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Roberts cracked a smile one day. We all cleared out, assuming the building was on fire. Turns out he was just chuckling over one of Curt"s idea emails.

I beat you to it.

Certainly there are circumstances where Things Come Up and in order to take advantage of an opportunity your people have to put in extra effort beyond the 40-hour week. That"s the nature of the beast, not just in the games industry but in any field where you need to be nimble. The kind of...

The heartbreak of being a content designer is that the nature of your job is to expend tremendous effort crafting the experience in such a way that it has the potential to be memorable for the player, with the understanding that, regardless of the quality of work or amount of effort you put into...

This kind of quote gets thrown around fairly often. Almost as often as the old "current MMO devs are in a huge diku rut and never come up with anything innovative" line. These two points of view would seem contradictory, were it not for the fact that neither is entirely accurate. I could...

It sounds like you"re taking Curt"s line about knowing the players out of context. He"s not claiming to be a player, but rather that the current economy makes it clearer who--in the field of investors and VCs--are the serious players in the game. Anything more than that was implied by other...

Ever notice that when a non-industry person meets game devs in person how one of the first things they often mention is how passionate the devs were? That"s not devs putting on an act or brainwashing somebody; passion is part of what makes us do what we do. And you get that face to face, but...

Certainly there are people in entertainment fields (movies, games, TV, etc.) that do what they do solely because they can make money. In fact, there are a lot of those people. They see a property that is extremely successful and think they can cash in by making a similar product. They make...

This is well said. If your primary objective is to find the surest way of making a nice living with little risk, then the games industry should be low on your list of career options. That, however, is not the primary motivating factor for everyone. I"ve worked at jobs where I didn"t...

Arden"s writeup is a good read, but it"s one case out of many. As with many situations, you tend to hear more of the bad stories than the good ones, and it should be said that the games business has a lot of good things about it. My personal experiences in the games industry have been...

I certainly hope so! Not to make excuses, but when I joined the EQ2 team there was very little definition for what community management even meant and very little history to draw from (except frequently bad history). So a lot of things had to be figured out along the way, which led to no...

We"ve actually been clear for a while that we"re making a fantasy game (our press releases even say we are "in pre-production on an original fantasy IP"). As Curt posts here, I can literally picture his hands clenched in frustration about how much more he"d like to say but knows he shouldn"t...

Forwarding this to our lawyers so they can get that phrase trademarked. You should start seeing it in our press releases very soon.

Nope. We were very clear with Ten Ton Hammer, when they asked us to do a panel at NYC Comic Con, that we would not talk about the game. They wanted us to speak anyway, so we said we would talk about what it"s like to live through the first year of a startup dev studio. And that"s exactly what we...

You"re going to feel like an idiot for saying this when we ship Easy-Bake Online (EBO), the best massively multiplayer cake-baking game ever created.

We"ll definitely be at San Diego Comic Con, but don"t expect us to be laying the entire IP out on the table. Not to be a downer or anything, but I wouldn"t want people expecting to see a game demo or something when that"s not what we"re going for. As for the New York show, Ten Ton Hammer came...

So *that"s* why all our character models have weird symbols on their foreheads.

The whole class/hybrid/skill thing can be argued a bunch of ways, but there are a few elements of human behavior that remain absolute. Chief among them pertinent to this discussion is that players will always choose the path of least resistance. Second is that creating expectations and then...

"noob-gruck"

QFE. Wasting good material now is only going to make you regret it later when you canreallylay it on me.

The truth is that it"s way too early to draw conclusions about details like how many races we"ll have or how big our world will be. We"re still in the concept phase of our design, which means a lot of writing, planning, and concept sketches. We first need to quantify how long it takes to build a...

Clearly he"s never seen you in person...

This is one of the reasons it"s going to be interesting to watch the reaction to Age of Conan. They"re pushing out of the MMO box in a lot of ways. Of course, there are things to keep in mind when judging any title"s relative success. Just as it is dubious to assume that because a hugely...

Very astute observation. I feel much the same way. With WoW I feel like I"m making a series of character compromises in order to play through some really good content and explore some extremely cool environments.

You can catch the video segment onlinehere.

We ain"t the sheepish types; there just isn"t any benefit for us to drone on about something you won"t be seeing for years. Talking about unreleased MMOs is like daydreaming about going on a date with someone you haven"t met yet. Rather than spending years trying to convince you how next...

Oh no you don"t. I deny any connection to that blog whatsoever!

You might think he"s joking, but he"s not.

Well I"m a Minnesota boy, so the weather hasn"t been a huge readjustment for me. We do have a San Diego native or two for whom the coldest days have been a little rough. What I will say is that New England is different from anywhere I"ve lived before. For example, Minneapolis, Denver...

Because we can. That"s a simplistic statement, but until you have worked in this industry you don"t realize how often the opposite is true. The more entrenched an IP, the lower the odds that a company is willing to push the boundaries with it. The biggest thing that"s different about our...

No, there haven"t been any runaway smash MMOs since WoW"s release, but I don"t think anyone in this thread was saying that every future MMO is going to have more subscribers simply because WoW came along. My point was that no MMO has a shot at those numbers unless it"s a great game, marketed...

Rather than a bunch of scheming developers looking to take advantage of investor naivet?, often it"s a case of venture capitalists looking for ways to compound their money seeking out hot trends like WoW"s splash in the MMO market. But anyway, I question the notion that WoW has a unique...

QFE. You can do all the planning and theoretical design in the universe, but trust me: when it comes down to actually populating a zone, implementing the quests inside it, creating the loot that drops there, and making sure it all ties together in a cohesive way that makes it feel like part...

Though I run the risk of sounding like a braggart, I know that my work on Mobhunter (and the relationships I developed even before I worked for SOE) resulted in a lot of positive changes to the game. I wrote about plenty of stuff that I saw as being wrong with the game, and in many cases action...

Though any response from me runs the risk of looking like I"m backpedaling over what I said in the distant past, since you are addressing specific perceptions about me as a person and a player, I will give it a shot anyway. I wasn"t working at SOE at the time of the EQ monk nerf. As I recall...

It is entirely possible that, had you asked those folks (or myself) back when they were just players whether they thought that to be the case, they would have agreed with you. It is also very likely that, if you asked them the same question today, their response would be very different.