from the web redemption desk
Joey Davidson & Erik Norris run a weekly web show called “Watch Us Play…” where they play through a game and provide commentary.
Being pretty entertaining guys, their playthrough of 38 Studios’ demo for their upcoming Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning (prologue to the BigWorld-powered Copernicus MMO, no release date) is worth a watch.
from the Drizzt desk
It’s no news that iconic fantasy author R.A. Salvatore is part of the team working on 38 Studios’ upcoming BigWorld-powered MMO, Copernicus. He joins Curt Schilling, Todd McFarlane, and a host of game development icons in the MMO followup to the upcoming Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. This Boston Globe article focuses a bit on Salvatore and his role in narrative development.
“I tried to think of the people that were the best in the world at what they did,’’ Curt Schilling wrote in an e-mail, explaining why his Providence-based video game company, 38 Studios, partnered with Salvatore. The former Red Sox ace needed a detailed fantasy setting for two projects: A World of Warcraft-like online game currently called Project Copernicus (still in development), and a single-player game, called Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning (set to launch Feb. 7).
from the Mad in Maynard desk
ZAM has an interview with the esteemed RA Salvatore and Curt Schilling of 38 Studios. In it they discuss their reasoning in driving their linked RPG world from studio Big Huge Games into the Copernicus IP, before and not after their BigWorld powered MMO ships :
Salvatore: When I came in and started working with the 38 Studios team, it wasn’t to simply create a game. Our goal was to create an intellectual property based on a world. A big world. A world where you could do anything you wanted to do. Because of that, when we brought in the guys at Big Huge Games, it was very easy for them to understand their parameters. It’s almost like telling a King Arthur story; you know the tale and the type of tale it is, but there are dozens of different stories that you can create from the characters and settings that are there.
More over at ZAM.
Over in Boston :
“38 Studios, LLC announces two new appointments to its executive team based at the company’s Maynard, MA headquarters. Rick Wester takes on the role of Chief Financial Officer and Denise Kaigler joins as Chief Marketing Officer. Both appointments were effective in February. Wester reports to Bill Thomas, the Chief Operating Officer of 38 Studios. Kaigler reports to Jen MacLean, the company’s President and Chief Executive Officer.”
Full details here.
from the Skip to the End dept
Gamasutra has some AGDC coverage of Steve Danuser from 38 Studios, one of the writers for Curt Schilling’s upcoming BigWorld powered title, talks about some of the difficulties in writing for online :
“No one wants to read in MMOs. As much as writers want to think their quest prose is for the ages, reading is not a popular activity in online gaming. The genre is a bad fit for classic storytelling. The strength of the MMO genre is that it is a social medium, a communal experience with a shared narrative.Giving players the tools to create their own story experiences within that narrative is what keeps them coming back to a game. Both directors firmly believe that MMO writers should be leveraging the strengths of both the medium and the playerbase far more than they do right now.” – Gamasutra
More over at the article
from the Older post but interesting dept.
38 Studios’ famous founder and recently departed CEO Brett Close talk to the Boston Globe about the labor and challenges involved in raising capital for a massive online IP and gaming studio.
“Creating a massively multiplayer game can take several years and is akin to designing an alternate universe. It involves lots of artwork, animation, and software programming. While a feature film might have two or three hours of music written for it, for instance, a team of composers at 38 Studios is writing 80 hours of music to accompany every possible game scenario. Additionally, the environments and characters are sketched first, then built in the computer as 3-D digital objects. Then, there must be testing. WoW was in development for five years.”
Link to The Boston Globe
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