Syp was one of the many, many people to write a post aimed at my interview with Richard Bartle at Massively. Unlike most of those other people, though, Syp followed that up with a post clarifying Dr. Bartle’s responses. In the face of clarification, Sype’s own reaction is very well-thought out.

“I agree that we’re on the same side of wanting MMOs to improve and jump forward, but I think you’re being far too harsh on the current crop of games in an industry that is still in its baby phase. Evolutionary development is how most forms of entertainment grow — the movie industry had a few revolutionary jumps, but by and large, most of it was evolutionary in nature … Why this irks us in the Warhammer community is that it appeared as if you were quickly dismissive of WAR as having the “same old patterns” without taking into account the features and style of gameplay that has either never been done before or has been done poorly in this field — the Tome of Knowledge, Realm vs. Realm conflict, Public Quests, Living Cities, Living Guilds, etc.”

This was some great blogging, Syp. I added the Waagh blog to my blogroll just last week, and this week I’m really glad I did.

I was noodling around the internets for something today and I remembered to look up Carrie Gouskos’ blog. She’s the (fantastic) Tome of Knowledge designer with the EA Mythic folks, hard at work on Warhammer Online. She used to be a Gamespotter before she jumped into the design field, and so she knows the interview gig from both sides of the chair. She paid me a tremendous compliment in a blog post at the end of last month, which I will share with you now:

I have to say this week I gave probably my favorite interview ever to Mike from Massively. Instead of asking me to rehash the features in the Tome (he had done his homework), he wanted me to talk about passion and emotion in game development. He wanted me to talk about Xbox 360 achievement points. I think his concept for that article serves the fans in a lot more ways than simply a bullet point of feature items we’re working on and whether or not *I* think they’re going to be cool. To me, it feels like that’s the kind of conversation you should be having at preview time, what are the developers working on and what are their objectives? Who are they trying to attract and how have they accomplished it? Even using in-game examples to show off how they’re achieving those goals. Leave the excessive use of adjectives and the KILLING MY SOUL for the reviews.

Every once in a while somebody says something that makes all of this worth it. Thanks, Carrie.

Thursday and Friday I was in Virginia visiting with the fine folks at EA Mythic. Got the full rundown on pretty much everything they’re willing to show right now about Warhammer Online. I’ll admit it: I was really impressed. The Public Quest system, RvR, Keeps … I was already enthused about all that stuff before I went. But, from what I saw, it really works.

The game also looks really good. Past screenshots of the game I’ve seen, even videos, have been a bit mediocre. The reason is pretty simple: they don’t have final lighting in the game. The current Beta has an intermediary lighting component that looks much better than most of the public screenshots. The final lighting paradigm (which is supposed to go in sometime in June) will be even better looking.

This weekend I’m spending pretty much every waking hour translating the 15+ hours of audio and experiences I gathered into blog posts. All of the content from the trip will be available at Massively under this tag: massively-goes-to-war. So far I’ve got up an interview with Jeff Hickman, one with Senior Designer Dan Enright, and a chat with Carrie Gouskos about the Tome of Knowledge.

Upcoming for this week: RvR, Keeps, Scenarios, the Empire/Chaos cities, Guilds, Classes, etc, etc, etc …

Big stuff today on Massively from me. My fingers hurt.

• Not technically from today, but instead earlier this week, a fun retrospective on the two most recent Guild Wars boxes.
• Catching up with Warhammer. I sat in on another one of those EA Mythic conference calls, which you may recall from here on the site. Made me a little sad not to be putting it up here. Times they are a changin’, huh?
• Lots of AoC stuff on the site today, as the NDA dropped for press folks. I put in a sort of thousand-foot view on the game, and a heaping pile of videos and screenshots.
• It’s also a Thursday, so Massively Speaking #3 went up. Yay for consistency! #5 or bust!

Massively Speaking Episode 2 runs down news and features from Massively.com for the week of April 14th-20th. Shawn and Michael are joined by blogging regulars Akela Talamasca and Jonathan Northwood to talk about the next LOTRO Book, the Epic Villain Archetype video, and (of course) Age of Conan!

Get the podcast:
[RSS] Add the Massively Speaking Podcast feed to your RSS aggregator.
[Digg] Like the show? Digg it.
[MP3] Download the MP3 directly.

So today was a big day for me, in a good way.

• The first Massively Speaking podcast went up on the website. No RSS feed or iTunes yet, but there will be. Go check it out, I think it went really well for a first offering. Yes, I still have a podcast here. Expect to hear from that feed again soon.
• We had an amazing day in general on the site. A video exclusive, a couple of great features; Cameron continues to rock so hard it hurts. I was generally very proud to be working at Massively today.
• I won not one, not two, but three Alterac Valley rounds. Warsong Gulch is this weekend, and I’m looking forward to it. Horde pwns our battlegroup in the bracket Hackworth is in right now.
• Today was also my last day at Slashdot.org. It’s like, for real now. My Facebook page says so and everything. You know it’s serious. Since I’m not going to have a lot of opportunities to talk about my time with the site, I’ll say this: Working at Slashdot was a singular experience. I’m really glad I had the opportunity to do it. I’m thankful to Rob Malda and the other editors for giving me the chance to do it. I feel lucky that I can say I participated in a site that’s – kinda – a part of Internet history.
• Final Score: 12761 posts. That’s about 11 a day over the course of three years.

Hope your day was good too, blog readers.

If you’re reading me, I’m hopeful that you’re familiar with the fantastic work of Cameron Sorden. His Random Battle blog is a constant source of thought-provoking commentary on Massive games. I don’t always agree with what he has to say, but Cameron always has a really great point to get across.

Given how much I appreciate his writing, I’m positively ecstatic to relate that he’s writing at a new website. Where, you ask? How about Massively?

Cameron’s first blog post went up today, touching on the tutorial experience in the MMO genre.

There’s no game tutorial that comes in, holds your hand, and says, “Hey, pal. You’re going to need to use frost trap effectively in the end game. Let’s practice it a little until you get the hang of it.” Most MMOGs just teach you the bare-bones basics of the game (like running, moving, and auto-attack) before they abandon you to the wild. You’re expected to figure out the rest on your own, and eventually to hit up sites like Elitist Jerks or the World of Warcraft class forums to make sure that you’re being all that you can be. Is this necessarily the best way to do things, though?

If you like Cam’s MMO commentary, make sure to subscribe to Massively. Cameron’s almost-daily posts on the topic are now going to be hosted at the site, providing even more awesomesauce to the kettle of cool we’re stewing over there.