With big companies like Blizzard, NCSoft and CCP Games in the industry, most new MMO developers garner barely any recognition. To break that trend a new studio named Colony Studios has emerged, boasting of a number of industry veterans in its ranks, that have worked on many big titles such as EverQuest, The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar, Dark Age of Camelot, EVE Online, Ultima Online, City of Heroes and World of Warcraft. Their current project is an MMO that will hopefully hit the stand by 2009. The company’s CEO Michael Wallis (worked on EVE Online), had this to say about their Sci-fi MMO:
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“Our MMO, which will offer far more than a linear storyline, will provide a ton of history and backstory, but the players will consistently influence the content,” says Wallis. “The bottom line is we’ve launched MMOs before, and our experience lets us anticipate bumps in the road and steer clear of them. The fact that we’ve been through it before means things are much less likely to fall through the cracks.”_
With the number of cross-genre MMOs being developed currently, it’s hard to say how or how much the MMO industry will evolve by 2009. Let’s hope that Colony Studios’ MMO outshines most of them; it’s about time a small studio makes a big MMO.