environments", blah, blah, blah), and wasn't anywhere *near* as much fun as Total Annihilation. It stuck with Blizzard's micromanagement-based approach to RTSes. Most folks early on did the same thing because Warcraft sold so well and they were cloning it, but the market's finally realized that micromanagement isn't so much fun, and is pretty much shifting away from it. Most modern RTSes let you select as many units as you want, build up queues a long way, preset some orders (and in TA's case, preset general behavior). Take a look at, say, Rise of Nations.

      Warcraft II -- pretty much same problems as Starcraft.

      Warcraft III -- haven't played it -- looks too much like WC II.

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      May we never see th