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!

The first strip in the brand-new webcomic Grinders is live on the Massively.com site! Webcomic artist Lem has teamed up with the MMO-happy crew to create a new weekly series based on the stories and characters of real MMO players. It sounds like a fantastic idea, and I’m really hopeful it takes off. Go submit your MMO stories to Lemmy and see them archived in ink!

It looks like we have a sense now of what the year is going to look like for MMO gamers. Free Realms is dropping later this spring, with what sounds like a twofer following in June. Champions and Jumpgate letting loose at the start of the summer is sure to give younger MMO gamers with some downtime plenty to do. Then capping off the year we’ll be seeing Aion on this side of the world. That’s about all the MMOs I expected to see release this year, with a pretty good spread. You have to sort of worry about two games hitting live service in the same month.

That said, it’s questionable how much overlap the JGE and Champs audiences will have. And, as Massively points out, Eurogamer’s announcement of Champions’ release date hasn’t been confirmed by Cryptic yet.

Just in case you need some background:

Free Realms: SOE’s first free-to-play title, a whimsical fantasy game aimed at tweens and families.
Champions Online: Cryptic’s second go at a superhero MMO, based on the tabletop RPG license. Will build on City of Heroes innovations and feature more physicality in the world.
Jumpgate Evolution: Netdevil’s long-in-development space shooter, a persistent online successor to games like Wing Commander.
Aion: A fantasy game from NCsoft featuring a unique background story and playable characters with the ability to fly.

I’d say it’s a busy year for MMOs, but the genre’s become something altogether different in the last few years. I expect most years we’re going to be looking at a number of big-picture releases, along with numerous smaller entries into the field. These AAA titles are going to be joined in 2009 by numerous free-to-play games and indie offerings; already this year we’re seeing the relaunch of Three Rings’ Bang! Howdy.

It’s awesome, and highly encouraging, to see the genre explode like this. I can’t wait to see what the industry looks like at the end of the year (thought I’m pumped that Free Realms is going live so soon!)

I’m going to put up a few more posts over the next week before I head out of town. That’s when I’ll be going radio silent, and I’ll make sure to mention it when I do.

For today though I just wanted to thank you. The outpouring of support in the comments, on Twitter, and on LinkedIn from my co-workers was … kind of overwhelming.

I greatly appreciate it, and I hope that my efforts will prove equal to the measure of your kindness as I try to find my way in a new career.

Many thanks.

There’s a lot I could say, enough to fill many additional posts and bore the crap out of you. Suffice it to say, my life is changing and it’s all a bit surprising.

This month will mark the end of my tenure as managing editor for Massively.com, and a conclusion to my career as a games journalist. I have been offered, and accepted, a position as a game designer at the SOE-Austin studio. I’ll be working on the DC Universe Online project.

As a result of this new position my wife and I will be moving to Austin, Texas at the end of the month. We’ll be there in about two weeks, actually.

I sat in on the Gamers With Jobs Conference Call for this week, and talked a bit about this newness there too. Feel free to listen in.

Please be aware: Massively is not closing. This isn’t the result of a cutback, I haven’t been fired, the site is 100% awesome. In fact, Shawn Schuster is going to be taking over as the Managing Editor of the site. As a reader of the site as well as a blogger there, I’m super pumped about Shawn running the show. He’s a top-notch professional and a fantastic writer. I’m really looking forward to see what he does for the site.

So what does this mean? Well, I’m going to be stepping away from MMOG Nation for a few months while I completely reorient my life. There’s no reason I can’t keep blogging here, just have to aim for a civil tone and probably not do a lot of talking about specific games. Though I offer no guarantees I’m not going to gush over Free Realms.

And of course, I won’t be done podcasting. I won’t be on Massively Speaking every week, but I’ll try to drop in on SUWT and GWJCC if they’ll have me.

Feel free to drop questions in the comments, I’ll try to answer as best I can. And thanks, as always, for reading.

In prepping for a new campaign I’m working on (a 4E translation of the Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path from Paizo), I’ve been trying to make use of the “Bonus Tools” offered by Wizards of the Coast. I say trying because, frankly, they’re kind of embarrassing. I developed web-based applications in college that had better functionality than some of these things; at the least they were more user-friendly.

Encounter Creator

• Incredibly intensive application for a Flash product; can’t run it on my laptop.
• Tons of monsters aren’t tagged properly, resulting in the sorting mechanisms being useless.
• Given that the box of monsters is super full because of this, the slider mechanism needs to be helpful; it’s not. It’s far too twitchy. Clicking once on the ‘down’ or up arrows on the slider doesn’t work. The mouse needs to be held down and the monsters move slowly.
• All options are dropdown boxes, not checkboxes, so you can only sort on one descriptor at a time (EITHER Solo, Elite, Minion, or Standard, not more than one descriptor.)
• There is not a single piece of information about their stats displayed in this application. All we know about each monster is what tags they deigned to apply to them. You have to have the compendium open at the same time to make it useful.
• There’s no way to specify if you want a Solo or Elite version of any of the monsters that aren’t already specified that way. You also can’t apply Elite templates to any monsters.

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I didn’t embed the Tython video from BioWare last week, but I meant to. I actually took a couple days to watch it because the end of my week was busy and hectic; when I did my jaw dropped. I mean, dropped open. Physically, with distance. To say that it’s impressive is an enormous understatement. It’s gripping, it’s compelling, it yanks you off your feet. I have a comparison for you to watch. Pay attention to everything in the Old Republic video, of course, but look at how much fun the actual in-game footage looks too.
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