New Wizards of the Coast president John Hight previously spent 12 years at Blizzard overseeing huge swathes of World of Warcraft, and his new role at the house of Magic the Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons has once again got him pondering MMOs.
Speaking with GamesIndustry, Hight says he would love to see a D&D MMO one day, even if it would come with hefty design challenges.
"I'd love to have that," he says of a potential D&D MMORPG. "I think that we'll want to rethink what an MMO is in this day and age. I think the traditional model that Blizzard – well, even before that, Ultima Online, Everquest – pursued, that could use updating."
If a D&D MMO is eventually in the cards – rather, another one, following and hopefully surpassing Dungeons & Dragons Online – it will be after Wizards can prove that it has "assembled the talent, we have the backend technology, we have the plans to pursue," Hight adds. Right now, it's just "a glimmer in my eye."
It all sounds a bit like a crystal ball right now. "What [will] an MMO look like in five, 10 years?" high wonders. "Where do people go next, after Battle Royale?"
Even more so under Hight, Wizards of the Coast has aggressively pushed for more D&D video games in the wake of Baldur's Gate 3, which found outsized success for an old-school RPG and proved that D&D systems can click with a big audience if presented well.
Already, we have Star Wars Jedi: Survivor director Stig Asmussen making a single-player D&D action adventure game at new studio Giant Skull. Last month, Wizards welcomed over a dozen former EA devs who escaped the wreckage of the publisher's canceled Black Panther and signed up for a D&D incubation project led by Monolith Productions and Shadow of Mordor veteran Michael de Plater.
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