THQ Announces Warhammer 40K MMOG

In our interview with the Warhammer Online team a while back, there were questions as to why we weren't going to be seeing a Warhammer 40K MMOG. Several people seemed quite keen on the idea. Well, for those people: your time is now. THQ has announced they'll be developing Warhammer 40K into a MMOG and mobile games. Gamasutra reports on comments from Kelly Flock, executive vice president of worldwide publishing for the company, about their plan to work with Austin startup Vigil games on the project. Says Flock, "We realized this is one of those few properties that has a high level of interest from the hardcore gaming community, which could be a great launching point to turning it into a great mainstream mass-market MMO ... We're not out to replace World of Warcraft, we think we have a unique offering in the same category that will get its own share of attention if we deliver properly on the gameplay mechanics we'll build our own audience." Flock demures from offering a timeframe for release of the game, saying they're not even going to try to pinpoint a development schedule yet.

Comments

The only problem I predict...

[GodInHell]

is that they have a little trouble keeping that kind of ultra-violent, soul crushing story line interesting to players over the long term.

Everything I like about 40K involves big armies, lotts of drama, and massive casualties. Not the best fodder for a MMO.

Two cents inserted, I go!!
-GiH

Re:So how does one...

[loopback_127001]

Nonsense. Try thinking a little bit outside the box.

Sample classes could be that a Space Marine is a character who is moderately tank-like in nature. Rather than having a player play a guardsman, you instead play a squad leader, and you have 'pets' of guardsmen who fire on your behalf. There's a basic "x number of guardsmen = 1 space marine. roughly." rule of thumb you could go by, and scale that up as characters level, until you become able to have 'pets' as a Commisar such as tanks, heavy artillery, or the equivalent. and the marine works their way up to, say, Terminator armor, or a single rhino/land raider.

If you don't assume one troop unit = 1 player, and break things up, the game could get quite interesting.

Re:Inquisitors and Space Marines

[servognome]

Perhaps they should consider doing what the Star Wars MMO did with Jedi.

You mean leave it out in the first place hoping nobody discovers how to actually become one. Then when enough people get bored and complain introduce a system that lets them mindlessly macro grind for months through a bunch of professions they don't care about. When they finally jump through all those hoops they discover that the profession is unfinshed. Finally everything gets scrapped a few years later and just make it a regular profession.