Back in May we caught wind of developer Jack Emmert’s shift from Daybreak to the newly formed NetEase-owned studio Jackalyptic Games, which is starting work on a UE5-built MMO set in the Warhammer 40K universe. We still don’t know much about the project beyond that, but a multi-part interview with Wargamer suggests that Emmert and his team have plenty of backing from NetEase and offeres a nugget about its design.
In one portion of the interview, Emmert talks up the support his studio has been receiving from the Chinese gigacorp in terms of its monetary backing, experts to help his team, and giving him the space to plan. Emmert notes Jackalyptic is about 45 people strong, but he believes he may need around 100 to see the project to the finish line, though he also hopes to keep the head count lean.
During another portion, Emmert mostly talks about designing an MMO and how the genre has progressed, but an interesting tidbit awaits at the end, when he discusses the potential for PvP:
“I have never emphasized PvP. God bless all the games that depend on it, I don’t know how to do it. If I play a PvP game and I lose several times in a row, I don’t want to play anymore, right? Like, getting your head beaten isn’t necessarily fun. And so you end up winnowing down your population.”
Emmert is also oddly coy about which Warhammer universe the game will be in, simply saying, “We have a Warhammer license. I can’t tell you which one, they have a whole bunch!”
Most of the interview pieces primarily talk about Emmert’s career trajectory, his personal history with the Warhammer IP and how he hopes his MMO will get fans interested in it, and the kind of players he believes will be drawn to the title. Ultimately the new MMO still sounds as if it’s in a high concept phase, but there are some pieces of information for fans to perhaps mull over regardless.
