NetDevil Working On Toy MMO, Warmonger Shoote...

NetDevil Working On Toy MMO, Warmonger Shooter, And One More

For a company that has been around for nearly ten years, all that NetDevil has to show for today are two mediocre MMO games: the first (from 2001 and still running) is Jumpgate - which may very well be the first massively multiplayer space simulator universe, and the other one is this year's Auto Assault cvasi-fiasco, released by NCsoft. What could possibly be even less appealing than a vehicular combat MMO? How about a toy MMO? Like... Lego or something.

The studio is in fact working on a new, as yet unannounced MMOG for a "major toy company", as confirmed to Gamasutra by NetDevil president Scott Brown and creative director Ryan Seabury. The two didn't reveal what IP they're dealing with, nor the toy company in question, but they expect to announce it in early January. The only hint dropped by Scott Brown is this:

"It's not that hard to figure out, but everyone we've told this to has responded that the IP is a natural fit for a MMO."

Does Lego seem like a natural fit for a MMO to you? Or maybe Transformers? Oh, I know, how about Barbie? That's gotta be it!

Aside from the "toy MMO", NetDevil is also working on two more projects, one of which is a modern day urban shooter called Warmonger. With it, they plan to take full advantage of Ageia's physics processing hardware, and create a highly destructive game. Kotaku is absolutely thrilled with the idea of being able to destroy anything in the environment one chunk at a time, and especially with this particular example offered by the devs:

"One example they gave was having the ability to shoot a hole through the ceiling so the person, and anything else that happens to be on the floor above you, actually falls through."

Also worth mentioning is that Warmonger is based on the Unreal Engine 3 technology, and like we said it will support Ageia's PhysX processor for enhanced destructible enviroments.

So, that leaves us with one more project - on which NetDevil has yet to reveal anything. But apart from the three future games, they are also working on making their five-year-old space MMO Jumpgate look better. Why would they bother, for a game with a user base of just about 1,000 people? Well, simply put, because it's profitable. Or so they say.

(N.B. Archive text, links removed)