EA studio Mythic develops a new Warhammer MMO with Emergent’s Gamebryo tools.
EA Mythic, the developers of Dark Age of Camelot, announced a licensing agreement with Emergent Game Technologies to utilize the Gamebryo Elements suite in the development of the new massively-multiplayer online role playing game to be released in 2007, Warhammer Online. This deal is a continuation of the partnership that began when Mythic used the Emergent tools to develop Dark Age of Camelot. Matt Shaw, Chief technology officer of EA Mythic, said that the deal was signed at E3 2005. He feels confident in the Gamebryo offering, saying that the toolkit is a “swiss army knife” that allows for “the flexibility to do what we need to do and to get it out of the way in order to make load decisions.”
Emergent’s Gamebryo engine has recently been licensed to Buena Vista Games and TimeGate Studios to create next generation console and PC MMO titles. Geoffrey Selzer, CEO of Emergent, believes that the online gaming space will expand beyond the scope of traditional MMO games. “MMOGs, we believe are the starting point to all new types of content whether you’re talking about episodic, or you’re talking about persistent worlds with instance-based gaming popped on top of it,” he said. “Whether you’re talking about continually expanding worlds, or user created worlds, we think MMOG technology points a direction toward the future, and that’s why we’ve taken a modular approach. We think MMOGs and the evolution of that type of content is where the future is. We don’t think it’s MMOGs as we see them today.”
Selzer noted that their relationship with Mythic, “Helps us make sure that our core is rock solid, and how we create the interfaces between the interfaces and the APIs between what they do and what we do, so it really helps us calibrate the scope of our product.”
Mythic’s Shaw added that, “Gamebryo has a lot of good avenues in there that you can use it when you want to, if you really need to do something super special, you can hit DirectX completely within it and still keep going with the rest of it being Gamebryo-based, that’s an incredibly useful feature.”
Warhammer Online is currently scheduled for Q4 of 2007.
Source: Gamasutra
