In a new interview with Gamasutra, NetDevil president Scott Brown has revealed that the company is "evaluating" the PhysX hardware card exclusivity for its Unreal Engine 3-powered shooter
Warmonger, and is considering making some of the title not require PhysX hardware to run.
When answering a question on the status of
Warmonger in
an in-depth feature interview published today on the site, Steele, whose company is also working on the
Lego Universe MMO and previously created
Auto Assault for NCSoft, commented: "Right now we’re sort of evaluating what’s the right sort of deployment for the game."
He continued: "One of the things that Ageia just did that’s pretty attractive is, with
CellFactor, they added a few levels that didn’t require PhysX. And some that did. That way people can try the game and see the difference.
Warmonger – up to now – is all PhysX."
Steele then explained of the title, which was unveiled at CES 2007 in Las Vegas: "We’re evaluating if it makes more sense to make some of the game not require the accelerator so you can see the difference. And also, maybe get a little more exposure for the title."
It's clear that the NetDevil president also has bigger plans for the game in the long-term: "This, of course, is step one. We’ve got a big huge design of where we’d like this to go. Maybe it could go on to become an MMO-shooter, you know, kinda like
Huxley style. Or maybe it goes on to become more like
Battlefield style, where we release expansion packs, and fund it that way. That’s what we’re trying to figure out. Now that we’ve got this fun toy that we built, where do we go from here?"
Steele's comments were extracted from a
longer Gamasutra interview running today on the site, including plenty more insight on the company's intent to change the developer/publisher paradigm.
