FileBlog: Sony Talks Convergence, Announces New MMO

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February 08, 2007

Sony Talks Convergence, Announces New MMO

The DICE convention kicked off yesterday (See yesterday's blog) and the first speaker was Yair Landau. He's not exactly a household name, but he's the dude you can thank for bringing the Spider-Man franchise to Sony and revitalizing it with some badass movies. He's the Vice Chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment and the President of Sony Pictures Digital. Sony Online Entertainment, the publishers of EverQuest and Vanguard, also falls within his domain.

Landau kicked off his keynote speech with a clip from the upcoming movie Ghost Rider. Good stuff: Ghost rider snaring a helicopter with a whip then driving down the side of a building leaving a trail of flame. His point? "We exist in a world where literally if you can conceive of it, we can make it real," he said.

The gist of Landau's message was about convergence of mediums in the age of digital effects. Previously, "Convergence" was a buzzword that meant Hollywood making games that played like movies, and (in theory) vice versa. Landau isn't alone in disagreeing with that. He says that there's convergence is in the creative talent behind projects: artists and animators are crossing the line between Hollywood and games all the time now, and frequently sharing tools. And he asserts there's a convergence of ideas: movies and videogames can be released that simultaneously play with the same concepts, such as "What would it be like to be Spider-Man?" But that ultimately games and movies have to be developed in ways that take advantage of each medium.

Landau had plenty of examples of this in action, the most relevant being Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg took an old genre, the war movie, and reinvigorated it with modern film techniques and digital effects. He made it relevant for people. Then the games industry ran with the idea: games like Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, and more recently Company of Heroes all took similar ideas and in their own way made the subject relevant again.

Putting it to Practice with a New MMO:

Landau had another example of a topic made relevant with modern techniques: Spy Movies. He showed a clip of the most recent James Bond flick, Casino Royale. Then he declared that at Sony he wants to "take espionage entertainment to a new level," leveraging the online community expertise and MMO experience that Sony Online has been gathering for years.

The result is a project code-named Vista, "because we pushed it back a year," Landau quipped. It's a massively multiplayer Spy game, featuring an espionage-driven world and both co-operative and player-vs-player gameplay. He says he wanted to build a game where it's okay to wear a tux, and promised "lots of storylines and experiences that are player-driven."

Then he satisfied our curiosity by playing a clip of the game concept. It's still very early in development; the movie was obviously pre-rendered although it looked to me like they tried to use in-game art assets. The characters were thin and muscular, the men hard-jawed and the women lithe. Yes, there were tuxes; there were also catsuits and machine guns. And hot cars with missile launchers, peeling off down cluttered European city streets.

Although Landau implied James Bond was the inspiration, the combat from the demo reel looked more like a page from the notebook of City of Heroes: a pair of spies took down a small army of crazily-costumed street thugs in a lightning-fast hail of machine gun fire and kung-fu kicks. Then an oversized villain who looked straight out of a comic book (or a KISS concert) bashed through a fence to take on the heroes.

A massively multiplayer spy game sounds like a home-run to me; it's a world that everyone can relate to and it lends itself to lots of gadgets and locations all over the planet. That said, judging by the demo reel, Sony will have to find ways to differentiate the game from City of Heroes or Matrix Online. I expect it'll be a while before we see more of "Vista," but I dig the idea.

-Fargo

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