Morrison on system-driven MMOs and Funcom's future
Is the MMO genre poised to go back to its emergent future? It's very possible, particularly given recent big-budget disappointments. Funcom producer Craig Morrison tackles the subject head-on in a new interview at Gamasutra.
Morrison cites system-driven games as the way forward, though he bristles at any mention of the terms "themepark" and "sandbox." "You need to build an ecosystem. You need to build a collaborative set of systems which give the players the ability to tell their own stories alongside yours," he says.
Morrison also hints at the shape of potential Funcom projects. "We could make a great systems-driven MMO for 10 or 15 million dollars. Which by the standards of Guild Wars 2, The Secret World, The Old Republic, is a very small budget, but we could bring it to market in three years with that kind of budget and hopefully have a chance of them growing organically from there. And we haven't got the huge expectation of, 'Oh my God, you spent 50, 100, 200 million dollars on this game, and it has to succeed,'" he explains.
