On Friday, GamesIndustry.biz published an interview with Thomas Bidaux of MMO developer NCSoft about the future of MMOs and he answered: it's cross-platform. Here are the excerpts most relevant to mobile devices.
Thomas Bidaux: For me, multiplatform is the holy grail. It's not about making a great game on PC and a great game on console, it's making a great game that you can play on PC or console, and then incorporate your mobile phone to expand the whole universe, because MMOs especially are extremely addictive. The longer the player can keep the world with him, the more he'll stay in the game universe. So the holy grail of gaming is a game that plays across as many platforms as possible.
GamesIndustry.biz: Is that something that NCsoft is currently, actively looking into - to work across consoles, PCs, mobiles and every available format?
Thomas Bidaux: Yes. At the moment we are looking at three different platforms. We're looking at PC and we're looking at next-generation consoles. But we're also looking at simple online integration through other devices. Depending on the solution you use, something as basic as html is viable, because you can play on your Wii, you can play on your DS, your mobile phone, because they all have capacity to read and understand this simple language. And there are other platforms we are keeping an eye on, but with less of a priority.
So we're looking at mobile phones, but that's very much a Wild West market. You have tons of operating systems, you have different screen sizes. If you want to do one game for mobile phones you'll end up designing hundreds of different versions. Doing a game for mobiles is going to be tricky, but perhaps things such as an auction house or character creation through the mobile phone is a better solution.
It's worth pointing out that while making a mobile game that's more than the lowest common denominator is difficult, developers are doing it every day. The fact that there are MMOs taking place entirely on mobile phones means to me that the mobile component of a larger MMO can be more than an auction house (which is quite compelling by itself) and character creation (which traditionally happens rarely).
GamesIndustry.biz: The majority of online games fit into the role-playing genre. Is it time for new genres to develop online too?
Thomas Bidaux: Yes, we can get away from RPGs as MMOs. That's something we're already doing. We have a couple of titles that are being developed that aren't MMORPGs - they're very different. And we're probably going to push in that direction even further in the future. RPGs were the most logical step to begin with, but there are other genres that can expand with online play.
Whatever game you're working on right now, you better stop looking at what online can bring to your games, because in the future every single game is going to be online. It shouldn't be thought of as a feature - it's part of the whole experience.
One of the reasons I use the term MMO instead of MMORPG is because it's more general and I think RPGs are the beginning rather than the end in terms of what's going online. The first time I thought about integrating mobile into MMOs was actually in the context of a browser-based strategy MMO called Travian. It's the kind of game that discourages you from playing it for more than 10 minutes at a time while simultaneously encouraging you to check back frequently. That's perfect interaction for connected mobile devices.
Thanks to David Edery at Game Tycoon for bringing this interview to my attention.
