With Hitman’s freelancer mode in the rear-view mirror and an upcoming James Bond game boiling away somewhere behind the scenes, IO Interactive has revealed yet another project. The Danish studio has announced in a recent post to its website it’s working on the straightforwardly-titled “Project Fantasy,” an online fantasy RPG.
I was curious about what the “online” part of online fantasy RPG meant—after all, you could plausibly describe Hitman as an online game even though it’s single-player—but IOI makes it sound familiar. The studio says it’s “building a new world, a new IP […] a world and a game built from the core to entertain players and expand for many years to come,” and pays particular homage to tabletop gaming and the idea of “a diverse group of individuals with different skills and strengths” working together and becoming “more than the sum of their parts”. That certainly sounds a lot like a pitch for a live-service game to me!
That’s… pretty much your lot as far as announced detail goes, although we can tell from the artwork at the top of the page that we’re sure as heck gonna see some willowy elf-folk and wide, squat dwarven lads. Even the job postings associated with Project Fantasy on IOI’s site don’t reveal much. The posting for a senior product manager promises that the game will “revolutionize the online fantasy RPG genre,” while the post calling for a senior combat designer reveals that the game will, in fact, have combat. That’s as close to a revelation as we get, folks.
