I’ve written at this site for more than three years now, a long time for me in terms of actual projects. Despite a deep sense of pride over the work I did at both Slashdot and Massively, I can honestly say that the work I’m most proud of from my time as a game journo is probably on this site. Having a space where you can follow what honestly and truly only matters to you is really important. I was going to whip up a “how to be a games blogger” post for the site before I took my full step back, but you’ve all probably heard it before.

If you want to be a blogger, do it. Blog. Podcast. Write. Don’t let your impressions of what other people do keep  you from doing something on your own. Don’t let your impressions of what other people think of what you do keep you from doing something. Life may be “what happens when you’re not paying attention”, but some things are worth stopping to really consider. As hard as it is to get into certain feilds, the world is much flatter nowadays. If there ever really was a barrier between people making content and people appreciating it, it’s long gone now. We, as observers, are just as much a part of the process as everyone inside the fence. If you want to hop that fence, whatever field you’re passionate about, I guarantee you can work to find a path there. It might be long, and it might be hard, but there it is.

For the time being I’m just going to stop posting here on MMOG Nation. I’m still very new in my gig, I’m still trying to figure out what it means to not be a professional blogger. While I’m figuring those things out, I’d rather not offer up half-formed thoughts or frustrating non-posts. I promise, honest and for true, that I’ll get back to this site. I just don’t know when or in what form that might take, so I want to be upfront about it. This RSS feed is going to be dark for a while.

That said, I’m definitely not going to stop writing. If you’d like to hear thoughts from me, as well as links and other various and sundry, I’d love for you to follow me over at whoisdialogue.com. It’s the newest, Tumblr-based incarnation of a website I’ve been running since I was in college. It’s a lot less focused, but I hope it’s still somewhat amusing.

Thanks for reading along, and we’ll catch up at some time in the future. Take care.

If you haven’t had the chance to listen to the second PvP / Penny Arcade podcast where they play Dungeons and Dragons, you’re missing out. I highly recommend it if you’ve ever wondered exactly how a tabletop gaming session goes. If you’re familiar with tabletop gaming, listen because they’re just a ton of fun!

I also recommend you listen to a recent episode of the Penny Arcade “Downloadable Content” podcast in which they do nothing but talk about D&D. Honestly, I got really excited listening to them talk about Gabe’s game, because their enthusiasm for the experience is something I and many of my tabletop friends feel regularly. It was more than a bit engaging to hear that enthusiasm on a podcast from guys I respect.

The podcasts dovetail nicely with Wil Wheaton’s series of posts to his site this week all about DMing a first session for his son and friends. It’s broken up into five parts, with the final part offering up some really very sound DMing advice for folks who may not have tackled the noble pursuit all that often in the past. He and Gabe (in posts to the PA site) are doing a great job of demystifying a hobby that I fear has a lot of weird baggage and miscommunication associated with it.

All this is a lengthy way of saying that I’m really very enthused with the reaction 4E is getting among these nerd culture icons. It’s my fervent hope that Scott, Jerry, Mike, and Wil talking so fervently about the hobby will get more people involved, more people interested, and maybe make this fantastic new edition of the rules a bit higher profile in the domain of general geekery.

If you want to play and haven’t yet, tomorrow’s actually a great day to start. It’s one of a number of Worldwide D&D game days happening this year! Just head over to the official Wizards of the Coast website to find information and locations near you. They’ve got a great event tracker on the site that will be able to set you straight on what’s happening in your area.

There’s been a bit of a meme going around where people share the sixth screenshot from their sixth screenshot subdirectory. Unfortunately, I don’t order screenshots quite like that. Instead, I thought I’d just go through my big old FRAPs folder (which contains the last 5 months or so of screenies from me) and show you my personal favorites. Here you go (with a key after the cut):

I’m hopelessly out of date, but I’ve been doing my best to get caught up on the ’sphere and such. Here’s some stuff I think is worth following up on:

• LotRO Book 7 sounds a-maze-ing. The new player experience and the release notes are some of the finest work yet out of an amazing group of devs. Great work all around.
• Eurogamer’s “Ten Level Test” is some of the best MMO writing I think I’ve ever seen. No joke. Oli Welsh has a fantastic take on this. Check out the editorial laying the groundwork, then the first two rounds: EQ2 vs. Vanguard, Lineage 2 vs. FFXI.
• The new WoW TCG Loot cards continue to impress. I love how the ultra-rares continue to add alternate game mechanic elements.
• The end of Tabula Rasa in a nutshell. Same day as my first at SOE. Weird world.
• Lauren revisits ‘bring the player’ vs. ‘bring the class’ with a look at Runes of Magic.
• Scott Brown proves NetDevil has a good grasp on reality: “We built this so that no matter how big it is, it doesn’t have to be a million-user game for it to be successful for us to run it for a long, long time.”

As per Paul Barnett and Kieron Gillen, here’s a list of games I think are canon, followed by a list of ‘in the now’ games I think are worth playing for various reasons.

Here’s my canon list:

1. Half-Life – Screw Doom. And Wolfenstein. I actually don’t like most of the id-era first-person shooters. I played them, of course, but they never grabbed me the way the tram car to Black Mesa did. While Half-Life may have Doom to thank for getting made, Valve reinvented the genre the id guys helped popularize by proving you could tell a compelling story while killing zombies at the same time.
2. The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past – The original Legend of Zelda is fantastico, but the perfect entry in the series has to be Link to the Past. I like it substantially more than any of the entries since, and it sets a tone that was aped by a number of games to come after. While the first game may have set the stage, Link to the Past was the game that delivered on the promise of the format.
3. Super Mario Bros. – On the other hand, the first game in the Mario series deserves special lauding. Not only did it teach a lot of us in the states how to play videogames, it made the platforming genre a bedrock foundation for every console to come after. While FPS titles tend to be the bread and butter of home gaming platforms today, sidescrolling and platforming were the original killer apps.
4. Resident Evil – A dog busts through a window and scares the pee out of you. How can it not be canon? Plus, the dialogue is a great example of why localization is so important.
5. Goldeneye – The first FPS that worked on a console, period. There would be no Halo/Killzone/FEAR/etc/etc without blurry, pixelated work of Bond on the N64.
6. EverQuest – UO and M59 may have come before, and WoW obviously has had a lot bigger impact, but there’s a reason I always call this the ‘grandaddy of MMOs’. EQ is worth playing if for no other reason than it gives you insight into the mind of almost every MMO designer to touch the genre since.
7. Baldur’s Gate – The ur-game for American RPGs. While there are a lot of different styles of American role-playing, the impact of BioWare on the US vision of cRPGs is impossible to overestimate.
8. SimCity – “So let me get this straight. This is a ‘game’ where you pretend to be mayor of a city, and you decide how much to tax people? And where to build industrial districts vs. commercial districts? Yyyyyeah, sounds awesome.” And yet, where are we today thanks to this game?
9. Grand Theft Auto III – Though I was tempted to put Morrowind here, GTA III had a broader impact on gamers and technically came out a year before. ‘Sandbox’ gameplay is ridiculously popular today (even where it shouldn’t be applied). This is the game that made that so.
10. Dragon Warrior – As Baldur’s Gate is to US gaming, so Square is to jRPGs. Dragon Warrior and (later) Final Fantasy defined an entire genre of videogames, all the way through to today.

And here’s my list of more modern plays:

1. BioShock – Stories are all about words or wooden voice acting! Atmosphere is the one thing everyone can agree the developers got right on this one. Plus, personally, I think ‘the twist’ in BioShock is one of the best ones in any videogame I’ve played … even if you did see it coming.
2. Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition – “We have this game that’s somewhat well known but not that many are playing it. Why don’t we figure out why that is and then … make it more fun?” Given that Wizards of the Coast and original D&D publisher TSR were once well-known for their hubris, this simple admittance that maybe they needed to re-examine their thinking was pretty huge. It’s a great test case for anyone with an existing product and fading interest.
3. Fallout 3 – Bethesda’s search for the perfect open-world sandbox came continues with this fantastic post-apoc game. Check out how they make the world seem ‘big, but not too big’. Plus, dig how storytelling can be embedded in a landscape as big as the DC Metroplex!
4. World of Warcraft – Play WoW to level 20. Think back on all the hum-drum, ho-hum activities you went through during your (estimating here) 4 or so hours of play. Now consider that the *reason* you think that’s ho-hum is *because* of WoW.
5. Left4Dead – Recent comments from Gabe Newell about Valve’s innovative highlights with this game is well worth appearing on a list of notable modern games. Not only is it a fantastic example of small-group social gaming, but the huge benefits of free updates after the original purchase are a big deal here.
6. Fable 2 – Hey, guess what? Fantasy RPGs don’t have to be inscrutable hard-to-control borefests! They can be fun, action-packed, even funny! A fantastic example of why accessibility and fun are becoming so important in gaming.
7. Tomb Raider: Underworld – I firmly believe that some sequels are good. Some franchises are worth revisting, some old games are worth remaking. The Tom Raider series continues to prove that I’m not crazy on that front.
8. Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise – Family-friendly games that make Dad and Mom just as happy as the kids? Buy, I wonder if those will sell well.
9. EVE Online – I personally don’t understand this game. This game isn’t ‘for’ me. But to deny that EVE is one of the most important online games in the MMO genre would be foolish. This game is *important*, and it’s getting moreso every day instead of less.
10. Little Big Planet – Despite the fact that this game isn’t as popular as I (and others) would like, LBP is a first step down a pretty amazing road. It’s a must-play.

While I’ve talked here before about how much I enjoy D&D Tiny Adventures, I’ve been stepping up my Facebook gaming of late generally. Mob Wars has impressed me quite a bit, though I think it’s kind of shameful how little context there is. It’s a bare-bones design where they ask you to pay money for their in-game currency, but I have absolutely no connection to the gameworld. There’s no fiction there, there’s no descriptions of the jobs I’m doing – It’s all design and no context.

I was struck by Tipa’s description of much the same problem in her work on her “Dire Bear” encounter. She’s basically creating an RPG run through the service’s API, giving you the same sort of ‘Tiny’ experience that you get on Facebook. She and her MMO-playing compatriot arrived at the “put the design in a fictive setting” almost immediately as far as I can tell. Why couldn’t the guys doing Mob Wars get that?

Obviously this is something I’ve been thinking about in a different way in the last week or so. I don’t know entirely what it is that I’ll be bringing to the DCUO team; you never know how a gig is going to work out until you get there. Especially with something like the development of a game. It’s an ensemble cast, a greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts creation built on the backs of people who are too dedicated to care that their spines might shatter before it gets good. I’ve learned all this just from my work as a blogger, but that’s about it. When I walk in the door at SOE later this week, I bring what I bring but I don’t know what will get used. I’m just hoping it’s enough.

As an aside, Tipa is a tremendous mind. She’s making a freaking RPG over twitter! Somebody hire that lady to do something tremendously awesome and game-related!