All Posts by Adrys

I wanted to send you a little news blurb about our latest podcast, "The wife-aggro Podcast 51: The Flying Labs Interview 2."

I got to talk with Rusty Williams of Flying Labs about their game, "Pirates of the Burning Sea."

Topics included:
The development of PotBS. What design decisions worked well, which ones didn't, and what they're doing to fix those that didn't.
What prompted the recent server consolidation and what it means for the future of the game.
What it's like being a game developer in the post World of Warcraft MMO Industry.

The show can be found at www.wife-aggro.com/podcast as well as downloaded from most podcast sites (I-Tunes, Podcast Pickle, Podfeed, Odeo, etc.

This week, Rage is joined by two members of Masthead Studios.

Atanas Atanasov, CEO, and Apostol Apostolov, Lead Designer, visited our Ventrilo server to discuss their upcoming MMO, Earthrise.

Some of the topics include:

• An overview on the Continoma and Noir
• The Types of Guilds in Earthrise
• Guild versus Guild Combat
• Guild and Player Housing
• Crafting
• Skill-based Characters
• Vehicles
• “Gold” selling

Rage and I want to thank the folks over at Masthead for making this interview possible. It’s obvious that they’re passionate about their game and, after listening, I’m sure you’ll agree they have some innovation going on over there in Bulgaria.

-Seth

I think there's a thin line between being truely innovative and creating a niche game.

Most Dev teams will say that they're just trying to create the best game they can while being true to their vision but I think in the back of their minds they're all hoping to create the next million subcriber break out game (WoW's numbers are a freak in the industry so I'm basing my comments on the *other* successful MMOs).

So, I think they're willing to slide in some innovation here and there but shy away from drastic gameplay changes for fear that they'll alienate too many MMO gamers.

The PVE / PVP / Player Created Item trinity have become the 3 pillars that MMO games become successful on. And there's historic examples of games that have tried to exclude one of these 3 and either failed outright or had to come back later and add them in due to player pressure *cough* Guild Wars *cough* City of Heroes *cough*.

Alot of money goes into the creation of an MMO these days. The dev teams where a handful of guys can rent a house and some computer equipment and kick out an Asheron's Call are awful rare any more. So it's only fair to give a team a break when they're designing to a well known audiance.

I do think Masthead is to be recognized for trying some new things here. As are some other groups out there who are pushing the envelope a little one what the MMO norms are.

We're working on getting an interview scheduled with these guys for our show, so please keep up the questions and comments. Maybe we can get them answered for you. And you never know, maybe it'll prompt MMORPG to give Earthrise an actual link from the, "Games in Development" part of their forums page.

We got the chance to submit some listener (and host :) ) questions to the Devs over at Masthead Studios who are developing the upcoming MMO, "Earthrise."

Atanas Atanasov, CEO at Masthead Studios, sent us back his answers which we've posted up on our podcast website at www.wife-aggro.com/podcasts

Enjoy.

-Sethanon

We've been fortunate enough to have a couple of interviews with the folks over at Wardog Studios about their upcoming MMO, Force of Arms.

To wrap up the latest interview, Patrick Hamilton sent us over some exclusive images of two of the vehicles that they're working on.

Check out the interviews and the images over at our podcast shownotes at http://www.wife-aggro.com/podcasts

I think it's an issue of communication.

Beta testers... Erm.. Good Beta testers are active in both the game and on whatever venue the developer has up for testers to comment about the state of the game on. Be that a forum, chat channel, or bug submission process.

Good developers also keep pumping out information on the state of the beta test. What they're hearing about, what they're working on, what to expect in the next build, etc.

As long as both the tester and developer are keeping those lines of communication full with feedback and information, beta tests seem to work out pretty well. This seems pretty simple, but in my experiance, only about half or less of the beta tests that I've participated have had both lines of communication running during the test. Generally, it's the developer side of communication that needs a litle work.

There's also a 10% rule at work in beta tests. By that I mean that out of 100 testers, only 10 are there with the idea that this is a test and that there *should* be issues that need to be resolved. These are the 10 that try alot of different things and then report back on what they find. The other 90 seem to think that a beta test is more like a release candidate. They jump into a beta test, power level the heck out of a single character, and then spend their free time comparing different games in general chat and informing everyone that can read which games they think "suxxors."

-dr

Jason Feller, who worked with Wahoo in the creation of Saga joined us this week for a podcast interview.

If you have questions about this genre breaking MMORTS, give us a listen and see your questions are answered.

Well, it's not battletech, but the guys over at Wardog Studios are working on a mech based game called Force of Arms. They just did a nice two part interview for us at our podcast.

The game is still in it's early phases, and has a ways to go yet, but it looks pretty promising.

I was pretty disappointed that the last mech MMO that I knew of, Battletech 3025 was dropped by it's network which was, I think, EA.

-seth

Patrick Hamilton and Jeff Newcomb of Wardog Studios visited The Wife-Aggro podcast this week to discuss their upcoming "Mech" based MMO, "Force of Arms."

Part 1 of the interview can be found on this week's podcast and part 2 will conclude the interview on next week's show.

http://www.wife-aggro.com/podcast

PotBS is breaking alot of new ground.

I think there's a type of MMO player who is really into the Fantasy setting and this game probably won't be for them. But for those of us who just want to get into a genre breaking MMO that definately charts new waters (to coin a phrase) this game would seem to have it all in a nice attractive package.

WoW (and yes, I'm a player) has set a pretty high benchmark for subscriptions. I'm not sure that we'll see another game hit those numbers for a while, though I wish all of the new ones the best of luck. But it did fall short in several areas that most of us who play it just tend to overlook because we just don't see another good option out there... yet.

It's not a guild friendly game. The mechanics for forming a guild and a basic chat option seem to be as much though as went into guilds by the WoW devs. Guilds just seem to be there to make it easier for people to chat about things and plan instance and quest events. Other then that, they don't serve much of a function compared to the likes of DAoC, Lineage, and EVE.

It's PvP is uninspired. Again, I'll point out EVE, DAoC and the City of Villians/Heroes games as better implementations of a concept.

I think PotBS will up the benchmark in alot of gameplay areas. And I look forward to sailing my own ships on Flying Lab's Seas.

It appears to me that they've found them selves in the enviable position of being victims of their own success.

I believe that originally they only intended to release the game over STEAM. Because that was the cheapest way to get a game out to what they probably assumed was going to be a medium sized fan base.

But, now that they have alot of buzz going on about PotBS, they're looking at options for a much larger release and all the fan erm... fanfare that goes with it.

I don't believe this is entirely for the fans. They've worked alot of years on this game and I'm sure that the idea of Gamestop launch parties ala Burning Crusade and LOTRO appeals to their vanity as much as it would to any of us. However, I do feel that their efforts to get as many people into the lauch as possible benefits all of us. Too many MMOs die a sad death from lackluster launches. To my mind, only EVE has managed to recover.

Delays suck, but I agree with the general theme here that we'd rather have a polished release a few months later, then a buggy one in June or August (depending on who you talk to).

I'm hoping that a longer polishing phase means a longer open beta.

-Seth

Pirates of the Burning Seas

Star Trek Online

Age of Conan

Pretty much in that order