So. Just sat through another Warhammer conference call. I’m sorry if this is turning into a WAR fansite, but their PR push is just so hilarious to listen to.

I can still honestly say - I have concerns about the game. Above and beyond, as a giant MMOG nerd, their high concept stuff sounds really, really interesting. I’m very much looking forward to the game, while still being a bit skeptical that this can be put out before the end of the year. As always, we shall see. Read on below for more from the EA Mythic show, details on the Empire/Chaos war, Jeff Hickman’s extremely quotable quote, and a lot of talk about the Disc of Tzeentch.

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Wow. You know, I generally respect the folks at MMORPG.com. My friend Alan made a comment a short while back, when I posted a link to one of their features, bagging on them for their cookies and such. But ehh … yeah. Way not to work guys. They have a feature up examining Vista compatibility with Massive games. An excellent idea in this troublesome post-launch age. A great idea, except that this is the huge list of titles they try:

1. WoW
2. EQ2
3. Guild Wars
4. Vanguard.

Wow. I imagine it must have been really hard to get a copy of CoH/CoV, SWG, Planetside, EQ Live, DAoC, Puzzle Pirates, ATITD, Lineage, Lineage II, Auto Assault, Asheron’s Call, DDO, and FFXI at the MMORPG.com testing labs, huh? Way to really get the whole field there, guys.

If there’s one genre I think that cross-platform play is well suited for, it’s Massive games. FFXI can now be played from three separate platforms, and it sounds like they’d be willing to take it to more doorsteps if there was interest. It’s no surprise then that Age of Conan might be a 360/PC crossplay title.

Revealing that the developer is “toying around with many different solutions” to cross-platform action, Conan product manger Erling Ellingsen went on to explain possible options in an interview to be published shortly.

“…one is having some shared servers and some servers that are not shared - simply to give players the freedom of choice. What solution we actually do end up with is something we will have to reveal later”. 

I don’t know why this is even that much of an issue. I can move around Tamriel just as smoothly on the 360 as I did on my PC, and Oblivion’s controls are fairly close to what you’d see in your average MMOG. I actually much prefer spellcasting on the 360, as an aside; the d-pad is ideally suited to hotkeying.  I’m sure there are technical hurdles to overcome here, but I don’t see why we can’t get more of these kinds of happy occurances in the future.

Btw: Blizzard, I’m looking at you. It’s cool if you don’t want to port WoW, but I call shenanigans on ‘it can’t be done’. Bah.

The house that Sony built just keeps on trucking. With little fanfare and quiet competence, the thirteenth expansion to the original EverQuest went online today. Buried Sea adds pirate ships, underwater zones, and something that sounds a lot like technology from the Transformers.

The Buried Sea introduces players to a new type of inventory slot called a Power Source which is used for new equipment available in the expansion, known as an Energeian Power Source. Energeian Power Sources are similar to a magical battery and come in a variety of types such as: fire, cold and light.

More than meets the eye, indeed. While the new content added at the high end will no doubt be welcomed by players, in my opinion the best stuff added by the expansion is the Fellowship and guild support. Guild banners: awesome. Fellowships: even more awesomer.

Fellowships are basically mini-guilds, a formal recognition of a regular group. As someone who is still having a lot of fun playing in one of those, I’d like to request that this be added to EQ2 asap!

On a semi-related note, EQOA is celebrating four years of existence. Keen … but um, realistically how many people are still playing?

Via Brenlo’s World, a short Gamespot blurb that indicates an EverQuest movie is in the works.

[Yair] Landau also hinted the Metal Gear Solid movie may just be the beginning. “There are other games we are looking to develop,” the executive said. “We’re working with one of my favorite producers right now on an idea for an EverQuest movie.” The producer was apparently of such stature that Landau declined to name him. “I’ll let him disclose that,” he said cryptically.

Erm. Okay. Nicely … nicely … how do I say this nicely ….

While I understand and respect the idea of growing the EverQuest brand via movies and other media, it is my considered opinion that ‘EverQuest: the Movie’ is a bad move from a customer loyalty perspective. There’s little possibility such a thing would live up to expectations of players and fans of the game, and the derision you would recieve from a hokey fantasy movie with the EQ name attached is not worth contemplating.

…

Or: Bwahahahahahahahaha. An EQ movie would really really suck.

MMOG Nation column up at GameSetWatch, a lot faster than I expected actually. I uhh, kind of went off on a rant. Sorry if it gets a little incoherent/preachy in there. After having an entire day or so to think about SOE’s White Paper, I decided the most topical thing for this week would be to get all of my brainstem swirlings out onto the virtual page.

Gaming is a hobby. I take it very seriously, as do a number of other people, but gaming is a big part of my job. For most players, for the average player, gaming is supposed to be about having fun. How is a player supposed to have fun if the same have/have-not bull that makes ‘real life’ so challenging intrudes on the game world? How will a casual player feel if he knows ‘all he needs to do’ is drop 50 bucks and he can be playing with his friends again? These kinds of questions are precisely why a lot of people play Massive games in the first place. Force real-world economics on most Massive players, and I think they’ll respond by just leaving.

I’d love to hear from folks what they think. Both on GSW and over in the comments on Raph’s site, I let my lid flip a little bit. I just … blarg. I love the business side of games as much as the next blogger/editor/journo/gamer person, but at the end of the day these vast virtual environments are nothing more than diversions meant to make people happy. Anything that gets in the way of that is (IMHO) academic, and I feel like sometimes that doesn’t get said enough.

Do you know how much SOE’s Station Exchange made in its first year of trading? Well, you should, becuase there’s this great story up on Gamasutra talking all about it. This is some crazy, crazy stuff. Millions of dollars flowed through the system as a whole, a single plat averaged about seven bucks in the first year the service was live, and individuals made upwards of $35,000 just from sales on the Exchange. Some people are making their livelihood from hiding in SOE’s skirts. Cray-zee.

My favorite section of info was the breakdown of money by character race/class:

Character auctions fetched as high as $2,000 for a single character, and none of the top 20 character auctions went for less than $1,000. All of the most valuable characters were one form of elf or another, the most-played set of races in the game. Character class did not apparently figure as much into sale price, though the most popular class (the Berserker) drew considerably more money over the course of the year than some other classes. 

Some good stuff here, go check it out.