Massively^™

38 Studios, the Boston-based MMO development company started by Curt Schilling, is working on a brand new, highly-publicized MMO project, code-named Copernicus. What does this have to do with World of Warcraft and the Azeroth Advisor newsletter? That's what we're trying to figure out.

In a recent interview with WoW Insider, the company's CEO, Brett Close, discussed the reasoning behind 38 Studios' purchase of the Azeroth Advisor and how they plan to use it in the future. According to Close, it's not an elaborate scheme to close down their competition by buying out their fansites and tools, but instead, they realize that in order to let the genre thrive, they need to work together. WoW's success ultimately means 38 Studios' success, and the success of other MMO developers. Plus, they plan to use the proprietary technology behind the Azeroth Advisor for other unnamed future projects.

It's been quite a long time since we've reported on a House of Commons dev chat with Lord of the Rings Online's Turbine and Codemasters devs, so this latest one should come as a special treat. In it, we get word of a few new features for the first expansion, Mines of Moria, which was just announced today to have a release date of November 18th! In order to paraphrase this long dev chat, we've bullet-pointed what we feel is the most interesting answers to player questions:

• No pre-Moria equipment will be part of the Legendary Items system.
• After Mines of Moria, they'll "most likely" be heading south with future expansions. Although there's word of fleshing out Eriador as well.
• Capstone skills are used in conjunction with Legendary Traits and Trait sets to make mega powerful skills. These capstones come in three different types: solo gameplay, small fellowship and 6-man instance gameplay.
• You will get access to another Legendary Trait slot at level 60
• Renown and Infamy will be changed to increase the amount gained in a full group and reduce the amount gained in raids.
• The Elves of Lothlorien will not have accessible reputation until the first book update after launch
• Suggested improvements to the kinship system include kinbank, plus stablemasters and crafting areas in the kinship house.
• The entire Book 1 of Volume 2 will act as an introduction to Legendary Items, so you will get them early on.
• Following the helpful dev diaries on the Hunter, Burglar and Lore-master, Turbine plans to release guides for the remaining classes from 50-60 as well.
• Inventory problems will be alleviated with quest tokens and key rings. Quest items will be stored in a quest journal, instead of the player's inventory. Key rings will hold important keys for certain doors.
• You will not need to finish Volume 1 to access Volume 2.
• No new hobbies releasing with Moria, but there are others in the works for future book patches.

What could possibly be a bad idea about an impending MMO based in the Fallout universe? We've heard the rumors, and we're very excited about the possibilities. So why would it be a bad idea? Well, according to original Fallout designer and newly-promoted Carbine Studios Design Director Tim Cain, "It's not necessarily the direction I would've gone."

Cain's main concern with a Fallout MMO is that the original game was designed to make you feel like you were living in a post-apocalyptic world. In other words, there's not going to be 100+ other players running around you killing (Oh God, please no!) the same 10 boars as you in the same area. Although Cain doesn't really offer any alternatives to this, would a Guild Wars-style instanced world be the solution? We'll have to wait and see what Interplay has up their sleeves.

Credibility is a precious resource; DJ Jester of w00tstudios.net is one of those people on the MMO circuit who has bags of it stashed under his mattress. His podcasts have always been right on the pulse, and he's had many worthy personages in the past as guests, from April 'CuppaJo' Burba to Matt 'Positron' Miller.

Now, Floyd 'Castle' Grubb, aka Castle the Powers Guy from City of Heroes, joins Jester and friends at the mike for a 41 minute megasesh in which the coming changes to powers in CoX are expertly dissected, laid out and examined for your delight and edification.

Early last week we discussed the upcoming server merge coming to Funcom's Age of Conan. Announced by new game Director Craig Morrison, the merge will combine a few of the lower population servers and (hopefully) will give players a more vibrant play experience. Jørgen Tharaldsen, Product Director for the game, has now stated publicly that they went ahead with plans for the merge only because of a vocal outcry from the playerbase in that direction.

Speaking with the site Strategy Informer, Tharaldsen stated "I think that people who are playing Conan are actually very happy about the news, and indeed it's been one of the most requested things from our playerbase. The essence of any MMO is the social experience, and right now people are spread out a bit too thin across the servers." He goes on to note that server merges only primarily help players that are already in the game. Convincing new players to try out the title is the next step, one they're currently working on behind the scenes at the company. We'll follow the story of AoC's server merge as it moves forward.
[Via 1up]

---

	Having fun in Conan's homeland? Make sure to check out all of our previous Age of Conan coverage, and stick with Massively for more news from the Hyborian Age!

Our discussions with Sony Online Entertainment's CEO John Smedley have touched on a number of issues. The changing face of Star Wars Galaxies, the company's connection to Live Gamer, and even the possibility of sequels to Free Realms. In a recent discussion with MTV Multiplayer, Mr. Smedley expanded on many of these issues and reconfirmed the innovative vision of SOE's future development. In the CEO's words, every game the company makes in the future will be playable on a console ... one would imagine Sony's.

The executive also notes the company's commitment to expanding the appeal of MMOs with non-fantasy titles. Smedley also notes the company's efforts to appeal more to women with titles like DC Universe Online. That said, fans of the company's headlining franchise shouldn't worry too much about its future: "It's pretty safe to say that "EverQuest" has not seen its last game. So we've got our own cards to play there, and I think we will play them at the right time. But the quality level will be something that people will be very happy with." Read on to MTV Multiplayer for the full interview.

One of the most hotly anticipated sci-fi MMOs on the horizon is Jumpgate Evolution. Despite the videos, screenshots, and bits of fiction that NetDevil has been releasing to stoke interest in the game, some questions remain unanswered -- particularly in terms of continuity with Jumpgate's previous incarnation and how they plan to differentiate themselves from competing MMOs in the genre.

To that end, WarCry has done a Q&A with Hermann Peterscheck, the Producer of Jumpgate Evolution. The interview touches on the challenges faced in the development process and the game's relatively low system requirements. In addition, Peterscheck discusses whether the game is really geared towards hardcore or casual gamers. See the WarCry interview for Peterscheck's views on where the game is and what he hopes it will be for fans of space-based games.

Our chums over at mmorpg.com have been getting some information from Jeff Hickman on a subject all Warhammer Online players know very well: the cut classes and cities that didn't make it to launch. There's been a lot of discussion of this topic since WAR went live - much of it of the 'it would have been more balanced if only' variety - and in the course of an excellent meaty interview, Jeff has some choice words to say on the subject.

Obviously, there's no date for reincorporation of the cut material yet (none of us seriously thought there would be, right?) The cut classes simply 'weren't as good as they needed to be' and will be done when they're done. We're impressed with Jeff's assertion that players shouldn't necessarily like all of the classes. 'Players should love some and hate others.' A step away from bland, one-size-fits-all pandering to the customer? Apparently.

Jeff's flatly dismissive of the notion that the cut classes' absence has unbalanced the game. His quote says it all: '...what we're seeing is a lot of people judging the game in Tier 1 (which is again, perfectly fine, you SHOULD judge the game in Tier 1), but I think everyone needs to keep in mind that that's the first ten hours of gameplay for a game that is hundreds of thousands of hours of gameplay out there over the next couple of years.'

Gamesindustry.biz has rolled out the second part of an interview with Jon Niermann, the Asia-Pacific president of EA. The main focus is on how well Warhammer Online can expect to do in an Asian market. World of Warcraft has not been faring at all badly, and it's natural to wonder how a similar but markedly different product can perform in the same arena.

Jon is upbeat about WAR's prospects, even given the known divide between Asian and Western MMO styles. 'I think it's going to surprise people, I think it's going to do extremely well.' It's easy to descend into cliche when talking about the differences between Asian and Western MMO styles, but we've frequently seen gamers mention three elements when discussing perceived Asian preferences: the ability to grind, large raids and group content, and PvP with depth. Given WAR's focus on Realm versus Realm, it could conceivably be the runaway success Jon Niermann expects it to be

Firesky has launched a Stargate Worlds channel on YouTube, and has promised that a new video will go live every week day from here on out. So far there are six videos, all of which are brief, punchy developer interviews related to the various weapons in the game.

A few of them are a little painful to watch due to extreme geekiness, but there is a somewhat amusing running joke about the flamethrower weapon being a terribly kept secret. Its existence is unconvincingly denied in most videos, and in one it is confirmed but the developer insists that flamethrower gameplay is not ready to be shown to the public. He says this while a monitor behind him displays all kinds of in-game flamethrower carnage.

Firesky proudly brags that the channel was the #1 most subscribed on YouTube during the week of the 21st, and that it sits comfortably in the top 25 for the whole month of September. That said, most of the videos have only had a couple thousand views, except for the very first video (the flamethrower one), which had 8,000 views. Huh; that's kind of like a microcosm of the monthly lifecycle of an MMO! Anyway, we've embedded the flamethrower footage on the other side of the jump.

By now, we all should know quite a bit about Lord of the Rings Online's newest expansion, Mines of Moria, slated for release later this year. We know about the two new classes and the new area to explore, but what about the future after Moria? This has only been touched-on previously, but in two recent interviews with Executive Producer Jeffrey Steefel, we get word of Turbine's plans with the franchise.

First, Steefel mentions the fact that they're aiming to release another expansion this time next year, and that there will be several new books released between now and then. While this has been discussed before, he mentions the act that these books will all take place in and around Lothlorien. Does this mean we may see the next expansion focusing on Rohan? Oh, wouldn't that be amazing.

The Leveling Pact

Massively: Brian, you talked about how day jobs are part of NC Norcal's idea of involving players in the game even when they're not necessarily playing, and it seems like the Leveling Pact is obviously a tie-in to that. Can you talk a little bit about that, from a philosophical perspective?

Brian Clayton: I'll talk about it from a philosophical perspective and then let Matt follow up with the nuts and bolts of it. The one thing that we continue to strive for with City of Heroes is to pick areas where the MMO genre could use some innovation. We certainly have the best character creation system, and I would argue that sidekicking was very innovative, at the time when that was released. Even the further iterations, like our base creation system, were still very innovative.

So we looked at another area of innovation with the Mission Architect system, and now the Leveling Pact. These are things that had been begging to be done in the MMO space for so long. Again, while sidekicking and exemplaring accommodate a number of player types, we feel that the leveling pact now accomodates another type of player. These things not only benefit City of Heroes, they push the genre forward.

Matt Miller: It's definitely one of those features that came to us based on a lot of feedback we had from our players, and especially our friends who are playing the game. They came to us and said 'You know, I like playing the game, and I like the sidekicking system, but I'm getting to a point where my friends are so far outleveling me that they don't want to exemplar down and do my stuff because they've already done it before. Is there any way that we can stay more in synch?'

"So we had this idea for the Leveling Pact: essentially splitting each character's XP gain directly in half and just distributing it across two characters whether they're offline or online."

So we had this idea for the Leveling Pact: essentially splitting each character's XP gain directly in half and just distributing it across two characters whether they're offline or online. And we said: 'You know what? There's a system here. This is a workable system. This is really innovative, and this is taking a new step in sidekicking, making sure that you and your friend are always able to play the game together, and will always be the same level.'

Massively: So basically the main character's XP gain is halved, and the other part is given to the buddy?

Matt Miller: Yeah, basically both characters when they earn XP, they go through all the calculations for earning XP – how much they're supposed to get, based on their team size, what they defeated – every calculation possible in the game, and at the very end it's divided in two and each person in the pact gets their share.

Massively: So the obvious question there, and Brian, this might be more to you, is from a business standpoint, this seems like it might be a dangerous ground to walk for powerleveling services. Because there's some obvious ways that this could be taken advantage of by those kinds of guys. Is that a concern for the company?

Brian Clayton: Sure. I mean, it's absolutely a concern. It's a concern that we deal with today, without the system. Really, what we're trying to do is build opportunities for our players to play the games in the way they want to. We'll continue to enforce our policies, and do everything we can to mitigate powerleveling services and things like that. But more importantly, this is a feature that our customers have been asking for, and it's a feature that we want to provide them with. Arguably, you could say we're making it easier for some of these powerleveling services, but at the same time we're probably improving the grouping experience for a substantial amount of our customers.

Matt Miller: There's actually less incentive now to use a powerleveling service, because now instead of paying someone to powerlevel my guy, I can actually have my friend play... and I'm not giving up my play time to some other service. I actually get to play whenever I want to on my character. And my friend gets to play whenever he wants to on his character, and we're both leveling at the same rate.


New Story Arcs

Massively: So for both of you: Issue 13 had already announced that you were going to do more Cimerora mission arcs, and now we hear there will be more Midnight Squad arcs too. Can you talk about where those are coming from as far as the overall story is concerned, and what you guys are hoping to get across for players on the mission content front?

Matt Miller: Sure. On the overall story, we always had more story to tell in Issue 12, with both the Midnight Squad and with Cimerora. We just didn't have time to get it all in. When we hired on – we just hired on a couple of new mission writers, and we wanted to make sure that their training didn't go to waste. We wanted to make sure that they understood the systems they were going to be dealing with.

And so we had a bunch of these leftover stories from Issue 12, and said 'Okay, let's get these in. Let's train you, and at the same time, get content in the game.' It's a win for us in training, and it's a win for the players in that they get some content. So that's basically what we did, and the story arcs are really fun. They give you more of the background to Cimerora, and more of the characters of the area, and more of the characters in the Midnight Squad, and more of the background on who they are. So it's a lot of cool stuff for the people who are really into the storylines.

Dungeon Runners

Massively: Now when you're talking about stepping more in the direction of the triple-A titles, that sort of implies that you're getting away from some of the smaller games that you guys have been working on in the past. We know that the Dungeon Runners team is experiencing some changes – can you talk specifically about that game, and what's going to be happening with those folks?

David Reid: Even before the NC West announcement, the Dungeon Runners team went through some changes. You're probably referring to the announcement of the reduction we had of about 21 people, several weeks before the announcement of NC West, and Dungeon Runners was part of that. And that was about the fact that – yes, we like Dungeon Runners as a service, but there was a decision not to port that product on to other platforms but to keep the game intact as it is right now on the PC platform.

There were a number of other projects that had not been announced that were part of that, and they too were what we'll call lighter and smaller MMO fare, rather than triple-A types of products. Beyond that, Dungeon Runners is as healthy as it's ever been, and is still a vibrant part of the NCsoft portfolio. It's just that it's a different sort of business, and one that is a very successful kind of business overall, it's just not where NCsoft is going to continue investing its product development publishing resources, going forward.

Massively: So it would be fair to say that people who enjoy Dungeon Runners shouldn't expect it to go anywhere, but as far as a ton of new content in the future... that would probably not be the direction that the company would be going in for that product?

David Reid: I'd clarify that answer just a bit. We were thinking seriously about 'should we bring Dungeon Runners to other, alternative platforms?' And that's what a large amount of that team was working on, and other parts of NCsoft. That decision has been: no, we're not going to. I wouldn't read into that anything about the amount of content that the Dungeon Runners team is going to be making on a regular basis. That will continue to go forward.

Console Ports

Massively: You mentioned porting to other platforms a couple of times now. We think it's a little more than a year ago at this point that you announced you had that agreement with Sony to think about doing some stuff for the PS3. We haven't really seen that so far. Is that part of this announcement, sort of refocusing NC West on getting some of Ncsoft's more stable games over to the Playstation 3?

David Reid: Yeah... I can tell you that we do think console development is an incredibly important part of our future. We do think that, you know, you look at companies like... NCsoft today is a PC only company, and we've seen what's happened with some of these formerly PC only (or predominantly PC) companies who have successfully brought their properties to the console.

As a gamer myself, I take a lot of inspiration from what the Tom Clancy series did for UbiSoft, or what Morrowind as a shifted Xbox and PC title did for Bethesda. And we believe that there is a transition like that that NCsoft can have, by taking some of its triple-A properties, and making a great triple-A MMO that works on the console.

"As a gamer myself, I take a lot of inspiration from what the Tom Clancy series did for UbiSoft, or what Morrowind as a shifted Xbox and PC title did for Bethesda."

So yeah, it is true. You can't do everything all the time, and at some level we recognise that the best prize for NCsoft to be focused on is the triple-A space, and that's on the PC platform and on the console platform. But beyond that, I don't have an announcement that I can make for you at this time!

Massively: Not a problem. We just wanted to clarify, because it seems like a natural progression from where you guys are talking about with triple-A titles being your focus.

David Reid: We passionately agree. Absolutely.

Massively: We really appreciate you guys' time. We know that the readers have been... we guess the best word is confused, because as we said, it sort of came out of nowhere. And we're glad we had the chance to talk!

David Reid: You bet! Well, at the end of the day, I hope that for folks who are fans of these giant triple-A games, these big investments in the MMO space with high production quality, there should be no confusion: this is good news for that game. We are going to get back to doing this all day, every day, in a world class way. The lighter side of the business, the free-to-plays and things like that, those are great businesses, but there will be other companies who will be delivering that form. It won't be NCsoft so much, going forward.

Read what David Reid had to say on Tabula Rasa and Guild Wars.

Massively: Great. So it's actually more towards NC West as sort of a general umbrella under which these specific studios can have their own names, and really carve out their own places within the company?

David Reid: Absolutely. Think about it this way: the reorganization and the establishment of NC West is more of an acknowledgement that we as a company can be doing better on the publishing side, in terms of taking these great products that these veteran leadership studios have been able to crank out, and turn them into much bigger phenomena. Right?

I mean, we've had great success with City of Heroes, we've had great success with Guild Wars, but we think it can be bigger. What we're not doing is changing the studio organization, other than the studios all now report in to Jeff Strain, who has moved on from the day to day management of ArenaNet – Michael O'Brien is now the studio head there, and is leading the Guild Wars 2 team and other projects there – but Jeff serves as a manager across the studio organization.

"... we've had great success with City of Heroes, we've had great success with Guild Wars, but we think it can be bigger."

And in parallel, what I get to do for Jeff and those studios is make sure that we do the best we can to deliver triple-A world class launches across our Western territories, and make sure that the marketing, the sales, the customer support – all the elements that great developers look to great publishers to do – are being done here. There's going to be some common platforms and things on the technology side, and a common team that helps serve the business, but nothing really changes on the product development side.

Massively: Okay. So you're saying nothing much is going to change on the product development side, but to that end it seems like as part of the NC West conglomeration, there are some folks moving around. There's a little more... we guess you could say refinement in what people are doing in a couple of these different studios. Could you talk generally about what we're seeing, as far as people moving on to new positions, people moving on from Austin to Seattle, those sorts of things?

David Reid: I should say one thing: that the decision about moving out NC West in the way we're doing it is, while there's no real change happening at the studio level, there is this ratification of 'NCsoft is going to be in the triple-A MMO space day in and day out', right?

We've done some interesting things and had some success with smaller titles, things like Dungeon Runners and Exteel are doing well for us, but the company by and large is the company that Lineage built, and this reorganization is a ratification of getting back to that business and going all-in on the Lineages, Guild Wars, Aions, City of Heroes, Tabula Rasas, Blade and Souls, those sorts of games are what NCsoft is going to be doing day in, day out here in the West.

Now, there's a specific question you asked there about how does this impact certain people. We are planning to – we're in the process of now porting the internal people that we would like to relocate to Seattle, and have offered a healthy number of folks a relocation up to Seattle to be part of what is principally a publishing headquarters. And so that's where the bulk of the North American and global leadership for marketing, for sales, for PR, aspects like that, we're thinking will be headquartered in Seattle.

Seattle for us was the logical place to go because of the relationship with Seoul, and Seattle just happens to be the place where you get the best number of non-stop flights to Seoul and to our West Coast studios, and to our UK office, out of Seattle versus any other city on the West Coast. And so we are also relocating what is now our Eastern games studio, the folks that are our North American and European producer team, for bringing games like Aion and Lineage and Blade and Soul into the Western market. Those folks are moving to Seattle, as well as the publishing headquarters.