Topics covered include the decision to make the game cross-platform, working with license-holder DC Comics, and departing from the standard MMO control scheme of “press 1 for fireball.”

Read on for the transcript.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what it is you do at SOE.

Chris Cao: Sure. My name is Chris Cao, and I’m the game director on DC Universe Online. My job is basically like a movie director, I make sure all the parts visually, technologically, and gameplay wise come together, and give you a rocking superhero experience.

I’ve been on the project since middle to late 2005.  So, it’s coming up on five years, but it’s all been worth it.  We have crazy technology that no one else has, that really lets you have physics-based superpowers and action combat right at your fingertips.

The MMO Gamer: So you were there all the way from the conceptual stage of things?

Chris Cao: I was.  Actually, I was there really early on when we first signed up Jim Lee.  Went around pitching it, figuring out what it is, and it’s amazing to see it now five years later.

The MMO Gamer: I’m curious, what kind of conversations went on when you were deciding to make it a cross-platform game?

Chris Cao: It was actually one of the things that attracted me to the project, was the fact that it was going to be on the PlayStation 3.

While there had been some pretty good MMOs on the various consoles, with the online connectivity coming on the PS3, it was a no-brainer that hey, MMOs need to be there.

A lot of console fans might not have known about them, and they still don’t really, so it’s great to be the first one on there and to give people that sort of attachment and understand what’s so cool about an MMO, but then also bring to life all of the action combat that you’d expect from a console action game.

So, a lot of people ask us, “Are you an MMO or are you an action game?”  And the answer I like to give is, “We’re DCUO.”

We just took inspiration from wherever we needed to, to make the best superhero-supervillain experience.  It wasn’t about following conventions,  it was about following that superhero fantasy.

The MMO Gamer: The reason I asked this is because, as you’ve pointed out, there haven’t been a whole lot of MMOs on the console.

Chris Cao: Yeah.

The MMO Gamer: The only one that really springs immediately to mind would be Final Fantasy XI.

Chris Cao: Well there was EverQuest Online Adventures too, but yeah, a couple here and there.

The MMO Gamer: Of course, that starts up that whole debate where the PC players might be wary of it because they think “Oh, you must have had to dumb down the controls and the UI for the console players,” and the console players might be turned off because they think “Oh, it’s also on the PC, it must be too complicated. I can’t figure out anything that’s not right trigger to shoot my machine gun.”

How do you come to a happy medium with that?

Chris Cao: Well, I think the answer is to just make a great superhero game.  And I go back to that because honestly, why do you want to play a DC game set in the DC Universe?

It’s because you want to be a superhero or a supervillain.  You want to have crazy over-the-top powers.  You want to be able to fly, leap, super speed.  You want to be able to do all of that.

And that’s really what it’s about.  Now, you can do it alongside your friends and alongside thousands or millions of other people.  That’s even better.  And so, that’s what I really look to.  For that PC MMO gamer, our two platforms are split.  PC gamers are with PC gamers.  PS3 guys are off on their own.

So, we can best customize the game to those audiences, but we’ve developed it cross-platform the whole time because we want it to be the same superhero experience, right?

At its core, we’re not making an MMO for MMO’s sake.  A good example of that is tradeskills.  Everybody asks, “Hey, do you have the old standbys?”  Well, we do so long as they support the superhero experience.

Batman doesn’t really go out and harvest flowers or mine ore.

The MMO Gamer: He does craft his Bat Grenades.

Chris Cao: Right, exactly.  Now he does go back, and he’ll figure some things out in his Batcave, so you can make some stuff.

But a lot of times… I mean, I was the lead designer of EverQuest 2.  I’m very familiar with MMOs.  And they are fantastic, and they do what they do well.

In fact, we took a lot of inspiration from some of the other comic book MMOs, and what they did well.

But really, do they get you to that punch-the-guy-in-the-face visceral image?  Do they get you to leap off of the building?  No.  So we had to go bigger with it, and that’s really what we’re after.

It’s not so much satisfying the conventions that are out there as inventing our own, so that you feel like a superhero.

The MMO Gamer: Back in 2005 when the project first started, superheroes and MMOs weren’t really that conducive to each other.  I think you had City of Heroes, and that was about it.

Chris Cao: Yeah, actually, it just came out the year before.

The MMO Gamer: Now, the field is slightly more crowded.  How do you stand out from the crowd when you’re dealing with City of Heroes, Champions, the Marvel MMO… I’m sure I’d probably missed about five or six others in there.

Chris Cao: Well, in light to your point, there’s even more fantasy MMOs.  It’s a huge genre now.  Everybody likes it.  Everybody wants to get into it.

So, it’s not just differentiating ourselves from superhero MMOs.  It’s what do you get that’s better in DC that you don’t even get in another MMO, or in another action game.

And what it really comes down to is two things:  You get action combat.  No bones about it.  On the PC or the PS3, you have visceral combat.  I know if you had the chance to play you’ll see what I mean.

This isn’t an MMO that sped up or dressed up.  This isn’t just animation.  This is connection with that superpower.

The second thing you get is a persistent world.  Now, to MMO players, they’re like great, I have that already.  But console players don’t.  They have the great action, but they don’t have a place that they can share with their friends, adventures they can go on forever, continuing updates every month, and a persistent world that you can just run across anybody and something serendipitous can happen.

So when I say take the best of both worlds, we’re dealing what no one else has done.  We’re taking all of the scale and scope and size that MMO brings, and that makes you feel real.

And then we’re adding in the instant action that you’d love to get and you do get out of all of your console games.  Those together give us really a unique kind of game.

It’s not a hybrid.  It’s just the ultimate superhero experience, because you’re really in the streets and you’ve got them.

You’re not playing Batman this time.  You are there with thousands of other players, working for and against him.  That’s never been done.

Continued on next page…

Topics covered include the allure of online games, juggling EverQuest with a professional baseball career, and why mounted combat on flying pigs will not be among the features included at release.

Read on for the transcript.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about what it is you do at 38 Studios.

Curt Schilling: My name is Curt Schilling, I’m the Chairman and Founder of 38 Studios. I do as little game design as possible, and I get to playtest what I think is going to be the next generation of online gaming experience.

The MMO Gamer: I’m sure you get this question a lot, but I have to ask, because it’s been the number one thing on my mind since I first heard about the studio, way back when it was still called Green Monster Games:

How does one go from playing Major League Baseball to starting an online game company?

Curt Schilling: I started gaming in 1980. The first game I ever played was Wizardry, which is still to this day one of my favorites of all time.

I got into the online space with Ultima Online. A teammate of mine when I was with the Phillies was playing it, hardcore.

I got into it, enjoyed it, liked it… But I’m not a hardcore PvP guy, so obviously I had some very challenging memories of those days.

The MMO Gamer: [laughing] So you played UO pre-Trammel, then?

Curt Schilling: Yes, pre-Trammel. Early.

The MMO Gamer: Those were the good old days.

Curt Schilling: That’s what I hear.

But then, somebody told me about EQ… I logged in to it, played it for a half an hour, 45 minutes, and quit.

Then I sat around the entire night, as you do with any good game, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it… “That was kind of cool! I’ve never played anything like that before!”

The next day I went back and I was hooked. That was all I played for the next four or five years.

Right around that time Sony found out that I played, and they invited me in for the VIP stuff.

I was already thinking about post-baseball, and what I wanted to do with my life. I knew I wanted to do something with a business, but not like a restaurant… not a thing that other people were doing.

More importantly to me, I wanted to do something that I was passionate about, and something that I was smart about.

I was definitely passionate about gaming, but I certainly wasn’t smart about it.

So, I turned my relationship with Sony into a kind of due diligence. I started to go in and talk to the people at the ground level, boots on the ground, people making the games.

I wanted to understand the industry, what works, what doesn’t. Why they liked their company, why they didn’t like their company.

I did that across the industry, to try and determine what the playing field was like, who the competitors were.

Obviously this was a time when it was just EQ, then it was Asheron’s Call, and DAoC… and then all of a sudden you had WoW, and it exploded into the mainstream.

The MMO Gamer: What was it that drew you to MMOs, in particular?

Curt Schilling: It’s been my choice of game for a lot of reasons.

The most important one for me was, doing what I do for a living, going out socially is not as easy for me as it is for other people.

But in an MMO, it’s painless. No one knows who I am. I can hang out, and have friends, and be whoever I want to be, without being Curt Schilling.

The great thing was, it got to the point where everybody that I played with—and still do play with—they knew exactly who I am, and none of them cared. Which is really cool for me.

Probably the biggest thing for me as a parent, and as a person who has heard all the arguments for and against gaming, and violence, and all of that crap… if it wasn’t for MMOs, I would not have the relationship that I have with my kids.

I’ve traveled my whole life. They were a way for me to log on when I was in San Diego, and my boys would log on in Boston, and we’d have our headsets on like we were in the same room playing together.

We’d group up, and within the MMO game space there are a lot of things you can teach people: You’re in a group, you have responsibility, you have a role, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do things… You have to socially interact with people, and there’s a right way and a wrong way to do that.

So my kids, when they were beginning to learn to read and write, could type and communicate on a keyboard, which is going to be a medium which they’re going to use their entire lives, when they were five and six.

I looked at it as a powerful tool to enable education, and positive things with my kids. As opposed to all of the negative things that were going on with video games, violence, and all of that other stuff.

The MMO Gamer: Impressive that you managed to juggle EQ with a professional sports career.

I knew guys who couldn’t even handle working at the grocery store and playing EQ at the same time.

Curt Schilling: Well, my wife would argue that I didn’t juggle it well.

It’s funny because there were times—and people find this hard to believe—but you have times when you’re sitting at the keyboard playing, and you’re thinking about work, right?

People can’t believe that I would be at work thinking about playing games.

There would be times when I was sitting in the dugout, where I’d be looking at the clock thinking, “If the ninth inning is over by 11, I’ll be able to get back and raid by 12:30!”

But I’m a gamer, that’s how we think.

And then I’d meet people across the country that I’d played with, because I’d travel all the time, I’d give them tickets to games, say hello, put names to faces…

My celebrity really became a non-issue, which was a big, huge issue for me. In the game space, me playing baseball doesn’t buy me any credibility—and it shouldn’t.

Gamers don’t give a shit that I won three World Series. They care if we make a great game or not.

The more they understand my credibility as a gamer, and my beliefs as a visionary for the company, hopefully the more they’ll understand what we’re doing.

Continued on next page…

The trio delve into such topics as setting Rift apart from the competition in a crowded market, the use of focus testing to refine the game’s features (and title), and how much of a role community will play in the game’s development.

[As a personal aside, I realize this may seem like an odd mixture of job titles for one interview, but Cindy Bowens is an old friend of mine (and is married to an even older friend), and I couldn't resist bringing her along for the ride... even if I am a bit out of practice interviewing community managers.]

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you both please introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about what you do at Trion Worlds.

Russ Brown: My name’s Russ Brown, I am a VP of Development. I basically run the development team for Rift at Trion Worlds.

Cindy Bowens: I’m Cindy Bowens, I’m the Senior Community Manager for Rift.

The MMO Gamer: Now, the first thing that really piqued my interest since the last time I saw the game: Why the name change, from Heroes of Telara to Rift: Planes of Telara?

Russ Brown: That’s a good question. We actually did some focus testing, we talked to some people, we got some gamers in… and the word “Heroes” just didn’t do very well.

People were sort of like, “Well, if everybody’s a hero, then I’m not a hero!”

And that was the main thing that people were talking about; they don’t want to be called a hero, they want to earn being a hero. So we took that name out.

Then we started looking at what sort of gameplay we have, what sort of things we’re doing, and the feature that really stood out was our rifts. So we said hey, let’s call our game Rift.

The MMO Gamer: City of Heroes, take note: This is free focus testing for you.

Russ Brown: [laughing]

The MMO Gamer: Aside from the name, what else has changed since our conversation last year?

Russ Brown: The main thing that’s changed is last year we had this idea that you could be any class any time. You could swap on the fly.

Once again we did some focus testing on that, and one of the things that came back was, “Hey wait, if I can do anything, then I’m not special. Why would a guild need me, if everybody can do my job?”

So we said okay. We still want customization, we still want people to change and dabble with things, so we basically broke the class system up into “callings.”

We have Warriors, Rogues, Mages, and Clerics, right? What that does is we still allow you to have this idea of souls, but the main difference is you start with a certain soul, you pick the soul for your starting class, and that’s what you were before you died.

Then as you adventure through the game you pick up more and more souls which you can swap out. Then you decide how you want to invest into a soul, how you want it to play.

For example, when I’m playing my Rogue, I start out as a Riftblade, I believe it’s called. Classic PvP rogue. Then when I want to get some range, I’ll put a Ranger in, I won’t go very deep into it with pets, but I’ll go deep enough that I can start building up my points with melee.

So my playstyle is, “Pew pew pew,” shooting the guy from ranged, and then by the time he reaches me, he’s almost dead and I can do a finisher.

The MMO Gamer: Interesting. Two questions, and two answers that you changed something big based on focus group feedback.

Russ Brown: Yes.

The MMO Gamer: Does that happen a lot?

Russ Brown: Well, it can’t constantly happen, but in the beginning you have to test and listen to what people are saying.

One of the things that always frustrated me at other companies I worked at was we did focus testing at alpha or beta. If I’m focus testing alpha or beta, I can’t do anything. I don’t have time to react.

If I’m in beta, and I say “What do you guys think?” and they say, “Well, if you did this it’d be a lot better…” It’s like, “Great, but I can’t do that! It’s beta, we need to ship the game!”

So we had focus testing earlier to make sure that we were on the right track. And then when we work with the community, when we have our closed and open beta tests, we can sit down and iterate things with them.

The other thing we did is, we added sides. Before we didn’t have sides, we didn’t have two factions that you started with. And the reason we did that is people were saying, “You’ve got no sense of being. You’ve got no sense of he’s my friend, he’s my enemy. I like this guy, I don’t like that guy.”

It immediately gives you guys you group with. It sounds simple, but when we were just saying don’t worry about sides, it was kind of confusing people.

The MMO Gamer: Cindy, I’m sure the first question a lot of people are going to have for you is, with a game this far from release, how much of a community is actually out there for you to manage?

Cindy Bowens: Right now we’ve got a couple hundred people on our forums regularly. It’s growing exponentially, and I can’t wait to see how many we have when I go back next week.

But the thing about this community that’s just awesome, is it’s all old MMO gamers.

I put up a thread my first day there, and said “What MMOs have you played?” They’re all old EQ, old DAoC… some World of Warcraft, but it’s mostly the people who have been around for the last decade, who have played these games, know what they want, know what they like, and know what they demand from a game and from the company making it.

One of the first things I’ve tried to do is introduce them to the team, let them know what the team wants to hear from them, and that their feedback is valid, and that’s been going great.

We have a lot of well-known MMO players in the community, my first day there when I logged on there were a number of people who popped on and said, “Hey, remember me from Vanguard? Remember me from EverQuest?”

I couldn’t be happier, because that’s going to be the roots of our community.

Continued on next page…

In an extensive interview, the two discuss WAR’s history from launch up to the present day, the changes which have taken place over that time, as well as what’s yet to come.

If you played Warhammer Online at launch and have been wondering if your issues have been addressed and now is the time to come back, this interview was done with you in mind.

If you would prefer to listen rather than read, this interview can be heard in its entirety during Episode 27 of our Working as Intended podcast.

The MMO Gamer: To get us started, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what it is you do at Mythic.

Carrie Gouskos: I’m Carrie Gouskos, the Producer on Warhammer Online. What that means effectively is that I’m responsible in some way for everything that happens with respect to what goes into the game, what the big picture plans are, and how we work with the community.

There’s obviously a large team of people who deal with the specifics, but for me it’s about the big picture, and steering it into the direction I think it needs to go, and working with the community and the team to hopefully get everyone’s goals aligned together.

The MMO Gamer: Now, you and I have only met once before, way back at Games Day LA in 2007.

WAR had just entered beta then, and I recall that basically everything was coming up roses: The game was looking great, it had a very rabid fanbase… I can attest to just how rabid, when I said something slightly negative about it in an article later on.

The game had a huge buildup, a huge following, then it launched, and…

What happened?

Carrie Gouskos: There are a couple ways to answer that.

Pre-launch, I think we did a very good job about getting people excited about the game. We had a huge license, and we had a lot of unique personalities on the development team that were really infectiously excited about the game.

We thought we were doing a lot of really neat stuff, and wanted to share that with everyone. I don’t think internally—actually, I know internally, nobody here was going “Oh, we’re going to beat WoW!” or any of that.  There was none of that kind of gauging.

But it was like, “We’re going to have a successful MMO. We’re going to be awesome, and have so many players!” all of that stuff. We had a lot of expectations, and we launched to that kind of hype.

I think the problem was, to some degree, you’re setting yourself up to be disappointed.

I actually think that we have a large game, with a lot of people playing who are excited about it. But you can see how many servers we opened with, all of that, and people try to do the numbers game, guessing how many players we have now…

The fact of the matter is that we came out huge, and there were problems. So I think that was a little bit of a buzz kill for the development team, and to some degree our players, as well.

We’ve been spending all this time since trying to refine the game, and get it to a state that we think, “This is what people are looking for, this is what they want.”

If you asked me personally how I feel about it, I loved the features in our game at launch, but I do think obviously there are things that I look at and say, “God, I wish I had fixed that! Or I wish I’d done that!” You can do that all day long.

So the goal since then has been to do all those things that we wanted to do, and to grow with our players, and instead of trying to make the game we think players are going to like, make the game that players are going to enjoy, because they’re the ones sitting here telling us, and we’re listening to them.

We’ve been maybe more quiet in the past six months, because we’ve been  hunkering down and going, “Okay, what is it that’s going to satisfy the players’ needs, make them come back, and make them happy?”

I think we’ve accomplished that. I don’t want to say that in the tone of like “rah-rah,” I do feel like we’re down to business at this point, and we’ve done a lot of things to the game that has pacified some of the dissatisfaction at launch, and I’m very happy with the players, and their interactions with us.

The MMO Gamer: Those improvements were actually the reason I wanted to talk to you, today.

I played WAR at launch… hell, I played a long time before launch, I was in beta from January of 2008. I got into the pre-order head start, talked all my friends into buying the game… We had a guild going, big alliance, a hundred guys on every night.

And then all of a sudden it just kind of… stopped. Coincidentally, right around the time that Wrath of the Lich King came out.

Carrie Gouskos: Uh huh. [laughing]

The MMO Gamer: That was basically the reason that I quit. I don’t play MMOs to solo, and I don’t like making new friends. So once all my friends quit, I was gone.

And, I’ve pretty much been trying ever since to talk them into giving the game a second shot.

I decided to just jump in and swim last month, and see if I could needle them down by constant reminders that, “Hey, I’m playing WAR again, you want to come back and try it?”

But their responses always tend to be, “No. We played it. We didn’t like it. That’s it.”

And that’s of course the prevailing notion of just about every MMO on the market: People get an idea in their head at launch, and no matter what happens to a game six months, a year afterward, the day they bought the box is the image they have in their mind forever.

Anarchy Online, for instance, was never able to live down that launch…

Carrie Gouskos: Actually, Anarchy Online was one that I went back to like three times. Every time I went back, I just wanted to love that game so much, I tried so hard.

But I understand completely what you’re saying. It’s funny, isn’t it? The only turnaround I can think of is you need to have a complete makeover. And even then, it’s hard to change your intuition.

Which is interesting, because I do think a lot of games are actually broken at launch, but I don’t think that Warhammer was.  There were problems, certainly. But compared to some of the experiences I’ve had in other MMOs…

I’m not saying that’s forgivable, at all. As an industry we need to move away from that, “We’ll fix it later” mentality, which I’ve never had. But they’re so massive, and there’s so much going on, it’s almost hard to contain it all.

And I guess you were setting us up for a question, which you can ask now if you’d like. [laughing]

Continued on next page…

Topics include the decision to bring Gods & Heroes back from the dead, differentiating yourself from a crowded online gaming market, and why the game may turn out to be more like Battlefield 2 than WoW…

Read on for the transcript.

The MMO Gamer: To start us off, can you tell our readers a little about  Heatwave Interactive and what you do there?

Anthony Castoro: My name is Anthony Castoro, I am the co-founder and CEO of Heatwave Interactive. We started Heatwave right at the beginning of 2007 by bootstrapping the company.

We did some consulting with MTV and some other game companies to fund our activities, but after 6 months or so we realised we needed more capital to do what we wanted to do, so we went out there and raised $7.5 million from a venture fund called Syncom Venture Partners in the D.C. area.

We really started the company to address a couple of things. Firstly, my partner Donn Clendenon, who co-founded the company, he is a long-term entrepreneur with a lot of success and several exits, and he had done online games.

I had started a game company directly out of college and learned a lot, but I didn’t have success with that, so I wanted to go into the corporate world and find out what it took.

And over fifteen years I learned a couple things: one, it’s really common for game companies of all sizes to get started with a project and not know why, not have good reasons for doing it, not have the resources to do it, not have the right plan.

Online games in particular are very powerful things, and the nice thing about them is they don’t have the same economic issues as console games, they have a long tail, if you do something even for a small group of people you can do very well.

EVE online is a great example of it, as was Ultima Online what, thirteen years ago now?

We started the company with that in mind, and also, the really great games are popular enough that they can make mainstream new IPs very successful.

Everything we do is also cross-media, it’s designed to be a television show, be a movie, be a comic-book. Not that we’re going to focus on that but you just should, there’s no reason not to do it.

The MMO Gamer: What drew you to the Gods & Heroes IP in particular?

Anthony Castoro: I had seen Gods & Heroes as a publisher when I was at Codemasters, and we all thought it was  pretty interesting.

I actually knew one of the co-founders, Chris McKibben, because he had been the general manager of Origin Systems back in the day when I was a lowly QA guy. Actually, I think when I started as a game designer at Origin he was still there.

I was interested in it because it’s fantasy, but not high fantasy, it was mythology. That was a niche that hadn’t been addressed, and everyone knows Roman and Greek mythology, so I thought it was a really smart move in terms of what product to make in this very crowded market.

I was really sad when Perpetual went under, I think it was a really cool idea, they had some issues obviously, but everyone has issues, and if they’d been able to figure those out I believe it would have been a very popular game.

The MMO Gamer: One of the really interesting aspects of Gods & Heroes when details first started circulating was the idea of the player controlling one hero and a squad of mythological allies.

What are your plans for that aspect of the game?

Anthony Castoro: I think the Minion System is here to stay, and if anything it should be blown out a little bit more. Since that idea came out there have been other games like Grado Espada, and to some degree Star Trek Online had minions, but I agree, in addition to the setting the Minion System was one of the biggest unique things.

That and some of the things they were doing with the combat. They hadn’t quite finished figuring out what was going to happen with combat, but the finishing moves and the tandem combat action was pretty cool.

We’re definitely focused on the Minion System, ideally making it more important and more fun. I think they have the basics there, and that will be a good place to iterate.

There are other things we’re going to do that will change it a little bit. Heatwave has a mass-market appeal take, so some things we’ll do with the IP, if you go to the website you can even see, the one little piece of art we’ve got there is in a different style, a little more dramatic, a little less clean.

There are some small things, overall, the look and feel of the game is still good, pretty competitive, but the characters themselves I think need some work, so we’ll probably do some work on the models and the customization available there just to make sure it stands up for a couple of years after its intended release.

The MMO Gamer: So what hard data can you give us in terms of release dates and monetization models?

Anthony Castoro: Our goal is to release it in 2011, but if there’s one thing people know about this business it’s that you have to release the game when it’s ready.

We’re spending a few months right now playing the game – it’s running in the office – getting to understand it, what the tools are, what kind of shape they are in, bringing in some former team members and a lot of new people.

We’re going to spend at least three months figuring out what we’ve got before we start talking about how we’re going to get where we’re going to go, doing some market research, and then we have to figure out if we can get the game into open beta twelve months later, what we can keep, what we can improve, and what needs to be new.

That also includes the business model. Subscription versus free-to-play with microtransactions is a big question, and ideally after we do some homework and we see how the audience feels we can make that decision.

I think free-to-play is far more viable than it was even 12 months ago, and so when you’re forecasting eighteen months in the future that might be the case but if you’re going to do a free-to-play game it has to be good, it has to be designed for free to play.

So that’s all a big consideration for us given the time. DDO has done it with some success and they’re probably a really good model of how to do that, they’ve done a really good job.

Continued on next page…

When I was growing up, a sandbox was what your cat buried its business in.

However, in recent times the term has become synonymous with enormous games that offer non-linear gameplay and allow for gamers to play games at their own pace and style.

Many big titles now offer gamers a broader and deeper experience that reaches far beyond traditional gaming.

And, in today’s economic climate, getting more bang for your buck is often a major deciding factor when choosing which gameplayers are going to put their time and money into.

Most genres of games have tapped into that school of thought, but when it comes to creating opportunities to play your game by your rules, the MMO stands head and shoulders above the rest.

Not only can you play the existing content how and when you want, if you don’t want to play the pre-prepared content, there’s flexibility that allows players to create their own community driven style of play.

Community = Content

Since joining Jagex, I’ve seen an incredible amount of community-driven content in our biggest title RuneScape in its (nearly) tenth year of game evolution. This content includes a surprising range of activities that are a testament to the demand for platforms that enable creative gameplay.

Ten years is a long time in anyone’s book, especially so for an MMO.

Sure, the development teams are largely responsible for the longevity of the game by updating content every couple of weeks. However, community-driven content, responding to feedback and supporting creative gameplay both in and out of the game helps keep players coming back to see what’s new.

There are  several different levels of creative gamplay that we tend to see in RuneScape: ranging from using the game as a social networking tool and a place to chat, to engaging in massive battle tournaments. To the uninitiated, mini-game “activities” are a good place to get stuck in as the base content is already there.

Completing quests, participating in the markets and killing slack-jawed noobs will bag you gold pieces in ways the developers intended. But, with a little ingenuity and planning, players create their own ways of earning a fewextra coins.

In-game businesses are common in MMOs, and in RuneScape we’ve seen all manner of acumen on display over the years.

Looking to drown your virtual sorrows after alching that party hat in a failed bid to impress a lady? You need a drink! And fortunately, there’s a veritable brewery of players with high cooking skills looking to turn a buck by running bars and restaurants from their houses.

Are you the owner of a tavern and want to advertise your establishment and get a seal of approval? Bring down the restaurant inspectors!

And, if after spending too much on Dwarven Stout, you find yourself too ‘constitutionally impaired’ to find your own way home, for a few gold pieces you can take one of the many RuneScape taxi services (by simply clicking “follow player” on your cab driver) to make a quick getaway before you embarrass yourself by soiling your armor.

Transcending the Game

Players who take content and use it to role-play, make money or compete show that with a few decent props and some ingenuity, communities can add hours and hours of additional gameplay.

Some props are added intentionally, like adding a dice for role play communities, while others come along by accident, as RuneScape’s trusted cabbies will testify. On occasion though, props transcend the game itself, as we’ve found with machinima.

Machinima could be considered the epitome of creative gameplay, as it takes the game and turns it into a film set.

There are hundreds of machinima films out there made by budding Peter Jacksons who dismantle the game completely, give it a new environment, new characters, a new story and a completely new purpose.

At Jagex, we love the creativity of RuneScape’s machinima makers and actively encourage it through competitions, an ever growing YouTube community and in a recent game update, a tool called the Orb of Oculus that helps players be more creative with their camera work.

Whether we’re talking RuneScape or any other popular MMO, emergent gameplay is seeing hundreds of thousands of players get even more out of what are already massive games. RuneScape’s developers will keep on giving players new and non-traditional ways to enjoy the game, and we fully expect to see our community using upcoming content in ways the developers never imagined.

Meanwhile, we in community management will keep on talking to our players, playing alongside our players and wherever we can, help them in their creative revolution.

Steve sits down with David Webber, Executive Producer at SpriteBox Studios to discuss their inaugural title, Sword of the Ultimate Destiny: Battle of the Three Kingdoms 9.

Topics include the process of importing Eastern games into the West, resolving culture clashes, and what may well be the ultimate incarnation of real money trading.

Read on for the transcript.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what it is you do at SpriteBox.

David Webber: Sure. My name is David Webber, and I’m the executive producer for Sword of the Ultimate Destiny: Battle of the Three Kingdoms 9.

What that means is I’m basically in charge of the day to day operations here at SpriteBox, bringing the game to the American market.

The MMO Gamer: Do you have any sort of official abbreviation? That title is a bit of a mouthful.

David Webber: Internally we like to call it SotUD:BotTK9.

The MMO Gamer: How about just SUD?

David Webber: I guess that could work, too.

The MMO Gamer: Alright, could you start things off by telling us a little bit about the game? I admit that I hadn’t seen much of it before I was assigned to do this interview.

David Webber: Absolutely. SUD is a brand new massively-multiplayer online role-playing game, originally released in China in 2004 as Battle History Warrior: Romance of the Three Kingdoms 9.

We didn’t feel that our primarily male, 18-35 year old demographic would necessarily gravitate to a game with “History” or “Romance” in the title, so that was one of the first big changes we had to make, once we received the license.

The MMO Gamer: I’m sorry… but doesn’t the game being six years old no longer make it “brand new”?

David Webber: Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s like those commercials you hear on the radio for used cars with 5,000 point factory inspections. We went over every line of code in this game with a fine-tooth comb, to the point that it’s now better than new.

Not only that, our localization team is second to none. We don’t want players to feel like they’re foreigners in their own living rooms the first time they log in.

The MMO Gamer: Could you go into a bit more detail on that? Localizing games from East to West is a subject I enjoy discussing with companies like yours.

David Webber: Sure. The biggest example of that I could give would have to be the game’s setting, the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history.

That lore, the backstory, was originally what attracted us to SUD when we were looking for a game to bring over.

You want to talk about source material? The Chinese have written so many books about this stuff it’d make Tolkien die of shame—if he wasn’t already dead.

But, the problem we ran into early in the alpha was that something an Asian player might immediately recognize as a cherished part of their history, an American player would just think is some kind of Babelfish translation error.

I mean, Wei, Shu, Wu? Who ever heard of these guys in Arkansas?

So, we had to make some hard decisions in order to ensure the game was accessible, and that was when we came up with the idea of “fantacization.”

The MMO Gamer: …Fantacization?

David Webber: Exactly. It’s like Westernization, only better.

We looked at each of the Three Kingdoms, and decided on a theme for them that American players could more easily relate to:

For instance, Wu is always portrayed in the narrative as the evil, war-like nation… and we  just had a light bulb moment and were like; hey, that sounds a lot like traditional fantasy Orcs!

Then we figured we’d use Shu for the Elves and Wei for Humans, add in a little magic, move the action from China to a planet named Mythadon… now that’s a game a Western player can understand without even looking at the manual.

And our partner studio in Shanghai already had several dozen published fantasy games under their belts, so it was all just a matter of asset swapping, at that point.

The MMO Gamer: So you’ve taken a historical Chinese MMO… and turned it into a fantasy Chinese MMO?

David Webber: I prefer to say that we took the Three Kingdoms backstory as a base, and built upon it to create a rich, original fantasy world all our own.

The MMO Gamer: To be blunt, there’s an awful lot of competition out there in the free-to-play Asian fantasy game market these days.

What could you possibly do to set SUD apart from the herd?

David Webber: I’m glad you asked me that, because SUD has a huge number of innovative features that we think are really going to make it stand out from anything out there on the market, East or West.

The MMO Gamer: Such as?

David Webber: Well, our microtransaction model, for one.

The MMO Gamer: I assume like most East Asian import titles, you’re going with the free-to-play cash shop model?

David Webber: The game is free-to-play to a point, yes. You can log in and stare at your naked level 1 character all day long without ever paying us a dime.

But, if you really want to play the game, well, then things get a bit more complex.

The MMO Gamer: Complex?

David Webber: How much is your time worth to you? Ten dollars an hour? Twenty? Fifty? Think about how many hours it takes you to get that suit of epic armor, or that top rank in the PvP tournament.

When you’re getting around a hundred hours /played, it really starts to add up.

Our core philosophy is that time is money.

Why should anyone have to go grind out rats, and spiders, and goblins for days or weeks at a time just to get to the meat and potatoes of what they really want to do?

We think that all these games like WoW that are moving toward a softer leveling curve are missing the point entirely.

In SUD, you can reach the maximum level five minutes after you first log in… as long as you can afford it.

Continued on next page…

Here we go, like Alice down the rabbit hole, venturing into a fantastic world of wonder and awe.

I apologize for the grandiose introduction, but something about a land filled exclusively with anthropomorphic animals does bring to mind certain images.

I refer of course to Earth Eternal, the initial offering from Sparkplay Media. I must admit that Earth Eternal isn’t at first glance something I would have considered for regular play, but it seems that I was very much selling it short. Having been able to spend some quality time with it, I will say that it certainly is something that I could get into.

I suppose we might as well start with the basics. Earth Eternal is a fantasy MMO, set in a world where humans have become extinct and animals have evolved to fill their place; at least in a nutshell.

Players may choose from a rather impressive list of anthropomorphic animals as their character; though as far as I can tell at this point, this selection doesn’ t have an effect on the actual stats or choices possible for the character.

The game is free to play, with the requisite cash shop, and as a final bonus, you can do it right from your browser.

Now I am suitably impressed by the technical savvy displayed by working out a way to get this to play in a browser, as it does actually look fairly good, but I have to admit that I personally far prefer playing with the downloaded client that comes with it. I may be just a little bit crazy, but for some reason the client seems a little quicker to respond to me.

In the interest of keeping things brief, I’ll start with what I like about the game, before I go on to some things I think might merit some changes.

First and foremost, I would say that the art team at Sparkplay deserves a rather heaping helping of kudos. The limitations of the browser based game they have could have proved a problem, but even with the reduced polygon counts, and lower texture resolutions, they have managed to make a game that looks very good.

I don’t want to mislead anyone and say that they’re going to be getting anything even approaching photo-realistic, but all of the game’s visuals work excellently together to create a coherent visual style that’s colorful and fun without being saccharine and “kiddy.”

The game also plays very well, though as I did mention above, it suffers from a little sluggishness in the controls occasionally, the control scheme is very similar to the standard layout that you find in most games these days, so anyone who has experience should not find themselves having any difficulty in picking up and playing.

One of the strongest parts of the game in my opinion is the level of character customization through skills and spells.

While one does select a class to play as when creating their character, they are not limited to only the skills available from that classes “Skill tree” for lack of a better word.

Certainly there are several skills and abilities provided to each class that are solely for them, but I would go so far as to say that fully half of the class skills in the game can be “Cross classed” allowing for a rather wide range of skills and abilities regardless of your initial selection.

This system is one of the better I’ve seen in recent years, allowing players to play and build their character based on their experiences and preferences rather than locking them in to a set selection of abilities right at creation.

Now there are a few things that I imagine could have been done better, and in most cases likely are expecting to be changed.

The first and certainly most annoying is the loading times. As someone who has been playing online games for a long time I like to think that I’m patient enough to deal with reasonable loading times. The loading times for Earth Eternal on the other hand simply are out of hand on occasion.

I certainly imagine that this is in fact a priority for the team behind the game and I would be shocked if this wasn’t fixed before the game was sent into a live environment.

Another minor qualm I have with the game at the moment is with the animation.

There are a few instances during which I have noticed a little bit of stuttering in the animation to the point where it actually did become a distraction. Again, this seems like the sort of issue that is likely to be sorted out during the beta.

One thing that does slightly bother me that isn’t a technical issue is the sound.

Perhaps I’m just being nitpicky here, but the game doesn’t seem to have that many sound effects, and when you hear the same one all the time being used for a number of situations it does start to grate a little, but like I said, perhaps I’m just being a little nitpicky.

All things considered, Earth Eternal is a very highly polished game that raises the bar for free offerings.

About the only thing that it has going against it, is that it does everything well, but as yet doesn’t seem to excel in any one area, though one might say that the atmosphere and setting are unique enough to make up for that.

Since it’s still a beta at this point it’s tough to make any real calls on how it’s going to turn out, we all know a lot can change.

But, at this point I would say that Earth Eternal is an amusing jaunt into a pleasant world, and a good way to while away a few hours. By all means,  anyone who’s looking for something to amuse them should at least give Earth Eternal a try.

Steve sits down with Alan Crosby, formerly SOE’s Director of Global Community Relations, and current Senior Producer of EQ2 to discuss the ten year history of the EverQuest franchise.

Topics include the changing tastes of players over the years, the prospects for an EverQuest 3, keeping the game on store shelves, and the next ten years to come.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself to us and tell us a little about what it is you do at SOE.

Alan Crosby: I am Alan Crosby, and I’m the Senior Producer on EverQuest 2. I’m essentially the shepherd of the game.

The MMO Gamer: EverQuest has been around now for over a decade now, having hit its tenth anniversary back in March.  

In terms of the online gaming industry, EQ was released when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, and yet it still survives into the present day.

How has the game managed it?

Alan Crosby: It’s done very well, it continues to grow, it continues to add expansions, new features, new content.

Its customer base, the community out there is very loyal, very passionate, and they stay around and keep playing, and demanding change.

We try to give them the change they want. They’re the main reason that the game has been around for ten years.

Yeah, we continue to put out content, we put out an expansion every year, we put out live content every few months, but it’s the players and their passion, their friendships, their social bonds that keep this game going.

The MMO Gamer: Do you have any figures as to how many people, in total, have played EQ over the years?

Alan Crosby: The total is somewhere over two million people have played EverQuest during its ten years.

The MMO Gamer: And do you know off the top of your head how many people have been playing it, consistently, for each of those ten years?

Alan Crosby: We pulled those numbers, I don’t have them readily available, but we actually announced it on the website for the tenth anniversary, some of the people who have been around since the beginning.

The MMO Gamer: Are there bronze statues of them in the middle of Freeport by now?

Alan Crosby: [laughs]

The MMO Gamer: What about the development side? Is there anyone still working on EverQuest who’s been there since the beginning?

Since the 989 Studios days, with Brad McQuaid at the helm?

Alan Crosby: I’m not sure if anybody from the original team is still on it. We have people from the original team still in the company.

Roger Uzun, for example, started with the original EverQuest team at 989, he’s now on the EverQuest 2 team. But I don’t know if any of them are still on the EQ team.

The MMO Gamer: EverQuest was pretty much the father of the MMO expansion pack, which, as you said, you used to release every six months and you’re still continuing to release on a yearly basis.

The base game, by the standards of the time was very large to begin with. Which makes me wonder just how large it’s gotten now, with all of those years of expansions under its belt.

Alan Crosby: I don’t have the number on-hand, but we did release how many square miles it equates to in the real-world on the site. But it is enormous. I dare say it’s the largest MMO out there in terms of land space.

We have somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 zones, each of them unique, each of them different with their own flavor.

And, we’re actually hard at work on the seventeenth expansion pack right now.

The MMO Gamer: EverQuest is also one of the few Western MMOs to have spawned a sequel. Asheron’s Call 2 notwithstanding, I wouldn’t include that because it did not long survive.

We’re currently at the point in EQ2’s lifecycle, around five years after release, where it was coming out during the lifecycle of EQ1.

But I haven’t seen any indications from SOE that an EverQuest 3 is in the making. Instead, you seem to be moving away from your roots, the traditional fantasy MMO, into more varied genres and age demographics.

Is this a trend that’s going to continue into the future? Will players ever see an EverQuest 3?

Alan Crosby: I can’t say whether you’re going to see one any time soon… I do know that we have not given up on the EverQuest franchise.

The brand is strong, in fact we now call it the EverQuest Universe, and we’re continuing to work on EverQuest 1 and 2, adding expansion packs and new content.

Eventually, I’m sure there will be some announcement… I’m not sure when, I’m not sure when work will begin… but this franchise is not going away.

Continued on next page…

Recently I have been given the opportunity to tackle the rather sizable task of reviewing one of the most expansive games on the market today.

Make no mistake, EVE Online takes the massive from MMORPG and runs with it like Forrest Gump.

I would like to make it clear that I certainly did my best to experience as much of the game as possible, but there was a great deal that was simply not possible with my relatively limited time with the game.

I suppose a reasonable place to start would be the technical aspects of the game, and the most noticeable part of that is the visuals. EVE Online, being set in space which doesn’t require an extensive amount of environment detail, instead places that detail in the ship and station visuals.

The graphics are impressive to say the least, the four races each have a visually distinct style for their ships from the practical and industrial looking Caldari, to a much more sci-fi theme with the Amarr.

While the ships and stations do look quite breathtaking flying past bright stars and nebulae one aspect of the visuals that I personally would have liked to see a little more detail was in combat. There is very little visual indication of your ship’s “health” while fighting.

Hardly a game-breaking problem to be sure, but something that I imagine would improve the character of the game, even something as simple as some shield flash on impact would draw me into the space combat a great deal.

The other half of the presentation equation, the sound, is in my humble opinion, the weakest part of the game. Now we all know that in space no one can hear you scream, but a little bit of audio can be a very powerful aspect of a games presentation, and EVE is a very quiet game compared to many.

All of the sound design that is there is very well done, missile impacts are visceral and the firing of beams and cannons are pleasantly destructive sounding, but I would have liked to hear more.

As far as the music goes, EVE comes with a jukebox with a rather expansive list of tracks you can listen to, but they play without regard to the situation you happen to be in, and there are situations where you find yourself in a rather intense fleet battle with a slow, soft piece playing in the background that can lead to a slight sense of dissonance.

While I did mention the sound being the weakest aspect, I would like to reiterate that it is in no ways bad, rather that when this is the largest gripe I have with the game, it must be doing something right.

While a game with splendid presentation can be impressive, it’s rarely fun without some content to back it up.

ANow I am normally a proponent of well written, highly story driven content, but in this case I will happily eat my words and say that EVE Online, especially with the new changes made in Dominion, delivers some of the highest quality player driven gaming of this or any other decade.

It does this by masterfully combining two related, but subtly distinct systems. In fact one might say that EVE Online provides two games for the price of one.

The first of the two meta games, and I would imagine by far the more niche, is the economy.

Now, many games have “economies”, but every other one that I’ve seen to date has paled in comparison to the amount of work that has gone into the market system in EVE Online.

Price histories, market reports, an incredible number of tools are all built into the market screen you can access at any time. As far as I can figure this is one of the most unique aspects of EVE, in that everything that can be purchased and is routinely used by the large player run corporations and alliances is created by players.

As I said above, this certainly does sound, at least to me, like the far more niche part of the game, but the depth possible makes it very fun if you happen to have an interest in it.

The other major thing to do, and the one that has received some rather major changes with the Dominion update, is Sovereignty.

I have to speculate here, as I’m not sure there’s really a definitive answer to this question, but I would imagine that this is the reason that EVE Online is the only particularly successful PvP focused MMO to date. This, to me, is the heart of the PvP game.

Essentially, this is a complex system of territorial control that player alliances and corporations partake in, conquering and holding their various galactic empires, and reaping the benefits of natural resources in those systems. The most recent changes were made with the goal of addressing some of the less entertaining parts of the territorial control game previously.

To my mind it certainly is very entertaining, even though to say that I participated is something of an overstatement. Rather you might say that I arrived and was promptly relegated to observer status. Watching though was an incredibly rewarding experience, with massive fleets of ships firing on another, and debris floating everywhere.

Having said all that, EVE Online is a difficult game to write a generic review for, because it’s non-standard in so many ways.

From the real-time skill training to the unique setting, it certainly will not be for everyone. In my opinion developer CCP understands that they are providing a niche title and are cultivating that outlook. One thing that can be said for any player is that this game is one that will require a rather sizable investment of time to get the most from the experience.

In an attempt to make a definitive review statement, I will say that technically the game is as close to flawless as I’ve seen, and it does what it attempts to do better than nearly every other title I’ve had the opportunity to play.

If you are looking for an epic experience in a sprawling galaxy; being a dashing space pirate, a mover-and-,shaker in the world of finance and industry, or an emperor of a vast galactic empire, EVE Online is currently the absolute best option.

Score: A solid 5 of 5.

Disclosure: A review copy and press account were provided by LEWIS PR on behalf of CCP Games.

Steve sits down with Joe Morrissey, a Senior Designer at Paragon Studios to discuss the inspiration behind, and current implementation of the Architect user-generated content system in City of Heroes.

Topics include preventing exploiters, how high-quality material can stand out from the crowd, and even whether the system allows a player to create art through a video game.

Read on for the transcript.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about what it is you do at Paragon Studios.

Joe Morrissey: I am Joe Morrissey, and I am a Senior Designer at Paragon Studios.

My primary responsibility up to the past year was Mission Architect, bringing user-generated content to the massively-multiplayer space.

That was a lot of fun to bring to life, and now to see what players are making of it. My primary responsibilities now are shifting to maintaining Mission Architect, while also beginning to work on the Going Rogue expansion.

The MMO Gamer: So, day one, you’re sitting in a meeting room and someone says, “I’ve got a great idea—let’s let players make their own missions!”

Joe Morrissey: That was me. [laughs] It started with a cry for better tools among the development team for missions.

I was the only mission designer on the project at the time, and we had thousands and thousands of players, tens of thousands of players to support. The tools we had were really good, but I was hoping to get some upgrades for them.

At the time we were still a part of Cryptic, and we just didn’t have the manpower, or the money, or the resources to really do that.

So, it was kind of this joke that I would go to the engineering department and be like, “Hey, can I get some tool support…” And they’d say, “Joe, we love you, but we have to support all these players, too. So, it’s either we support these players, or we give you support and take the same amount of time.”

So I was like, “What you’re saying is that if I make what I do so something that the players can do it, then you’ll support me?” And they’re like, “That’s not what we’re saying at all, no.” [laughs]

The MMO Gamer: And then you said, “No take-backs!”

Joe Morrissey: That was what started it. But it went onto the backburner because we were a small team, and there was no way we were going to pull that off.

Then, once NCsoft acquired us, they pretty much asked, “What do you guys want to do?” and we said, “Three things: Power customization, Mission Architect, and a boxed expansion.” And they’re like, “Okay.”

The MMO Gamer: So the idea originally wasn’t so much to let players design their own content, as it was to kill two birds with one stone?

Joe Morrissey: Really for me, wanting tools so the rest of the team could actually come up with content was the idea. Because we have a lot of guys on the team that are hardcore players, they play the game all the time.

Then they come to me like, “I’ve got this idea for this story, we should really do this arc with this guy!” And I’m like, “That’s great. I haven’t got time to do it. I’ve got plenty of other story arcs to work on.”

But, if we made the tools easy enough, then they could actually come up with the arcs, and we can put them out.

Then somewhere along that road it dawned on me: Why stop with the rest of the team?

It was a scary venture, because we were getting momentum from it, and the studio leads at what is now Paragon but at the time was NC NorCal, they wanted to differentiate us from other games out there.

Architect just kind of kept coming back up like, “How are we got to do that? That’s really scary to do,” and I’m like, “That’s why we are going to do it. We are not going to do it because it is easy.”

We definitely have learned that you have to take risks, even when your game’s been up for five years, especially if your game’s been out for five years, you have to keep reinventing yourself and keep yourself fresh.

And that is what we have seen now that Architect is out, and we have fifty thousand arcs that players have made with it.

The MMO Gamer: How do you make that transition, from a group of professionals working on something that they are getting paid to do, to fans who are paying you to play the game?

How did you ensure that everyone wasn’t just out there making five second missions, giving them fifty bazillion dollars and the Flaming Girdle of Swank Iron?

Joe Morrissey: The good thing is that all of our rewards are exactly the same in Architect as outside of Architect.

It is an equivalent system, so if there is any exploitiveness in it, it is in our regular game, as well. We’ve had five years to kind of dial that back. We don’t give them access to directly say like, “This guy is going to give me two million experience, or I am going to get this, or this.”

Your rewards are based off of kills. So, the way players would exploit the system is that they create villains that are easy to kill for them. And with that, we actually scale the rewards according to how easy the guy is to kill.

If you make a guy that is just a minion and doesn’t really have good powers, you aren’t going to get that many rewards because the risk isn’t really there.

That’s primarily what we’ve been doing. But it’s a good system, since it is based on the kills we can monitor what you are killing and control the amount of rewards based on that. You are still getting the equivalent that you get outside, because you go through those guys that are easy to kill much faster than you would with somebody else.

At the end of the day when you do the math the numbers come out pretty much equal.

Continued on next page…

Oh Vanguard, how we all wanted to love you.  When you were originally released, we were excited.  The latest brainchild from two of the people who designed the original EverQuest, with art from the famed Keith Parkinson (Rest in Peace buddy, you’re missed), and gameplay designed to be a new take on the original “vision” of EverQuest, you had a lot of hype.  With Brad McQuaid pushing as hard as he could, and even a good presence on the premier EQ 1 guild site, we had high expectations.

And those expectations were dashed, and I mean strewn across every type of rock imaginable, when it came time for release.  Plagued by problems with funding, Sigil and Vanguard were dropped from Microsoft and later picked up by Sony Online Entertainment. The original release of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes was a buggy, ill received mess.  There were issues galore, lack of content from 40-50, and horrbile “chunking” and performance .

People pronounced Vanguard dead in the water.  And unfortunately, Sigil as a company pretty much followed suit.  Almost the entire was team disbanded and fired, or hired into other SOE projects, from the parking lot.  It was a sad day for Vanguard and Sigil.  But while the Vanguard team today is but a fraction of what it was at release, here is the good news:  Vanguard has turned into an amazing game.  While still plagued by nagging bugs, performance has been increased dramatically and the infinitely small dev team currently at SOE has been working their tails off to make the world of Telon full of content, and more attractive to today’s MMO audience.

I want to interject here and state this; no matter what I say, or what kind of impressions I give, Vanguard may still be a sinking ship.  While there are still a myriad problems with the title, by far the biggest issue facing Vanguard today is the playerbase.  The good:  the people who currently play Vanguard are mature and sophisticated, and almost always friendly.  The bad: there is nowhere near enough of them.  People still have a bad taste in their mouth from the original release of Vanguard, and the drama that befell Sigil still appears to be holding people back from trying the title.

And that is really too bad, because if you were to try out the title today, either as a returning player, or a new face, you would be in for a treat.  The new “Isle of Dawn” content that was added as a 14 day trial for Vanguard is a GREAT starter zone, and really gives you an idea of what Vanguard could be; a top or second-tier MMO.  The content there is plentiful, the story is interesting, and the entire experience for the most part is exciting.  There are usually people on at all times of the day, crafting or adventuring, or doing Vanguards third ” sphere,” diplomacy.

Diplomacy is like acard game that people can play, designed as an entirely different way to progress or level your character.  Same thing with crafting.  Crafting in Vanguard is treated as its own 1-50 game.  And you can do either crafting or diplomacy completely separate from adventuring levels.  Granted, you may have trouble getting resources for higher level crafting, or have to purchase mob-dropped cards for the diplomacy game through the auction, but it is still possible to play them separately from your normal leveling.  And at higher diplomacy levels, you can flip “switches” in the main towns in the land of Telon that give other players buffs.  And those buffs range from crafting and diplomacy buffs, all the way to adventuring buffs such as increased HP or damage for players.  Higher end guilds frequently  keep track of what buff is up in what city, so that they aren’t fighting other guilds to get the buffs up that they might need to raid that night.

It is an interesting way to get diplomacy involved in the higher tiers of content.  Crafting, while  giving you the ability to make boats and housing for other players, hasn’t  been as instrumental at the higher levels as a lot of people would want.  But if you enjoy crafting, it is decently fun system, just keep in mind that you might not be making items that a lot of other players will want so do not go into it with making a ton of money in mind.

One of my favorite things about Vanguard is the world of Telon.  People talk about the size and look of Telon in a lot of other impressions or reviews, but you will never be able to understand the variety of content, and variety in the looks of the land if you don’t see it for yourself.  Telon is a beautiful world, with screenshot-worthy scenes almost everywhere that you turn.

There are a lot of people out there that think that Vanguard is one of the prettiest MMOs out there, and I will agree with that wholeheartedly.  From the Asian inspired continent of Kojan, to the Middle Eastern reminiscent area of Qualia and finally the typical fantasy visuals of Thestra, the different amount of themes in Vanguard can be staggering.  And the best thing about thse different places is just about everywhere you look, you can find some kind of content for your level range.  The problem that you run into, is that not all level ranges are represented as well as they should be, and their are particular areas and quest chains that you really HAVE to do in order to keep up with gear.  Content up until level 45 or so is supposed to be smooth, and then gets a little grindy from 45-50.  But after 50-55, the content becomes a major grind, through faction, tier and XP.

Recently added to help that out though is the mentoring system.  Max level players can mentor down to lower levels if they want to go back and experience content that they might have missed, while still getting kill xp at the rate that they normally would.  And while I hear that XP rate is minimal when it comes to actually level 51-55, it still is a bonus if you are the type of person who wants to experience all the content that a game has to offer.

As far as race and character choices go, Vanguard has around 15 classes and 19 races.  Races are varied and yet still alot of overflow, example being that Vanguard has 3 different human races.  But along with those, you also get your 3 elven choices, High/Wood/Dark, Dwarves, Halflings, Half giants, wolf/tiger/fox people, Gnomes, and a few others.  The classes in Vanguard feel really well done.  Most classes feel and play a little different than others of their Archetypes.  Examples being, in the tank archetype, Warriors dual wield, Paladins use a sword and shield, and Dreadknights use 2 handers.

Healers are also interesting; you have the prerequisite Clerics in plate using direct heals and Hot’s, Shamans who focus a little more on DPS, and two of the most unique classes in Vanguard:  the Bloodmage and the disciple.  Bloodmages are cloth wearing healers that actually generate healing to others through causing damage to mobs, and Disciples are a monk/healer hybrid with Jin and mana based heals.  Jin being something that Disciples get outside of mana, that regens and can be used for healing or damaging attacks.

MMOs have come a very long way to say the least. We have seen so much variety and expansion from the industry; it is becoming hard to keep up with. It seems that MMOs in general love to pop up in the most unexpected of places. So what do you get when you combine some of the most popular and well-known tech devices in the world, and a Sci-Fi based MMO? Iron Will Studio’s Outer Empires.

Outer Empires is a unique MMO that resides in one of the most unpredictable areas of the universe, space. However, this is not your typical MMO that you play at 2AM while trying to finish your research paper. What sets this MMO apart from many others is that not only is it available on many current web browsers, but also on iPhone and iPod Touch devices from Apple. So if you somehow manage to obliterate your motherboard, not a problem! You’re still able to enjoy a well thought out MMO at the touch of your fingertips, literally.

Now that I have pretty much bragged enough about how convenient it is to have such accessibility to an MMO, it’s time to move on to the game itself. In Outer Empires, players are able to freely choose how they approach the universe right on the go. You have a variety of ways to go about things, but probably the most direct approach to the game is the player’s ships.

Players are able to buy, sell, build, or even modify their own ships. It adds the uniqueness factor by having every player in control of how they foresee their ships. I think Outer Empires really has made it to the point where players are not as tiresome as they typically would be. They are not compelled to choose a certain component; rather they are open to customization and free thought.

Every player is able to join or be in control of a faction (which most people can just look as a guild). This provides an in-game private chat system, forums, and universal bank system, all of which is exclusive to the faction. Besides being convenient, it leads to further growth and development within your own community. Players don’t feel alienated from their members, and are given strong communication with all who are associated.

Every player in the game is able to transport various goods throughout the universe. There are also a variety of set tasks that players are recommended to perform to really get them started in the game. They pretty much give you a nice boost in the game by getting you started at a steady pace. Once players reach a comfortable level, they are able to then create their own in-game colony. With these colonies, players are able to perform a host of things, such as manufacturing, research, and even mining.

Outer Empires truly brings something new to the platform of MMOs. It is definitely refreshing to be able to try out something unique and well thought out. The fact of being able to be explore the universe, join friends, create colonies, and modify galactic ships is a good enough reason to give this game a go.

Outer Empires is currently available on the iPhone and iPod Touch, as well as a host of internet browsers (Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer).

Intro

NCsoft has recently released their latest entry in the crowded fantasy MMO genre. Aion has some big shoes to fill, with all the hype and a large amount of pre orders the game received before launch.

Aion centers around the conflict between two races (the Elyos and the Asmodians) that live on the planet Atreia, which split apart in a cataclysm and now each race lives on their own half of the separated planet. The two races can meet in battle it out in world PvP in an area called the Abyss.

Graphics

Aion has some very nice graphics with some of the most beautiful scenery seen in any MMO. The world looks alive with lush forests, lively lakes, and deadly swamps. Birds fly overhead and help add the feeling that players are in a living breathing world.

Animations are nicely done and the little things like the character becoming visibly exhausted as their health gets lower. Mobs will rub or slap their bellies or other little animations that help keep players immersed in the world. Cats move gracefully as they stalk their prey, Ox like creatures lumber along, and every other creature acts as you would assume.

Armor is very basic when you start out and as you level and buy or loot more it becomes cooler looking. Most pieces can be dyed with dye made by other users or bought at certain vendors found in the game. This helps players differentiate themselves from other players that are sporting the same armor. Another feature that Aion has is the ability to take a higher level piece of armor and make it look like a lower level piece.

So if you like your current armor and when upgrading don’t like the look of the new stuff as well, you can go to an NPC to change the higher level to look like the lower level armor.

The only drawback is you loose the older piece in the process. On a sde note, it would have been nice to see more variations in the look of armor; my character looked the same for over 10 level with little change in appearance.

User Interface

Aion sports the usual UI as most MMOs, it doesn’t do anything to revolutionize the way the game is played but since it is practical this doesn’t detract from the game. There are all the normal options that let you move the health bars around as well as add more sidebars to the screen.

You have the option of using a quest tracker that allows you to see a good selection of quests on your screen while playing. This allows you to keep track of quest goals without having to switch back and forth between game play and the quest panel. You can also double click on a quest and it will open your quest panel allowing you to get further details. Another feature allows you to select certain words like places and NPC names and a waypoint added to your map.

This eliminates the need to search all over an area for your objective and does make the game easier as it saves you time.

Gameplay

Aion has four classes; warrior, scout, mage, and priest. Once you reach level 10 each class has the choice of two further classes to branch out to. The warrior can become a gladiator (melee DPS) or a templar (tank). The scout can branch out to an assassin (melee DPS) or a ranger (ranged DPS). The mage class has the options of a Spiritmaster (pet based caster) or a sorcerer (ranged spellcasting). Finally the priest can become a cleric (healer) or a chanter (support healer w/ buffs and melee DPS).

Aion allows you to create 8 characters per server so if you wanted to you could make one of each class.

Character creation is the first part of the game that you’ll see that really shines. The creator allows you to choose premade character builds or tweak your own for that perfect character. There are sliders that allow you to change every little part of the character and this in turn lets you pretty much make any kind of look you want. Players can even create pixie sized characters to large hulking alter egos; whatever character type one could think of can think of one can make. Once the player does select a server and choose which race they want they are locked into creating only characters of that race on that particular server. So in order to make a character of the opposing side one needs to change servers.

Once the character is made a short movie is played giving the outline of the main story once that is done, the player is free to begin their life. No matter what side the players chooses they are in for a very similar experience. There is basically no difference between the lands of each race. Both races start near farms and progress to a town move onto a lake area outside the town and then are shuffled off to a forest area and etc. Each side only has one starting area and this creates a serious sense of déjà vu and severely limits the replayability of the game.
Now onto the greatest feature found in Aion. Flight. Once the player reaches level 10, they gain the ability to fly. Flight is limited to certain areas and even then it has a timer that only allows flight for a short time. Even with these restrictions it is a great feeling to let open ones wings and jump into the sky and take flight. It would be nice to be able to fly in every zone but the restriction is there for a reason, without it quests would become too easy as one could just fly from point to point and bypass all the content in between.

Every couple levels players can buy new combat skills from the appropriate skill trainer. Prices for skill books start out low but ramp up as the levels increase. Skills are the standard “press this button” at this time to do this or that. There isn’t much innovation other than the fact that one can perform combos. Once a certain skill is used one can keep the combo going but only a few seconds is given to get the next button press in and keep it going. While combos help break up the monotony that most MMOs fall into when dealing with combat skills it still boils down to pressing the same buttons in order until the enemy is dead.

Continued on the next page.

Jeffrey Philipp had the opportunity to talk to David Allen and Hue Henrey to talk about Quest Online’s upcoming MMOG, Alganon. The in depth and candid interview can be found after the jump.

The MMO Gamer: Could you begin by introducing yourself and telling us what you do at Quest Online?

David Allen: I am David Allen, co-founder and President of Quest Online, creator of Alganon. I do pretty much anything that needs to be done. I make sure the right people are hired, the project milestones are on time, the core vision is shared and followed, and ensure Alganon comes together best as possible.

The MMO Gamer: First I was curious what the end goal for the studies system is going to be. Chiefly I am curious if there is going to be a hard cap for the amount of ranks you can learn on a character or if they will be able to study in perpetuity. If the latter, what are the plans to prevent players who have been playing for longer from outpacing newer players simply due to the fact that they have been playing and studying longer. And conversely, if there is no hard cap how are you going to make the increases meaningful without making them overpowered in edge cases?

David Allen: We will be launching with years of studies, and the available studies will grow over time, allowing players to focus on extended studies in the areas they are interested in pursuing. Keep in mind the study system is a “support” system first and foremost. A player can learn core studies they wish to focus on in just a few month’s time, but refining (or maximizing) those studies takes substantially longer. So one example could be a player can get +4% melee crit in 8 days, but get to that 5% crit it’s 30 days. The system is actually very well-balanced, so a player could get to max level and get great gear, but they may be lacking that 3-4% crit or 5% armor bonus that another player who has managed their studies has. This does add up, but the difference isn’t enough to cause problems, only enhance the gameplay for those who manage their studies wisely.

The MMO Gamer: Regarding the studies system, I am also curious as to your thoughts on the EVE online system that resembles it. Was it an influence on your plans and designs for your own system, and if so were there any parts you planned to improve?

David Allen: EVE has a great time-based progression system; they proved it works and works well. We have learned a lot from all major MMOGs, and simply put, all good MMOGs grow based on learning from each other. We do have a few things planned for the study system we haven’t announced yet, but these are features for next year, not at launch. Obviously it’s something that will grow and shape as the game progresses.

One last question about the studies system, I am just curious if you have had any particular feedback on the usefulness of the system, and whether players are finding that it helps. Also, a quick note/suggestion from a new player I wouldn’t mind having a slightly longer training queue.

It takes some time for the application of studies to shine, since it’s 1% here and 1% there, but over time it builds up. More importantly, it provides small differences between players. Two players, both of whom choose to play Soldiers, may choose two different weapons to specialize in. The one who specializes in swords isn’t going to see an enormous, game-altering advantage when they equip a sword versus an axe, but when they have to decide whether to have the local blacksmith craft them an epic battleaxe or an epic longsword, they’re going to choose the sword, even if the stats on both weapons are identical. The soldier who chose to study axes will make the opposite decision. Expand this concept across dozens of studies, and decisions more complex than just “sword or axe?” and you’ll see how the study system allows two otherwise identical characters to develop their own unique quirks.

We’re also taking a look at the study interface and training queue time, but the training queue is a delicate balance. The longer the queue, the longer players can work on their studies without actually logging in to the game. While the idea of players who pay us money, but never play the game, may sound good from a financial standpoint, we’d rather make a fun game, and to do that, we need people to play. A short queue time is there to encourage people to log in and enjoy the game, not just study.

The MMO Gamer: Again, pardon me if this is just me missing it because of my newbie status, and I understand the game is still currently in beta, but during my explorations I was not able to find the larger overarching plot or story. I personally am very fond of plot and story based gaming (though I’m likely setting myself up to get knocked down much of the time in this genre), so I was hoping to find myself at least tangentially entangled in some major event taking place in the game world. Are there any plans to bring that game world, it’s history and lore, and the current events of same to the forefront?

David Allen: Actually the starter quests on both continents are tied to main storylines. For example, the first quest on the Asharr side is to find out why the wolves around Andar have come out in the open, rather than hiding in their dens. (It’s not normal for the people of Andar to have a front yard full of wolves.) The cause of this strange activity leads to accusations of necromancy and the recovery of a bloodgem. This leads to the Scholars in Greenvale, and the discovery that the same madness has also infected the farmers in the area. The story continues to expand from there, as players discover the source of this plague, a secret Death-cult, and fight to put an end to the madness plaguing Asheran Forest. Even actions that may seem to be side stories or extraneous to the main story come back into the story at later levels. The quests only get bigger, better, and more in-depth the more one progresses throughout the game.

However, players aren’t forced to read the story if they don’t want to. If they just want to play the game, they only need to read the quest tracker, which tells them exactly what they need to do next. We’ve found that most players end up doing that. They tend to ignore the story and enjoy the game without it. As Alganon grows, we’ll add additional story-related features, such as cutscenes and scripted events, for those players who enjoy them. However, for launch, we are using those resources to improve gameplay, and so players who are interested in the story will have to read the quest logs.

The MMO Gamer: Another quite popular aspect of many games recently is PvP, though so far I haven’t managed to really get into it for some reason I’m still hoping one day that there will be some implementation that grabs my interest. What, if any, are the plans for Player versus Player content in your game?

David Allen: We will definitely have PvP, but we want to do it right. It is slated for the first major expansion in mid 2010. We are actually taking an approach that will allow us to balance PvP and PvE separately by giving each action the option of behaving differently based on the application (an NPC vs another player).

Read on as the two discuss matters of heroism and villainy, time devoted to story versus combat, the misconceptions of it being a “Massively Single-Player Role-Playing Game”…

And, of course, why anyone would want to play something other than a Jedi in the Star Wars universe.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself, and tell us a little about what it is you do at BioWare.

Blaine Christine: Sure. My name is Blaine Christine, I’m a producer at BioWare Austin. My job is primarily interfacing with LucasArts on all aspects of the game.

The MMO Gamer: What does “interfacing” entail? I’m sure some of the more hardcore fans hear that and picture George Lucas sitting atop a tower, meddling with knobs and dials and playing you like The Sims.

Blaine Christine: [laughs] I wish it was that cut-and-dried. Typically it’s myself interfacing with the LucasArts producer, Jake Neri, on pretty much a daily basis for everything about the game.

It’s them essentially looking at the game at whatever state it happens to be in, looking at the artwork, anything that’s going into the game, or website, or any other aspect, and giving us feedback.

Essentially just collaborating with us on making the game great.

The MMO Gamer: So then, how does one go about making the game great?

Blaine Christine: [laughs] Well, I think for BioWare the formula is distilled down pretty well, at this point.

Our lead designer, James Ohlen, has been with BioWare for eleven plus years, he was the lead designer on Baldur’s Gate and many other games.

In terms of quality and what goes into making a true BioWare experience, I think he is the key reason we’re able to succeed, and head in the direction that we’re heading.

But really, as with any other game it’s about really great planning, great design, but it’s also about listening to feedback that comes all sources.

Whether that’s from LucasArts, from within our own company, or eventually when we get there hopefully opening it up to fans to play, and listening seriously to the fans and their feedback to help us make a great game.

In an MMO I think it’s key to get feedback from as many sources as possible. It’s such a big undertaking, it’s not quite as simple as some other games, where you can plop down a focus group and have them look at it for a short period of time.

Looking at that feedback is critical.

The MMO Gamer: Ever since TOR was first announced there’s always been a very big emphasis on heroism; you, the player, aren’t just some regular schlub who wandered in from off the street, you’re a hero! Everything you do is heroic!

But if you’re an “evil” character, say, playing a Bounty Hunter or a Sith, wouldn’t you be a villain, not a hero?

Blaine Christine: [laughs] I certainly can’t deny that.

I guess what we mean by hero is not necessarily in the good guy sense, but hero in the you feel like you’re taking on a ton of enemies at once, your storyline is impactful and meaningful… you don’t feel like you’re being sent on quests to collect ten boxes for some random vendor.

The MMO Gamer: So you can play as an antagonist, the story for the “evil” classes doesn’t just swap names and places around from the stories of “the good guys”?

Blaine Christine: I would say yes, very much. The storyline for the Sith Warrior, if you want to play a bad guy, he is a bad guy.

Your storyline as it goes through, he’s not a nice, friendly dude. You see that in the gameplay footage we’ve released, where you get the choice to save or kill the captain.

These are heavy choices, and if you strike him down, you get dark side points that are going to influence how your character develops, influence how the rest of the story goes. You kill somebody, they’re not there later.

The MMO Gamer: That morality system, the dark side and light side points, seems to be carried over directly from Knights of the Old Republic. But in the MMO, what is that actually going to do?

I would assume that with the breadth of content you’re dealing with the story can’t change all that much, even if you’re all the way light side playing as a Sith Warrior… you’d still have to be out there doing bad things and killing people by nature of its being an “evil” class.

Blaine Christine: The best answer to that is it’s going to be similar to the other games we’ve done. If you look at KOTOR and how that worked out, if you played light side versus dark side, there were distinct different in the story, and distinct differences in how your character developed.

It’s going to be very similar to that.

The MMO Gamer: But in KOTOR, it was the exact same story regardless of what you were playing. A Jedi Consular had the same story as a Jedi Guardian. Here you’re dealing with a lot more variables.

Blaine Christine: That was sort of the thing where yeah, all of the classes were bound by that one story, which is not the case here.

Each of our classes has a distinct story, but within each of those stories, if you go light side or dark side, there would be differences similar to what you saw in KOTOR.

The MMO Gamer: So you could play a fully light side Sith Warrior or a dark side Jedi?

Blaine Christine: Absolutely.

The MMO Gamer: Interesting twist. Being a Sith and going around saving kittens?

Blaine Christine: Yeah, exactly. [laughs]

Continued on next page…

Topics discussed include the “stickiness” of session-based games, striking a balance between FPS and MMO players, and whether or not The Agency even falls under the definition of a traditional MMO at all.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about what it is you do at SOE.

Lorien Gremore: I’m Lorien Gremore, I’m the Lead Producer on The Agency. I’ve been with the project for a couple of years now… a little bit more than that, actually.

What I do is I lead the production team, we help to coordinate across all the different disciplines on the team, making sure people’s work comes together appropriately on time, and moves through the process of pipelines, distribution, and delivery.

The MMO Gamer: This has been a recurring theme that I’ve been bringing up in my interviews with SOE, and I’d like to bounce it off you, as well:

It almost seems to me as though the company is trying to distance itself from its roots, the more “hardcore” traditional fantasy games like EverQuest, and move towards focusing more on games that can appeal outside of the MMO genre, like The Agency, for instance.

Lorien Gremore: I think it’s a wonderful philosophy that SOE is taking right now. We’re seeing something that indicates that there are more stories to be told, really.

Everybody loves classic fantasy, I love Lord of the Rings, for instance. You can’t get more classic than that. People love a good sci-fi classic, as well.

But there are simply more stories to be told, and the fact that we are engaging in a modern, exclusive, dynamic world, that is optimistic and vibrant with lots of rich storytelling and missions…

It’s just something that we’re bringing new to the space, and it’s such an interesting genre and theme, I think it engages a lot of people’s imaginations right away.

The MMO Gamer: Where I was going with that is, it almost seems as if the age of the 5,000 hour, soul-sucking, life-consuming, quit your job and stay home to play it MMO is coming to end.

And now the “session” MMO, the bite-sized 30 minutes at a time MMO, is up and coming.

Do you feel that The Agency is the—I don’t want to use the word vanguard—the leader of the charge toward this new phase, if you want to call it that?

Lorien Gremore: We definitely try to deliver fun now with no waiting, that’s one of our mottos.

We definitely want to make sure that you have the option of jumping in, jumping out, having a quick experience, or a long-term experience if you’re looking for one.

There’s lots to do in The Agency, there’s lots of different varieties of gameplay available.

This is something we hope keeps people engaged, but also allows people to feel like they’re specializing, doing what they like to do, and able to do it fairly quickly.

You can jump in and do a mission in a few minutes, see how that worked out for you, and then maybe do a longer mission next, team up with a bunch of friends and do an epic mission.

These are all options we’re trying to offer players. We’re not trying to lock them into hours, and hours of long raids and things like that, that you might be tired of from other games. It’s not our speciality.

There’s fun to be had in those things, and I certainly enjoy them on my own personal time, but that’s not the game we’re making, here.

We’re specifically trying to create something that gives people a little more of the options that hopefully they’re looking for, right now.

The MMO Gamer: The flip side to that is, the advantage that the soul-sucking life-consuming MMOs have, is that they’re soul-sucking and life-consuming. They have huge, I guess the technical term would be “stickiness.” People play them for a very, very long time.

There are people, for example, who have been playing EverQuest for the entire decade that it’s been out.

One of the concerns I have as a player about this new breed of “thirty minute at a time” MMOs is, I would use the analogy of Tetris:

Tetris is a great game. You can download it any time you like and there it is, you play for 30 minutes and then put it away. But, most people don’t play Tetris on a constant basis for ten years at a time.

How do you get that stickiness, and keep players coming back month after month within the shorter timeframes you’re aiming for?

Lorien Gremore: I think it’s replayability that really helps us there. Since you are what you wear in The Agency, you have the option of playing any of the roles that are available to you based on your outfit that you choose before each mission.

You could play through a mission as a stealth role, and then play through it again as a combat role and get a new experience that way. You may also want to replay a mission because you didn’t get the highest level of rating on that mission.

So if you got a bronze the first time through, you might think, “Well, it’s fun to have the bronze, I can go on and now do the missions that that bronze level unlocked me, but I might want to go back and redo it through the silver rating or even the gold rating to get more goodies, more rewards, more advancement.”

That’s a really valid type of gameplay. I look at some other shooters out there, that people are replaying the same maps for years at a time.

My husband plays Halo all the time, and replays the same maps over, and over again, because they’re still engaging, because they’re designed for a particular type of audience that enjoys the replayability of it, because there’s such a dynamic that comes from smart AI, smart players, doing smart things, cleverly planning out their attacks and things like that.

We’re trying to offer a lot of that in The Agency. You can see in our demos that there’s a lot of planning and strategizing, working together with different skill sets.

Your experience even in the same mission as the same role might be completely different depending on who you took through that mission with you.

If you were taking a support character with you and were playing a stealth character, you might have a totally different experience than if you brought a combat character.

There’s a lot of replayability there, and there’s a lot of reasons to replay. You might find new secrets and clues, you might have a collection you’re going for in terms of intel or operatives.

So there’s a lot of engagement from the rewards you can get through replayability, and there’s also the engagement that you can actually get through the fact that we offer different types of gameplay, via the combinations of skills and outfits, roles, gadgets, all of that good stuff.

Continued on next page…

After having worked on some of the most critically acclaimed titles of all time, including Fallout, Arcanum, and yes, Grand Slam Bridge, he is now bringing his experience to bear as the Design Director of Carbine Studios, and their unannounced next-generation MMO.

Read on for his thoughts on the genre, the industry, and his plans for future retirement as a corduroy jacket-wearing professor.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself to us and tell us a little bit about what it is you do at Carbine Studios.

Tim Cain: I’m Timothy Cain, I’m the Design Director. Which means I’m in charge of the design department, which we split into Systems, and World.

Systems is combat, creatures, items… basically everything that requires a specification. World is all the lore, and content.

The MMO Gamer: Let’s start right off with a nice big philosophy question: Do you consider yourself to be an artist, an entertainer, or something else entirely?

Tim Cain: I’m not an artist, so I must be an entertainer.

The MMO Gamer: Do you believe it’s possible for games to become art?

Tim Cain: Yes, it’s very possible for a game to be art.

The MMO Gamer: Do you believe that the game Carbine is working on rises to that level?

Tim Cain: I think the correct answer is I hope it’s art. We always strive for it to be art. However, I think if you’re not trying to make a work of art that is fun, and accessible, I don’t think you should try. You should worry less about the art, and more about how enjoyable it is.

I’ve seen some works of art that I wouldn’t care to actually have and look at every day.

The MMO Gamer: So then what is fun to you? Define “fun” in an MMO.

Tim Cain: Well, the reason I like playing MMOs, is for all my life I’ve played RPGs. I gravitate towards them, I’ve made a number of them in the past.

But, MMOs have that added dimension of you’re there with thousands of other people, they’re trying to do the same things you’re trying to do, and your friends are there too, witnessing you do this.

I think part of the fun that comes out of that is just, the fun of it being social, the fun of it being a communal effort.

Going back to single-player RPGs, you feel lonely. It’s like, “Did you see that cool thing I just did?” It’s much more fun playing these games in a group. I always have one character, I was saying earlier, that I make that I don’t tell anybody about.

I solo just to judge certain parts of these games on just some merits that I don’t want to do while—I don’t want to bore the people I’m playing with.

I’ll do every crafting skill, I’ll do achievements, and people don’t need to be with me while I do that. But, for the most part it’s 80-90% of the time I spend playing these games in a group. That’s just kind of the essence of these games.

The MMO Gamer: As you said, you were a big RPG guy in the past.

A lot of people may not be familiar with your name, but just about every RPG fan should be familiar with what you’ve worked on: Fallout, Arcanum, Temple of Elemental Evil, Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines… all very good single player RPGs.

Now here you are working on an MMO. The biggest difference, which you just hit on, is you are not the lone protagonist going off and saving the world by yourself. You are one of hundreds of thousands of protagonists, all playing together towards the same goals.

So, how do you get that storytelling element, the essence of RPG heroism in an MMO, when you’re not the lone protagonist any more, when you have 50,000 people all doing the same things you’re trying to do?

Tim Cain: That actually is the challenge. That’s one of the things we explore every day. I know how to tell a story in a single player RPG, I’ve done it multiple times. What’s fascinating to me about MMOs, is the first ones that were made were very sandbox.

There were no stories, there really weren’t even quests, the way a lot of people today would view quests.

They weren’t nearly as well-defined, and described as in the game as “Hey, you’re starting a quest now, here it is. Do this, this, and this, then return to me and I’ll give you this.”

That’s what people think of as a quest now. But EverQuest had nothing like that. You had to talk to someone, and hit on a keyword, then he’d say something to you and it didn’t go into a log book or anything. You just went off and did what he said, and hopefully you’d find something that he’d want.

I think that the direction MMOs are going is if we can actually figure out how to tell a story, so that you’re involved in a storyline, I think people will view that as kind of the next step, instead of just doing a set of quests.

That’s the kind of thing we’ve been trying to solve at Carbine, and I think we have a solution… but I can’t say what it is.

Next year I want to give a talk on it. I wanted to give it here, but we had to put it off until next year. It’s called, “I’m a Special Snowflake.”

The MMO Gamer: So, we’ve kind of evolved from “No story at all,” to “Kinda-sorta a story.”

But, the story as it exists in MMOs today is in a little two by five inch box, with five paragraphs of text which nobody actually reads.

Some games, like The Old Republic and to a lesser extent EQ2 have tried to circumvent that with voice acting, but that obviously starts getting extremely expensive, extremely fast.

Is there a way to tell a story in an MMO, to engage players, without the game either costing a billion dollars or putting people to sleep?

Tim Cain: Yes. We’ve got a way we’re trying to tell stories, so that not everyone may get the exact same ones. Some of the elements of what we did include…

A lot of MMOs, everyone goes to the same zone, does the same quests, and then leaves and never comes back. Our game won’t be like that.

We have a word for when you click on someone and get a big box of text, it’s called a lore bomb. We’re not doing lore bombs. I think there are other ways you can tell stories.

The people under me are the ones actually doing the design specs, so what I end up writing is what I call the design philosophy docs. I give them like, “This is what a quest should be.”

I’m not actually telling them how to make a quest. I’m saying: here’s what the essence of a quest is, and here’s what I want it to be in our game. I do the same for achievements, for storyline, for using instances in the game; this is where you use an instance and this is where you don’t.

The underlying thread behind all of them is I have a player who’s playing this game, and they want to feel like they’re moving forward toward some sort of progress.

It has to include even when you hit the level cap, so it can’t be that going up a level is your sense of progress. It can’t be finding items is your sense of progress.

There has to be some other progression in the game, and I think I’ve found several axis that you can measure progress along, that people measure themselves as making some progress in the game without having to wade through lore bombs, or having them wait to go on raids with 19 other people.

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The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among are readers who maybe unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about what it is you do at Nexon.

Min Kim: My name is Min Kim. I’m the VP of Marketing at Nexon.

What I do right now is mostly handle Biz-Dev, marketing strategy, and PR. But I also contribute to a lot the operations side, because that’s where I really started at Nexon, especially at Nexon America.

Having started back in around 2005, I did the local versions for North America. I operated that for North America. And through that we actually ended up opening up the office here. So, the beginnings of my career at Nexon America were actually in operations.

The MMO Gamer: To start us off, you give just a little bit of company background, for those who perhaps haven’t been following you before.

Min Kim: The company was founded in Korea back in 1994. The company in the states, this is actually our second time out, and I know people know that so there is no point to hide it.

We actually closed our doors here in North America, I think in about 2004. But then we opened again.

So we came out with Kingdom of the Winds and a few other games back in the early 2000s. Then we reopened the doors again as Nexon America with MapleStory back in 2005.

The success was so big that there was no way we could have done that or scaled it out of Korea, so we set up shop here in Los Angeles in 2006.

The MMO Gamer: Of course MapleStory has gone on to be, I guess the scientific term would be a ginormous success.

Min Kim: Yeah. [laughs]

The MMO Gamer: I’ve seen some crazy figures thrown around, in the neighborhood of 90 million registered users.

Min Kim: I think MapleStory’s logged over 92 million registration, yes.

The MMO Gamer: How many of those are in the U.S?

Min Kim: The U.S., the last number we put out was slightly over six million registered players in North America.

The MMO Gamer: Those are some very respectable numbers.

Min Kim: I think a big part of it was that we actually answered a market need, back in around 2005 where I think at that point a lot of people were saying that MMOGs or MMORPGS were meant for people that were older, maybe grew up with D&D, who were in their 20s into their 30s playing these games.

We felt the reason why was because the only way to access those games was through a payment mechanism that teens don’t have access to, which is credit cards.

When we launched MapleStory here there was a market need for it but it wasn’t being fed because there were no games that were out that teens could enjoy in an MMO sense because they didn’t have access to credit cards.

The only way they could do that was ask their parents to allow them to subscribe. And for most parents that didn’t grow up with this stuff, it’s like magic beans. It’s like a complete waste of money. So, that’s I think how we started out.

But again, if you look at Asia, MapleStory is extremely successful. It’s probably best in class. And there’s a lot of MMOGs there, and I think they just got it right.

It’s the simplicity mixed with a lot of the art style. I don’t know what came together well, but it just hit it out of the park.

The MMO Gamer: But for all of that, there are a lot of players out there, and even some in the media who don’t seem to consider what you do at Nexon to be making “real MMOs.”

Min Kim: I think, is that up to the last few years, they didn’t consider our type of games as real games. It’s like, “Oh, we don’t cover that” kind of thing. And I think some of that has to do with the fact that our games are online and the content is constantly changing so it’s very difficult to review a game like ours.

Up to the last few years it was just difficult meeting with the press, and to show them our games, because they already had the stereotype of Eastern games being low-quality.

They look at the graphics and think that we’re not able to produce high-end games. We’re totally able to do it. But we make our games like this on purpose because we want 80% of the installed PC base to be able to play.

I honestly think that the PC market has been shooting itself in the foot by constantly pushing the envelope, so that only five people can play it.

I think the controversy now, and what’s making people think is you’ve got companies offering games on Facebook and MySpace that are making a killing. Probably making more money than the next-gen MMOs.

I think what we’ve got to think about is what do the players want? What do the consumers want? And it’s not all the same thing.

The MMO Gamer: On that subject, there’s a lot of talk in the industry these days about a trend towards more casual gaming as opposed to the more AAA titles you were just talking about. There is a notion out there that players want to have their gaming time defined.

They want to know that if they play game X it’s going to take exactly 30 minutes, and then they can get on with their day.

Min Kim: Sessions.

The MMO Gamer: Session play, exactly. That’s the latest buzzword.

As Nexon has seemed, from my outsider’s perspective, to be more of a casual game focused company from the start, what are your thoughts on that subject?

Min Kim: Well, I hate the word “casual” because that’s actually put us in a box, where we’ll meet up with the press and they’ll say, “Oh, they’re a casual game developer.”

But there are a lot of definitions about what casual means. Like one example I give is Texas Hold’Em. If I’m playing with you guys and we’re playing Texas Hold’Em at my house and I’ve got a $20 buy-in, that’s a very casual experience.

You go to the casinos, where you’re playing at the World Series of Poker and you put $10,000 down, it’s not casual anymore. It’s extremely hardcore even though it’s the same game. [laughs]

I think the word “casual” just makes it more difficult, but I do think that players are looking for different experiences and I think it’s our job in the industry to basically just cater to them all and not limit it.

I feel like we’ve been limiting the market greatly. Games like Dungeon Fighter, you look at it, it looks very casual but I don’t like to use the word “casual.” I like to use the word “approachable.”

So if you’re looking over my shoulder and I’m playing Dungeon Fighter online, that game, I think, is the type of game where your friend who had never seen it before might say, “Hey, move over, I want to try,” because it looks like an arcade game, versus something that is very complex.

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The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself to us and tell us a little bit about what it is you do at Trion.

Russ Brown: I’m Russ Brown, I’m a VP at Trion for Heroes of Telara. I’m kind of the top of the food chain for the whole project.

The MMO Gamer: So you’d be the man to talk to, then?

Russ Brown: Yes. [Laughter]

The MMO Gamer: You said something very interesting during the demo. You’d been in the industry for quite a long time before going into retirement. But, then this game brought you out. Why?

Russ Brown: It was the opportunity to do a game where I could change content, the dynamic content, based on what the community wants. So, so much of being in games was guessing what the community wants, guessing what the game player wants, giving it to them and then going “OK, hopefully that works.”

So now I can react, that’s very important to me.

The MMO Gamer: Well technically, if you want to know what the community wants you can just go to the forums and see what everybody is complaining about.

Russ Brown: Well, you’re a wise man. [Laughter] Sometimes the forums are right.

The MMO Gamer: And sometimes they are very, very wrong. Anyway, we should probably be talking about Telara, not the forums.

Russ Brown: Yeah. [Laughter]

The MMO Gamer: So how does this game allow you to do that, then? React to players to give them what they want faster than a standard MMO?

Russ Brown: It allows me because of the way our technology is [built]. Once I have content on your machine; so you will still have to patch. I want to make sure people understand that. Once you have the content like animations, I can tell the servers how they need to behave. Once you have a dragon, I can say “Hey dragon, go attack over here. Hey dragon, go do this.” Or, “orcs go attack over there.”

So I can figure out what the players want to happen and do that.

The MMO Gamer: So you’re trying to set up a system that’s more dynamic than most MMOs, and actually create something approaching what they used to do in MUDs, or early EverQuest with live GM events?

Russ Brown: Exactly! Something where you can actually make a difference, so it’s not the same. Right now, in a lot of MMOs, if I go to this zone it’s the same as it was three or five years ago. And also I can give the players what they want.

One of my grand visions is to not only do it on a big scale but do it on a small scale too. Have things like merchants who have sales. Don’t always have the same things. So when people stumble across him, they’ll think “Cool, this guy is selling a magical weapon he didn’t yesterday.”

The MMO Gamer: The problem that always comes in is that dynamic ability comes with a cost. How are you going to manage that? Are you going to enlist volunteers for this, or have an extremely large customer service team?

Russ Brown: So we have a full development team, and we have a pretty good pipeline for getting that done really quickly. But yea, it’d definitely something that we’re going to have to support. It’s more gaming as service; we’re there to serve you.

The MMO Gamer: Is there anything you personally would like to talk about? The sort of thing people such as myself don’t generally ask you?

Russ Brown: That’s a great question. What I want to talk about is letting players have fun. Giving the players what they want.

The MMO Gamer: In an MMO? Are you insane, sir?

Russ Brown: [Laughter] No! I’m not! It’s supposed to be fun, it’s not supposed to be a chore that I’m scheduled to do every day and eight o’clock, right? You’re supposed to be in there to have fun! And my goal is to have fun. I think so much in gaming, especially online gaming becomes a chore.

The MMO Gamer: So then why do you think that the common mindset among developers seems to be that MMOs must occupy 5,000 hours of gameplay, and therefore we must make players do XYZ that they don’t really want to do for the first 4,900 hours to get to the fun stuff?

Russ Brown: I honestly don’t know. And sometimes I wonder that. I think you can make a game fun. I think sometimes games, and not just MMOs, make a game but not necessarily make it fun. That’s the answer I’m going to give.

The MMO Gamer: A follow-up to that would be, “fun” means different things to different people. What is it to you?

Russ Brown: Two things define fun for me. One is seeing new experiences, going around and seeing cool stuff and seeing stuff change and the other one is character advancement. So for me character advancement is fun, I need to feel like my character is getting better and that I don’t have roadblocks. I need my guy to feel like his growing.

The MMO Gamer: How is advancement handled in the game then? How have you sought to make it fun?

It was very interesting during the demo, where you where showing off that any character can change between any job at any time. I did have some wheels in my head turning, thinking “Huh, this is never going to work. You’re going to have to carry five sets of armor around with you.”

And the subjob system was very interesting; can you get into that a little bit?

Russ Brown: So what the subclass system is; we have four basic core classes. And the four classes have their basic MMO roles. You have a fighter, a cleric, a rogue and a mage. The subclass system is how you do hybrids and how you get some specialization in your class. Given this example, so you want to play a paladin who is more of a fighter who can heal, you’ll play a subclass paladin on a fighter. If you want to play a paladin who is more like a cleric who can fight, you’ll play a paladin as a subclass to the cleric.

So that way, I can always, when people say “Well you know, a hybrid’s not as good as this class.”, if you want to be the best healer, be the cleric.

The MMO Gamer: Does the subclass level up as well, or does it just stick to your main class’s level?

Russ Brown: Excellent question, you’re the first guy to ask that! As your main class levels up and [in] your subclass, more stuff gets unlocked as you get more levels. So they’ll automatically appear, you don’t have to go to a trainer.