Don’t be too hasty in dismissing Durango as yet another pseudo-MMO mobile knockoff. The previous developers of Vindictus are dead serious about forging new territory in the mobile market.
“Assuming the days of a quest-based or theme park type of MMORPG had already passed, we tried to bring innovation to the genre by making a new type of MMORPG that hadn’t previously existed,” What! Studios Project Director Eunseok Yi said in a recent interview. “Since we didn’t have any preceding model to use as a reference, we had to go through tons of prototypes in the development process. The technical parts were also a huge challenge, since we wanted to let lots of players enjoy the open MMO world in real time.”
Yi went into detail about Durango’s dino-tastic setup in the piece, including how players will start the game, how they’ll go about crafting and taming the wildlife, and how players will be interacting with each other over the course of the game. Apparently there will be one permanent central continent that will be surrounded by temporary archipelagos.
So why dinos? “Dinosaurs could appeal to a broader audience and it also could be very effective in expressing the primitive vitality of the wild and dangerous land,” Yi said.
Durango is starting a Korean limited beta test on December 9th.
