Ask Massively: Inappropriate recollections edition

I have to be honest here — the Templars destroy The Secret World for me — not because they don't look cool (I'm kind of a sucker for this sort of thing) but because they remind me an awful lot of The Grail from Preacher. They've got the same color scheme, the same pseudo-military sense of things, the same trappings. So I look at these guys, and suddenly I stop thinking about The Secret World and want to go read some comics. Maybe if they all wore clown makeup, that would fix it.

This week's installment of Ask Massively actually is fielding a question about TSW, so my desire to see the Templars in clownface is vaguely on-topic. Plus, our readers ask about Skyrim, which I hear is all the rage these days. So click on past the break for this week's questions, and if you've got a question for a future installment, mail it to ask@massively.com or leave it in the comments.

Fienemannia asked: Is the open beta for The Secret World coming this month? Next year? What's going on with it?

This is a case of rumors conflicting with other rumors, and even we originally reported the rumor that the open beta would be this year. (It was edited later, of course, but it's possible to miss that.) Funcom has confirmed that there will be an open beta, but it won't be before Christmas, so odds are good it won't start until next year.

Blancmanche asked: So why don't we have people working on creating something like Skyrim as an MMO?

It's because Skyrim is a single-player game that can get away with many, many gameplay elements precisely because it only has to worry about one player. Single-player mechanics often take a lot of work to adapt to a setting where even just one other person is present, and Skyrim's whole lynchpin of a sprawling world partly relies on the fact that you are the one who goes out and changes things.

That's not to say that the game's popularity will go unnoticed among the MMO design teams of the world. It's just that you can't put wings on a car and expect it to fly.

Unverfied B asked: You realize that you just made humanity lose many millions of productive work hours by linking TVtropes on this site, right?

If you're browsing Massively during work hours, you're probably not doing much productive during those hours anyway. (Exceptions made for those of us who do work here. Usually.)

Looking for some advice on which class is best for soloing in Aion? Not sure who this Raph Koster fellow is? Curious about the release date of NCsoft's newest MMO? You've come to the right place! No one knows MMOs like we do. If there's anything you'd like to know about the MMO genre or the site itself, Ask Massively is here to help every Thursday afternoon. Just ask!