– Left to right, top to bottom -

1.) BioShock. A momentous moment in the game, that thankfully I could take a snap of without spoiling anything. I took a snap right after this that was a spoiler, of course.

2.) This is the strange non-crazy illithid in one of the House areas. I think his name is ‘Bob’ or something.

3.) The special ’social’ area behind the scenes in EverQuest II has a piano with its own built-in dancers.They’re wacky haflings named after some of the community folks, lest I’m mistaken.

4.) I dunno why I took this screencap; I just really liked the way this lizard was dressed.

5.) From one of the test houses, this great tent and a pair of animated-pet decorated bed was quite a treat. Along the walls were pretty much every one of the heritage quest weapons. Awesome, amazing example of EQ2’s housing.

6.) I really really have wanted to like the offerings in the EQ2 marketplace, and until this awesome spellcasting outfit dropped in I hadn’t. Want. Want want want. Not want at $10. But want.

7.) Err. Sometimes when I’m watching stuff on iTunes I catch snapshots because my cap button is a weird one. What can I say, I actually like Clone Wars.

8.) One of the early moments in the dwarf starting quest in LotRO. Gandalf kicks a cave troll to the curb, and looks really hawt doing it.

9.) The amazing-fantastico Podcasters of Bree! L to R, Back to front. Brent, Darren, Jonathan, Adam, Michael, Craig.

10.) This is what it looks like to podcast with the guys from the Gamers with Jobs crew. This is another of those accidental screencaps that turned out so nicely I kept it.

11.) This is me as Amak sitting in the Theed square during the SWG Fifth Anniversary celebration.

12.) I think this is from the second hub in the High Elf area in Warhammer Online. I love the ‘destroyed beauty’ look that WAR goes with in a lot of places. Very effective.

13.) And yet, the regalness of the intact bits are pretty awesome too. This is from the Imperial City, near the library.

14.) I love this graphical bug. Huge pets are just so awesome. This Rex is enormous compared to the little peeps.

15.) I love the theme in the Nethers. Amazing, amazing zone. I don’t understand why most folks don’t like this one.

16.) The, um, Dark Lady’s new skin. A lot to like, and not just for the obvious reasons. Check out that bow!

17.) I actually really like the WoW comic. It’s popcorn fun, and awesome to see events from the comic show up in game.

18.) A quick cap from the world event that presaged Wrath of the Lich King’s release.

19.) My favorite place in the whole wide game! Gjalerbron all the way. Howling Fjord or bust.

20.) Speaking of which, this central area is majestically amazing no matter where you’re standing.

21.) I … just like penguins. Especially these penguin models. Squak!

I finished up another gallery I thought you might find interesting to take a look at. This one was shot the same week as AGDC 2008, just a day after the conference ended. Myself and Elizabeth from Massively took a good hard look at DC Universe Online, and I shot a bunch of fun pictures to accompany the visit. Check out our trip to SOE Austin.

The loss of beast loyalty is NOT new, it just became apparent in GU5 due to a bug. A bug that we have now fixed. To get an understanding on how this wasn’t originally communicated to Beast Masters we have to do a little internal history lesson. Four score and seven something something…

Blixtev and company started working on an ambitious chapter that we called Beast Mastery. During this time we had X amount of designers, programmers, and artists to start our brainstorms/documentation phases.

During the weeks that followed designers, programmers, and artists started to leave the project. Where they went is irrelevant. What IS relevant is the fact that other designers, programmers, and artists had pick up the torch where the others left off. As well as finish their own tasks. For some of those tasks we inherited, we were under the impression that the system/item was done, and just needed bug fixes/polishes. I will freely admit that I was the 3rd designer to touch loyalty/happiness pre chapter 6 launch. When I got this assigned to me, it was assigned as a “fix the bugs that come in, the system is done”. So that’s what I did.

I had internal docs that said the design was to lose loyalty, I didn’t get any bugs on them not losing loyalty, and during my play tests I didn’t find any bugs on this. We went live with this feature enabled. Yes we dropped the ball and it should have been in some sort of update/post to give you more information on it. Since it was me who inherited it last, you can blame me, I am a big boy I can take it. I wont make excuses, all I can say is I was focuses on getting all my tasks done, and fixing what bugs came in for loyalty so I didn’t ever tell Beast Masters how the system works from A to Z.

Lets fast forward to GU5. Hanse had a tough task of working BM update, it is a tough task don’t doubt that for a second. There are a lot of intricate details in this system that are all intermingled, and one wrong move will have wide ramifications. Hanse discovered that the expertise “Beast Empathy” never really functioned. So he took a stab at making beast loyalty happiness function with this expertise. Loyalty/Happiness is called in several places and he had to touch all those places. Unfortunately in the course of making your happiness/loyatly function more efficiently (and with expertise that works) we introduced a bug that dramatically increased loyalty loss. Hanse has since fixed this bug, and we have patched it out …

Produced by Lucasfilm Animation, Star Wars: The Clone Wars takes audiences on incredible new Star Wars adventures, combining the legendary storytelling of Lucasfilm with an eye-popping, signature animation style. Star Wars: The Clone Wars will open in North American theaters Friday, August 15. International release dates will be announced soon. The theatrical debut of Star Wars: The Clone Wars is only the beginning of all-new Star Wars adventures that continue in the fall when the long-awaited television series premieres on Cartoon Network, followed by airings on TNT. Details regarding international broadcasts will be announced shortly. Star Wars: The Clone Wars showcases an entirely new look and feel to the galaxy far, far away — combining the expansive scope of the Star Wars Saga with state-of-the-art computer-generated animation. Each week, viewers will see a thrilling, 30-minute “mini-movie” created by the talented artists at Lucasfilm Animation.

This is way, waaaay bigger a project than I thought it was. I had assumed the live-action show was the main thrust of their creative campaign, with the Clone series just a way to make side-money. This makes me think it’s t’otherwayround. Looking at the images from the animated series, it’s like looking at a really nice videogame. So why not make it a videogame? The Clone Wars era is actually the *perfect* time to set a game like this. It’s got the appeal of some later era components in the background, while still having plenty of room for Jedi to participate. It’s also right there in the movies, making it more appealing to folks who may have never heard of Knights of the Old Republic.

With her earlier statements taken into account, this paints a fascinating future for the MMO industry. If BioWare’s game really is a fantasy title, what the hell is it? A D&D game that tries to grab mindshare where DDO didn’t? That’s the implication of her statement that their game “has a fantasy setting akin to the company’s previous fantasy role playing games.” A title set in their Dragon Age world maybe?

So, out past the WAR/AoC fight this year, we have highlights like these:

• BioWare’s Fantasy Title
• The Agency
• DC Universe
• The Clone Wars MMO
• StarGate Worlds
• Secret World
• Lego Universe
• World of Darkness

Only one fantasy title! And it’s BioWare! Sniffle. I think I just learned how to love again.

I have to say: I partially hope this is wrong. I want a KOTORO MMOG. But, could I live with this? Heck yeah.

Ultimately, though, my love has been for science fiction since I was a wee tot. Heinlein, Aasimov, Clarke, Stephenson, Gibson … these are the folks that I think of when I go to my happy reading place. As has been noted many times by NPD sales, developers, and money-men, I’m in the minority. Apparently the idea of surgically implanting a stainless steel port into your skull, in order more easily connect with a computer, is something not everyone enjoys. In space no one can hear you scream, and it’s hard to love a robot.

I’m tired of it. The Sci-fi ‘niche’ is a fantastic venue for creative thinking, and it’s an incredibly evocative milieu for gaming. Here are my five reasons why science fiction makes for a better setting than fantasy …

Update: Welcome io9 readers! Make sure to check out Grimwell’s fantasy-oriented response to this post, and my podcast followup to get the full discussion.

1. Down With Poncy Elves – I’m so freaking tired of immortal long-eared humanoids, I could spit. Elfy welfies are boring. Everybody plays elves instead of humans because when faced with the choice of immortality or blotchy skin, immortality and flawless pores win every time. What’s the point of even offering elves and humans in the same game: they’re the same freaking thing. Beyond elves specifically, I see the lack of magic or the purely fantastical as a strength to sci-fi stories. No one is saying you have to stick purely to boring old reality (ie: Star Trek), but you at least have to try to come up with an explination for the out-of-the-ordinary. Trek’s technobabble is one of the worst examples, and hedges incredibly close to Clarke’s third law. Most sci-fi, though, extrapolates existing trends into their fantasy world. AI, for example, is presently unfeasible, but not because of any sort of conceptual limitation; we just don’t have the technology yet. I find that much more gratifying than the meaningless pablum of “it’s magic!”
2. Bringing a Gun to a Knife Fight -Swords and axes are cool. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a guy – hitting something over the head with a big metal object is something I’m pre-programmed to enjoy. That said, the variety afforded by modern items and weapons is hard to match in a fantasy setting. Tabula Rasa’s healing widgets are a great example, and the sf/x that represent them are fantastic. Blizzard has certainly shown the variety you can get out of axes, hammers, and plate mail, but projectile weapons are a nice change of pace. Dinking around with TR’s weapons has been a highlight of the experience.
3. Actually Cogent Storytelling – That ‘no magic’ thing (should) extend to better storytelling. Look at the lore of most fantasy titles: blah blah elves blah blah elder gods blah blah chosen race blah blah great conflict. Most of these games have little more than the serial numbers filed off to distinguish between their backstories. Is Norrath really all that more compelling than Dereth or Vana’diel? Sci-fi storylines tend to be based (more or less) in the real world, meaning players have a lot of built-in context on which to base their understanding of the game world. This not only means players might find the lore more approachable, for those who care about such things it should lead to better roleplaying. What’s an easier point of view to adopt: a crazy lizard-guy who can throw fireballs or a human soldier?
4. A Hopeful Outlook – This may be something hard to grasp, but I fundamentally think sci-fi settings are more hopeful than your average fantasy world. In fantasy, so much of the time, the efforts of the players are just chessboard moves. Ageless NPCs, demi-gods, demons, these are the ‘real’ players in the lore. We just show up as incidental actors on a much bigger stage. In science fiction, people are people. The protagonists of the story are set against much more understandable foes; even ravenous space aliens are fundamentally mortal. They may be unstoppable, inscrutable killing machines, but they can still be killed by a well-place bullet. Beyond that, I find the idea of humanity expanding into outer space (even if it’s in self-defense) incredibly uplifting. Our current attitude towards space exploration is so blase that even the flight from Earth seen in the Firefly/Serenity series (”Earth-that-was could no longer sustain our numbers, we were so many.”) seems hopeful by comparison. How can anyone look up at the night sky and not wish to go visiting some day?
5. The XKCD Factor – Have you ever read the webcomic XKCD? Go check out a few comics if you haven’t. You’ll be able to quickly tell if it’s the kind of humor you get. A Venn Diagram outlining the number of people who can fully appreciate blogofractals, Katamari jokes, and an unnatural fear of velociraptors does not encompass all of humanity. That can also be said for folks who truly appreciate science fiction. Lots of people can debate Kirk vs. Picard, but mulling the finer points of bespoke nanotechnology design after reading Diamond Age is a more rarefied experience. Sci-fi is demanding in a way that fantasy isn’t, and as a result sci-fi gamers tend to have instant connections with their fellows.

Burning Problems – The launch of the expansion to World of Warcraft is going to cause Blizzard bigtime headaches.

Buzz! Bigtime wrong. The launch went almost flawlessly, and despite the huge impact it has had on the life of raiders WoW rolls along unbowed and unbroken. I always thought the expansion was going to be good, but I expected Blizzard to have problems similar to the game’s initial launch. Instead, big blue learned its lessons and scored a customer relations coup.

That Not So Fresh Feeling – At least one of the MMOGs slated to launch this year is going to end up being kind of a stinker.

Ding! This was kind of one of my ’safety’ options, but it came very much true nonetheless. Vanguard was a huge letdown for expectant fans, and the SOE team is still doing overtime work to make the ship sail in a straight line.

Less Is Better Than More – The monthly fee-less games will continue to gain in popularity in 2007. With Dungeon Runners and Guild Wars both proving out NCSoft’s wisdom, other companies will begin to consider changing up the usual box-and-a-monthly-sub costs. At least one major U.S. Massive game will offer a substantially different payment setup than the monthly subscription by the end of the year.

Ding! I’m going to give this whole thing to me. Both DR and GW are doing great, and RMT/microtransactions are on everyone’s lips. I consider SOE’s decision to use microtransactions for Agency and FreeRealms a win for this point.

Raph’s Rabbit – Whatever Raph has planned will prove to be an eyebrow raiser. Even if it’s not the Next Big Thing, Areae’s product announcement will end up sounding like a pretty good deal and will be a constant topic of conversation towards the end of the year. We won’t see whatever it is live in 2007.

Ding! Another ’safety’ one, kinda, but the buzz for Metaplace is high and rising.

Later is Worse Than Sooner – One of the big MMOGs slated for release ’soon’ or in 2007 is not going to make it out this year. Whatever game it is, gamers will increasingly think of it as a lost cause, and you’ll see less public interest in the game going forward.

Buzz! Surprisingly, folks are still as fascinated as ever for all the delayed titles. I had kind of expected Conan to lose some steam from a delay, but the anticipation still seems to be there. Warhammer is hotter than ever.

Bio-Shocking – Whatever Bioware has planned is going to make people really excited.

Buzz! No announcement. Dangit!

Beggar’s Canyon – SOE is finally going to get off its ass and do *something* with Star Wars Galaxies.

Ding! I’m actually going to give this one to me. I never would have imagined the something to be ‘actually make the existing game something people would want to play’, but there you go. The housing event, beast mastery, the upcoming space stuff … SWG is looking really great in the here-and-now and the fans are taking note.

Ever Awesome – 2007 will be the year EverQuest 2 finally gets its due. Good fallout from Faydwer and hype for the next expansion, as well as players looking for an alternative from WoW, will swell the ranks of SOE’s flagship. We’ll start hearing boastful subscription numbers out of them, as they start to get back into the range EQ Live inhabited back in the good old days a few years back.

Errr … ding? Sort of? Faydwer had tons of great fallout, the higher players get into Kunark the more they’re liking it, and there are definitely more people playing … but not quite the amount I predicted here. I’m going to call this half a ding? Is that okay?

Newbie – A company that has, as of yet, not published a Massive game will announce their intention to do so. They’ll promise the moon, and will have already failed and announced the end of the project by December.

It was close, but Ding! From publisher signing to dev shop closure, all in one year. Life’s tough.

Fallout Fallout – The Fallout MMOG will be canceled, with little explanation as to what happened.

Buzz! More’s the pity.

In Space … – Eve Online will continue to do crazy-awesome well, with their end-of-year numbers at the end of 2007 simply blowing peoples minds.

Ding! The rest of this prediction didn’t come true, but Trinity has ended a really strong year for the game, so I’m going to give this one to me.

Gutshot – The release of one of the new generation of heavyweights will prove devastating to a member of the old guard. A game we all think of today as stable and healthy will be a shadow of its former self by the end of the year.

Buzz! You have to remember, though, that I was assuming that WAR, PotBS, and Conan were all going to be released this year. Ahh well.

2007’s Winners: Warhammer Online, Eve Online, EverQuest 2, Guild Wars

Not grading on this one, but I think this was mostly right. Even if WAR didn’t release, I think it’s got a ton of mindshare going into next year.

2007’s Losers: Star Wars Galaxies, Gods and Heroes, Vanguard, Dark Age of Camelot

SWG doesn’t belong on this one, but the others seem pretty much right on. DAoC ‘lost’ a bit, I think, because now everybody knows Mythic is cribbing the best of its RvR system for WAR … meaning there’s what reason to play the older game again? I got asked a long while ago why Gods and Heroes was on here. In December of last year it still looked mighty promising. The answer then (and up through most of the summer) was that it just looked too generic to work. Despite my rising enthusiasm through the fall it looks like I wasn’t the only one that felt that way.

That means the grand total is-

Right: 6.5
Wrong: 5.5

Hey! I didn’t do to bad, all things considered. Go me.

Did I let myself off too easy here? Let me know about it. And if you want my MMOGnostications for 2008 … that’s tomorrow’s post.

The big picture: SWG is still not a game that I (personally) want to play every day, but you really have to hand it to those guys for the passion and persistence they’ve displayed in keeping that ship afloat. Also, DCUO concept art is gorgeous.

I arrived at the SOE offices as Austin experienced one of the rainstorms I personally associate with areas near the gulf coast. Apparently, they’re actually not that common down there; Austin is further from the water than I always think it is. This lack of rain results in stupidity and accidents whenever it does come down. I got to witness a fairly impressive one on the way over, and at the end of my trip it resulted in a rather long wait for a cab back. In any case, when I got there the sky was working on a sweaty downpour. The area around SOE-Austin’s office is landscaped like a mini-jungle, and it seemed somehow terribly appropriate.

After a quick wait in the lobby, Chris Cao ushered me into the office of SWG lead designer Thomas “Blixtev” Blair. We were soon joined by Producer Lorin “DeadMeat” Jameson, and launched into a discussion of Galaxies’ workflow process. On an intellectual level I’d understood the challenges they face in working on the game before, but it was really driven home looking over Blix’s shoulder. Most Massive games, like your EverQuest 2s and your World of Warcrafts, have well developed tools sets that allow them to add content to the game with a reasonable amount of effort. It’s not trivial, from what I understand, but there is an understood workflow for adding a quest (for example) and tools to support that flow.

SWG has no such niceties. At the time I was in his office, Blix was adding in a set of armor to the game. A camouflage-patterned scout trooper set, it was added into the revamped Imperial Theme Park as a result of Test Center player feedback. The number of files required to be checked out, the lines of scripting required, the hoops to jump through, the swords to swallow … to describe it as ‘fiddly’ would be an understatement.

Mr. Jameson explained that this is the biggest legacy of the original vision of Star Wars Galaxies as a sandbox game. There is no concept of a ‘quest’ in the game’s basic structure. At its core SWG is a wide-open system, inside of which almost anything can be built using their powerful scripting language. It’s a double-edged sword. That power is incredibly flexible, but ultimately requires a lot of acquired knowledge before new team members can contribute to the game’s creation. When the game launched there wasn’t even a tool for outfitting NPCs with clothing; clothes had to be manually added to each NPC via database tables.

My immediate question was, of course, “Why don’t you make yourselves some new tools?” Essentially it all comes down to priorities. They only have a certain amount of developer time in a given week, and (understandably) they primarily want devs creating content for future chapters. Any time spent away from content creation for tools development is ‘wasted’ time from the player’s point of view, regardless of what it might mean for future content or the game’s workflow. It’d be kind of hard to sell ‘Chapter 9: The Fantastic Developer Tools!’ as a good idea.

Discussion of concrete game elements primarily revolved around the upcoming badge system. The badge system as it exists in the game right now is the addition of a simple line of text in your character’s description. Something like ” … has visited the Agrilat Crystal Swamp” is an example. You can view other players’ badges, and if you’re wondering how long an avatar has existed in-game that’s a great yardstick. Characters that existed prior to the NGE have “Elder” profession badges, and ones that go way back reference things like the Dead Eye project. The ‘new’ version of the badge system is going to add slick looking little icons to each of the badges and generally make it a much more interesting visual experience. You’ll still be able to look at badges on other players, and (like the ones in City of Heroes) there will be lots of fun tweaks in the badge visuals. More interestingly, there are going to be a metric TON of new badges. Most of these new badges are of the collection variety, a subject that was covered extensively in a recent Friday Feature.

An interesting point they made about the badge system, and with many of the systems they’re adding into the game as they go: those systems get decent tools. Since they’re adding content to make use of the systems they’ve made, their attitude is now one of making tools as a part of the system creation process. They demonstrated how easy it was to add content to the badge system, and I assume that there are some decent tools revolving around the Beast Mastery system as well. Even if it’s still a painstaking process to get armor into the game, new things at least won’t suffer from the same limitations.

We relocated to a ‘hang-out’ area at the Studio for a less formal chat about the game’s history. Much of that revolved around the New Game Enhancement, from their point of view. I didn’t even bring it up, I don’t think. I haven’t been a hater for a long time on this subject, but it was obviously still something that caused them discomfort to talk about. Primarily we discussed the reality of having to deal with a large group of very angry people who won’t go away. The problem was more one of conveying information in the right fashion than anything else. It was a matter of community relations and consideration, and ultimately required that they reassess the way that they made the game. The sense I got was that in ‘breaking the game’, they gained a better understanding of what was required to serve the players. Obviously a painfully learned lesson – but an important one just the same.

There was a great deal of discussion here about those learned lessons, and I think all of them felt humbled by the experience of dealing with the NGE. Chris Cao brought up his ‘players who post’ post, the legacy of which lives on thanks to the unblinking eye of the internets. It’s hard, a month on, to convey how much respect these guys have for the process of selling players on an idea. Most of my notes are now faded to the point of being encrypted. I’m left with a sense of disappointment, because I know what we talked about was fairly important to my understanding of SWG.

To a greater or lesser extent, these guys are the ultimate example of how to make a game. The depths of their screwing up is obviously something that we all wish could have been avoided, but consider what SWG represents today. It’s a quality game getting more polished by the month, with a (slowly) growing population amid a crowded and competitive field of games. They’re not trying to beat number one; they’re not even trying to beat number five. They’re focusing on what is most important for their game, for their community, for their players, and they’re executing with skill and passion. To borrow Paul Barnett’s analogy: if WoW is the Beatles, SWG is like … Information Society. Very fun for a small group, and completely different in the here and now from what was there and then.

We moved rooms yet again to continue our talk about the ecology of communication surrounding games, with an eye towards the outer bits. IE: blogs and news sites and such. Our discussion there centered around the usual blog tropes covered in a dozen discussions of the medium: perpetuation of bad information, reliability of posters, relationship to the dev team. We also chatted a bit about podcasting, and I was surprised how big of fans they were of Yivvits and Mr. Bubble. Well … maybe not surprised.

Folks had to actually get back to work at that point. John Blakely took me for one last tour around the office, heading into the scrum areas for both SWG and DCUO. I got to see hints of things that will be in that latter game, but what I saw is nothing that you haven’t already guessed already. What I was surprised by was the art. Arena.net’s walls of art were beautiful, but since GWEN was almost done most of the art I saw was on the floor. There in Austin all the art was still on the walls in the cogitating phase – and it was incredible. My wife is a much bigger DC nerd than I am, and it made me very regretful she wasn’t there; We just watched through all of Justice League recently, and suffice it to say there were a lot of familiar faces hanging on the walls.

That was pretty much the end of my tour, and the much of the rest of the evening was spent having dinner with Brent and folks, so I didn’t have much time to cogitate on what we talked about. It was a great experience, and one I’m grateful I had the chance to participate in. I’d like to think I brought something to the table as both a player and a commentator. It was also another chance to learn that almost without fail people who make games are overly intelligent excellent people. Working in close proximity to that kind of creativity has to be a rush.

Many thanks to John Blakely and Michael Shelling for setting it up.