Is Monolith Soft Working on an MMORPG?
by Menashe
If you’ve been following Nintendo Enthusiast, you’ll know that we gave Xenoblade Chronicles the Game of the Year Award. Heck, many of us even consider it to be this generation’s best game. So, we pay really close attention when it comes to their developer, Nintendo-owned, Monolith Soft.
Taking a look at Monolith’s website, you’ll see that there are a number of new job openings within the company. We know that Monolith are working on a new RPG of sorts for the Wii U, so let’s see if we can learn anything new from the job listings. Most of them are quite common, like a 3D designer capable of working with and animating 3D models, maps, and facial animations (sounds good to me!) There are also positions for a 2D artist to work on storyboards and art-sets, an effects designer for battle effects, a motion designer for handling motion within the battle scenes, and a whole bunch of “planners”, who are to deal with
1) planning for games that use a network,
2) planning and writing scripts for the towns,
3) planning event scene creations, and
4) planning the AI of enemies.
That’s all fine and nice but it doesn’t tell us much more than the fact that Monolith are working on an RPG with towns, 3D models with facial animations, fancy battle scenes, and nice 2D art pieces to boot. However, there is one other job opening that tells us something new. The job calls for a Network Programmer who is capable of creating “clients” in the game console which will allow it to interact with a network, and the development of network-aware applications and libraries that use the internet.
Basically, Monolith Soft are working on a game that interacts with a network over the internet. This can mean many things. It could just be a fancy way of saying there will be glorified DLC. But it’s also possible that the game itself is played over the internet. Many people claimed Xenoblade Chronicles was practically a single-player MMORPG (which is an oxymoron) so it’s quite possible that they’ve expanded their vision of Xenoblade to include thousands of people running around in a massive online world.
The Monolith listings are all in Japanese but you can check it out here and have Google translate it.
