14 DAY TRIAL // Former THQ boss Danny Bilson has spilled the beans on some of the big projects underway at the struggling publisher before its bankruptcy, including one of the most emblematic – the Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millennium Online multiplayer title.
THQ was a pretty big mid-size publisher a few years ago, owning a few great internal studios like Volition, Vigil, or Relic, but it was forced to declare bankruptcy after a series of failed investments and canceled projects.
Among them was Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millennium Online, a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game that was set in the Warhammer 40k universe and was being made by the team at Vigil.
Former THQ boss Danny Bilson has talked a bit about Dark Millennium Online with VG247 and revealed some inside details from the game's development, including how, after the lackluster debut of Star Wars: The Old Republic, THQ quickly decided to cancel or at least rework the whole expensive project.
"What happened was, in December of 2011 is sort of when the wheels came off for THQ, and there was a tremendous loss of money in the uDraw situation as well as some tough releases during that year. By the end of the year we had to make cuts," he said. "We knew that we weren’t going to be able to go subscription, and then we lost a ton of cash that year. There was no way we could gamble on the big bet like an MMO."
The project was quickly retooled into a new one that was intended as either completely free-to-play or with a low price that charged for DLC packs, according to Bilson, and things were looking really good.
"We were going to take some of the great stuff they had and redesign it. I remember some things that I really loved, like each player would have their own capital ship and your friends could have quarters on it. You collected all your stuff from your adventures on your ship, and you could customise it."
The game ended up resembling the likes of Borderlands and already release dates were being thrown around inside the publisher.
"Then it was much more like a Borderlands kind of game. It was a four-player co-op jump-in jump out, go on these missions with your friends. I was really excited about that. With the commitment of that year we felt we could finish that game and ship it within that year, which would have been summer of 2013. It would have been last summer."
Unfortunately, pressure from other executives and shareholders who were unhappy with the whole Dark Millennium Online fiasco meant that Bilson had to cancel even the remainder project and, soon after, he left the company altogether.