White Wolf and CCP merge...

[Cergorach]

Whoa! Read this:
http://www.white-wolf.com/index.php?line=news&articleid=629

White Wolf: Known from their Vampire RPG (+ whole World of Darkness universe) and a boatload of D20 material.

CCP: makers of a semi-popular MMORPG (Multiplayer Massive Online RPG) called Eve-Online.

Resulting in: A World of Darkness MMORPG and a pen and paper Eve RPG (comming near you in the future).

[edit]
Details:
EVE Online: Products to be introduced in 2007 will include strategy guides, enhanced collectable card games (there's already a Eve ccg), role-playing systems, and novels all based on EVE Online.

I have mixed feelings about this. While i greatly respect the quality of WW's RPG work, i am afraid that work on a WOD MMORPG will reduce the attention Eve-Online will be getting from the CCP development team. On the other hand, knowing WW style, the Eve p&p RPG might bring in a lot of new players to Eve-Online (not to mention making the current player base stay longer and be even more fanatical). Also if a WOD MMORPG is build on the same technology as Eve-Online is, that might mean more development time that would also benefit Eve-Online.

For those of you that wonder why Eve-Online is such an unique MMORPG, one of the aspects is that all the 130,000+ players share a single universe (one huge computer cluster). Games like World of Warcraft, while having a lot more players, share those player across a lot of different servers (devinately a lot less then 100,000 players per server).

More info on Eve-Online: www.eve-online.com
[/edit]

 

[der_kluge]

Wow. That's pretty interesting.

 

[thatdarncat]

Eve is a pretty nice game... I'll be interested to see what comes of this.

 

[Nightfall]

Yet another company sells its soul to WW. (No I'm not saying Necromancer Games, Malhavoc Press or even Fiery Dragon did that. Just saying...well look at Warcraft! )

 

[Buttercup]

This is yet another step down the road toward the death of table top rolplaying games, I fear.

Sigh.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

CCP has to devote more attention to the WoD game. As much as it might pain the EVE Online crowd to think about it, 130k subscribers simply isn't generating the kinds of big revenue that a company needs to grow and expand. There's a chance to really break out with a WoD game and do, if not WoW numbers, at least EQ1 numbers, which would mark a big jump forward commercially.

In any case, cool that they're doing this. It'll be interesting to see exactly how it works out; White Wolf's chat room games all end up pretty bizarre.

 

[Buttercup]

Yet another company sells its soul to WW.

You are completely missing the point, here. This isn't about selling of souls. It's about a paradigm shift.

 

[Tiberius]

I, too, am a little wary of this development. However, I'd love to see an Exalted MMG, so this might be a step in that direction.

 

[GoodKingJayIII]

Eve is a great game and was really a treat to play for the brief time that I did. I'm sure they'd do a WoD MMO justice in its own right, though I've yet to see a computer game do justice to the massive politicking and double-dealing that goes on in Vampire.

This is yet another step down the road toward the death of table top rolplaying games, I fear.

Sigh.

Maybe. I think it's hard to say at this point. But I have a hard time believing that table-top roleplaying games are just going to die.

 

[Ian the Mad]

I've yet to see a computer game do justice to the massive politicking and double-dealing that goes on in Vampire.

You clearly didn't spend enough time playing EVE. The heart of that game is in the player politics, backstabbing, dirty tricks and double dealing.