When I briefly spoke with John Blakely, VP of development for Sony Online Entertainment – Austin, at E3 last week, he promised that “DC Universe Online” has something for everybody.

For anyone who’s a fan of DC Comics, they can, of course, expect nods to various aspects of the DC Universe. “The DC fan is going to be like ‘I want to see Superman, I want to see Batman.’ There’s Bizarro, Big Belly Burger and those kind of things,” Blakely said, without revealing too many details before a playable version of the game hits Comic Con later this week.

And for the MMO gamers, they can expect the familiar features they’ve grown accustomed to. “We are an MMO company and we know what our players like,” he said, matter-of-factly. “You can look at the feature sets that we have in our existing products, and we’re going to draw a lot of those pieces in… People are used to it.”

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Last month, some “Age of Conan” forum members discovered that female characters in the MMO swing their weapons slower than males, causing them to do significantly less damage over time.

Developers at Funcom stated earlier this week that they “never intended for any character to be stronger/weaker than another based on its gender.” They said the fix will be coming in the next several weeks.

Reading about this topic on a few other gaming blogs, I noticed a few comments from people who thought there should be differences between male and female avatars in terms of physical abilities. Here’s what I found: Read more…

Unless you’re “World of Warcraft,” most massively multiplayer online games have proven passing fads. Eventually, most people move back to Blizzard’s addictive game.

The term “WoW” killer has been banded about quite a bit. So far, no one has stepped up to the plate. Funcom’s “Age of Conan,” however, has done far better than most expected. To date, “Age of Conan” already has more than 700,000 registered players.

Considering BioWare has an MMO coming, it makes sense they’ve been checking out their competition — “Age of Conan” included.

Yesterday, we spoke with BioWare co-CEOs Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk about their thoughts on “Funcom”’s latest, and whether BioWare could finally be the company that figures out why we still don’t have a console MMO.

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“Phantasy Star Online” remains one of my most treasured online experience. I haven’t found a game that’s since stacked up.

Naturally, you might think I’ve tried “World of Warcraft.” I haven’t. I’ve avoided all MMOs after having a less-than-stellar experience with “EverQuest II.” Too much aimless wandering around, too much forced group work. I didn’t play for very long.

That’s my impression of most MMOs. I’ve yet to see one that acts much differently. So when presented with a chance to check out “Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning” from EA Mythic, I told content director Destin Bales about my genre apprehension.

Bales responded with some very interesting ideas that just might convince me.

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I’m not sure what the animal cruelty laws are in Norway, but I guess they don’t include covering a horse in ping pong balls.

A few weeks ago, I saw a demo of “Age of Conan,” the new MMORPG from Funcom.

With the game due out next month, we’ve heard lots of things about it already: how difficult it is to adapt the controls for the Xbox 360 controller, and whether or not the game features nipples.

But there was one fact during the demo that caught my attention: in order to capture realistic movement for the in-game horse mounts, they motion-captured real horses.

I had to see it to believe it.

So I asked for proof, and Funcom gladly sent it to me. From Product Director Jorgen Tharaldsen:

“In order to make [the horse movement] believable, we looked for someone who could help us to make it look as you would expect in a real-life situation, and we found this in a team of crazy British guys who lined up an entire stable and even a stadium for motion capture. As a thank you to the Brits, we naturally had to put the jolly old lance in the game when fighting mounted! I’m not sure if we are the first or only ones to do this, and it really doesn’t matter. What I do know is that riding a horse in ‘Conan’ looks mighty cool, and even realistic, so as far as we are concerned we reached our goals.”

Click onward to see more photos of the horse and rider in action, as well as the screenshots of the final results.

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(The following is part of my GameFile column, filed at MTVNews.com.)

What ["Love" MMO designer Eskil] Steenberg envisions — and, of course, is making — is a game that is smart enough to react to anything a player does.

…“I believe that games need directors,” he said, “digital directors that can figure out in real-time what’s going on in the game, analyze what the players are feeling and doing and adjust to that and make the game do what it should do … to make a dramatic balance.”

How about a “Star Wars” reference to explain? “A digital director could do very small things. Like, it could say, ‘Well, at this point [the player is] 2 feet away from destroying the Death Star. Maybe we should not fire the big gun at him right now. Just keep up with the player. Let him do that, because he’s got a tiny bit of health. Let him be the hero.”

Steenberg gets the irony that he wanted to be a designer, got hired to be a programmer, and is now figuring out how to program a designer into virtual existence. His digital director could be responsible for, in his words, “the most awesome game ever.” The Death Star example is really just a small thing. A game like “Love” powered by a digital director “has to be able to generate stuff and add stuff and remove stuff and shift not just on the small level — the health and things like that, which is kind of easy — but you want that engine to be able to say: ‘We need a powerful nemesis right now. That’s a missing character. We need to generate that character. Give him a castle. Give him weapons.’”

(Steenberg is young, smart, and you will hear from him again. Read the rest of this story is at MTVNews.com)

Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick, speaking at the 2008 Smid Cap Conference today, is explaining why his company is rejecting EA’s offer to purchase the company for $26/share. In the process, he is detailing Take-Two developers’ past successes, current projects and future opportunities.

Gamers, let me direct you to slide 24 of Zelnick’s presentation, “Potential Untapped Opportunities.”

• Next to “MMOG/Online Gaming” we’ve got “Civilization” and “BioShock” listed under the column “Potential Take-Two Opportunities.

• Next to “Traditional Media (Film/DVD)” we’ve got “BioShock” as a “Potential Take-Two Opportunity.”

So… should those opportunities remain untapped, “BioShock” and “Civ” fans? Or do you want Take-Two to tap away?

San Francisco — Girls want to make games, too. It’s just that they’re intimidated.

At least that’s what a survey conducted by Sony Online Entertainment has revealed.  Conducted among female students currently enrolled in game design, programming and visual effects at The Art Institutes schools, the survey showed that 61% “believe male dominance in the industry is a deterrent to women pursuing a career in gaming” and 42% “would like to see women portrayed as leaders in video games.”

As a result, this inspired SOE to form G.I.R.L. (Gamers In Real Life), a scholarship program to educate and recruit women in the video game industry. The announcement of the scholarship program was made during the Game Developers Conference last month at an event for SOE’s upcoming spy-themed MMO “The Agency.”

Representives of G.I.R.L. included some of SOE’s executive staff as well as women working directly on “The Agency” from SOE Seattle, like producers Sherry Floyd and Heather Sowards.

Being that women working in games is a topic I’m quite interested in, I sat down with both Floyd and Sowards the day after the event to talk about what it’s like to be women working in a male-dominated field.

One reason why it’s good to have women in games? They know how female video game characters should dress. During my conversation with Floyd, who works on the art content of “The Agency,” she told me:

“We have to do a lot of women’s clothing; half of the characters in the game are women. … I think it’s really good to have a female perspective there. I know more than once I’ve talked to an artist and said, ‘Um, you can’t cut the sleeves like that because her bra would show.’ You’ve got full-figured women in the game, and they would have to wear a bra! [laughs] Actually, everybody’s really respectful about it, and we do laugh a lot when we have these conversations. And I would say the men in our creative group definitely know a lot more about shoes, the cuts of blazers, A-line skirts versus pencil skirts and everything else than they ever cared to know. But they’re definitely educated now, and they’ve educated me as well, so it’s been really good.”

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San Francisco — Dave Jones, head of Scottish game development studio Real Time Worlds, had a new MMO — his first MMO — to show off at one of the most packed sessions of all of this year’s Game Developers Conference. He was showing “APB” a cops and robbers MMO in the works for, I assume for PC (Jones didn’t confirm for sure; and, after the session, Phil Harrison told me he was only in attendance out of curiosity).

So who needs an MMO from the makers of “Crackdown“?

Anyone who is interested in an MMO without a grind and who wants to play one set in something like the real world. Those are two of the priorities Jones highlighted at the beginning of his 45-minute presentation.

“I want to replace geek with chic,” he said, though later admitting he had multiple level-70 “World of Warcraft” characters. In his MMO, experience points, do not belong. In his game, there is no leveling up. There’s just a lot of character customization and lots of shooting.

Jones’ talk really was about eye candy, though. The designer’s voice became background sound to a series of impressive videos that left the crowd awed. Several of the videos features “APB”’s character-creation tool, which is designed to ensure that every player can create a unique character. The proofs of that concept were a scarred Asian gangster and then a geek squad of star game designers Richard Garriott, Shigeru Miyamoto, Peter Molyneux, and Warren Spector.

The famous designers were just samples. “We will not create any of the characters in the game,” Jones said. “The players will create the characters.”

All images in this post were taken by camera, off of Jones’ presentation screen. The images looked sharper in real life.
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San Francisco — If you’re an MMO gamer who buys his/her virtual in-game goods on the black market, your days of shady dealings may be numbered.

A panel I attended earlier this week at the Game Developers Conference’s “World in Motions” series suggests that player-to-player item selling is going to be increasingly legit — whether many MMO players like it or not.

The session was called “Learning to Love Virtual Item Sales.” The half-hour presentation was led by Andy Schneider, president and co-founder of Live Gamer, “a legitimate market for virtual trading,” and Steve Goldstein, co-founder and president of Ping0, a Live Gamer partner and distributor of Flagship Studios‘ “Hellgate: London.”

Legitimate virtual item sales are common, particularly in free-to-play games, and especially in Korea, where micro-transactions — the buying and selling of in-game assets and content — are rampant. But for games that don’t offer real-money transactions, like “World of Warcraft” for example, websites like IGE and ItemBay have transformed illicit virtual item sales into a billion-dollar business — over $1.8 billion according to analysts’ estimates given in the session — and game publishers aren’t getting a cent.

Schneider and Goldstein want to change that.

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Our last post covering Funcom’s “Age of Conan” hasn’t moved off the front page, yet Multiplayer is already prepared to share some more with you about the upcoming MMO. Sorry, no nudity this time (though we did see some during our presentation!), but we do have some news on the eventual Xbox 360 port that Funcom’s been kicking around.

The Game Developers Conference doesn’t properly start until Wednesday, but companies are taking advantage of the gathered press in San Francisco to show some 2008 wares. One of Multiplayer’s first appointments was an updated look at “Age of Conan,” currently scheduled to drop on PCs sometime in May.

But, it’s also coming to the Xbox 360 — eventually. While catching up with Funcom Product Manager Jorgen Tharaldsen, he updated us on the Xbox 360 version’s progress. Unfortunately, Funcom doesn’t yet have a timeframe for release, as the their resources are devoted to ensuring a May ship date for the PC version.

Once that’s out the door, however, Funcom can prep their move into the console space. Such a transition doesn’t come without substantial hurdles, says Tharaldsen. The four and a half years of developing “Age of Conan” on the PC means their work has been crafted around a mouse and keyboard.

While “Age of Conan”’s combat incorporates real-time combos not unlike “God of War”, the interface powering “Age of Conan” was built for a PC gamer. As such, the interface won’t necessarily transfer 1:1 onto a control pad, thus requiring a complete interface revamp. When asked if a PC user could hook up an Xbox 360 controller to their PC and play “Age of Conan,” Tharaldsen shook his head.

Still, Tharaldsen maintains “Age of Conan” will end up on Xbox 360. Is it coming in 2008? Probably not. Have they made substantial progress on the console interface? Not yet. Does the recent confirmed cancellation of “Marvel Universe Online” worry us? A little. But, Funcom remains confident, and you know what? At least they’re taking their time.

Funcom’s upcoming M-rated MMO “Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures” caused quite a stir last week when the game’s community manager said the US version wouldn’t feature nipples, due to legal reasons.

The studio later flip-flopped, however, and declared the announcement a miscommunication; the US version would, indeed, have nipples. More specifically, players could choose to remove everything above the waist on their female avatars, thereby exposing their breasts (complete with nipples, obviously) to the other human players in “Age of Conan.”

Gamers may have rejoiced at the prospect of virtual titillation, but Multiplayer wanted some basic answers: why even bother putting nipples in “Age of Conan”? After “Mass Effect,” is Funcom risking a mainstream backlash? Did everyone read “nipple” in the headlines and overreact?

For more, we contacted Funcom Product Manager Jorgen Tharaldsen, who also works as a freelance journalist. He just returned from a vacation to Iran covering extreme sports. “Since the very first meetings we had about where to take Age of Conan we were extremely clear on the fact that we were NOT about speculating on sex and violence. We wanted to be about bringing the true Conan experience to the gamers out there, and we have always been clear on that,” said Tharaldsen in an e-mail exchange with Multiplayer.

He has a point. Robert E. Howard’s mythical universe is filled with scantily clad women — case in point, the vast majority of “Conan the Barbarian” comic covers feature barely clothed damsels in distress. Conan’s not wearing very much, either.

“This is the most hardcore Conan story of all,” reads an Amazon.com review of “Conan the Barbarian” novel The Conquering Sword of Conan. “Dr. Freud would have field day with this. Graphic violence, deviant sex, sadomasochism; all are here in full display.”

Tharaldsen takes several opportunities to point out that if such displays of nudity are par for the course in the Conan world, their appearance in a game based on that material makes sense, too. Nonetheless, he readily admits Funcom practiced restraint when implementing nudity into “Age of Conan,” and expresses some frustration over the United States’ response to what Funcom internally refers to as “nipplegate.”

What does he mean by that? Read on to find out.

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