The week in massively features

Massively goes to WAR: Every Warhammer class explained
The morning was quickly running out, and to compensate for the sheer amount of information we needed to pile through our demonstrators went into overdrive. For roughly an hour we moved quickly from class to class, visiting the highpoints of several different types of gameplay. Much of our discussion explored the karmic doppelgangers across classes; different races entirely that share similar roles or playstyles.

EverQuest's senior producer and designer on SOE's Living Legacy
Last week we sat down with EverQuest lead designer Ryan Barker, and senior producer Clint Worley. They were both very enthused to talk about the Living Legacy program, the just-announced initiative to bring adventurers back to Norrath. With the game's amazing tenth anniversary just about a year away, it was very interesting to speak with these industry veterans on what the team has in store for us this summer.

Unboxing EverQuest's Living Legacy
So you've decided to take SOE up on their Living Legacy promotion, with free two months of gameplay and all the goodies you can fit into your extra-large sized trick-or-treat bag, and are wondering just what you'll find in that bag when you open it. If you're finding yourself in EverQuest, you'll get quite a lot.

Tabula Rasa goes AWOL from Q1 NCSoft financial reports
When the financial reports for the Q1 performance of NCSoft hit the Massively offices, fingers were quickly pressed to pages with one intent -- finding out what was going on with Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa. Already this year, we've heard dour reports on the status of the game, which were then rebuked by NCSoft, but those reports still planted seeds of doubt.

Massively interviews Jon Van Caneghem about the SCI FI Channel MMO
Massively sat down with Van Caneghem (a busy man since the news dropped on Monday) to chat about both the fantasy MMO and the SCI FI project, and what Trion's been working on since they formed. Van Caneghem told us why Trion wants to make a different kind of MMO, and how they'll balance an online game with a television series from the network that's running Battlestar Galactica. The interview starts right after you click the link below.

EverQuest II's senior producer on SOE's Living Legacy
Bruce Ferguson is both new to the EverQuest II team, and an old hand as well. Bruce was with the team back when the game first launched, and just a few months after his return we sat down to chat about the intriguing new Living Legacy program. Overlapping between the sequel and the original EverQuest, this ambitious recall program may be even more meaningful for EQ2 than the original game.

Player vs. Everything: The retention game
The conventional wisdom in any service-driven industry is that it's far, far cheaper to retain an existing customer than to recruit a new one. This is especially true in the MMOG industry, where your business model is largely dependent on maintaining a long-term subscriber base.

Player Consequences: Item Binding
Item binding has become a fact of virtual life for most of us nowadays. We get an item, pick it up, and it somehow magically attaches itself to us like some kind of lamprey.

From Tabletop to Desktop: WAR's Destruction careers
With the announcement of the White Lion as the final career in Warhammer Online, we finally have a good idea of what the class dynamics will be in the long-anticipated MMO from Mythic.

Massively goes to WAR: Spotlight on the Goblin Shaman
The first class we took for a tour was the Goblin Shaman, the healer/DoT specialist for the greenskin race. Though nothing was said beforehand, the tiny gobbos with the big sticks are this blogger's favorite class. It was therefore especially enjoyable to check out the numerous tweaks to the concept, look, and UI of the little healer. Read on for the full Waagh!

TurpsterVision: An MM-No?
So Exteel, does it deserve the place it holds on the bottom right of Massively? Should we have this Multiplayer game tarnish our MMO street cred? It is a stones throw away from being an MMO.

Anti-Aliased: There's other people there too, ya know.
I'll be blunt -- I hate grouping. Nothing pains me more than grouping up with four of the "internet's finest" and going into a dungeon to kill some monsters. 95% of the time, it seems I'm doomed to find 4chan (NSFW) rejects or screaming 10-year-old kids (NSFW).

Massively Speaking Podcast Episode 8
We chat quite a bit about DDO Module 7, and then tackle the massive amount of stuff we've had on the site this week about Warhammer Online. Mike, Cameron, and Shawn toss around questions about the EA Mythic visit, and we speculate on the future of the genre. Join us!

The Gaming Iconoclast: Fighting Ennui
However dour, bitter, and generally misanthropic Ol' Freddie happened to be, he was onto something -- boredom kills. It is the death knell for any character, no matter how well-geared; any game, no matter how innovative; any hobby, no matter how engrossing it may once have been.

Massively goes to WAR: How to get your Public Quest loot
Over the last week or so we've already talked about some of the most innovative features of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. We've covered the Tome of Knowledge, the game's one-of-a-kind crafting system, and today we had a lengthy look at their approach to classes and races.

Player vs. Everything: Starting over
Most of us have spent a lot of time playing our favorite games. Chances are good that unless you're totally new to the MMOG world, you've got at least one character at some ridiculously high level, armed to the teeth, sitting on a big pile of gold amongst the trophies of your slaughtered foes.

Rohan: Blood Feud enters open beta
In a genre that is exploding with popularity, the Korean free-to-play MMO market seems to get more and more competitive with their subscription-based western cousins. A perfect example of this is YNK Interactive's Rohan Online: Blood Feud, which has just entered open beta.

Massively interviews JGE producer Hermann Peterscheck
Ever since ION 2008, the fine folks at NetDevil have been slightly more forthcoming with details from their sci fi opus-in-development, Jumpgate Evolution. First there was the interviews that writer Keith Baker did about the game's three factions, filling us in one some of the background lore that's being plugged into the game.

Ask Massively: What did the "Old School" teach us?
Normally, I don't start off an edition of Ask Massively with song lyrics, and if I did, the likelihood of my choosing Simon and Garfunkel is approximately the same as the likelihood of Clinton winning the White House this year.

The Digital Continuum: Omega solo solution
There was a time in my MMO playing when I would spend hours looking for a group in games like Final Fantasy XI. No television was watched and no handheld gaming devices were manipulated during those prolonged waiting periods. I just sat there chatting with whomever I could in-game.