The massively multiplayer online gaming business seems to be getting bigger by the day. Players have more choices than ever before, so if you're a publisher of an MMO you have to do your best to let gamers know what your product can offer that the competition can't. If a publisher can get enough players hooked on its title, then subscription fees should take care of the rest.
Early
next year, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment (WBIE), with the help of co-publisher Sega, will bring its own MMO to market. The Matrix Online, developed by Monolith Productions, will offer what no other MMO can: a continuation of the Matrix universe and where every person "jacked in" plays an active role in shaping the continuing saga. GameDAILY BIZ recently sat down with Jason Hall, Senior Vice President of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment,
to see what he thinks of the current MMO market and how The Matrix Online fits into it.
Hall told us that work began on the technology for Matrix Online back in 2000, and it wasn't until 2002 that WBIE inked a deal with Monolith to begin developing the game. Interestingly, he said that Monolith had been working on the game even before they got
the deal with WBIE, in the hopes that they would get the deal done. "From back to front, the total production time is almost four years," said Hall.
When asked about the increasingly crowded MMO market and what Matrix Online will offer to differentiate itself, Hall responded, "The first thing you should look at is what it doesn't offer, which is trolls and dragons and elves," alluding to the fact that most MMOs today seem to be inspired by Dungeons & Dragons. He continued, "It is a contemporary urban environment that 99% of the people playing in our society can understand just on sight...aside from that, we probably have the most fluid and efficient depiction of combat in an MMOG." Hall also emphasized the sheer size of the game world, which he estimates is "about five times the
size of Manhattan."
Most important, however, said Hall is that The Matrix Online is an official part of the Matrix world and that it is an official continuation of that storyline. "If something happens in The Matrix Online, if there were another Matrix movie, that movie would take into consideration what happened in the game." To ensure Matrix authenticity, the Wachowski brothers have been involved with the game since its inception, and it's up to them to approve characters that are created, what happens to known Matrix characters and more.
With that in mind, though, there are a lot of fans that were generally disappointed in the last two films in the trilogy. Is it perhaps too late to release a Matrix game and expect it to be successful?
Hall doesn't believe this will be a problem, because first and foremost, all involved wanted to make sure it was a good game, regardless of story. In fact, Hall believes that a player that has never even seen any Matrix movie would be able to jump right in and have a great time. "If the game itself stands on its own and it's fun, its existence is justifiable just on the basis of the gameplay alone."
And as for the fact that the popularity of the property may not be that high anymore, Hall offered, "Although the second and third films may not have met expectations, they certainly made a whole lot of money. And pretty much everybody knows about The Matrix in one form or another, so the penetration that a Matrix related video game would have in general is going to be greater than,
in general, an original property that no one has heard of at all."
Of course, WBIE also has the challenge of overcoming the stigma of the last game to utilize the Matrix property, Enter The Matrix, which quickly seemed to become everyone's favorite whipping boy for bad licensed games. Hall told us, "It definitely sets a certain bar for expectations that the consumer has and we have
