I’m not sure I’ve ever mentioned it here, but one of my oldest friends is the awesome dude who came up with Chronotron, one of the very first PAX 10 highlighted games! Joe and a few of our other friends are out in Seattle right now talking up the game at their floor kiosk, and meanwhile an interview he did with X-Play has dropped on the web! That’s embedded below. He was also interviewed in one of our local newspapers, the Isthmus, and you can find that piece up on the Isthmus website over here.

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[Well, this is interesting - longtime GSW friend and MMO fiend Michael Zenke has been talking to some of the folks at Red 5 - recipient of almost $20 million in VC to make what is presumably meant to be a WoW-beating MMO - and they have some interesting, high-level thoughts about persistent online worlds. Can they pull it off? We'll see!]

Ed Stark and Dave Williams are veterans of the tabletop gaming industry. Between the two they’ve had a hand in publishing major revamps of pen and paper roleplaying systems, popular trading card games, and a number of board games.

Between the two they’ve had a hand in the revamp of Dungeons and Dragons to the 3.0 rule set, the Legend of the Five Rings RPG, the West End Star Wars Roleplaying game, and numerous card- and board- games.

Last year they joined the still-running-silent, VC-backed MMO developer Red 5, based out of Orange County, California – the World Of Warcraft veteran-founded company has been in existence since 2005, has $18.5 million in backing from Benchmark Capital and Sierra Ventures, and most recently announced former Oracle exec Michael Weingartner joining the firm as VP of engineering.

I’m going to go ahead and weigh in on the new Wrath of the Lich King cinematic as a big mistake on Blizzard’s part. Embedded below the cut are all three of their opening movies. Feel free to go watch them all so you know what I’m talking about; they’re each less than five minutes.

The two earlier movies do a fantastic job of highlighting the central characters of the game: the player races. The original movie is particularly evocative, in fact, because it focuses on the game’s lore and establishing a mood, something the second trailer starts to do but then abandons a bit to show players, essentially, having a bit of fun. The BC trailer is still effective, though, because it conveys the importance of Illidan to the whole Outlands experience. In some ways he’s ‘the reason’ that players are headed out there in the first place, so putting him front and center makes sense.

Now, this is equally (if not moreso) true with Arthas, Northrend, and the Lich King expansion, but they’ve made the new trailer entirely about Arthas. I think this is a pretty clear mistake – that whole bit with the Front Wyrm and the Death Knight army is cool, but they should have included another minute or so of cinema time featuring PCs doing their thing to tie the game back to the most important characters: ours.

We have still not seen anywhere near every race/class combo in the cinematics, which is just weird. They have the perfect opportunity to silence the haters and get some gnomes in a cinematic, and they pass that by. Damn weird. I’m still looking forward to seeing an Undead that’s not a ‘caster in one of those things …

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I’ve gotten a lot of strange looks and sidelong glances for not tackling Warhammer here on the site.

My take on the game is up at Massively, in sort of condensed format.

In short, Warhammer is just like every other MMO. It’s brimming with potential. It’s extraordinarily good at some things, bad at others, and will perpetually need to be finished. It’s not the be-all end-all of the genre, and it’s almost certainly not a “WoW Killer.”

At the end of Beta, though, Warhammer Online is a game that the men and women at Mythic Entertainment can be proud of. It’s an extremely well-produced testament to the IP. It’s a visceral expression of the phrase “War is Everwhere.” And, most importantly, it is a fun game.

You can also hear my opinions on the game in Massively Speaking #19, and Brent’s got a barn-burner of a podcast coming that will feature my voice on this subject as well.

As I noted a bit back my life is a bit weirdy at the moment. Apologies for the sparse posting. Haven’t blogfaded – just need some time off. I’ll let you know how it all turns out.

Gamers with Jobs Conference Call Special Edition – August 14, 2008
D&D 4th Edition design, reception, lessons learned, plans for D&D Insider and more!

Live (sort of) from GenCon, Michael Zenke and Julian Murdoch interview the core design team from Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition.

On this first day of the biggest Role Playing event of the year, Mike Mearls, Lead Designer, Scott Rouse, Senior Brand Manager, and Rob Heinsoo, Lead Mechanical Game Designer from Wizards of the coast, sit down with us to talk about design philosophy, beta testing, the future of D&D Insider and what lies ahead. We dig deep, getting into what’s worked, what’s been a surprise, and what lessons they’ve learned along the way.

This week for MMOG Nation Broadcast episode 14, Michael gets to ’sit’ down with one of his blogging idols, Mr. Tim Dale of the Van Hemlock blog and podcast! Michael and Tim find themselves in most unusual circumstances: the depths of a fetid and swampy graveyard in the middle of the night! They’re there to go graverobbing, pulling out the bits they want and leaving the rest to rot. The subjects of their graverobbing attentions?

Asheron’s Call 2
Mythica
Auto Assault
Gods and Heroes

Join us for some retrospectives on gameworlds that have gone to a better place …

Music:
“Re: Your Brains”, Jonathan Coulton. Thing a Week, Week Four. Used without permission, but I’d like to think he wouldn’t mind.