Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Space. It’s cold and uninhabitable without profoundly advanced technologies that keep our frail human organs from staging a whizzbang prison break right out our eye holes. Vampires. They’re all yucky and clammy and dead and stuff. Iceland. It’s… um, actually quite pleasant in many areas, though occasionally a bit nippy. So I guess staging EVE Fanfest in Reykjavik kinda works, especially since the Internet tells me it’s pretty dreary over there right now. I, sadly, am stuck in sunny, delightful San Francisco at the moment, but I do have some EVE and World of Darkness news for you. Specifically, WoD is slightly more existent than it was last year.

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But perhaps not quite as you might imagine. According to the World Of Darkness presentation at the Eve Fanfest – some of which you can see here, via VG247 – the players will be able elect “the Prince Of The City” for the real world locations such as London and New York, which will be player leader characters who will be able to permanently kill other players. As we anticipated, the game will be a full-blown sandbox, like Eve, but this time it will feature melee combat between supernatural protagonists, and have blood as currency. Yum.

White Wolf are holding their Grand Masquerade at the moment, which makes me wish I was in New Orleans. That said, just mentioning New Orleans makes me want to be there so we won’t give White Wolf too much credit. If you’re not aware of them, they’re the company behind Vampire: The Masquerade and other related role playing games. Not the computer versions, mind, but the actual pen and paper, sit around and speak words to each other versions. The Grand Masquerade is their fan get-together and details about CCP’s upcoming World of Darkness MMORPG have been dripping out of it. Dripping like blood, you see?

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Aha! Below you’ll see I’ve posted some slightly dodgy footage taken by someone who attended the White Wolf convention, The Grand Masquerade, which is taking place in New Orleans at the moment. No game footage, it’s one of those animated concept art scene-setting things, but this is the first we’ve really seen of CCP’s world on the World of Darkness MMO. It turned up in this thread on QT3. I can’t see much more information than that at the moment, except that the game will be based on the older Masquerade system. More news as I dredge it.
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Reynir Harðarson, (pronounced “Hardarson” or “Hartharson”? the jury is out) who was one of the key imaginations behind Eve Online and the original art director, is now working on the World Of Darkness MMO in Atlanta. He talks quietly and rapidly, making transcribing and interview like this one (conducted in a noisy conference hall) incredible painful. Nevertheless it’s worth doing because he is articulate and incredibly astute, and I think this brief conversation captures a fragment of that. It staggers me each day that his work, and the work of CCP as a whole, gets ignored and over-looked by the industry.

Frankly I don’t give a crap whether you liked Eve, or found it boring, or unplayable or anything else: what you need to understand are the principles that are at its foundations, because they’re principles that can be applied to stop MMOs becoming stale and inflexible in the future. The number of people I’ve encountered working on MMOs who don’t really know anything about Eve Online is shocking, and I regard that lack of knowledge of the work of people like Harðarson as one of the key reasons why MMOs are progressing so slowly, and regurgitating the same tired, tiresome ideas over and over again.

Anyway, let’s get down to the interview.
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