Windstorm's Dusty Monk Interview - Part Two - Page Two

15 Apr 2010 at 14:02:20 by Tim McDonald

Considering that you're doing most of the programming and you're going to be contracting out most of the stuff, what's the timescale in terms of actually having something out there?

This is not an official release date, just to be clear on that, but the estimate right now is to try and have something out there around November. That's the plan of attack right now. Before that point we'll make an initial announcement about the game itself, and then we'll start trying to build some press, and some excitement, and some word of mouth, and talk about what the actual game is and the world that's in the game and the characters, and stuff like that. I can tell you it's not going to be a casual game – it's very much going to be a character-oriented world-type game.

One of the things that I drew a lot of inspiration from was Torchlight. I looked at Torchlight and said, here's a small game put together by a relatively small company. The entirety of Torchlight was built in 11 months, and they built it from previous prototypes that they had put together. It was strictly digital distribution. The game design itself, if you look at Torchlight – it's a well-polished copy of Diablo 2, but it's still a heck of a lot of fun to play. It's a great game. They put that game out there, and they put it on Steam for $20 USD a copy, and they did really well. I said “There's a model for Windstorm Studios.” And they're using that game to fund an MMO! They've been very public in saying “We're building an MMO, but we don't have the funds and publishers to do it right now, so we're putting out a single-player game and we're going to go forward with that.” That was really some inspiration for Windstorm Studios. I said, we can do that. We can put together a single-player game that serves as a sort of introduction to our game. We can get that out there and hopefully pick it up on Steam, or pick it up through digital download, and it'll be a rousing success, and we'll go forward from that.

Let's move forward further, to a time after the rousing success of your single-player RPG. You're still presumably going to be working on your MMO with a small team, but are you hoping to rise up and compete with World of Warcraft?

Oh, no. Absolutely not. We looked at a number of prototypes when I was at Ensemble. I spent a lot of time investigating MMOs, and I still do – really paying attention to and really looking at all of the different MMOs. From all of this, I absolutely and firmly believe that there's room in the market for a small MMO. I'm not even looking to build a niche MMO – by that I mean things like Fallen Earth and Dark Fall. Those are two great independent MMOs built by relatively small teams. Dark Fall was built in its entirety by 30 people, and that's the size and scale of the project that I'm looking to build. I don't intend to spend $30 million USD. I don't even intend to spend $15 million USD to build this game. I firmly believe that there is an MMO that can be built that's appealing, that has a brought audience appeal, that doesn't require a real hardcore mindset or a real raider-type mindset, and can be built in less than 30 months and for significantly less than $30 million USD. I'm not looking to compete against World of Warcraft – I don't even want to try and build that kind of game.

One of my strongest motivators is that for almost two years, my family got together on Tuesday nights and we'd all play City of Heroes together. Myself, my wife (who is a complete non-gamer) my 10-year-old daughter and my 12-year-old son. Then my brother-in-law in Houston and his wife would get on Skype, and we'd all play City of Heroes online together. I realised two things. One, almost every gaming household has multiple PCs, while almost none of them have more than one console. Two, there's really room for a game that families can play together. I've yet to find a game that competes with City of Heroes that will allow both my wife the non-gamer, myself the hardcore gamer, and my 10-year-old daughter to create characters and play together. One of my greatest disappointments with Champions Online was that it really went towards the hardcore stats end of things, and there's absolutely no way I could get my wife, my daughter, or even my son to play Champions Online because it requires such a hardcore knowledge of the game just to play at all.

I'm really drawing from my City of Heroes play experience when I look at the type of MMO I want to build. I want to build an MMO that's fun to play and that's accessible, but not something like Free Realms – it's not geared at pre-teens or kids, necessarily, but is still a game that families can come together and play together.

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