DM

This is Age of Conan: IN SPACE. And I'm not going to change my mind until a month after launch.

Good interview. Aaron spoke with a lot of candor and revealing honesty, coming off as a pretty good guy. I've really appreciated his efforts, particularly his ability to take a "boobs and blood" game and turn it into something engaging and "modern" instead of campy, sexist, etc. I know it wasn't all him, but he was an integral part.

Thanks, Massively!

In WoW, pre-BC (within a couple months of launch), I led a guild RP event in Gnomeregan (I was a gnome, traumatized by the destruction, finally coming back to come to terms). We had almost three groups, with at least 6 or 7 60's. As we were going down the final tunnel towards the last boss (the one with the lower ravine and the top side), either a hunter or a rogue aggroed a mob on the lower side. The mob then proceeded to run through the ravine and all the way back to us, gathering about thirty of its friends along the way. We were caught pretty unprepared and wiped. And that is how multiple 60 level characters all died in a level 30 instance.

I'm worried about combat/classes. With so many classes, it often seems like they're more gimmicky than real, fleshed out and individualized experiences. If that fundamental experience isn't there and durable (will you want to manipulate the same mechanic for your toon's lifetime?), I doubt the rest will matter much.

There was a discussion on the AoC forums about whether this actually appealed to women. Personally (as a male, but in gender studies), I found it to primarily be a half-hearted marketing ploy to try to shield Funcom from the flak of nudity, brothels, and a very masculinized world. The "men are dumb, weak sheep, let's take advantage and kill them" mentality is cliched and demeaning to pretty much everyone. Of course I can't speak about the actual game until I play it, but I definitely have my doubts.

What I'm more interested in is how many women actually worked on AoC (outside of voice actresses/motion capturers). I know it's a male-dominated field, but WAR/Mythic has at least a visible contingent of female developers/designers, while I've yet to see any women working on Age of Conan. That might just be me not looking, but, thus far, it's only added fodder to the argument that "mature game" equates to "stereotypical teenage boy desires."

"Fun," as many have commented, is highly subjective. WoW made steps in the right direction, but what I think it really did well was "polish." It didn't crash and burn out of the gate, taking months and years to be the game it was supposed to be. Certainly, it was released as incomplete as many games, but it worked and worked well (server lag issues aside). It's (along with the failure of titles like Vanguard) primarily why so many developers delay releases and cite "polish," because MMO gamers are notoriously wary of new releases. I think this is helping Mythic with WAR, because it's so like WoW down to their approach of "releasing it when it's done." People equate WoW with quality (even if it's not the best, gameplay wise), and when WAR becomes WoW with RvR, it benefits accordingly.

I don't really understand the reference to the bug zapper. Are you referring to the zapper from GU Comics? That's what I thought when I read the title, and I was rather shocked that SWG and Guild Wars cancellations were imminent.

Assuming AoC releases well and on time (and this is a mighty assumption), I'll play that for awhile. Ideally, I'd like WAR to be released while I'm still interested in AoC so that when I do switch, all the post-release bugs/lacks of content will be at least somewhat remedied. First time for real, MMO choices and I can't wait!

Shadowbane (you may cringe now) had live events that were fairly interesting. Since the land was often so sparse, it was easy to avoid significant detection for some events wherein certain guilds of certain factions would be involved with little outsider interference. The rewards were often aethestic that you could display in your city etc, but I believe were also eventually incorporated into the game as a whole.

In other games, though, where word and people travel a lot faster, it really is, like the above poster said, pretty much impossible to do well.

I'm surprised you didn't mention Tabula Rasa in this column. TR presents a fair number of "choice" quests where you decide whether to feed a prisoner or use the food for torture, turn someone over for government experiments or set them free, etc. It hasn't had significant effect on the actual game yet, but the very presence of the choices is interesting and has a lot of potential.