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BlizzPro interviews Helen Cheng and Marco Koegler
BlizzPro has posted their BlizzCon interview with World of Warcraft Quest Designer Helen Cheng and Technical Director Marco Koegler about Warlords of Draenor and the future of WoW. The interview covers a variety of topics about the coming expansion, including why the team decided to return to a ten level expansion curve instead of sticking to the five it has been more recently (it makes for smoother leveling progression, plus level 100 is cool!), how (or if!) the time-travel aspect of Warlords will affect Azeroth itself (it shouldn't, provide we heroes rise to the occassion), and why there aren't any new playable classes or races for this expansion (new character models are resource-intensive). But those are far from the only topics discussed during the interview. Cheng and Koegler also go into whether or not Garrisons will be character-based or account-wide, and what the different challenges are within either approach. Cheng also talks in depth about daily quests and their history in the game, the shortcomings of that particular design, and how Blizzard hopes to create a more balanced questing experience going forward so as to avoid some of the problems with quests in Mists of Pandaria.
Dungeons and Dragons Online: Menace of the Underdark goes live [Updated]
Hope your dice are polished and your character sheets fresh from the copier: Dungeons and Dragons Online's first expansion has gone live on Turbine's servers. Menace of the Underdark is now available for all players who have purchased the digital expansion pack from the studio. Menace of the Underdark represents a sizable addition to the game. With it, DDO is expanding into the Forgotten Realms campaign setting and offers a new class, the Druid. Players will also be able to level up to 25 and expand their characters with the epic destinies system. "Menace of the Underdark delivers a wealth of content for our players and introduces significant engine upgrades that allow us to bring to life in a striking, visually impressive manner two of the most requested features, the new Druid class and access to the Forgotten Realms setting," said Executive Producer Fernando Paiz. While you patch up the game, you can check out the last of Menace of the Underdark's developer interviews after the jump! [Source: Turbine press release] [Update: Turbine just announced over Twitter that the game is now available on Steam!]
Glamour shots: Rift's visuals crew rock the IRC
Like it or not, a good first impression is often heavily influenced by looks. You could be the most intelligent, gentle, funny person in the world, but no date is going to give you a second chance if you show up to dinner wearing a [NAME OF POP CULTURE ICON YOU LIKE TO RAG ON] t-shirt. Likewise, the dev team at Rift: Planes of Telara is working hard not only to make the game as fun to play as possible, but to make it look fashionably awesome while doing so. Trion World's Scott White (technical art director) and Russ Cahalan (lead animator) fielded questions about Rift's visuals, animations and style in a recent IRC dev chat. The Q&A is chock-full of useful tidbits, such as info about the existence of a weather system, the wide range of emotes, weapon effects (think glowy and drippy!), particle effects, and stances. The duo also discussed the process of creating the animations and world visuals, including the enormous effort that went into making rifts some of the best eyecandy you'll see in an MMO. Cahalan cracked open the door to give players a peek into the range of weapon animations in Rift that will be present: "We don't have any animation sets that will have flexible weapons like chain swords, whips, or flails currently. The player animation sets are currently pushing close to 500 each, and those include 10 different sets per race/gender to cover the weapon categories we have in game. Those cover a pretty wide variety of weapons, and give a good amount of visual variety between players of different races. We do, however, have some weapons that contain motion. But those are generally VERY special weapons, and are highly desirable." You can read the full transcript at Telara Central.
Video lets you learn about Free Realms from the creators themselves
Free Realms is so hot right now it's almost smoking, indeed they've surpassed a million accounts and the game only officially launched earlier this month. QJ.net scored themselves an exclusive interview with the Big Giant Heads at Sony Online Entertainment to find out how the game was created from Producer Andy Sites, Creative Director Laralyn McWilliams, Art Director Rosie Rappaport and Game Designer Douglas Cronkhite. It's an interesting look at the game and actually makes me want to play it even more -- plus the zombies are cute. Indeed it's a great underhanded way at generating even more interest whether you've been playing since the beta or are still wondering what the heck this Free Realms lark is all about.Click out the video after the jump.
The Daily Grind: Machinima news interviews?
Yesterday we were treated to an interview on MSNBC that was held within Lord of the Rings Online. Aside from the fact that it's refreshing to see news coverage where games aren't being blamed for the world's ills, it was interesting to see them using game footage in this fashion. That said, people have been doing interviews in virtual worlds like Second Life for quite some time, and using machinima for everything from PR to corporate training. Still, we wondered - is this something you'd like to see more often on mainstream TV - machinimated interviews from different MMOs? Would you, for example, tune in to watch an interview with Vin Diesel if he were on his (rumored) Resto Shaman in World of Warcraft? Would you be more or less likely to watch interviews with game developers or PR people if they were held in their respective games? Or is that a bit too geeky for you, and you'd prefer to stick with in-person interviews?
Fallen Earth dev interviews continue with "Funslayer"
As we reported on their first dev interview, the Fallen Earth team is doing a great job at keeping us excited and informed on the progression of the game and the team involved. In this fourth dev interview, we hear from "Funslayer", Lead Scripter on the Fallen Earth MMO project.As with the previous dev interviews, we hear about the basic essentials, like favorite color and underwear preference. These are certainly the types of questions every player needs to know about their game's developers. Yet the important part comes after the introduction, when forum-goers get to ask the real questions. We learn quite a bit about the game's tutorial, NPC AI, and where he got that awesome nickname. Check out the entire 3-page thread in the Fallen Earth forums for more on this Q&A, and be sure to check out the previous and upcoming dev interviews as well.
