Realtime to announce second MMO next year

Realtime Worlds creative director David Jones has revealed that the Dundee-based developer - currently hard at work creating online title APB - will release the first details of its second MMO project next year.

Jones, speaking in his keynote presentation at this year's GameHorizon conference, wouldn't confirm anything more for now, other than that it was "a very ambitious project" that the company is "very excited" about.

He also revealed that it was the project which the company originally set out to create, and was what the initial USD 30 million in venture capital funding was raised for back in 2005 - with the implication that the "ambitious" nature of the game was why APB will now be released first.

Jones went on to talk about the reasons for the formation of Realtime Worlds - principally that he wanted to creative a new business based on online gaming, and challenge the traditional sense of creating games and funding those projects.

He also outlined the major challenges that the company has faced in setting up an online title for the first time - including latency and bandwidth issues, the need for a big QA team (which will surpass 70 people soon), the need to work on a twenty-four-seven basis and the big investment required.

He didn't give any specific details about APB's business model in terms of what it will cost players, but did say that the model would "remain flexible for as long as possible and focus on what it costs to run the game," with more details revealed closer to launch.

And regarding costs, Jones warned that any company attempting to create an online title should know "intimately" the concurrent player connection cost, a number which should include the operations team, infrastructure, customer support and bandwidth.

Realtime Worlds' first release was Crackdown, an Xbox 360-exclusive which gained significant critical acclaim - but Microsoft's reluctance to commit to a sequel saw the company opt for its own projects instead.