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Some shiny for your Tuesday. Wonderland has up a link to a video demonstration of independent project ‘Infinity’. This space game will apparently allow for seamless atmosphere-vacuum transitions. Nice. Meanwhile, Dark and Light is finally gearing up for launch. Considering I was reporting on this game back in my MMORPGDot days, that’s really nice to hear. It’s also nice to see. Their screenshot galleries are sites to behold.

Well, when they release the list of server names, you know they’re close to launch. Yes, next week Dungeons and Dragons online joins the Post World of Warcraft MMO market. This is essentially the first big launch since EQ2 and WoW came on the scene around Christmas of 2004. City of Villains is doing quite well, as far as I know, but I view that as an expansion to CoH more than anything else. This is the first new IP trail blazing that’s been tried. I know that there is interest, as I’ve already heard talk about the beta in World of Warcraft City chat, and the leader of my guild has already quit to form a similar organization in DDO.

I don’t think he should have bothered. My impressions from the DDO Beta will form the basis for a launch-week review on Slashdot, but here is my very cynical two cents.

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Update: Interesting comment down below the cut. If it was indeed all meant in good fun, it’s a pretty good joke. More player control is something I and my chums have jawwed about often when we talk of the problems facing the MMOG industry.

Update: The guild has come back with the claim that it was all a joke. I amend my statement to ‘clueless asshats with no backbone’.

Kotaku linked to a demand by ‘The Imperial Order’ on the Detheroc server. If this is the same TIO I knew from SWG, this surprises me not at all. They’re demanding 5000 gold pieces before they bang the gong and release the AQ content. All so they can be ‘remembered’. I’m not dignifying this with a Slashdot post, but I’m going to record the post here for posterity. The post is after the cut.

I’m just going to go ahead and call these guys ‘clueless asshats of the day’.

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On Tuesday, James Mielke put up the 44th article in his ongoing ‘My Life in Vana’diel’ column. I’d like to expend a few words talking about the series, which is far and away my favorite ongoing column. Milky never fails to entertain with the tales of the Roundabouts.What I enjoy most is his ability to sum up the community aspect of Massive Gaming. A lot of the conversation I read about MMOGs centers around the technical, the player whine, or the academic. Milky does a little of all of that, but primarily he is getting across what it’s like to be in a place and in a time. What he offers is a slice of life, in a community inside Final Fantasy XI.

In the presence of dozens of Dynamis veterans, learning the ropes of a successful Dynamis in both San d’Oria and Windurst (Windy is considered the hardest of the initial four Dynamises) proved to be insightful, rather than frightful. These guys are all business and it shows in the clean and efficient manner in which they dissect each instance. Dynamis-San d’Oria can be tricky, especially when you run into the flotilla of Summoners with their avatars out. Any one of those avatars has the ability to one-shot the whole alliance with an Astral Flow, but with Makkini at the front along with his pulling party of BLMs and mages, sleeping them was little trouble. Slowly but surely we made our way through the thoroughfare of South San d’Oria, dispatching the various Vanguards we encountered (Hawkers and Dollmasters - BSTs and SMNs - were the most important), and blowing up the time-extending Serjeant Tombstones and Voidstreaker Butchnotches as we needed.

I highly recommend reading along with the series, which begins a long, long time and many, many levels ago.

Why not try a trifecta approach?

1. Put a well-known industry veteran, who happens to be an employee, up for interview on your philosophy.
2. Make sweeping changes to your games and offer a free way to play one of your games indefinately in a limited fashion.
3. Offer a bundle package that offers all of your games in one, along with 30 day trial periods for all of them.

While I don’t see this overcoming the World of Warcraft wall, there is no question SOE has deployed the big guns in an attempt to crack it.

Terra Nova has a discussion up about Religion in Massive spaces.

But if we open the door for gameplay with a religious component, is it desirable or even possible to keep the religions in an MMO entirely fantastic?  If a group of players want to set up an guild/organization that’s avowedly Christian or Hindu, or one which has no relationship to any actual religion, is there any reason not to allow it?