POL Lead Heads To California (December 20, 2006)

[ChrisReid]

GameSpot has caught up with former Privateer Online director Raph Koster. The former Origin designer left SOE-Austin back in March, and now he's opened a new studio in San Diego. The Areae website hints that his new team could working on a software engine or new technology to facilitate game creation, rather than an actual new title.

Origin, Sony Online veteran touts new dev studio in SoCal; no games but lots of names pepper announcement...

Areae, Inc. is a company dedicated to taking the tired old virtual world and making it into something fresh and new. Something anyone can jump into. Something where anyone can find something fun to do or a game to play. Something where anyone can build their own place on the virtual frontier.

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Original update published on December 20, 2006

 

[gwydion]

while I do sincerely hope this means a new WC could be in the works, it's very possible that it only means that some of the old games are being slightly revamped to appear on EA Replay.

 

[ChrisReid]

It's very possible that more old WC games are being prepared to run on modern systems, but this article doesn't seem to be about that. Koster's specialty is massively multiplayer games, and it sounds like he's making tools to streamline their creation. There's no suggestion that he's working with EA on anything right now. His claim to fame is that he worked on one of the neat cancelled WC games, Privateer Online, and you can still find it listed in his resume.

 

[AD]

It's very possible that more old WC games are being prepared to run on modern systems, but this article doesn't seem to be about that. Koster's specialty is massively multiplayer games, and it sounds like he's making tools to streamline their creation. There's no suggestion that he's working with EA on anything right now. His claim to fame is that he worked on one of the neat cancelled WC games, Privateer Online, and you can still find it listed in his resume.

Hehehe, Gwydion meant to post it to the other thread about the other news item from the same day. He posted there confused about why his post had disapeared. He probably clicked the discuss link for the wrong story.
https://www.wcnews.com/news/2627
http://www.crius.net/zone/showthread.php?threadid=21103

i swear i posted a response to this already... anyway... for all we know they're just talking about redoing some of those franchises for EA Replay. But lets hope it's something more substantial.

 

[gwydion]

yeah, i messed up, oops