World of Darkness Interview

For all those of you that are not quite yet satisfied with the information that came out from the Grand Masquerade event that was held in New Orleans, Massively has put together a brief interview with Shane Defreest, community developer at CCP North America and White Wolf Publishing, about the World of Darkness MMO of which we have yet to see any screenshot or footage. Here’s a sampling:

The Grand Masquerade logoIt was discussed in the panel that it seems as if the game is going to be vastly more mature, both in content and game style, than any other MMO on the market. How will that affect the way that it’s going to be marketed to the audience as a whole?

I think that’s Vampire: The Masquerade overall, regardless of whatever iteration it’s been presented in. I think the Activision games did a great job of accurately portraying that. I thought that while they were both great games, Bloodlines particularly did an excellent job of conveying the setting. I felt like I was playing World of Darkness. I thought that Vampire: The Eternal Struggle, the card game and the LARP, didn’t diverge from the setting at all either. They haven’t felt gratuitous or inconsistent, but rather “this what we’re marketing because this is what we have.” If people know what we’re about, then they know what to expect. I don’t think we need to do anything different — we just need to apply what we do to another medium.

Do you think that the maturity of the setting and the playstyle of WoD could be detrimental to the subscription total at launch? It seems to be a difficult balance to strike between marketability and setting.

I don’t think it’ll be detrimental at all because if it were detrimental to this, then it would have affected all of the other iterations as well. Those Activision games each sold 350,000 to 450,000 units. I think that there’s a market that really wants that experience and other games that have tried to do it. If our game gets a mature rating, it gets a mature rating. So what? I think that there are some games that have a level of gratuitousness that ours won’t. If our game has nudity, then it’ll be because that’s part of what game needs. It won’t be a T&A show, and there won’t be fountains of gore erupting out of people’s heads just because that’s what you do.