Features

In a special treat, we spoke to seven industry leaders about the State of MMOs as they exist today and where they're headed in the future. We take on the biggest topics, such as the cost of development, subscription vs. micropayments, innovation vs. evolution and many more.

In this article, we hear from SOE President John Smedley, ZeniMax Online Studios General Manager Matt Firor, Themis Group CEO Alexander Macris, GamerDNA.com Director of Community Sanya Weathers, EVE Online Game Designer Chantel Zuurmond, IGN PC Executive Editor Steve Butts and the former Executive Producer of Star Trek Online Daron Stinnett.

It was a sentiment shared by most of those we spoke to. It's obvious that World of Warcraft has the market by the throat and have become perhaps the only truly global game in the MMO-space. That means some tough realities for the games in the next tier.

"[MMOs are in a] state of unrest, right now," said Matt Firor, General Manager of ZeniMax Online Studios, a sister company of Bethesda. "World of Warcraft is ruling the subscription game market, and no one wants to complete with them directly, so they go off for niche markets."

As a special note, this will be my final article here with WarCry and it's been a pleasure.

It's about to hit its fifth birthday, so we took the chance to talk to Valerie Massey of CCP Games about the history of EVE Online and in the process, got a little scoop of this summer's expansion pack!

We also have a nice little video interview that CCP put together with CEO Hilmar Petursson on the company's history. You can grab that here.

The title of the next expansion - revealed here for the first time - will be "The Empyrean Age," the same as the EVE novel by Tony Gonzalez also slated for the summer. The reason is simple, this is the first EVE Online expansion where the story of the game and its universe will play a key role, a lot of it based off the novel.

"The universe of Eve has always had this fragile peace between the races and now that's going to end," Massey said. This means war and that is the core new feature: factional warfare. "People can actually take an active role and choose sides for who they want to fight for and who they want to fight against."

Read it all after the leap.

CCP Games CEO Hilmar Petursson sat for an internal interview the company did on its history. WarCry has it today for those who want to see "The Red Lion" talk about how CCP got where it is.

Click below to watch the whole thing.

CCP's Pétur Óskarsson recently spoke to WarCry about EVE Online's experiment in game development democracy, the Council of Stellar Management. In this interview, we talk about the genesis of the idea, timing, scope and more.

WarCry: Are there any limits to how many times a player can be on the Council?

Pétur Óskarsson: Yes, everyone is limited to two terms of six months each. This can be concurrent terms or two terms in total over their lifetime. We want to keep the program a bit more inline with most Democratic states.

As I said before, the first year is going to be hard but we still believe it's worth the effort and worth the time. We really want EVE to become better and hopefully this council will become an essential part of EVE in the future. We're really kind of flying blind here and don't really know what to expect but no guts, no glory.

Read it all after the jump.

In the fourth of our five part "The War on the Impossible" series, we focus on Trinity, the next expansion to EVE Online. Due out this winter, CCP promises a complete graphics overhaul, a brand new client and a host of gameplay improvements. We preview them all in this article.

To get caught up on this series, you can check out Part One: Introduction, Part Two: Democracy and Part Three: Ambulation. Part five follows later this week.

"We have a focus in this expansion and its beautiful ships," said Chief Technical Officer Halldor Fannar. "I believe this is only the beginning."

The expansion is about more than just pretty pictures though. During a detailed presentation, Fannar explained that all those graphics would be made possible by a brand new client, which not only provides significant improvements for everyone in a traditional DirectX9 environment, but also paves the way for the future and DirectX10. The goal is not just to throw more polygons at people, but to take advantage of larger company resources to build a client that runs better as well.

Ready to learn more? Click below to get the scoop!

Call it what you want, "walking on stations" or "Ambulation". Next year, EVE Online is going to let people out of their pods and into the world. We preview both the artistic and gameplay plan for the expansion after next as part of our week long series of reports from last week's fanfest.

This is the third part in our series. To get caught up, you can check out Part One: Introduction and Part Two: Democracy.

When CCP looked at their game, they realized an overwhelming percentage of their subscribers were male and many people of both genders just could not relate to a game where people primarily identified with a spaceship, rather than a living being. As they continue to try to grow their game, they felt the need to fix the problem, but also did not want to change what made EVE Online so popular.

By design, Ambulation will not change the way people play EVE. They've gone to great lengths to ensure they don't waste their time with graphical representation of functionality already in the game, but instead create new gameplay for those who do wish to get off their ship and see the sights.

Read more after the jump.

Yesterday, we introduced the coming week of articles based on what we saw at EVE Online Fanfest and today we focus in on our first issue: The Council of Stellar Management. This is CCP's attempt to bring "deliberative democracy" to EVE and in true CCP-fashion, they not only presented their design, but invited a couple people to disagree with them and gave them microphones.

In this article, we describe the system, relate the presentations of Jessica Mulligan and Dr. Richard Bartle, the debate that followed the CCP CEO Hilmar Petursson and then finally our own take on the idea. Enjoy.

CCP then said the Council of Stellar Management exists within the "physics of the world", not to influence it. This statement though is a direct contradiction to the design presented earlier in the day, where the councilors were to serve as people, not players and to consider whatever the players want, which theoretically could and should include questions of game balance and design.

At this point, Mulligan brought up a theoretical example where the Goon Swarm convinces the council to vote that all ships be replaced with pink ponies. It's patently ridiculous, but not really inconceivable. What would CCP do, she asked. They admitted they would not make such a change, as they would need a good reason why and none could be given. However, they argued this would never happen.

Read more after the jump.

In the first part of a multi-part week long look, we introduce what we learned at EVE Online Fanfest held last week in Reykjavik, Iceland. There, CCP Games explained a wealth of information on the future of their virtual society, including a look at the upcoming Trinity expansion, the Ambulation and even a democratic initiative within the game.

Check back every day this week for a dedicated, focused feature on a specific aspect of the game's future.

"War on the impossible," is the company's latest mantra, according to CEO Hilmar Petursson. But, EVE Online has always defied expectations. It launched as a shell of a game to a very limited to subscriber base, yet while most games follow a very predictable life cycle, EVE refuses to quit growing. As of last week, the game has 197,773 subscribers, up substantially from last year. It creates a growth chart that looks more like Google's stock price than the typical bump and decline most games see.

Part of this success is how the world of EVE has taken on a life of its own. While most games divide their players between servers for technical and gameplay reasons, CCP capitalizes on the infinity of space and runs a world that recently hit 37,290 concurrent players logged in. The value of this is not just technical, and their Fanfest demonstrates the fact perfectly.

Read part one after the leap.

JR "razor" Sutich traveled down to Atlanta to attend the ribbon-cutting for CCP North America. This is the former Whitewolf office where the company now has customer support, the early creative elements of World of Darkness and of course all the RPG stuff.

World of Darkness Online is indeed being worked on, and I got to see some early concept art and it looks great. It's dark enough with just the right amount of grit and neon and it captures exactly what I think of when I picture running around a city at night. The werewolf looked awesome. Mike explained that the bulk of the content for WoD Online was being created at the new office, while the majority of the technical infrastructure was being worked on in Iceland.

For more, check out the full item on Razorwire (link below).

JR "razor" Sutich traveled down to Atlanta to attend the ribbon-cutting for CCP North America. This is the former Whitewolf office where the company now has customer support, the early creative elements of World of Darkness and of course all the RPG stuff.

World of Darkness Online is indeed being worked on, and I got to see some early concept art and it looks great. It's dark enough with just the right amount of grit and neon and it captures exactly what I think of when I picture running around a city at night. The werewolf looked awesome. Mike explained that the bulk of the content for WoD Online was being created at the new office, while the majority of the technical infrastructure was being worked on in Iceland.

For more, check out the full item on Razorwire (link below).