14 DAY TRIAL // Even while it's getting ready to launch an expansion for The Lord of the Rings Online, called Mines of Moria, Turbine is thinking ahead about the future of MMOs and how it can evolve as a company in order to provide what players want. One of the most interesting development opportunities seems to be taking MMOs out of the PC market and bringing them to gaming consoles like the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3.
Jim Crowley, who is the chief executive of Turbine, said at the Tokyo Game Show that “The MMO needs to become a multi-platform tool. The view of Turbine is that MMOs necessarily need to be on consoles” and added that “There are uniquenesses to each platform that suggest that the actual gameplay needs to be optimised for each platform”. So, the Turbine vision is to create games which are playable on all gaming platforms while making sure that the game worlds are not really connected.
When the Xbox 360 was launched and Xbox Live was unveiled to deliver cross platform play with Games for Windows Live, a lot of people thought that MMOs would be the first games to benefit from the possibilities that opened up. Still, very few games are at the moment cross platform capable and the Xbox 360 does not sport versions of any significant MMO, even though some developers, like Funcom, are thinking of targeting the Microsoft console.
On the other hand, Sony is also very eager to create MMOs which would work on both the PC and the PlayStation 3 and has projects, like DC Universe Online and The Agency, which are said to be in parallel development for both platforms. But the people at Sony are also saying that shared game worlds might not be a good idea for cross platform MMOs.
Turbine has not announced that it plans to bring The Lord of the Rings Online on any gaming console.