14 DAY TRIAL // The success of Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II, the tactics title that Relic developed from the fantasy setting created by Games Workshop, led publisher THQ to develop two new titles using the same universe, a MMO and an action adventure single player title.
At E3, the company talked about the Warhammer 40,000 MMO, now bearing the subtitle Dark Millennium Online, and about their ambition to challenge World of Warcraft, Blizzard’s leader of the subscription-based MMO market.
Talking to the journalists who were shown a video demonstration of the fresh MMO Danny Bilson, vice president in charge of videogame development at THQ, said, “Some people thought ‘wow, did we show too much?’ I don’t think so. I kind of wanted to shake up Blizzard a little bit and show that, because there’s a lot of stuff they have to do to do some of the things we’re doing there,” adding, “They are awesome – don’t get me wrong – but we’re in the game.”
There's little detail linked to Dark Millennium Online at the moment but the developers are promising more information will be coming when the Gamescom conversion goes live in August. It would be interesting to actually see the game in action and compare it with the other would-be World of Warcraft killer now in development, Star Wars: The Old Republic from Electronic Arts and BioWare.
Even less is known about Space Marine, in which players will be able to “don the armor of one of the emperor’s chosen in a battle for the very survival of humanity,” apart from the fact that it will mix melee and ranged battles and that it is set to come on the PlayStation 3 from Sony and the Xbox 360 from Microsoft in 2012.