Wanted to drop in quick to offer a few links.

• Everything we’re writing at Massively about E3 can be found at the e3-2008 tag on the site.
• I particularly like our series on the DC Universe Online title.
• World of Warcraft’s new achievements look freaking awesome. Much better than I’d expected a WotLK’s launch.
• EA’s chief exec has confirmed the KOTOR MMO. About. Freaking. Time.

Tomorrow I’m heading to LA to help Massively and Joystiq cover the shredded remains of E3. Wish me luck.

As you might imagine, I’m unlikely to get a ton of blogging done here over the course of the week.

I also think I’m going to take a short break from MN – maybe just a week or two. Need to do some relaxing now that I’ve gotten my ‘out of the gate’ shakes down pat.

In the meantime I’ve got two podcasts in the can to fill out the time off. Just wanted to give you a heads up.

Hope you’re looking forward to a good week.

Briefly, I have some more complex thoughts on the Warhammer thing:

• I think this is a “good thing”. It’s tough, it’s hard, it’s … I’d even actually use the word violent. It certainly felt like the community as a whole took a sock to the gut with this news. Everyone was bopping along, going “yay WAR”, and then fell on their faces. Overall though, I think this is going to be good for the community in the long run.
• At the very least, this resets expectations. Spent some time with my family this evening, and there was a lot of talk about expectations vs. reality; when expectations are ‘greater’ than reality can provide, the result is unhappiness. By manually setting expectations for fans at a lower level, it guarantees that players will be (probably) less unhappy.
• It nails into the ground anyone who could have said they were trying to rush this out the door poorly made. They were so unhappy with some of their content that they cut it out with a knife rather than let it muddy the experience for players.
• This may be a new “high point” for in-development games, a developer publicly sacrificing the few so that the many might live. While this is very much flying in the face of the “we’ll work on it until its done”, it is just about the firmest commitment you could possibly see to “we won’t release it until it’s good.”

The only thing I’m still a little offput by is Jacobs’ statement that EA had nothing to do with this decision. I’m … umm … going to go out on a limb and call shenanigans on that. I’m willing to bet that *somewhere* behind this announcment is an EA exec looking at his watch and tapping his foot in cartoon-like impatience.

Tip of the hat to the folks at Mythic Entertainment. I really hope this works out the way you guys want it, and I hope that the fan community continues to show the patience it has in the last 48 hours or so. It really does seem like the dedicated fans are rallying to the game … we just need to hear more about the particulars.

Thanks.

Update: There are a ton of folks coming out on the side of the Mythic team, which is really heartening to see. I agree that it’s better to ship with fewer, better features. I agree 100%. I’m still stuck on the idea that if they wanted to they could hold off until early next year and get those classes in. Would it ultimately matter? Does it matter that the “Orcs” only has one Orc class? Does it matter Empire and the DEs don’t have a tank?

In the long run probably not. To be honest I think part of the shock is that it’s randomly inserted into an interview with a website. Mark does a podcast for the crafting system but not this? :/

Looking forward to hearing the whys and wherefores behind this.

–

This is … this is really frustrating. I don’t see this as a good thing. Sorry, I’m just dissapointed. You say for months and months that you won’t release it until its ready, and then you drop this on us:

“A number of months ago,” Jacobs began, “we sat down and looked at where we were with our Capital Cities and we looked at what we were doing with Altdorf and Inevitable, we looked at the Greenskin home, the Dwarf home and we went ‘there’s an awful lot to do here and there are some issues‘.” There was something missing. It wasn’t enough fun, it wasn’t interesting enough, it wasn’t “alive” enough.  From there, the team was faced with a choice. They could either keep going down that path, working on all six cities and trying to get them finished before launch or make the hard decision to shelve four of the cities until post-launch and make sure that Altdorf and Inevitable were as full and rich as their design had intended. Mythic chose the latter. “we decided to focus our energies on two capital cities; one for Order and one for Destruction, and make them fabulous, said Jacobs. “Not good, not great, but fabulous.”

And:

“We tried,” Jacobs said, “we tried to see if we could make them better and we just couldn’t make them great. So we had a choice. Do we put in some non-great careers just because they are iconic, or we cut them out and put them in post-launch if we can get them right, or do we not put them in at all?” In the end, whether it’s the second or the third option is still unknown.

The four careers that are going may surprise players (and even includes one of Marks personal favorites). The list is as follows:
Choppa (Greenskin)
Hammerer (Dwarf)
Blackguard (Dark Elf)
Knight of the Blazing Sun (Empire)

This means the removal of two tanks and two melee DPS classes.  “I wish we didn’t have to do it,” Mark said, “I really do. Unlike the capital cities [which provided a silver lining in the end], I can honestly say that I really wish we didn’t have to cut them out, but it’s better for them to be cut out than to have classes that aren’t great and that we would spend more time trying to make them great post-launch than we should have to.”

I just … I don’t really have any constructive things to say about this, because it’s so fresh. More on this later, I’m sure.

Gamers with Jobs Conference Call Episode 92 – July 9th, 2008

A New Audio Sponsor From Mick Mize, Playing D&D 4.0 Online, The Cross-Pollination of RPG Gaming, Diablo III, Your Emails and more!

This week Michael Zenke joins us as we educate our listeners in the finer points of pen and paper roleplaying games, the crossover with video gaming and what kind of D&D 4.0 games we’d like to see. We also tackle some saucy new emails on Spore, Diablo III, tossing rabbit’s salad and more.

As I mentioned yesterday, I transferred from a PvP server (Dark Iron) to a PvE server (Malfurion) over the weekend. Given my familiarity with the PvP ruleset, I decided to stay flagged on Malfurion. In my mind it was purely a convenience element. Running Thrallmar tokens is a lot easier when you can just ride up to the point and cap without thinking about it. I’ll also be honest: it was sort of a point of pride. I made it 64 levels on a PvP server. Sometimes, that was hard. It was a challenge. It’s not nearly as big a deal as a lot of people make it out to be, but STV was a monkey-in-a-barrel-of-pain.

Folks who have walked around flagged on a PvE server are now laughing at me because they know what’s coming. Yup: opposing faction tards wander up behind me, stealth-flag, and gank me. Usually while I’m fighting a mob. The act of wandering past an opposing faction player, killable, is an everyday occurance for a PvP server player. You see red names every day. My personal view was one of honor: I don’t attack lower levels unless they attack me first. Anything within a few levels of me is fair game, and avatars my level and higher are very much fair game.

And that’s just me, right? I got ganked by 70s all the time, never understood it but never begrudged it. There was no value to the kill, but the game mechanics allowed it. Fair game, no harm no foul. Only got corpse-camped once, and I managed to turn the tables quite deliciously on my harasser. (Hint: Never give  a Subtlety Rogue a second chance. Preparation and Premeditation are a bitch.)

In just four days on my new PvE server I was constantly being ganked by people who weren’t just PvPing – they were being assholes. One Druid stealth-flagged so obviously I even knew it was coming. She saw me questing, ran around a hill, and when she came back she was red-named. I was in the middle of a fight, of course, and so her level 70 moonfire spam killed me pretty much straight off. No fight, no fighting chance and (most importantly) no warning to me that she was a threat.

In other words, PvP on a PvE server is a losing proposition. It’s a joke, it’s “care-bear” nonsense. When there’s no realistic consequence to your actions (calling in reinforcements, logging on a higher-level character) there’s no point to engaging in it. So now my name is a boring shade of blue, just like everyone else’s. I can tell you from personal experience that it was far less aggravating being PvP flagged on a PvP server that it was being PvP flagged on a PvE server.

Bit surprising, and all in all dissapointing.

Over the past few weeks or so, I’ve been really enjoying a sideline business in EverQuest 2 Void Storm chasing. Fire Festival blossoms were a ton of fun too, don’t get me wrong, but I have a lot of appreciation for what SOE’s put out there as just the first part in a multi-month live event. The Void Storms supposedly tie into the next EQ2 expansion. I imagine they presage a wider-scale invasion … leading up to a full-on assault for the expansion proper? One can only hope!

Let me put it this way: if this is the kind of live event we can expect for the rest of the year, SOE is definitely going to be looking at an upswing in subscriptions. The event itself is simple enough: grab a pair of goggles, go find a storm, free the souls besotted by the void, kill a few beasts, and head back to the city. There’s a quest required to get the goggles and anti-void potion, and the quest is simple as dirt: 10 saved souls for a win. Each completed quest nets you a token.

These tokens can be turned in to a vendor very nearby to where you obtain the quest. If you pick your zone right, you can make the run to the storms and back lightning fast. You should keep in mind, basically, that the storms level-adjust themselves to your character. IE: doesn’t matter what zone you go to, you can complete the quest and get your tokens. You’ll only need 18 to get the full set of appearance armor – even fewer if you just want a nice robe or the friendly goblin companion pet.

It’s so simple, but still fun, an easy-to-complete enterprise that just begs for on-the-spot grouping. It’s the kind of thing I’m extremely hopeful we’ll see more of in the expansion – meta currencies for concrete rewards, ways to encourage players to get together in the short term as well as long term.

Check below the cut for a few videos and screenshots from my time with the live event content.
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