MMOs have a solid place on PCs; but are they destined to make their mark on consoles as well? There have been some notable MMORPGs for consoles, like Final Fantasy XI, but so far they're a minority as a console genre. An important question now hangs: Is all this about to change.
NCsoft's North America President Chris Chung recently remarked in an interview that MMOs on consoles are inevitable. The South Korean-based company is the force behind popular MMOs like Guild Wars and Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa.
NCsoft caught a nice break when it scored an exclusivity deal with Sony last year. The studio will be releasing four new MMORPGs on the PlayStation 3 sometime in the future. When asked about these upcoming games, Chung remarked that:
I think there are a lot of causes that factor into good MMOs on a console. These are elements like 'does the person have a standard definition TV or an HDTV? You don't have a good a resolution on regular TV, and a lot of games were hurting for that.
Ultimately, we have to really optimize for consoles; we have to create an experience that's suited for the [PS3] and supports the MMO element. I think the shift is inevitable; real-time strategy is one of the last PC genres moving onto consoles, and I think we'll see a similar trend for online games as well.
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