Last month at the E3 Media & Business Summit, EA president John
Riccitiello casually shattered the wall of secrecy surrounding BioWare's Knights
of the Old Republic massively multiplayer online role-paying game.
Unfortunately, his lieutenant, EA Games president Frank Gibeau, is more
disciplined when it comes to speaking the press. In the second section of a
two-part interview, the affable executive deflected any questions about the
KOTOR MMORPG with a polite "no comment" and a brief laugh.
But just because Gibeau was tight-lipped about the BioWare Austin-Lucasarts
collaboration didn't mean he didn't want to talk about MMORPGs. That's because
the executive will be overseeing two massively multiplayer launches in the next
two years: Warhammer
Online: Age of Reckoning on September 18, and The Game Which Will Not Be
Spoken Of in 2009. Both games are aiming to lure away some of the near-12
million subscribers of World of
Warcraft--a game Gibeau himself has played extensively.
Indeed, online gaming as a whole is central to EA's strategy. In two weeks,
the company will launch Spore, Sims creator Will Wright's highly ambitious
evolution-civilization-space-exploration simulation. The game takes user-created
content to a whole new level, letting players create their own race of creatures
and upload them to EA's servers, where they can wander into other players'
games. Unsurprisingly, the Spore Creature Creator's dizzying array of options
has led to the spawning of thousands of X-rated monsters since its release in
June.
How will EA keep kids from inadvertently encountering rampaging penisauruses
and genitaliarachnids? What will it take to take a bite out of WOW's massive
user base? What's going on with the Medal of Honor series? Is Black coming back?
GameSpot sat down with Gibeau to get some answers... again.
GameSpot: So the launch of Warhammer Online: Age of
Reckoning is fast approaching. What groundwork are you laying to take on World
of Warcraft?
Frank Gibeau: Well let me back up and say that core to the
strategy of the company--and very specifically our label--is that we want to be
online with everything we do. I'm no longer greenlighting games that are
single-player only, even console products. They have to have deep online modes
because that's where our fans are spending a lot of time and, frankly, that's
where a lot of the value in the IPs we create can really take hold.
We already have two operating MMOs. We launched a game called Ultima Online
in 1997, back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, and that's still in business.
It's still got hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Then there's Dark Age of Camelot,
which we picked up when we bought Mythic we also have a situation where we have
well over 100,000 subscribers. Both are highly profitable, but they're old
world.
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