I’m off to Miramichi, New Brunswick for the Jalloo Festival early tomorrow morning. I’ll be on a couple panels there and it should be a pretty good time. If you’re up that way, come to the festival and check it out. Hopefully after I get back Danuser and I can put together our next podcast and I’ll post some juicy goodness on the site. See you in a few!

You may have loved our original website, but we’ve gone ahead and completely redone it! It’s no longer entirely Flash, so you can link your friends to specific pages all you like. It also looks really awesome, and there’s one or two cute tricks with Munch this time around (Hint: Watch for something to appear in the top right corner). Your cursor will no longer be stolen by our hungry mascot, but it’s a fun website all the same. Check out the new and improved 38 Studios website!

There are a couple of pretty rockin’ posts over at LagORama that are basically rants about changing things in MMOs from both the player and developer perspective. Both resonated with me, because both apply to me at all times. Check out An Open Letter to MMORPG Developers and An Open Letter to MMORPG Players. I agree with both. Does that make me a paradox?

Finish your game before launch. If the launch date can’t be pushed back, remove the unfinished portion of the game and get it done right. For example, if the last 20-30 level chunk of your game has (basically) no quests, and quests were previously the method to gain levels, change the level cap to end when the quests end. If the content can’t fill out as many levels as the mechanics, you pretty much have to go with the weakest link and temporarily lower the level cap.

While I’ve been spending all my free time in Age of Conan on the Tyranny server killing fools, the forums have continued to march on here at Nerfbat. Instead of writing a compelling post or podcast (I blame Danuser… and he’s going out of town today so it’ll be a while before the next shows up), I’ll go ahead and rely on others to do it for me. Here’s some of the latest from the Nerfbat Forums… Continue Reading »

So the reason I’ve been quiet all week is… Age of Conan! Yep, it came out, and it’s better than I expected. I wanted to wait to get a good impression of the game before I posted anything about it. I’ll probably stick with it for a while. If you want to play on a PvP server, I’m Luckbad (level 20 Conqueror) on Tyranny. I’m with the Nocturne guild, which is a great group of folks that I played LotRO with.

The May 2008 Boston Post Mortem is tonight (Wednesday, May 14) at The Skellig in Waltham. This month Kurt Reiner of Demiurge Studios will talk about developing “Brothers in Arms: Double Time” for the Wii in conjunction with Gearbox Software. Haven’t decided yet if I’m going, but I’ll have a 38 shirt on if I do. More info on the Boston Post Mortem website.

Where is the great Player-versus-Player MMORPG? It doesn’t exist… yet. There have been a few attempts at integrating PvP into a massively multiplayer game from the ground-up, and it hasn’t quite worked out just yet, at least not for an avatar-based fantasy or sci-fi game. No true PvP game has gone mainstream since MMOs hit the big time. Continue Reading »

The discussions about massively multiplayer games continue on the Nerfbat Forums. We’ve built ourselves a solid little community here. We are now up to 307 members, 265 topics, and 4244 posts. Here are some of the recent discussions that didn’t have to do with MafiaMatrix: Continue Reading »

You might think that, as a game developer, I’m all for anything that can help against piracy. Piracy is bad, and can even cause companies to shut down when it runs rampant. But, how far is too far? Well, I think we’ve found out how far is too far. Now when I go purchase a game at the local video game store, I don’t even own it. Continue Reading »