Modern MMOs “Barely Even Games,” Says Former Guild Wars Dev

Self-confessed “console guy” Richard Foge thinks that MMOs get an easy ride, but none of them is even as good as Mario 64.

Richard Foge, who has worked on such diverse games as Guild Wars, SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs – Fireteam Bravo, and God of War, has attacked MMOs, saying that they are nowhere close to keeping up with cutting edge games and have math where they should have action.

Writing on the Undead Labs website, the studio that he has recently joined, Foge said that he liked the idea of MMOs, but couldn’t stand the actual games themselves. Foge thought that MMOs should be able to go toe-to-toe with the biggest triple-A games, and thinks that making action-orientated MMOs for consoles is how that’s going to happen.

He described the game that Undead Labs was working on, a persistent, online, console action game where players banded together to fight zombies, and their success or failure was down to their own skill, rather than “numbers and spreadsheets behind the scenes.” Players would be able to set themselves significant and important goals as well, like capturing a power plant to get the communications network in their community up and running.

The game that Foge describes sounds like it could be a lot of fun, albeit very ambitious for a new studio like Undead Labs. It sounds like he’s underestimating the challenge of getting a large-scale, persistent world to run smoothly however, especially one with reflex-orientated, action gameplay. That’s going to be a significant hurdle to overcome if his game is actually going to be playable, let alone successful.

Source: Massively