News overload in the past day or two...

• Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog - Watch Joss Whedon's latest bout of brilliance while you still can.
  
• Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic MMO - Finally!
  
• DC Universe Online - Sounds like its coming along nicely.
  
• Champions Online - Lots of recent coverage of this superhero MMO too.
  
• Watchmen - I'm watching the Watchmen.
  
• The Dark Knight - It's been a loooong week so I'm passing on the midnight show, but I'll definitely be visiting Gotham this weekend.

It's a good time to be a geek!

Champions Online is the superhero MMO that Cryptic Studios is doing instead of Marvel Universe Online.

And based on everything I've read so far, I couldn't be happier. Highlights include...

• Hi-Octane Excitement: No more boring auto attacks and lengthy recharge times. Champions Online combat is instantaneous — and electrifying!


• Total customization: Choose from hundreds of different costume pieces, colors and body types to create your character's one-of-a-kind costume and look.


• Keep your enemies close: Every hero must have an archenemy. Design your character's supreme adversary, choosing a name, powers and costume for a superpowered foe to bedevil your hero throughout his or her career.


• Endless exploration: The battle against evil rages across the world into outer space and alternate dimensions.


• Make your mark: The story of Champions Online is constantly changing, continually evolving. Villains are defeated. Heroes rise and fall. Cities transform. Your actions may decide the future!

The trailer doesn't show a whole lot so far, but I am kinda digging the pseudo-cell shading effect...


Marvel who?

After months of rumors, Microsoft has finally confirmed the cancellation of the Marvel Universe Online MMO...

"If you really look at the data there's basically one [MMO] that's successful and everything else wouldn't meet our level or definition of commercial success," he said. "And then you have to look [and say]: 'Can we change the business model for that? Is that really viable given how far we are in development? And so forth. Does Marvel want to do that?' There's a whole bunch of factors [in canceling the game]."

So basically, they were intimidated by World of Warcraft and didn't feel that they would be able to replicate its success (or profits). And they're probably right.

I just wish they weren't so short-sighted. Trying to buy WoW-like success is definitely not a winning strategy, but innovative (and fun, of course) gameplay alongside superhero legends like Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four, and the rest of the Marvel line-up would draw a dedicated (possibly rabid) subscriber base and make a decent amount of cash for Marvel and company.

Hopefully, the DC MMO will come to a more satisfying finale.

Holy crap, does this look incredible...

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is coming this spring. Unfortunately, it's only for the consoles at this point.

<In my best Yoda voice...>Hmm, an Xbox360 in my future, there may be...

How cool does this look? ...

The game is called The Agency from Sony.

The Agency is an intense action shooter set in a high tech world that lies just around the corner. Live the life of an elite agent in a persistent online world of super spies and rugged mercenaries, who use both the highest technology and the lowest tactics to accomplish their goals. Featuring cooperative and competitive play, The Agency is designed to provide instant action and long term strategy for all fans of espionage, intrigue, and explosive gameplay.

In other words, 24 meets Alias meets Counterstrike. Sign me up!

As defined by Wikipedia:

ding - Jargon for advancing a level in many video games, particularly of the role-playing genre. It originates from Everquest as there was a "Ding" sound when you leveled up.

Why do you care? (Well honestly, you probably don't. )

That's right, read it and weep, n00bs! It took a while, but I finally overcame my natural gaming attention deficit disorder and played one game long enough to reach the level cap. Yay me!

Here's a screenshot of the actual Ding moment (click to bigify)...

The game is Lord of the Rings Online (blogged previously here and here), and it's far from over despite the level cap. There's lots of high-level content to see and phat loot to acquire. The beauty of LotRO is that there's a ton of Middle Earth left for the developers to add to the game in the form of free updates, and eventually a paid expansion or two. (I can't wait to explore Moria!)

That's not to say I'm not looking forward to other games, but Lord of the Rings Online will be my home (literally) for some time to come.

p.s. In LotRO the level up sound effect is actually closer to a "whoosh" than "ding".

p.p.s. In the interest of full disclosure, I was the last of my regular gaming group to level up. However, I contend that they cheated... How dare they continue playing when I'm lazy and/or not in the mood!

Raph Koster is a game designer known for his work as the lead designer of Ultima Online and the creative director behind Star Wars Galaxies.

A little more than a year ago, Raph started a new company named Areae, which has been feverishly working on a super-secret MMO-related project. Today was finally the official unveiling of Raph's project, called Metaplace.

Metaplace allows anyone to build their own virtual spaces and treat them just like any other Web site. You can build chat rooms, store-fronts, online apartments, and all kinds of homebrewed games and attach them easily to your blog or MySpace page. Areae is even building their own full-blown MMO using the Metaplace tools.

From the FAQ...

Can I make my own world?

That's sort of the whole point. You should be able to stage up a massively multiplayer world with basic chat and a map you can build on in less than five minutes. It's that easy. Inherit a stylesheet -- puzzle game, or shooter, or chat world -- and off you go! Building maps and places is as easy as pasting in links from the Web, and dragging and dropping the pictures into your world.

Of course, as with any Web 2.0-ish social experiment where users generate most or all of the content, 90% of the resulting product will be complete crap.

<cough>MySpace<cough> <cough>YouTube<cough>

Uh, sorry about that. Of course, that also means that 10% is pretty good stuff. If Metaplace really is as easy as they make it sound, it should be extremely interesting to see what kind of cool stuff we end up with...

OK, so I was half-right...


That pretty much says it all.

Just read an interview on MMOG Nation with Paul Barnett, Creative Director of the highly anticipated Warhammer Online MMO for EA Mythic.

It's a long interview, but I highly recommend reading through it because Barnett's opinions are both informative and extremely entertaining. In fact, the real reason that I'm blogging this is because it made me laugh out loud.

First, a little background... "Pets" have become a standard feature in MMO's. Basically a pet is an animal or non-player character (NPC) who accompanies you on your adventures and often fights alongside you. Unfortunately, some pets are much cooler than others.

Well, as Barnett explains, the developers are having fun with their implementation of pets in Warhammer...

The fact that we’ve got pet classes, right? Pet classes, just not crap. Here’s the problem with pet classes right? They’re rubbish, they’re all rubbish. Who wants to have a little widget that wanders off and fights for you? How bloody crap is that? It’s sort of like … I don’t know what it is. It’s like being in school, and threatening people only because you’ve got a big mate next to you. He’s a cretinous coward. So! What we did with pet classes is we have these Squig herders, little tiny goblins with big ears who are basically on speed. They’re great. They wander around, and they summon these Squigs. And one of the Squigs they summon is this battle-armored Squig; enormous, great big armored Squig with a ring through it’s nose! And the Squig turns around and he eats the Squig Herder. And he’s sort of in the stomach of the Battle Squig, and he grabs ahold of all the intestines and he pulls on the intestines to make the Squig bounce around the land and fight things. And the Battle Squig sort of chews people up. And then when it gets wounded it sort of staggers around and coughs, and spits the Squig Herder out of his gob, and he sort of flies through the air doing this: “Waaaaaaaaaaaaauuuuuughh”. That, to me, is what our game is all about: because it’s Pet classes, just not crap. It’s fun.

Can't wait to see that in the middle of a battle!

It's something of an understatement to say that Vanguard: Saga of Heroes is a game that failed to live up to its high expectations.

Even prior to release, the game suffered from some "old school" (i.e. outdated) design choices and insanely high system requirements. However I believe the main reason Vanguard crashed and burned is beta testing, which the game desperately needs six more months of. It was rushed out the door buggy with a humongous but mostly empty gameworld. Unfortunately, the state of the game has lead to real-life repercussions for the employees at Sigil, who developed the game.

From F13.net a couple days ago...

Sigil employees were told to meet outside. At which point they were terminated. On the spot.

More details came the next day in this announcement from John Smedley, President Sony Online Entertainment...

Today I would like to formally announce that SOE has acquired the assets of Sigil Games Online, including Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. As a part of this acquisition, we are bringing on approx 50 people from Sigil in order to insure that Vanguard continues to grow. SOE is dedicated to making sure that Vanguard is well taken care of and that we provide the same level of service we do for our other titles. In the near future we will come out with a publishing plan that will largely be driven by the strong player community that Vanguard has already built up. We plan on supporting Vanguard for many years to come, and you can expect many content updates as part of your subscription. Down the line we will of course be coming out with new expansion packs, but right now the focus is on making sure Vanguard is running the way it should be.

The Grouchy Gamer has details on how the game might've arrived at its current state...

Brad McQuaid has been an absentee manager at Sigil for months. Not only has there been a leadership vacuum at Sigil, with the employees there left twisting in the wind, but I have been able to confirm that Brad hasn't even bothered to be at the office.

Since last year.

And finally, we get some dirt in a candid and fascinating F13.net interview with one of the disillusioned Sigil developers...

What people don't understand, is the game that went out the door was literally created in the last 15 months. Design worked 12-18 hour days for 9+ months. Coding and Art worked insane hours as well, all trying to actually get something playable out the door.

And also...

f13.net: How was QA treated through the course of development?

Ex-Sigil: QA?

f13.net: QA.

Ex-Sigil: QA was one person up until about November... ONE.

f13.net: What.

Ex-Sigil: 100% serious.

f13.net: What? How? This is an MMOG.

Ex-Sigil: Vanguard had one internal tester for probably 95% of the design cycle.

Unbelievable. My best wishes go out to all of the once and future Vanguard developers.