[GDC] The World Online MMO, From The Makers of Dreamfall

Even as a working title, "The World Online" sounds like one hell of an ambitious project, and according to info surfacing from this week's GDC, it's a new MMO game currently being developed by Funcom. Their latest online endeavour is of course Age of Conan, which should be released later this year. However, it's probably more relevant to note that the team working on The World Online is largely made up of former Dreamfall developers - even though they stress out that "It's not a Dreamfall MMO".

For the time being, Funcom is only showing the project to publishers, telling the press only that it takes place on Earth in the present day, and that it uses the same graphics engine as Age of Conan. Eurogamer managed to get the following comment from a company spokesman:

"We have always used our in-house technology, and we're developing the engine even further," the spokesperson added. "The Age of Conan engine, even today, looks really good with DX 10 - so the guys working on the [new] MMO have even more time to work on gameplay and content."

Speaking of Age of Conan and DirectX 10, we have just added some new screenshots from their barbaric MMO in our gallery, showing the difference between DX9 and DX10 in a couple of scenes (scene #1 on DX9 / DX10, scene #2 on DX9 / DX 10).

But getting back to The World Online, the final bit of info available is that the game is being made primarily for the PC, and apparently for the Xbox 360 as well. No release date has been estimated so far, so it might take a while until "the good stuff" is revealed.

(N.B. Archive text, links removed)