Tobold and Tipa have had lists of desired feature, while Lum laughs at a general one and Angus laughs at Lum. I’m kinda-sorta with Mark on all this finger-pointing: I think we have it pretty good nowadays. Most people want to play WoW, it seems, and that’s cool. There are going to be WoW clones launched in the next five years; many of them will be poorly done. You can launch an orcs n’ elves game without being WoW, though; WAR is definitely not going to be WoW, again.

I’m with a lot of the other bloggers insofar as wanting some different things out there. However, I think I’m in the minority by thinking that things are pretty much going okay. Not only do we have it pretty good right now, we’ve got it pretty good coming down the pipe. Today I want to lay out why now is such a great time for MMOGing, and why folks who want ’something different’ have absolutely no reason to complain about the future.

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Last week, I jumped into a Skype chat with some of the fine folks at Perpetual and we … ahem … attempted to have a conversation about their upcoming squad-based Massive game Gods and Heroes. Despite my recording setup working 100% fine just the night before, we had nothing but problems the day of. Thankfully the understanding team at Perpetual and the persistence of media liason Dana Jongewaard has resulted in what I think is a fairly interesting email interview.

Again, I went ‘big picture’ with questions. Below, Art Director Mike Hines, Game Systems Designer Travis George, and Community Manager Chris Launius hold forth on various game elements like setting, combat animations, the squad system, and the value of releasing with focused gameplay. I think that some of the team answers shed light on elements of the game I’ve been a bit murky on to this point, and I know that the folks over there seem to have a good sense of humor.

We also focused a lot of attention on our interactive—we refer to them as “paired”—moves, which allow the player to actually animate in conjunction with the enemy, allowing for much more dramatic and visceral animations. Centaurs can throw you in the air and impale you with a spear or you can grapple with an enemy Samnite gladiator and take him down with a number of different wrestling moves. There is a reason it’s called Greco-Roman wrestling!

Read on, and be enlightened.

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I’ve been enjoying coverage of Gods and Heroes recently and, of course, the beauty of the extraordinarily awesome trailer. I could have sworn I’d talked about the game here on the site before, but the only mention of the title the archives offered up was Perpetual’s staffing kerfluffle. So, I hit the search function and realized that I’m retarded. I don’t know what I was thinking at the end of my prognostication post last year, but ehh … maybe I was sleepy? I’d like to note for the record that GaH? Has nothing to fear. Even if it doesn’t go kersplodey, it’s going to cause a stir methinks.

Gamasutra has word that Perpetual is having some problems. So much so, in fact, that they’ve had to drop thirty-five employees.

As we achieve this major development milestone, a number of content production roles come to an end. The Gods & Heroes team remains over 80 talented people strong as we enter the final phase prior to launch — play-testing and tuning to deliver the highest quality game possible … Perpetual remains 100% committed to shipping a fantastic Gods & Heroes game and to continuing development of the much-anticipated Star Trek Online.” 

Hey, that’s awesome, guys, and I’m sure the game’ll be great. But umm … why did you have to cut those content production roles 10 days before Christmas? I’m just sayin’.