Look out City of Heroes, DC Comics is making its way to the MMO world and its bringing comic book artist and publisher Jim Lee along with it.
The game, under development by Warner Bros. Interactive and Sony Online Entertainment, is expected to hit next-gen consoles and PCs in 2007. It will let players create their own heroes to keep the streets safe in a DC Universe. The title will bring with it familiar DC heroes, cities and more.
Lee himself is not only a vice president at DC, he’s an avid MMO gamer. He opted to commit to the deal when Sony came on board. It seems EQ is his favorite game going at the moment. He’s been working on the project since August and it sounds like it will be one to watch.
Comic book site Newsarama landed a pretty big interview with Lee that makes the title sound more than interesting. City of Heroes is a fantastic game, but to actually play in a fully immersed DC Universe could take the genre to the next level.
Three factors about the deal with Sony made the decision really easy for me to make. One, Sony Online is one of the leaders in the MMO space. They have a great history of doing amazing games, and they produced one of my all-time favorite games, Everquest, which really was and continues to be one of the most immersive and entertaining games to date. Second, WildStorm was hired on to do the conceptual artwork for the game. We have a small team of really gifted, well known artists like Carlos D'Anda, Ale Garza, and Scott Iwahashi working with me on creating all the initial art assets. We are creating the line art for the figures and environments in collaboration with Mat Broome, who is one of the art directors on the project. Mat, as many will remember, was a former WildStorm artist who left the world of comics years ago to work in video game space. Third, Sony Online is local--being based in San Diego and I knew a number of people who were already working there. So while the DCO is actually being produced out of their Austin, Texas offices, there are still a lot of time efficiencies that take place because I can just drive 20 minutes over to their San Diego offices and see DCO 3-D work in progress models and get immediate feedback and answers to my questions from Mat. Then the line art gets sent to Austin where the DCO art director Jared Carr and his amazingly talented crew construct the actual in-game models and environments. Overall, it's an exciting opportunity to spread our wings here at WildStorm and do something new, but still obviously comic book related. The project is a real creative challenge and what artist can refuse that?
Newsarama
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