We sat down with the president of New World Interactive to talk about the breadth of their games and what’s next with their new studio. Keith Warner also is the director NWI’s Canadian subsidiary New World North and with incredible experiences like Insurgency under their belt, we couldn’t wait to dive in and talk about the past, the present, and the future.
Prima Games: New Worlds has had a heavy focus on military-focused shooter games in the past. Do you have any veterans on your staff?
Keith Warner: No, but we do have a lot of advisors from various services around the world, and we get their stories and some imagery. And we take input from them and sometimes it’s integrated into our games.
Prima Games: What is a little bit of the process that goes into from the advisory to moving into designing that realism that goes into a game like Insurgency?
Keith Warner: Sure, sure. The advisors are always working with our game designers. Sometimes they’re submitting real-life footage. Sometimes they’re submitting anecdotes about their experiences. They’re often submitting reviews of some of the things we want to cover in the games, and then the designers are integrating that and deciding where it fits and how it fits. Working with the programmers, the artists, and the balance of the team to create for us what is a realistic experience.
Prima Games: And with the new studio, how has this opened up the team’s vision for future games? Does this mean new IP’s or is the focus on continuing well-known franchises?
Yes and yes. And not to be quite so enigmatic, we’re going to continue to work on first-person shooters, military-esque. We’ve got a couple other projects in the works at various stages, one in preproduction, one sort of an early stage of production. I can’t really tell you a whole hell of a lot about them. But I can tell you that one of them is outside of the real world sort of experience, and we’re really excited about that one. In addition to continuing what we’ve done, we’ve got three solid franchises so far. We’ll continue to work on those and continue to extend them over the years.
Prima Games: What was the leading factor behind the decision to expand into Calgary?
Keith Warner: We needed to consolidate our team, which was spread out all over the world in 12 time zones. It included a core team in Amsterdam, a smaller core team in Denver, people in Finland, Czech Republic, Serbia, Brazil, literally all over the world; and we realized that it makes sense to get them all together in one location to the extent we could. Canada really was a natural for us because of the immigration limitations into the United States, and Calgary was ultimately what we selected among the candidates that we looked at in Canada
Prima Games: Off-topic to present day games, there’s a lot of controversy with developers choosing the Epic Game Store as an additional option for sales. What do you think about the community’s reaction and has that impacted how you, yourself, see the platform?
Keith Warner: I think it’s too early for me to personally give you input on it. I think EGS is still trying to work out the kinks. Cross-play is a big question mark. One of the things that’s important to us is being able to extend our matchmaking system from what we currently have if we were to move on to EGS, so that’s a big consideration technically for us. They have some proof of concept. They’re adding some games that make some sense, but it does bifurcate the audience unless you can have cross-play. And so bifurcation of the audience is not beneficial because you’ve got one guy who wants to play with his buddy and he’s on Steam and the other’s on EGS. Until they solve that in a way that really works, it’s going to be very hard for any game like ours, which is a multiplayer game, to commit to both. Otherwise, you split your audience. That doesn’t help either audience because part of our game being successful is having servers filled.
You can learn more about New World North right here with the studio’s official website!
