Topics covered include the decision to make the game cross-platform, working with license-holder DC Comics, and departing from the standard MMO control scheme of “press 1 for fireball.”

Read on for the transcript.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what it is you do at SOE.

Chris Cao: Sure. My name is Chris Cao, and I’m the game director on DC Universe Online. My job is basically like a movie director, I make sure all the parts visually, technologically, and gameplay wise come together, and give you a rocking superhero experience.

I’ve been on the project since middle to late 2005.  So, it’s coming up on five years, but it’s all been worth it.  We have crazy technology that no one else has, that really lets you have physics-based superpowers and action combat right at your fingertips.

The MMO Gamer: So you were there all the way from the conceptual stage of things?

Chris Cao: I was.  Actually, I was there really early on when we first signed up Jim Lee.  Went around pitching it, figuring out what it is, and it’s amazing to see it now five years later.

The MMO Gamer: I’m curious, what kind of conversations went on when you were deciding to make it a cross-platform game?

Chris Cao: It was actually one of the things that attracted me to the project, was the fact that it was going to be on the PlayStation 3.

While there had been some pretty good MMOs on the various consoles, with the online connectivity coming on the PS3, it was a no-brainer that hey, MMOs need to be there.

A lot of console fans might not have known about them, and they still don’t really, so it’s great to be the first one on there and to give people that sort of attachment and understand what’s so cool about an MMO, but then also bring to life all of the action combat that you’d expect from a console action game.

So, a lot of people ask us, “Are you an MMO or are you an action game?”  And the answer I like to give is, “We’re DCUO.”

We just took inspiration from wherever we needed to, to make the best superhero-supervillain experience.  It wasn’t about following conventions,  it was about following that superhero fantasy.

The MMO Gamer: The reason I asked this is because, as you’ve pointed out, there haven’t been a whole lot of MMOs on the console.

Chris Cao: Yeah.

The MMO Gamer: The only one that really springs immediately to mind would be Final Fantasy XI.

Chris Cao: Well there was EverQuest Online Adventures too, but yeah, a couple here and there.

The MMO Gamer: Of course, that starts up that whole debate where the PC players might be wary of it because they think “Oh, you must have had to dumb down the controls and the UI for the console players,” and the console players might be turned off because they think “Oh, it’s also on the PC, it must be too complicated. I can’t figure out anything that’s not right trigger to shoot my machine gun.”

How do you come to a happy medium with that?

Chris Cao: Well, I think the answer is to just make a great superhero game.  And I go back to that because honestly, why do you want to play a DC game set in the DC Universe?

It’s because you want to be a superhero or a supervillain.  You want to have crazy over-the-top powers.  You want to be able to fly, leap, super speed.  You want to be able to do all of that.

And that’s really what it’s about.  Now, you can do it alongside your friends and alongside thousands or millions of other people.  That’s even better.  And so, that’s what I really look to.  For that PC MMO gamer, our two platforms are split.  PC gamers are with PC gamers.  PS3 guys are off on their own.

So, we can best customize the game to those audiences, but we’ve developed it cross-platform the whole time because we want it to be the same superhero experience, right?

At its core, we’re not making an MMO for MMO’s sake.  A good example of that is tradeskills.  Everybody asks, “Hey, do you have the old standbys?”  Well, we do so long as they support the superhero experience.

Batman doesn’t really go out and harvest flowers or mine ore.

The MMO Gamer: He does craft his Bat Grenades.

Chris Cao: Right, exactly.  Now he does go back, and he’ll figure some things out in his Batcave, so you can make some stuff.

But a lot of times… I mean, I was the lead designer of EverQuest 2.  I’m very familiar with MMOs.  And they are fantastic, and they do what they do well.

In fact, we took a lot of inspiration from some of the other comic book MMOs, and what they did well.

But really, do they get you to that punch-the-guy-in-the-face visceral image?  Do they get you to leap off of the building?  No.  So we had to go bigger with it, and that’s really what we’re after.

It’s not so much satisfying the conventions that are out there as inventing our own, so that you feel like a superhero.

The MMO Gamer: Back in 2005 when the project first started, superheroes and MMOs weren’t really that conducive to each other.  I think you had City of Heroes, and that was about it.

Chris Cao: Yeah, actually, it just came out the year before.

The MMO Gamer: Now, the field is slightly more crowded.  How do you stand out from the crowd when you’re dealing with City of Heroes, Champions, the Marvel MMO… I’m sure I’d probably missed about five or six others in there.

Chris Cao: Well, in light to your point, there’s even more fantasy MMOs.  It’s a huge genre now.  Everybody likes it.  Everybody wants to get into it.

So, it’s not just differentiating ourselves from superhero MMOs.  It’s what do you get that’s better in DC that you don’t even get in another MMO, or in another action game.

And what it really comes down to is two things:  You get action combat.  No bones about it.  On the PC or the PS3, you have visceral combat.  I know if you had the chance to play you’ll see what I mean.

This isn’t an MMO that sped up or dressed up.  This isn’t just animation.  This is connection with that superpower.

The second thing you get is a persistent world.  Now, to MMO players, they’re like great, I have that already.  But console players don’t.  They have the great action, but they don’t have a place that they can share with their friends, adventures they can go on forever, continuing updates every month, and a persistent world that you can just run across anybody and something serendipitous can happen.

So when I say take the best of both worlds, we’re dealing what no one else has done.  We’re taking all of the scale and scope and size that MMO brings, and that makes you feel real.

And then we’re adding in the instant action that you’d love to get and you do get out of all of your console games.  Those together give us really a unique kind of game.

It’s not a hybrid.  It’s just the ultimate superhero experience, because you’re really in the streets and you’ve got them.

You’re not playing Batman this time.  You are there with thousands of other players, working for and against him.  That’s never been done.

Continued on next page…

Head on over to the official website and sign up now!

They are still somewhat short of that number, and there is just one day left! Get on over to the SW:TOR Facebook page, and add them on Twitter before time is up!

Topics covered include the allure of online games, juggling EverQuest with a professional baseball career, and why mounted combat on flying pigs will not be among the features included at release.

Read on for the transcript.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about what it is you do at 38 Studios.

Curt Schilling: My name is Curt Schilling, I’m the Chairman and Founder of 38 Studios. I do as little game design as possible, and I get to playtest what I think is going to be the next generation of online gaming experience.

The MMO Gamer: I’m sure you get this question a lot, but I have to ask, because it’s been the number one thing on my mind since I first heard about the studio, way back when it was still called Green Monster Games:

How does one go from playing Major League Baseball to starting an online game company?

Curt Schilling: I started gaming in 1980. The first game I ever played was Wizardry, which is still to this day one of my favorites of all time.

I got into the online space with Ultima Online. A teammate of mine when I was with the Phillies was playing it, hardcore.

I got into it, enjoyed it, liked it… But I’m not a hardcore PvP guy, so obviously I had some very challenging memories of those days.

The MMO Gamer: [laughing] So you played UO pre-Trammel, then?

Curt Schilling: Yes, pre-Trammel. Early.

The MMO Gamer: Those were the good old days.

Curt Schilling: That’s what I hear.

But then, somebody told me about EQ… I logged in to it, played it for a half an hour, 45 minutes, and quit.

Then I sat around the entire night, as you do with any good game, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it… “That was kind of cool! I’ve never played anything like that before!”

The next day I went back and I was hooked. That was all I played for the next four or five years.

Right around that time Sony found out that I played, and they invited me in for the VIP stuff.

I was already thinking about post-baseball, and what I wanted to do with my life. I knew I wanted to do something with a business, but not like a restaurant… not a thing that other people were doing.

More importantly to me, I wanted to do something that I was passionate about, and something that I was smart about.

I was definitely passionate about gaming, but I certainly wasn’t smart about it.

So, I turned my relationship with Sony into a kind of due diligence. I started to go in and talk to the people at the ground level, boots on the ground, people making the games.

I wanted to understand the industry, what works, what doesn’t. Why they liked their company, why they didn’t like their company.

I did that across the industry, to try and determine what the playing field was like, who the competitors were.

Obviously this was a time when it was just EQ, then it was Asheron’s Call, and DAoC… and then all of a sudden you had WoW, and it exploded into the mainstream.

The MMO Gamer: What was it that drew you to MMOs, in particular?

Curt Schilling: It’s been my choice of game for a lot of reasons.

The most important one for me was, doing what I do for a living, going out socially is not as easy for me as it is for other people.

But in an MMO, it’s painless. No one knows who I am. I can hang out, and have friends, and be whoever I want to be, without being Curt Schilling.

The great thing was, it got to the point where everybody that I played with—and still do play with—they knew exactly who I am, and none of them cared. Which is really cool for me.

Probably the biggest thing for me as a parent, and as a person who has heard all the arguments for and against gaming, and violence, and all of that crap… if it wasn’t for MMOs, I would not have the relationship that I have with my kids.

I’ve traveled my whole life. They were a way for me to log on when I was in San Diego, and my boys would log on in Boston, and we’d have our headsets on like we were in the same room playing together.

We’d group up, and within the MMO game space there are a lot of things you can teach people: You’re in a group, you have responsibility, you have a role, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do things… You have to socially interact with people, and there’s a right way and a wrong way to do that.

So my kids, when they were beginning to learn to read and write, could type and communicate on a keyboard, which is going to be a medium which they’re going to use their entire lives, when they were five and six.

I looked at it as a powerful tool to enable education, and positive things with my kids. As opposed to all of the negative things that were going on with video games, violence, and all of that other stuff.

The MMO Gamer: Impressive that you managed to juggle EQ with a professional sports career.

I knew guys who couldn’t even handle working at the grocery store and playing EQ at the same time.

Curt Schilling: Well, my wife would argue that I didn’t juggle it well.

It’s funny because there were times—and people find this hard to believe—but you have times when you’re sitting at the keyboard playing, and you’re thinking about work, right?

People can’t believe that I would be at work thinking about playing games.

There would be times when I was sitting in the dugout, where I’d be looking at the clock thinking, “If the ninth inning is over by 11, I’ll be able to get back and raid by 12:30!”

But I’m a gamer, that’s how we think.

And then I’d meet people across the country that I’d played with, because I’d travel all the time, I’d give them tickets to games, say hello, put names to faces…

My celebrity really became a non-issue, which was a big, huge issue for me. In the game space, me playing baseball doesn’t buy me any credibility—and it shouldn’t.

Gamers don’t give a shit that I won three World Series. They care if we make a great game or not.

The more they understand my credibility as a gamer, and my beliefs as a visionary for the company, hopefully the more they’ll understand what we’re doing.

Continued on next page…

What better way to celebrate my beating the odds by not coming down with some virulent form of convention-plague, contracted after shaking the hand of some guy working on Who Knows What from God Knows Where who forgot to wipe himself before he got on the plane?

Yep, a nice relaxing bike ride… cruising along enjoying the scenery at 20mph… taking in the sights and sounds… swerving to avoid a collision… flying over the handlebars… landing with all of my weight squarely on my right arm…

Damn you, E3. You just couldn’t let me go one year without a major medical emergency, could you?

Suffice it to say, with my dominant arm in excruciating pain for most of the past few weeks and popping Vicodin like it was candy, I wasn’t really in any condition to go about producing content for the site.

But, now that things are on the mend, I’m going to be going to an expedited schedule to make up for lost time, starting today with my Rift: Planes of Telara interview.

The trio delve into such topics as setting Rift apart from the competition in a crowded market, the use of focus testing to refine the game’s features (and title), and how much of a role community will play in the game’s development.

[As a personal aside, I realize this may seem like an odd mixture of job titles for one interview, but Cindy Bowens is an old friend of mine (and is married to an even older friend), and I couldn't resist bringing her along for the ride... even if I am a bit out of practice interviewing community managers.]

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you both please introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about what you do at Trion Worlds.

Russ Brown: My name’s Russ Brown, I am a VP of Development. I basically run the development team for Rift at Trion Worlds.

Cindy Bowens: I’m Cindy Bowens, I’m the Senior Community Manager for Rift.

The MMO Gamer: Now, the first thing that really piqued my interest since the last time I saw the game: Why the name change, from Heroes of Telara to Rift: Planes of Telara?

Russ Brown: That’s a good question. We actually did some focus testing, we talked to some people, we got some gamers in… and the word “Heroes” just didn’t do very well.

People were sort of like, “Well, if everybody’s a hero, then I’m not a hero!”

And that was the main thing that people were talking about; they don’t want to be called a hero, they want to earn being a hero. So we took that name out.

Then we started looking at what sort of gameplay we have, what sort of things we’re doing, and the feature that really stood out was our rifts. So we said hey, let’s call our game Rift.

The MMO Gamer: City of Heroes, take note: This is free focus testing for you.

Russ Brown: [laughing]

The MMO Gamer: Aside from the name, what else has changed since our conversation last year?

Russ Brown: The main thing that’s changed is last year we had this idea that you could be any class any time. You could swap on the fly.

Once again we did some focus testing on that, and one of the things that came back was, “Hey wait, if I can do anything, then I’m not special. Why would a guild need me, if everybody can do my job?”

So we said okay. We still want customization, we still want people to change and dabble with things, so we basically broke the class system up into “callings.”

We have Warriors, Rogues, Mages, and Clerics, right? What that does is we still allow you to have this idea of souls, but the main difference is you start with a certain soul, you pick the soul for your starting class, and that’s what you were before you died.

Then as you adventure through the game you pick up more and more souls which you can swap out. Then you decide how you want to invest into a soul, how you want it to play.

For example, when I’m playing my Rogue, I start out as a Riftblade, I believe it’s called. Classic PvP rogue. Then when I want to get some range, I’ll put a Ranger in, I won’t go very deep into it with pets, but I’ll go deep enough that I can start building up my points with melee.

So my playstyle is, “Pew pew pew,” shooting the guy from ranged, and then by the time he reaches me, he’s almost dead and I can do a finisher.

The MMO Gamer: Interesting. Two questions, and two answers that you changed something big based on focus group feedback.

Russ Brown: Yes.

The MMO Gamer: Does that happen a lot?

Russ Brown: Well, it can’t constantly happen, but in the beginning you have to test and listen to what people are saying.

One of the things that always frustrated me at other companies I worked at was we did focus testing at alpha or beta. If I’m focus testing alpha or beta, I can’t do anything. I don’t have time to react.

If I’m in beta, and I say “What do you guys think?” and they say, “Well, if you did this it’d be a lot better…” It’s like, “Great, but I can’t do that! It’s beta, we need to ship the game!”

So we had focus testing earlier to make sure that we were on the right track. And then when we work with the community, when we have our closed and open beta tests, we can sit down and iterate things with them.

The other thing we did is, we added sides. Before we didn’t have sides, we didn’t have two factions that you started with. And the reason we did that is people were saying, “You’ve got no sense of being. You’ve got no sense of he’s my friend, he’s my enemy. I like this guy, I don’t like that guy.”

It immediately gives you guys you group with. It sounds simple, but when we were just saying don’t worry about sides, it was kind of confusing people.

The MMO Gamer: Cindy, I’m sure the first question a lot of people are going to have for you is, with a game this far from release, how much of a community is actually out there for you to manage?

Cindy Bowens: Right now we’ve got a couple hundred people on our forums regularly. It’s growing exponentially, and I can’t wait to see how many we have when I go back next week.

But the thing about this community that’s just awesome, is it’s all old MMO gamers.

I put up a thread my first day there, and said “What MMOs have you played?” They’re all old EQ, old DAoC… some World of Warcraft, but it’s mostly the people who have been around for the last decade, who have played these games, know what they want, know what they like, and know what they demand from a game and from the company making it.

One of the first things I’ve tried to do is introduce them to the team, let them know what the team wants to hear from them, and that their feedback is valid, and that’s been going great.

We have a lot of well-known MMO players in the community, my first day there when I logged on there were a number of people who popped on and said, “Hey, remember me from Vanguard? Remember me from EverQuest?”

I couldn’t be happier, because that’s going to be the roots of our community.

Continued on next page…

World of Tanks is described as a team-based MMORPG focusing on armoured warfare featuring tanks from the period 1930-1950. The game is a $10m development and recently went into closed beta testing in Russia

The closed beta for World of Tanks begins on July 15, 2010. The registration for the World of Tanks closed beta starts on the 1st of July, 2010. Grab and redeem your key as soon as possible to ensure a spot in the beta!

How to redeem your closed beta key for World of Tanks:

- Obtain a closed beta key by clicking here
- Go to World of Tanks registration page http://game.worldoftanks.com/registration/
- Fill in the simple registration form and input the beta key you received below
- Confirm your registration
- Download the game, install and join tense online warfare!

“Hi-Rez Studios is committed to delivering the best value in PC gaming”, said Todd Harris, Global Agenda Executive Producer. “In addition to including all of the game’s initial launch content for free inside the single-purchase price, we are bundling nearly 6 months worth of post-release content and features and including that within the single-purchase game. One purchase of Global Agenda lets you experience all of this content forever with no subscription.”

The latest solid news we had heard of the game’s development was its announcement as Project V13.

Visit the game’s website here.

If I can remember how to use this newfangled Twitter thing that the young kids are into these days, I’ll be broadcasting periodic tweets as to my disposition during the show, and commenting on anything that really catches my eye.

You can follow the action right here: http://twitter.com/TheMMOGamer

Highlights from today’s appointment book include Trion, with their renamed Rifts: Planes of Telara, THQ with the 40K MMO (which I really want to see, being an old 40K nerd back in high school), and 38 Studios, who will be sitting down with me to have a little conversation about their as-yet unnamed mystery project.

“We are proud that the quality of our games and publishing services enabled us to acquire this license,” said Christoph Jennen, CFO of Gameforge. “Our upcoming Star Trek browser games will further expand our consumer base and market share on an international scale.”

GameForge runs the MMO portal MMOGAME.com, where you can find out more about their current games catalogue.

Players logging in between the 25th and the 28th of this month can also get a bonus pet, the Frostpaw Kitten through the in-game marketplace.

The update includes:

• Two new high-level raid dungeons
• New Halas starting zone
• New Halas housing options
• Story Teller UI guide
• Exclusive login bonus item (available only between May 25, 2010 and May 28, 2010)
• Halas themed Marketplace items
• Multiple in-game events

For more information about EverQuest 2, visit the official website.

Don’t you hate it when people spam your Facebook page with a bunch of random nonsense about pink cows lost on their farm, muffins in their restaurant, or needing to put out a hit on someone in Cuba?

Then man, are you ever going to hate the next few years of MMO gaming, if SOE has anything to say about it.

Topics

• What we’ve been playing
• SOE Releases The Agency: Covert Ops, a “Facebook MMO”
• The Agency: Covert Ops sets us off on a “social media gaming” rant
• Age of Conan: Rise of the Godslayer Goes Live
• Silverlode Announces Naval MMORPG Captains of DarkTide
• The Fickle Nature of the Fandom, Re: The Carrie Gouskos Interview

Hosts

• Jeffrey Philipp
• Steven Crews

As always we appreciate your feedback! You can also send us your questions or topics you would like us to discuss by dropping a comment here or sending an email to podcast@mmogamer.com.

Remember to subscribe!

Here is how you get your key and redeem it:

Click here to get a gift code!

1. Redeem your key on the Runes of Magic homepage by going to the “Redeem Key” link located on the side (or go to: http://us.runesofmagic.com/us/box.html) and enter your account information and redeemable key, then click “Submit”.

2. Check your registered email address to find your gift code ID and password for your Special Experience Package.

3. Log into your account and character, then click the “Item Shop” button on the lower right hand side or press “/” key to open the Item Shop menu.

4. Click the “Redeem Voucher” button on the top left side of the Item Shop menu.

5. Enter the voucher ID and password. Check your Item Shop Backpack for your Special Experience Package and enjoy!

Update: All keys are gone! Keep an eye out for future giveaways!

Unlike other pirate titles, Captains of DarkTide is set in a fantasy realm, combining magic and gunpowder, dragons and steamships, elves and orcs… Through questing and crafting, players will acquire fire-belching or lighting-spitting cannons, and can crew up with everything from orc snipers to dwarven bombardiers to dragon-summoning dark elves; and for all you undead fans, yes, even the lich and his minions are included.

For more information about the game and to sign up for beta, visit the official Captains of DarkTide website.

Age of Conan: Rise of the Godslayer is being distributed through retail by CompuExpert in the US and by Deep Silver in the European markets, and is available as an all-new combined package that includes both the original game and the expansion so that even new players who might not own a previous copy of the game can easily get started on their adventures through the new lands of Khitai. It is also possible to upgrade an existing copy of ‘Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures’ to the expansion through the Funcom account management system, or by purchasing the game in retail and upgrading with the key enclosed in the box.

For more information about the game, visit the official Age of Conan website.

In an extensive interview, the two discuss WAR’s history from launch up to the present day, the changes which have taken place over that time, as well as what’s yet to come.

If you played Warhammer Online at launch and have been wondering if your issues have been addressed and now is the time to come back, this interview was done with you in mind.

If you would prefer to listen rather than read, this interview can be heard in its entirety during Episode 27 of our Working as Intended podcast.

The MMO Gamer: To get us started, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what it is you do at Mythic.

Carrie Gouskos: I’m Carrie Gouskos, the Producer on Warhammer Online. What that means effectively is that I’m responsible in some way for everything that happens with respect to what goes into the game, what the big picture plans are, and how we work with the community.

There’s obviously a large team of people who deal with the specifics, but for me it’s about the big picture, and steering it into the direction I think it needs to go, and working with the community and the team to hopefully get everyone’s goals aligned together.

The MMO Gamer: Now, you and I have only met once before, way back at Games Day LA in 2007.

WAR had just entered beta then, and I recall that basically everything was coming up roses: The game was looking great, it had a very rabid fanbase… I can attest to just how rabid, when I said something slightly negative about it in an article later on.

The game had a huge buildup, a huge following, then it launched, and…

What happened?

Carrie Gouskos: There are a couple ways to answer that.

Pre-launch, I think we did a very good job about getting people excited about the game. We had a huge license, and we had a lot of unique personalities on the development team that were really infectiously excited about the game.

We thought we were doing a lot of really neat stuff, and wanted to share that with everyone. I don’t think internally—actually, I know internally, nobody here was going “Oh, we’re going to beat WoW!” or any of that.  There was none of that kind of gauging.

But it was like, “We’re going to have a successful MMO. We’re going to be awesome, and have so many players!” all of that stuff. We had a lot of expectations, and we launched to that kind of hype.

I think the problem was, to some degree, you’re setting yourself up to be disappointed.

I actually think that we have a large game, with a lot of people playing who are excited about it. But you can see how many servers we opened with, all of that, and people try to do the numbers game, guessing how many players we have now…

The fact of the matter is that we came out huge, and there were problems. So I think that was a little bit of a buzz kill for the development team, and to some degree our players, as well.

We’ve been spending all this time since trying to refine the game, and get it to a state that we think, “This is what people are looking for, this is what they want.”

If you asked me personally how I feel about it, I loved the features in our game at launch, but I do think obviously there are things that I look at and say, “God, I wish I had fixed that! Or I wish I’d done that!” You can do that all day long.

So the goal since then has been to do all those things that we wanted to do, and to grow with our players, and instead of trying to make the game we think players are going to like, make the game that players are going to enjoy, because they’re the ones sitting here telling us, and we’re listening to them.

We’ve been maybe more quiet in the past six months, because we’ve been  hunkering down and going, “Okay, what is it that’s going to satisfy the players’ needs, make them come back, and make them happy?”

I think we’ve accomplished that. I don’t want to say that in the tone of like “rah-rah,” I do feel like we’re down to business at this point, and we’ve done a lot of things to the game that has pacified some of the dissatisfaction at launch, and I’m very happy with the players, and their interactions with us.

The MMO Gamer: Those improvements were actually the reason I wanted to talk to you, today.

I played WAR at launch… hell, I played a long time before launch, I was in beta from January of 2008. I got into the pre-order head start, talked all my friends into buying the game… We had a guild going, big alliance, a hundred guys on every night.

And then all of a sudden it just kind of… stopped. Coincidentally, right around the time that Wrath of the Lich King came out.

Carrie Gouskos: Uh huh. [laughing]

The MMO Gamer: That was basically the reason that I quit. I don’t play MMOs to solo, and I don’t like making new friends. So once all my friends quit, I was gone.

And, I’ve pretty much been trying ever since to talk them into giving the game a second shot.

I decided to just jump in and swim last month, and see if I could needle them down by constant reminders that, “Hey, I’m playing WAR again, you want to come back and try it?”

But their responses always tend to be, “No. We played it. We didn’t like it. That’s it.”

And that’s of course the prevailing notion of just about every MMO on the market: People get an idea in their head at launch, and no matter what happens to a game six months, a year afterward, the day they bought the box is the image they have in their mind forever.

Anarchy Online, for instance, was never able to live down that launch…

Carrie Gouskos: Actually, Anarchy Online was one that I went back to like three times. Every time I went back, I just wanted to love that game so much, I tried so hard.

But I understand completely what you’re saying. It’s funny, isn’t it? The only turnaround I can think of is you need to have a complete makeover. And even then, it’s hard to change your intuition.

Which is interesting, because I do think a lot of games are actually broken at launch, but I don’t think that Warhammer was.  There were problems, certainly. But compared to some of the experiences I’ve had in other MMOs…

I’m not saying that’s forgivable, at all. As an industry we need to move away from that, “We’ll fix it later” mentality, which I’ve never had. But they’re so massive, and there’s so much going on, it’s almost hard to contain it all.

And I guess you were setting us up for a question, which you can ask now if you’d like. [laughing]

Continued on next page…

It’s been far too quiet around these parts, lately. But, hopefully things will be getting back to normal soon.

E3 is coming up next month, and it’s always a crowd-pleaser.

Until then, we have some actual honest to God news and features for you this week. Not the least of which is Carrie Gouskos sitting down with Steve to have a little chat about Warhammer Online. And by little, we mean 40 minutes straight.

Scheduling conflicts meant that she couldn’t actually join us on the podcast proper, but we know that “reading four pages of solid walls of text” isn’t really the fashion these days, and we threw the audio into the show, anyway.

NOTE: In response to feedback regarding a technical problem with the audio only playing through one stereo channel, I’ve gone back and saved the file in mono as a workaround. Quality may suffer slightly.

Please do not point out the irony of griping to someone about bugs in their game, and then having to patch an mp3 after release. – Steve

Topics

• What we’ve been playing
• Pre-recorded interview: Carrie Gouskos, Producer of Warhammer Online. Audio begins at 9:10
• Age of Conan: Rise of the Godslayer Releases May 11th
• Fallen Earth “Restructures” Its Staff
• Alganon Released. Again
• The MMO Gamer 3.0

Hosts

• Jeffrey Philipp
• Steven Crews

As always we appreciate your feedback! You can also send us your questions or topics you would like us to discuss by dropping a comment here or sending an email to podcast@mmogamer.com.

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