Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

As a former college football player, I often heard the phrase, “Go big or go home!” It referred to a teammate’s work ethic and whether he would work out – “get big” – or just be lazy and fail – “go home”. The Colorado-based MMO developer, NetDevil, has decided to “get big” rather than “go home”. Having secured a monstrous deal with LEGO to produce an MMO featuring the multi-colored building blocks of the highly-popular brand name, NetDevil is preparing to push the limits of the MMO genre.

Hermann Peterscheck and Scott Brown of NetDevil

However, LEGO isn’t the only thing NetDevil has been working on. With Auto Assault celebrating its first anniversary and Jumpgate readying for a major announcement of some kind, there’s a lot to be done on the MMO side of things for NetDevil. We also shouldn’t forget to include NetDevil’s non-MMO product, Warmonger, in the mix. Warmonger is nearing its release date, so FPS fans, be ready for something completely different.

While at OGDC, Jeff “Ethec” Woleslagle and myself (Cody “Micajah” Bye) had a sit down conversation with Scott Brown, president of Netdevil; Hermann Peterscheck, the producer for Jumpgate; and Grace Wong, NetDevil’s business development manager. They were very forthcoming with information about their upcoming titles, so we have split our article into sections based on the game or topic covered.

Jumpgate

For those of you who are old-timers, you may remember an old free-flight MMO from NetDevil called Jumpgate. Unlike EVE Online or the other sci-fi ship based games that have been released, Jumpgate fell more in line with single-player titles like Privateer, where space combat was more free-form and wasn’t limited – it relied more on the dexterity of the player than the other titles.

“Jumpgate is a shooter game, plain and simple, but it holds all the other aspects of an MMO like character customization, a free-form world, crafting, mining, etc.,” Scott said. There’s no dice-rolling or random number generators, the game relies on the skill of the pilot and the dexterity of his aim. In short, it’s space-combat/flight-sim MMO (SCFSMMO?) and shouldn’t be confused with the “other” space-based MMOs.

NetDevil has begun working on Jumpgate again, albeit with a small team, but the NetDevil folks didn’t want to leak too much information about the game to early. All Scott could say was that “there would be a major announcement soon” and that they “are looking for offshore distribution partners to pick up the title.” What does this mean? It means that there are big things in store for Jumpgate in the near future.

“It was our baby, y’know,” Scott said. “It’s the game we really got started on. It was my first attempt at developing a graphics engine. There wasn’t anything like it on the market, and I still want to play a game like that.”

Warmonger will be free, but NetDevil hopes to market weapon packs and map packs to players.

Warmonger

Since GDC, the NetDevil team has really worked on polishing and refining the gameplay of their upcoming PhysX-based title. “We’ve got all the levels done, in fact most of the game is pretty much in there,” Scott said. “Now we’re just working on making the game as pretty and fun as possible.”

But how will NetDevil make money on Warmonger? Scott and the NetDevil team have been working on that same problem. “At the beginning, we’re just going to be giving it away,” he answered. “We want people to wonder if it’s fun to have a totally destructive environment in a shooter game. But after that, we’ve been trying to figure out if we should release map packs, weapon packs, or other extras through a sort of online store sort of system.”

“The other possibility,” Scott continued, “is actually picking up a publisher to work on the next game in the series.” This would be a terrific achievement for NetDevil, since all their previous games have been built in the MMO space alone. Developing a full-fledged multiplayer FPS is nothing to sneeze at.

For those of you running a hardcore, physics-card system, make sure you check in with NetDevil over the next few months. According to Scott, Warmonger is ramping up for a short open beta, and it’d be worth your while to go in and check out the game before the other physics-thugs on the internet burst onto the scene.