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City Sprawl
NCSoft's PR Head Mike Crouch on an ever-expanding urban landscape
LQGaming Services:: With the next generation of gaming consoles arriving, are there any plans to port any of NCSoft's MMORPGs to a console such as Xbox 360 or PS3?
Mike Crouch: We'd like to. Our games are based on the PC but they are platform-agnostic as our CEO likes to say. Really, it's just a matter of the technology in terms of the consoles catching to what we can do with the online presence. Right now you can get some multiplay, but really not the massively multiplayer level.
So our plans are to work in that direction but right now we really have nothing in the works that we can talk about.
LQGaming Services:: You've just announced that City of Heroes / City of Villains is now available in Korea. Tell us a little about the process of getting the game to the Korean peninsula and where the game might be headed to the in the future.
Mike Crouch: We have high hopes for this game going into Korea. Even though it doesn't really fit into the game style you would traditionally see going into the Asian market. But we have localized the game to include new characters that have more Asian stylings, more costumes and powers that look and feel so that the Asian customers would enjoy [the experience] a little bit more than what the
American
version of it would be.
One example [of the language barrier] is its not called City of Heroes over there. It's City of Hero because they don't use plurals often in their language often.
We also introduced some new signature heroes over there that are more in tune with the culture and what expectations for the customers are. We are trying to be successful in another market and we've done some things that will make the game more appealing to them.
LQGaming Services:: As far as competition goes, what did you think of about DC Comics announcing DC Online?
Mike Crouch: It's going to be years and years and years away. When you announce you're going to work on an MMO, it's going to be 2-5 years of development time. At this point we don't consider them competition and we really don't consider anyone competition because the market is so new that we're all just trying to build the market.
If a game is successful - like World of WarCraft - we applaud them because they're bringing new people into the market. Those people are going to play World of Warcraft and then maybe come to our game. Maybe people will leave our game to go to their game.
Regardless, everybody's bringing more people into the market and that's what we want to build this industry.
So are we worried about DC Comics and Marvel Comics competition? Not really.
--Chris Wyatt
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City of Heroes Community.
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