Dark Age of Camelot Interview
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Q: The interesting difference between MMORPGs and single player games is cost. MMORPGs have a large backend network with 24-hour a day technical support. They have in game support. They have lots of quest writing to do, which requires huge amounts of research. This leads to investors taking a lot of risk in creating a MMORPG. How do you mitigate that risk? Also, if I can hit you with a second question, what do you think are some of the new areas of technological development in the pipeline for MMORPGs?
A: Well, for the first part of your question, fortunately, we already have a customer service center. We already have lots of rack space and a great relationship with UUNET. So, those are things that we don't have to re-invest. We will add more customer service for IMPERATOR and more servers. But the server technology will be the same. We already have staff on hand that is very familiar with our server backend. Also our client is the Camelot client; we aren't going to re-invent the wheel. However, it won't look like the Camelot client, but the underlying code is much the same. In terms of what kind of new technology we may be using, we have a policy of upgrading Camelot every year. We constantly release expansions and we upgrade the graphics engine with the new release. Over time, the releases will morph into the IMPERATOR engine. Right now, we are talking with Microsoft about DirectX 10. Of course, we are going to put that into Camelot, which means that it will end up in IMPERATOR.
