Interviews

If there's one pastime that MMO fans share, it's making predictions. Which games will succeed, and which ones will struggle? Which will go free-to-play, merge servers, or even shut down? And will there ever be an MMO that's crowned as the WoW-killer?

But what about the bigger picture of online gaming in general? We've seen it come a long way over the past decades, and it's not always easy to see where it's headed. SOE's director of development of the EverQuest franchise, Dave Georgeson, sat down with Massively at PAX East this year to prognosticate on the future of online gaming. And of course, part of that future includes EQ Next, and while he still can't talk specifics, he did shed some light on the philosophy behind the game's design, with some hints about what players might see when it's revealed at SOE Live this summer.

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Richard Garriott recently dropped in on Matt Chat to talk up Shroud of the Avatar with host Matt Barton.

Lord British has a lot to say over the course of the hour-long show, including some elaboration on Shroud's curious is-it-or-isn't-it-an-MMO design structure. "While most people will probably play in what I call the default setting of the open world, you can also turn it down to the other levels of comfort or safety that might prefer," he says.

There's plenty more where that came from, including bits about the story, Tracy Hickman's involvement, and the game's approach to traditional RPG questing. Click past the cut for the full interview.

[Thanks Avaloner81]

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The next expansion to EVE Online was announced during this year's PAX East. Odyssey will usher in to the game a host of improvements ranging from better exploration mechanics to a redistribution of resources, ensuring that players have plenty to do with their internet spaceships over the summer. But what are the longer-term impacts of these changes? What can players expect from this expansion and more moving into the future? How does all of this play into the soon-to-launch DUST 514?

I'm admittedly not a regular EVE Online player, but I was on the show floor for the big announcement, and I had a chance to ask CCP executive producer Jon Lander a few questions after the presentation. The first one was the one that sprang to mind after viewing the announcement (which you can do as well with the video just below): Is this an expansion meant to add something new to the game, or is this meant to fix things that are broken?

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This year's PAX East is the first one to take place in a post-launch world for Guild Wars 2. Last year, one of the big rewards for panelgoers was scoring a beta key; this year, anyone can grab a copy right now without a problem (just a fee). Consequently, the game hasn't had quite as much presence this year. But the team at ArenaNet decided to do something different this time around by sending out two of the designers to sit down and just answer questions from media representatives.

Before the palaver began in earnest, we were given a brief recap of the game's current state and the overall design focus. At the moment, we know that the game's developers are not looking to release a major expansion, focusing instead on more immediate content releases on a short schedule to make the game as good as it can be. While they don't like to use the term sandbox, they want the game to be a living world where people have a reason to be out in the world instead of stuck in small, instanced areas.

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Champions Online players have just braved a full-scale invasion in the appropriately named Lemurian Invasion event. So now the superheroes of Millennium City get to take a long weekend and possibly head to the beach, right? Hardly. A new challenge approaches in the form of the upcoming Forum Malvanum event, throwing heroes into a pitched arena battle run by a mysterious alien race. But it's not quite what you might think.

The aliens behind these gladiatorial games have been running challenges across the galaxy for quite some time, and they've now invited Earth's champions to participate. Should the heroes emerge victorious, they'll reap the rewards of galaxy-spanning wealth and power. Not that you can expect the games of an intergalactic race obsessed with bloodsports to be particularly fair...

Leaving aside the perpetual nightmare that is a superhero's life, this even promises to offer several additions for players. Aside from the almost mandatory new lockbox, the event will contain new content including an arena showdown and a mission focused around a high-speed race. We also had a chance to sit down and ask producer Tom Edwards a few more questions about the upcoming event. Read on!

Gallery: Champions Online Main Gallery

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CCP is no stranger to massive and often chaotic live events. To keep with tradition and finally illustrate just how DUST 514 console players and EVE Online pilots will interconnect, CCP will host a live event this Friday afternoon (UTC) called the Battle for Caldari Prime.

Sound cryptic? We agree! So we joined a roundtable with CCP Senior Producer Arnar Hrafn Gylfason to get the skinny on just how explosive this event will be for the greater EVE Online universe.

It turns out that something big is happening, and it will hopefully demonstrate just what an impact DUST 514 will make on the IP. We imagine a lot of explosions and plenty of drama, so read on for a little of both.

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Richard Garriott has some harsh words and a bit of tough love for game design professionals in a new interview at PC Gamer. Lord British, more visible in the press these days as a result of his successful Shroud of the Avatar Kickstarter project, sat down with the mag to talk at length about what ails gaming and who he thinks is capable of doing something about it.

"I think there's really very few great game designers," Garriott says. "I think Chris Roberts is one of them, Will Wright's another, Peter Molyneux is another. They clearly exist, but on the whole, I think that the design talent in our industry is dramatically lower than we need, as an industry. It's a very hard skill to learn."

Garriott cites a lack of education and a lack of extra-design skills as problems plaguing many designers and the industry at large.

If you're not a good artist and not a good programmer, but you still like games, you become a designer, if you follow me.

You get into Q&A and often design. And the most valuable part of creating a game is the design, which the programmers are technically executing. And they'd be happy to just execute some of them. But in my mind, most artists and programmers are just as much of gamers as the designers, and I usually find in my history that the artists and programmers are, in fact, as good of designers as the designers. They're often better, because they understand the technology or the art.

So we're leaning on a lot of designers who get that job because they're not qualified for the other jobs, rather than that they are really strongly qualified as a designer. It's really hard to go to school to be a good designer."

During my hands-on play session with The Elder Scrolls Online at the media event last week, I got a glimpse of the early game experience, and it was delicious. But most MMOs are judged on what awaits players at the max-level endgame, so I sat down with ZeniMax Online Studios creative director Paul Sage to ask about those areas of the game that I didn't get to see.

Specifically, I asked Sage to describe ZeniMax's strategy for keeping players occupied once they hit the level cap at 50. His reply included four main activities: questing in enemy alliance zones, four-player dungeons, adventure zones, and the PvP alliance war in Cyrodiil. Read on for all of the details I gleaned from the interview!

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This week we heard the disappointing news that EON, the official print magazine for MMO EVE Online, has officially closed down. The quarterly magazine first launched back in 2005 and may have been the first official magazine dedicated to a single MMO. The first edition was packed full of current news, sneak peeks, coverage on major events, fan-written fiction, features, and guides. The experimental magazine was produced by MMM Publishing under official license from CCP Games and proved to be a big hit, going on to publish 30 editions over the next seven and a half years.

Though EON has had a much longer run than most official MMO print magazines (the World of Warcraft magazine lasted all of five issues), it's still disappointing to see it go. The closure has a special significance for me because it was at EON that I and many other players started out as writers and editors. It's thanks to the work of the mag's editor Richie "Zapatero" Shoemaker that I went on to get this job at Massively, where I've written the weekly EVE Evolved column for almost five years now. EON Magazine was a real gem that will be sorely missed by dedicated fans, but the biggest shame is that those who might support the mag didn't know it was having financial difficulties until it was too late.

In this week's EVE Evolved, I look back at what made EON great, ask why it failed, and interview editor Richie Shoemaker on his thoughts behind the closure.

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Marvel Heroes is an upcoming action RPG that allows players to sling web justice as Spider-Man or just throw a stress-relieving tantrum as the Hulk. Whatever your favorite alter-ego, the upcoming free-to-play game hopes to be a refreshing addition to the isometric genre.

At a recent press event in San Francisco, I sat down with David Brevik, President and CEO of Gazillion Entertainment, to scope out the influence of Diablo vs. the Marvel Universe and whether we'll see the PvP fans are hoping for.

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Richard Garriott has been to space, but his upcoming game, Shroud of the Avatar, is not in space. It is on Kickstarter, and according to Garriott himself in a recent interview, that's because it allows him to release a game without oversight. Garriott claims that the unnamed games he's released to sub-par reception have been chiefly the result of publishers meddling with the finished product, whereas the games he has been allowed to finish his way have been classics.

While the game is not explicitly tied to the Ultima franchise for copyright reasons, Garriott sees it as very much being in the spirit of the older games, since Ultima IX ended with the world more or less destroyed. He also discusses influences on the game world's design and how players can switch between single-player and online modes of operation without a problem. If you're looking forward to the game, you can get more details in the full interview.

Has Guild Wars 2 become overly complicated since its launch last year? This is the question that Forbes posed to ArenaNet Lead Designer Isaiah Cartwright, who admits that the team debates the question regularly.

"Because we've been adding a lot of reward systems, we've seen an increase in the number of currencies out there," Cartwright explained. "But we're getting toward the tail end of the number of systems we feel that we can put in the game. We'll be really working on improving the current systems we have and making them more robust."

Cartwright also addressed how the team is catering to guild content, saying that ArenaNet wants to give more of a boost to smaller guilds: "We know there was an initial influence cost that was very high that a lot of smaller guilds weren't able to get into it, so we're looking at ways that we can improve that, make smaller guilds more able to compete on the influence gathering area."

Trion Senior Design Director Simon Ffinch recently gave an interview at OnRPG.com concerning the future of RIFT. As you're probably aware, the fantasy title just celebrated its second anniversary, and Ffinch was asked about the firm's big plans for 2013 and beyond.

"We do have updates planned out for RIFT well into next year with some really exciting and much requested things for the players to experience," Ffinch said. "We will be expanding on all the features we have in the game right now and exploring a host of new ones."

Ffinch also hinted at some extra-Teleran adventures. "Telara itself will actually enjoy a period of peace and tranquility, but the Ascended will be needed more than ever... uh... elsewhere, to make sure it remains this way. I will just leave it at that," he teased.

A great soundtrack has the ability to raise the mundane to memorable and the wonderful to epic. It's hard to imagine films like Star Wars or Back to the Future without their iconic scores or video games like Super Mario Bros. and Final Fantasy without their catchy tunes. So I'm always keen to hear the soundtracks of up-and-coming MMOs because they give me an indication of how much care is being given to the overall quality of the project.

I'm doubly excited for WildStar's score because it's being composed by Jeff Kurtenacker. Kurtenacker produced one of my all-time favorite MMO soundtracks, Pirates of the Burning Sea, which is a playful, exuberant romp through the nautical soundscape. And so far from what we've heard of WildStar's score, we can expect much of the same when we make planetfall on Nexus.

On one drizzly afternoon in a country that you've never heard of, Kurtenacker met with us in a small pub to talk about the joys of creating the music that will soon be infecting the brains of thousands (millions?) of gamers worldwide. Read on, space-man or space-woman, and be astounded!

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In this post-Halo age, it's hard to imagine any sort of galactic ground battle happening without a stirring score at your back. So the challenge to the SOE audio team and Composer Jeff Broadbent was formidable: PlanetSide 2's soundtrack had to rock so hard that it would bring tears to the eyes of combat-hardened troops.

Whether or not the musicians and audio team succeeded is, of course, your personal opinion, but it's hard not to be impressed with the end result. Broadbent's worked on a variety of projects spanning video games, TV, and film, but PlanetSide 2 is his first crack at scoring an MMO.

We talked with Broadbent about his inspirations, experiences on the project, and his take on the end result. Read on and be enlightened!

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