Practice Your Rite of Pants -- WoD MMO On The Way!

I am old veteran of the White Wolf "World of Darkness" live action and tabletop roleplaying games. I certainly believe that "Werewolf: The Apocalypse" was one of the best RPGs ever written.

So I was as interested as I was mystified when Icelandic game company CCP, creators of "EVE Online," merged with White Wolf. It just seems like an odd combination. But I want to see what they're going to do.

The first thing, it seems, is the obvious one: a WoD MMO. This could be a fantastic idea if the game is role-play centered rather than combat-centric. Kindred and Garou spend a lot of time fighting, but the real heart of a WoD game is in the politics and the social interaction. If CCP could find a way to recreate the different cities, a la the Camarilla Fan Club, that would be great too.

The World of Darkness is a huge milieu, so we'll have to see what they center on. Unfortunately, I'm sure the MMO will take place in the "new" World of Darkness, not the old setting with which I am familiar. Here's some advice for CCP, which I'm sure you won't take -- pay Mark Rein·Hagen the damn money, and use the old World of Darkness!

My one year of college Icelandic didn't stick with me very well, so here's mogarmy.net's translation of the original press release:

The Icelandic game developer CCP will be developing a new massively multiplayer online computer game called World of Darkness. The game will be developed along with White Wolf, the board game company CCP merged with last year.

The setting of the game will be World of Darkness, a world inhabited by vampires and werewolves. White Wolf created said world and has written stories and books that take place there.

Halldór Fannar Guðjónsson, one of CCP's programmers, couldn't give any more details on the game, but said its development will begin in the next few months.

CCP owns an operates the Icelandic massively multiplayer online game "EVE Online" which currently has over 180,000 subscribers.

I'd like to point out that White Wolf has never produced a board game; they make tabletop RPGs, LARPs, video games and novels.