Might & Magic Creator Joins Garriott At NCSoft

Thanks to Google News for its link to the press release announcing Jon Van Caneghem, founder of New World Computing, has been hired by MMO developer NCSoft to work as "executive producer... on a new, unannounced online game project." As the release notes, Van Canegham "created the Might and Magic and Heroes series and turned them into two of the industry's most successful titles, with more than 20 million units in combined sales", and following the dissolution of New World Computing due to owner 3DO's collapse, and the sale of the Might and Magic franchise to UbiSoft, he'll be "working with [Ultima creator, Tabula Rasa developer, and NCSoft Austin head] Richard Garriott and NCsoft's... designers to create the next generation of massively multiplayer online games."

Comments

Re:Fun, more MMORPGs...

[AKnightCowboy]

City of Heroes is pretty fun. I've never bought a MMORPG before and I was hesitent to plunk down a monthly fee for an online game (I'm used to playing FPS's where the servers are free), but I've enjoyed this for the 3 days I've been playing it.

The only oddity I find with this genre is that it seems to take a lot of time and dedication to sit and build up a character. I played for about 16 hours since Saturday and only built up a level 9 blaster character, but in the meantime I ended up seriously pissing off my wife because I've been ignoring her.

Is zoning out of reality a normal side effect of playing MMORPGs or am I just weird? I seem to recall people referring to Everquest as "Evercrack" so I'm worried I may have stumbled down a slippery slope. Perhaps I should flee back to Desert Combat and FPS games before it's too late.

don't assume it'll be HOMM based

[ambertch]

Why did people assume it would be a turn based online game? People automatically put together HOMM and MMORPG. HOMM was a good series for other reasons like a its creativity. It's like saying Worlds of Warcraft was going to be way to complicated because it would be WC3 online. And as a random note the new Dodge Viper is designed by the same Japanese guy who designed the Camry, now make assumptions about that

Re:Lame

[Wtcher]

It's not just another MMORPG; Garriott's Tabula Rasa is supposed to be very different, combining aspects of single-player games (ie. you are the big hero, unique quests, etcetera) with a community setup (so you meet and come across other players who have their own unique quests which may intersect with your own). Garriott and his team's gone back to try to figure out what makes games fun, working off of that concept; I've spoken to another designer who explained that game-making was typically creating a lot of systems and hoping that the end-product will be fun.

Anyway, as I'm sure you can tell, I'm looking forward to their creation. =)

Re:MMO Might and Magic?

[Roger Wernersson]

Not neccessarily. You could have a set time limit for your turn, say 10 seconds, and everyone have to plan their move simultaneously.

This is basically what MMORPGs does today, but slower. I've heard that Anarchy Online, for example, updates once every second, in effect making it turn-based.

Of course with more units, you lose control, but one could make up for that by assigning default actions for idle units, which is how most RTSs works anyway.

I seem to remember enjoying playing CivNet in simultaneous mode a few time; same thing but on a smaller scale.