Interview: Codemasters Online Gaming’s David Solari Discusses Dragon Empires, Plans for the Future

By Siam Choudhury | June 17, 2008 | | Filed under: Features, Interviews

Editor-in-Chief Siam Choudhury puts on his interviewer hat and sits down for a discussion with David Solari, Vice President and General Manager of Codemasters Online Gaming.

Topics covered include the cancellation of Dragon Empires, balancing being a third-party publisher with in-house development, and plans for the future.

The MMO Gamer: Could you begin by introducing yourself and what you do at Codemasters Online, please?

David Solari: Hi, I’m David Solari and I am the Vice President and General Manager of Codemasters Online. That’s a long way of saying I’m responsible for the Online Gaming Division at Codemasters.

The MMO Gamer: Codemasters had a long history in the MMO industry prior to establishing Codemasters Online Gaming. Could you tell us about your experiences with The Realm Online, one of the first MMORPGs?

David Solari: The Realm Online was a really interesting product with a very loyal user base. It was this title that really drove Codemasters to get into the persistent gaming space. When we took it over, The Realm Online was relatively an “elder statesman” in the persistent space. For that reason it was a really good product to help Codemasters gain experience.

The MMO Gamer: There was another, later attempt by Codemasters to launch an in-house developed MMORPG called Dragon Empires. The title was hyped and had a strong following until development was halted in 2004. What happened?

David Solari: It was The Realm Online that really inspired us to try and make our own MMO. In fact, originally, we were working on “Update 4″ for The Realm Online which would have seen a whole host of new features for the players.

As planning went on, we saw that we had so many fantastic ideas that we needed to channel those into a new project – which was where Dragon Empires was “born”.

We were very ambitious and wanted to create a game that we felt could not only compete with, but exceed the likes of the original Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot. MMOs are probably the hardest games to make, particularly the core technology which allows 100s of players to interact.

Despite a large team, huge investment and involving consultants we just couldn’t get this technology to work. We are not the first to face this problem, we haven’t been the last and I am sure others will have the same problems in the future.

The design was nailed, the world was built, (it looked amazing) and many of the systems were developed but we could not overcome the massively multiplayer challenge. The team had four major pushes over two years, but finally we had to accept that it wasn’t going to work. It was incredibly painful for everyone involved, and we appreciate also very painful for the fans who had followed the game for so long.

The MMO Gamer: What did Codemasters learn from the development and cancellation of Dragon Empires?

David Solari: We learned developing a MMO isn’t easy. We also gained a huge amount of experience in preparing to launch a MMO both from an operations and marketing perspective.

The Dragon Empires experience was really the foundation for what Codemasters Online is today.

The MMO Gamer: Do you think you are ready to bring MMOG development back in-house again?

David Solari: We talk about it a lot. We do have plans to do in-house development, but we haven’t made any final decisions on timing or project specifics at this time.

The other thing to remember is that developing a persistent game doesn’t mean $40m and 40 months of development. Different products on different platforms for different audiences require different commitments.