The good folks at Paizo have announced that they have licensed their Pathfinder game to Goblinworks to develop an MMO game. Now, I play neither MMO’s nor Pathfinder, but I am a fan of the way Paizo does business, and this is obviously a Big Deal from the standpoint of the gaming industry, given Pathfinder’s consistent rankings either just above or just below Dungeons and Dragons in terms of sales estimates.
The game is described on Goblinworks’ website as:
a hybrid sandbox/theme park-style MMO roleplaying game where characters
explore, develop, and dominate the River Kingdoms, a treacherous
no-man’s-land of squabbling kingdoms on the edge of wilderness.
I’m no expert on MMOs, but the sandbox/theme park hybrid does seem pretty par for the course. Given some of the other information on the Goblinworks page about the game, I wonder just how much of Pathfinder will actually make it into the game, other than the name (emphasis added):
Players explore, adventure, develop, and dominate their domains by
playing fighters, rogues, wizards, or any of Pathfinder’s many character
types, or they can use the game’s archetype system go beyond the
standard options to create nearly any sort of character imaginable.
In any event, congratulations to Paizo, and it will be interesting to see how Pathfinder fans react to the news and the game itself, once it goes live.
This is very early stages stuff. It doesn't sound like Goblinworks has even gotten funding yet, from looking at their web page. MMO's are notoriously difficult and expensive to create, and usually fail. Even if all goes well, this thing is several years away.
It actually looks like GoblinWorks has been spun off of Paizo for the primary purpose of doing the MMO. It was founded this year and shares a lot of lead staff.
I think I'll remain cautiously optimistic / curious about this. As has been said already, MMOs are enormous undertakings, with (usually) vast staffing and funding issues. Because of the complexity involved with an MMO of the 'standard' type, I shudder to think of the poor testers.
Still, their goals are lofty and I wish them only the best. Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I have to go submit an application to join their testing team…
4th Edition on line s dead, Long live Patfinder !
Agreed. This MMO is years off. But imagine how much Paizo will publish for table top inbetween then. This might be a timing thing for them because they know they'll run dry on material and need to reboot the PFRPG edition (inevitable) and move their setting timeline up (also typical for any game world).