Warhammer 40,000 MMO Needs One Million Players

It's hard to make a successful MMO these days, with the industry moving towards free to play and with Facebook games offering an interesting alternative. THQ is one of the publishers forging ahead with a big project, Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millennium Online, a MMO that is being developed by Vigil Games, the creators of Darksiders, and will probably be launched at some point in 2012.

Talking to CVG Danny Bilson, who is the vice president in charge of core games at publisher THQ, said that Dark Millennium Online would be built so that it's “very friendly to the WoW player,” adding a bit of a personal experience, “I'm a diehard MMO player myself - going back to EverQuest. I've spent lots of time in WoW. As a WoW fanatic, I'm going to go right to 40K as soon as it comes out.”

Bilson promises the Warhammer 40,000 MMO will have more vehicles the player can use than World of Warcraft, with the superior firepower that comes with them changing the way the combat works. It's not clear whether Dark Millenium Online will have the same basic mechanics as the Blizzard made market leader or whether the shooting in the game will be governed more by actual skill than by the level and skills of the player character.

The THQ executive is also saying THQ is not aiming to create a MMO that will take on World of Warcraft directly, like Electronic Arts and BioWare are doing with Star Wars: The Old Republic. The Warhammer 40,000 game only needs about one million players to be successful and the way it is built makes it easy for players to migrate from other MMOs or to jump in if they are fans of the fictional universe. Bilson adds that playable sections of the game will soon be shown to the public.