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In a recent interview with Allakhazam, BioWare's Sean Dahlberg discusses their newest MMO project, Star Wars: The Old Republic. As Community Manager for the project, Dahlberg was able to give some great insight into the game's storyline and direction, or at least as much as he could say for now.

One particularly interesting part of this interview is the discussion on PvP. As Allakhazam points out, the Republic and Sith Empire are not exactly friendly towards each other, so PvP would be an obvious game feature. Dahlberg explains that PvP is definitely part of the game, yet points out that TOR "is not looking to be the jack-of-all-trades game. Instead, we are going to focus on what we do best and make sure the game and all its elements are fun and entertaining." He goes on to explain away what may have sounded like a suggestion that the game will be PvP-heavy by saying, "TOR will offer fun and rewarding gameplay no matter what your play style is. If you're not a PvPer at heart, there are definitely other things within the game to do."

Sounds very promising, and we're excited to hear more about the game, and relay it all to you, when more news becomes available.

Since the game's launch in April of 2005, ArenaNet's Guild Wars has set the bar a bit higher for future MMOs in relation to gameplay, their unique business model and skill balance. Their constant attention to detail when balancing literally hundreds of game skills between PvP and PvE has been an ongoing progression for everyone on the ArenaNet team.

Often seen by hardcore players as the name behind this constant balance is Isaiah "Izzy" Cartwright, Game Designer at ArenaNet. We were able to catch up with Cartwright for a brief interview regarding the past, present and future state of PvP in Guild Wars. Follow along after the cut for the full interview and some exclusive PvP screenshots supplied to us by ArenaNet.

In an interview with videogaming247, Turbine bigwig Jeffrey Steefel said that he expects The Lord of the Rings Online to become the second viably successful western MMO in Asia (after World of Warcraft), should his team get the Chinese launch right. The two MMO-playing communities have historically had very different tastes, but Steefel believes western devs are finally figuring out how to break into the east. "That's where a big part of the global gaming market is and it's been that way for a long time," he said, "but we're only just now figuring how western games can begin to tap into that market.

Steefel also noted -- as many of Blizzard's competitors have been keen to do -- that much of WoW's growth in recent months has been in Asia, not in America or Europe. Guess he's hoping to capture a little of that Blizzard cross-cultural mojo when his game launches in China and Korea. We're aware Asia is a long way away for most of our readers, so for those of you who could care less: check out our own interview with Steefel for subjects a little closer to home. Shameless, aren't we?

The latest EverQuest II expansion, The Shadow Odyssey, will launch this week on November 18th. In advance of the launch, Stephanie Morrow of Beckett Massive Online Gamer recently interviewed some members of the EverQuest II design team -- Noel Walling (Design Supervisor), Paul Molina (Game Designer), Adam Stevens (Game Designer) and Carlos Mora (Associate Game Designer).

The Beckett Massive Online Gamer interview focuses on the lore of EverQuest II (with an emphasis on background for readers who've never played), but also gets down into some specifics regarding The Shadow Odyssey dungeons, the challenges of designing around the 80 level cap, and some of the new features that players can expect from this week's launch of the fifth EverQuest II expansion. If you're an EQ II fan, the interview is worth a read, and of course we also hope you're enjoying our ongoing coverage of The Shadow Odyssey.

We're pretty well swept up in the Wrath of the Lich King launch today, but that doesn't mean we're not keeping an eye on the rest of the MMO world. Our most recent Massively Speaking podcast featured an interview with Turbine's Kate Paiz, Senior Producer for Dungeons and Dragons Online, conducted by our overlord Michael Zenke. The interview hits on some details of Turbine's plans for Dungeon and Dragons Online in Module 8 (namely 'hirelings') and beyond.

But there's more -- GameBanshee recently ran a Turbine interview detailing how DDO has changed in Module 8 over its previous iterations. The GameBanshee interview gives us some additional details on Module 8's hirelings, and focuses on the new Character Generation system, a story-based introduction to the game, and content for higher-level players.

Even though former Blizzard veteran and Flagship CEO Bill Roper just recently joined Cryptic Studios as a design director, it hasn't taken them long to sit him down and put together a brand new "Meet The Team" segment for his position with the Champions Online team. If you haven't read many (or any) of these often interesting interviews just yet, we highly recommend giving this one a chance. Not only does Bill speak about his time with Blizzard, but also the essential lessons he's taken from being the CEO of Flagship and how he plans on applying them to his work at Cryptic.

Attentive readers will notice that the interview also hints at the progress of Champions Online. With Bill discussing his interest in implementing the crafting system, which isn't in the game yet, but also mentioning that the title is pretty far along. Most MMOs in development experience a delay or two, but by the sounds of it we may actually get to play this one on time.

Yes, that's right, two people actually sat down with all of their Lego blocks and worked out how to build Booty Bay with only 100,000 pieces! Astrylian and Raeina, a husband and wife team of Lego and World of Warcraft fanatics, completed their five foot replica of the Steamwheedle Cartel's southern most city in just under a month of building. Lucky for us that they decided to sit down with our sister site, WoW Insider, and chat about the whole project!

One of the most remarkable things about the whole display is that there's not a single custom built Lego piece in it. Everything was built using standard Lego pieces, such as the head of Dobby from the Harry Potter set being used as the head for the various goblin models. Even with that limitation, the scene is very well done and quite accurate. If you want to see the whole interview and learn how they did it, run on over and visit WoW Insider for the full details of the build!

It looks like the sci-fi MMO genre is going to experience quite an influx of new titles in the months and years to come. Beyond the more standard sci-fi MMOs we've reported on in the past, one that's caught our attention at Massively is the upcoming post-apocalyptic title, Earthrise. It seems that beta testing is going to begin "in autumn", as confirmed by Masthead Studios CEO Atanas Atanasov in an interview with Polish MMO-centric gaming site The Art of MMO.

While the interview brought to light some interesting revelations about Earthrise as a sandbox MMO, it also nailed down some details such as the system requirements to run the title: minimum requirements are 2 GHz CPU, 1024 MB RAM and 256 MB VRAM video card supporting shader model v3.0, according to Atanasov. But the interview also gives confirmations about guild-based PvP (which Atanasov refers to as 'Guild-vs-Guild' or 'GvG'), character advancement, and the roleplaying opportunities he sees being available to players in the Earthrise sandbox. Check out the entire English version of the interview over at The Art of MMO for more on this title.

Massively has been watching what's happening with 38 Studios and their upcoming MMO codenamed 'Copernicus' -- and the most recent bit of info we turned up comes through today's interview at Gamasutra by Christian Nutt. Gamasutra has interviewed 38 Studios Executive Art Director Todd McFarlane, well-known to most of us for his work in the comics industry and for the numerous offerings of McFarlane Toys.

Indeed, a fair amount of the Gamasutra interview focuses on McFarlane Toys and its success in the action figure industry, but McFarlane spoke a bit about 38 Studios and its MMO project as well. He touched upon how 38 Studios hopes to differentiate their game from what's presently offered: "But the question is, can we make ours feel better than the other guys? And the stuff that I'm seeing relative to what's out there in the open market, the answer is absolutely, right now." While McFarlane doesn't exactly spill details on what we can really expect from Copernicus, he does offer up some hints as to what 38 Studios is doing, and more importantly, why they're taking a different approach to the MMO space than some of their competitors. For more info on Copernicus, or just to read up on what a comics legend is doing these days, check out the full interview with Todd McFarlane over at Gamasutra.

In a recent interview with Ten Ton Hammer, ArenaNet's Bobby Stein explains a great deal about the process of creating such an intriguing storyline as we have in Guild Wars. The company's Writing Team Lead speaks candidly about how they were able to concentrate the plot into the most efficient and interesting quest lines, walking that fine line between a boring wall of text and "nothing more than quest dispensers."

Speaking briefly on the upcoming Guild Wars 2, Stein adds, "We were able to keep the coolest things from the world while letting the rest remain in the annals of history. Despite all that has changed, Tyria is very much in need of heroes. A lot can change in a few hundred years. New races have risen to prominence. New threats have surfaced. You'll see threads of current Guild Wars history, along with some new stories." Even as there's no new information on Guild Wars 2 here, it's still a compelling article for those interested in learning more about the storyline writing process from one of the best in the business.

Linden Lab announced that it has signed on interactive design agency, Big Spaceship, as a key part of its strategy to rework the user-experience, user-interface and signup system for Second Life. The project has been dubbed the UX (User eXperience) project. Big Spaceship, in fact, has apparently been onboard with the Lab for some little while now -- we're only really just hearing about it.

We had the opportunity to steal a bit of time with Benjamin Linden (otherwise known as Ben Glenn) who is a Director on Linden Lab's User Experience team and talk to him about Big Spaceship's involvement. Ben is primarily responsible for the user interface design of the Second Life viewer. Along the way we learned a lot about the Lab's reasoning behind this project, the goals they were shooting towards, and how they intended to achieve them.

We've all known about Turbine's plans for a console MMO for a few months now, but in a recent interview with videogaming247.com, Lord of the Rings Online's Executive Producer Jeffrey Steefel mentioned the fact that an announcement will be coming early next year on what type of "products" Turbine aims to release for the console.

"What we're doing now is the early development work and the work with the hardware manufacturers to understand where they're heading in the online space, where the connectivity between the console and internet is really headed," Steefel said in the interview. Since Turbine's recent work with Warner Bros, the speculations have been across the board from a Harry Potter MMO, to LotRO being ported to the console or even an entirely new project. The biggest news of this interview though is the fact that he mentions "products", plural. Guess we'll just need to wait a few months to know for sure. In the meantime, we should be able to keep ourselves busy.

The player-driven economy of EVE Online is very much a playground for those interested in being financiers, traders, or whatever variant of corporate tycoon their greedy little hearts desire in the virtual space. EVE is a far cry from most MMOs in that its market isn't manned by NPC vendors, it's almost entirely player driven and remains dynamic due to the fact that EVE is a single-world game, where all player interactions can conceivably affect the game's economy. For some players, EVE's economics is where they immerse themselves. Indeed, in some cases it's even where they PvP with their rivals in price wars and market manipulations. To them, the market is where they live and breathe, just as much as lowsec is the ideal environment for many pirates, and lawless 0.0 space is where players interested in large-scale alliance warfare feel at home.

While EVE doesn't officially support a stock market or banking institutions, the sandbox approach CCP Games took to the game has allowed players to establish their own financial ventures in-game. However, without safeguards put in place by CCP Games, and with New Eden being a place where players can act as they wish, there's always the risk of embezzlement in any large-scale, player-driven financial institution. While it doesn't happen as often as most assume, there have been incidents like the EVE Intergalactic Bank (EIB) scam that have eroded investor confidence in such ventures. Fortunately, not all players are daunted by this, both in terms of those with a vision to establish a financial venture and the investors they rely upon. One such visionary in New Eden is "Ricdic", Founder and Managing Director of EBANK.

Not according to EA Games president Frank Gibeau, who has been understandably diplomatic about the potential success of the company's upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO. In a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz, he discusses his views on the different virtual space occupied by SWTOR and Warhammer Online, after being specifically asked about it at a recent event in San Francisco.

"Well, as much as Need for Speed is a competitor for FIFA," Gibeau stated in the GamesIndustry.biz interview. "They compete in the same genre of videogames but they're very diverse customer bases. The Warhammer customer base will overlap to a degree with Star Wars, but obviously you're bringing in millions of new customers with the Star Wars universe."

I read E-ON so I know you've really got your finger on the pulse of EVE, but given the magazine's quarterly publishing schedule, how do you meet the challenges of covering a game that's always evolving?

My finger isn't on the pulse at all. Never has been. I just know where to find the pulse when I need it.

It's difficult to be topical and obviously the magazine could be seen to date quite quickly, but I don't feel that aspect detracts from the the magazine at all. If anything it enhances it. I've always likened E-ON to a snapshot of EVE. Each issue captures EVE in a moment that will never exists again. For example, in the first issue we published a profile of a much-loved EVE fansite called EVE-I. Soon after publication EVE-I went down and never returned. (It actually went down before publication, but the admins assured me it would be back.) At the time it was slightly embarrassing that the we had a glowing profile of the site and some people on the forums found that amusing, but as time has gone by and memory has faded, EVE-I has been forgotten by all but the oldest veterans. The point is that the site is no longer active, it no longer even exists.... except in E-ON.

It's a similar story with the "Darwin's Contraption" movie, which we previewed in Issue #005, and maybe the EVE: Ascension mod (#009) will never see the light of day, but in E-ON all these great fan projects can be celebrated for their efforts, if not their achievements.

As for the ever-changing nature of EVE, it's precisely because EVE never stands still that there are always deep seams of material to mine for content. I actually feel that we could do an issue of E-ON every six weeks, perhaps monthly, but I'm not sure my superiors share that view because it's a fair bit of work that goes into design and production and MMM are a very small outfit, but there certainly is never a problem filling an issue with words -- quite the opposite.