Cartoon Network Releasing Casual MMO, Eventually

Posted on April 17, 2008 - Filed Under Industry News, MMO |

* * * * * 1 votes

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting, keep it casual!

Cartoon Network has decided to get into the Massive Multi-player Online Games (MMO) and is currently developing FusionFall. The MMO has had it’s share of growing pains though and has been delayed twice. The original release date was spring of 2008. Spring has come really quickly for Cartoon Network so they had pushed the release date out to this summer, but it has slipped again to this fall. MMO games are huge and take a long time to get polished and that is what Cartoon Network is dealing with now.

FusionFall is targeting children in the 8-14 year old range. This range is a bit older than the current demographic that watches Cartoon Network. FusionFall will contain eleven different characters from the Cartoon Network’s shows, such as Dexter and the Power Puff Girls. The characters are set to be a bit older in the game than they are on the TV shows.

The big difference between FusionFall and other MMO games is FusionFall is a platformer and not a role playing game (RPG). Platformers require players to run and jump and shoot things. The quests or missions in the game are designed to be short and take a maximum of 30 minutes to complete and that is where the casual part of the MMO comes in. This game will be designed to play in bite size chunks and not played for hours on end. I am sure you can play it for hours on end, but it was not designed that way.

“The gamer’s skills that have to do with moving around and fighting are much more important here than their character’s stats,” he explains. “We’re not building a game for hardcore gamers who will spend 60-plus hours a week here. If you think of those as hour-long dramas on TV, we want to be the half-hour sitcom. All of our missions are built in a way that they can be completed in 30 minutes at most. That get-in-and-get-out style of play is what makes casual gaming so popular, and we hope it is what will make ‘FusionFall’ popular.”

Thanks The Hollywood Reporter

Spread Casaual Gaming Love: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.