Possible Summer Expansion

I was out of town the last couple of days, so didn’t notice until now that Mark Jacobs addressed the recent rumor of a DAoC expansion pack over at the Developer’s Round Table. Here’s what he had to say:

This is getting way out of hand so let me clarify things yet again.

1) We will not begin work on the expansion until January at the earliest. We will only begin work on it once we have all the updates that we want to have in the game (houses, horses, etc.). These updates will be free.

2) There is nothing that we are planning for in the first expansion that we could have gotten in today or even in a few months. Converting and upgrading all the artwork in the game is a multi-month process in of and by itself.

3) The date for the expansion’s release is late May/June at the earliest but even this is not set yet. Realistically, we are looking at something no sooner than 8 months out.

4) Nobody will be forced to upgrade. The game will continue to work just fine.

5) The add-on pack will be geared to the highest end graphic cards today (please keep in mind#4 above). Even assuming that we could have had the NI4.0 engine and all the artwork converted (we couldn’t) and in by October we couldn’t have targeted the high end cards now without alienating a lot of our potential audience. In 8 months, the cards we are looking at will not be state-of-the-art any longer so their cost will come down and will be more readily available and used.

6) We have not established any pricing yet but it will not be at 39.95 it will be higher. Sorry, just joking. It will certainly be less than that but we haven’t even begun making plans for this aspect of it. My hope is that we can keep the price down as low as possible and still satisfy the retailers, distributors, manufacturer and leave a little something for us. Please keep in mind that even though Mythic is the publisher we don’t get to keep anything close to all the money from a sale. Remember that the retailers take a big cut and Vivendi takes a big cut. What we are left with doesn’t leave us with much of profit per box when we include the free month. I can’t tell you the exact figure because of our contract but you couldn’t come close to buying a movie ticket for what we earn on each box sale after the cost of the free month.

7) The add-on pack will feature lots of new things (not anything we have ever talked about) that we will only talk about as we get closer to release (for obvious reasons).

8) DAoC was not the the highest priced MMORPG ever, not even close. Please check the prices of UO/EQ/AC/AO at launch and compare. We are actually the least expensive game. I could be wrong but I know that 3 out of the 4 were at 49 or above and UO had 2 different versions but even the standard one I believe was higher than ours.

9) The add-on pack is not a bug patch or anything like that, it is new content, new content and more new content. And if that is enough, more content. And sure, we could have gotten this content in at release but then release would have happened in June 2002 at best and then it probably would have not been enough then because we would be criticized even then for being smaller the EQ or AC because they will be upgrading too. As I’ve said before, no game can compete with the sheer volume of content of a long-standing MMORPG as long as the long-standing MMORPG is being supported.