Massively

We braved the jam-packed San Diego Convention Center show floor to bring you some eye candy from this year's Crowded-Con. Included in the gallery are MMO publisher booth tours, the palatial Upper Deck booth, and some general Con pics as well as highlights from a few of the panels and from the SOE block party Saturday evening. Sister site Joystiq has a gallery of some of the great costumes and gratuitous cosplay seen at Comic-Con, so be sure to check those out as well via the preview embedded below.



Gallery: Costumes of Comic-Con 2008

We stopped by the NCsoft booth at Comic-Con 2008 and had the chance to chat with City of Heroes Community Manager Alex 'Lighthouse' Von Minden, who noted that a number of community members were disappointed about not being able to attend the Con for a chance to snag the exclusive in-game item from the VIP Pass. We thought it would be fun to give players not in attendance a chance to pick one up, so we're happy to present Massively readers with 10 chances to win a unique in-game CoH Comic-Con item. This contest is open to all ages and locations -- you'll just need an active City of Heroes account to claim it. To enter, just leave a comment in this thread by 5pm EST Wednesday, July 30. We'll choose 10 winners at random to receive a code for the unique in-game item. Good luck!

Update: contest closed! Thanks to everyone who entered -- we'll be announcing winners ASAP!

A banner atop the NCsoft booth at Comic-Con 2008 read cryptically: "DNA Test Site: Adam & Eve 2.0." Several rows of brightly-colored buttons arrayed on a table, there for the taking, were emblazoned with the same message. Even more puzzlingly, couples were lining up to swab their cheeks with Q-tips to be stored in plastic pouches labeled with their names and today's date. What kind of crazy cabal initiation was underway at NCsoft's booth?

Without fully revealing the mystery of Operation Immortality, an NCsoft representative shed some light on the cheek-swabbing activities of the fans lining up two-by-two. Five couples, one per day of Comic-Con festivities, will be chosen to have their DNA sequenced and stored in a hard drive that will be jettisoned into outer space -- and why exactly? In case the horrifying possibility of a Bane victory renders the human population of Earth annihilated, we'll be able to repopulate it with the human DNA kept safe in the off-site storage of space.

Sony Online Entertainment released a handful of new official screenshots for DCUO at Comic-Con this past weekend, and also had a playable pre-alpha demo on the show floor for us to get our grubby mitts on. Check out the galleries below for the official shots plus some screens we culled from play sessions on the floor, and stay tuned for our hands-on impressions, gameplay videos, and coverage of the DC Universe Online Comic-Con panel with Jim Lee.

Sony Entertainment Online revealed a metric ton of new information on their upcoming superhero MMO DC Universe Online at E3 this week, and Massively was on hand to pick the spicy brainmeats of Creative Director Chris Cao, SOE-Austin VP of development John Blakely, and famed DC artist and Executive Creative Director for the project, Jim Lee. Check out the roundup of all the DCUO coverage from E3 including interviews, screenshots, a full breakdown of the trailer and analysis of DCUO's role on the console. Plus, don't forget to tune in next week for our exclusive interview with Jim Lee!

Development team interview

• A top to bottom exploration of DC Universe Online
• How the DC world will come to life in DC Universe Online
• E308: DC Universe Online already 'released' inside SOE

Screens and Trailer

• DC Universe Online screenshots
• First footage of DC Universe Online
• The DC Universe Online trailer explained

MMOs on the console

• MMOs for your PS3
• DC Universe Online's role on the PlayStation 3

One might rightfully acuse the term "user generated content" of being a rather dry way to describe what is really a fascinating trend in media: the opportunity for "users" to contribute their own creations and have them incorporated into traditionally heavily produced "content." By nature interactive, the games industry is taking notice of the power of UGC, and in a panel yesterday at ION 08 we had the chance to listen to Flying Lab's Troy Hewitt and Linden Lab's Rob Lanphier talk about how user content has been working in Pirates of the Burning Sea and Second Life. Attorney Eric Goldman of Santa Clara University School of Law was on hand to discuss some of the legal issues surrounding UGC, and the panel was moderated by Scott Warner, owner and leader of the intellectual property and technology group at firm Garvey Schubert Barer.

Scott: Troy, do you want to start us off by talking about how user content has been working in Pirates?

Troy: Sure. As some of you may know, we just launched PotBS earlier this year. We have a system in the game where players can create flags and sails for their ships. There's a mechanism to distribute your work and they can actually create and sell their designs as well. Players can also create and model their own ships, and other people in game will be able to use those ships. We have 30 ships now in the game made by players, and these were actually done by only 13 people; so it's a small group of dedicated people creating these ships. With the flags and sails, about 20% of our player base is creating them and a much larger percentage actually use them.

Our mission: infiltrate SOE's Seattle studio, obtain intel on The Agency, regale the awesomely hyperactive lead designer Hal Milton with questions from left field. Operatives were dispatched, urban primitive ladies were photographed, and foyer introductions were presided over by a really cool gun. Stay tuned for more news about living the life of an elite agent, and check out the gallery for tour photos featuring concept art from The Agency, giant robots, and a not-so-secret reveal.

Joseph Ybarra, SVP of strategic operations at Firesky, the publishing subsidiary of Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment, presented a session today at ION 08 about the Stargate Worlds production model that borrows heavily from Hollywood and TV models. The goal for SGW is to approach content updates for the game more like a production cycle for television, in which an episode takes a predictable amount of time to complete (14-16 weeks in the case of Stargate Atlantis).

After some background on Firesky and CME, Ybarra showed the Stargate Worlds trailer and launched into a discussion of the strategy with SGW. The idea is to adopt a movie model for the development phase and a TV model for the post-launch "live" phase. They chose to use the BigWorld middleware platform and Unreal Engine technologies in an effort to use proven tools: "don't reinvent the wheel." This allows them to both minimize risk and focus on the content.

Globalization is one of the session tracks here at ION 08, as befitting an industry seeking the holy grail of a truly global marketplace for online games. Tuesday's keynote was delivered by Won II Suh of Neowiz, a Korean online games company with 20 titles currently supported or in development by 1000 employees across 8 regions around the world. Mr. Suh described the current landscape of online gaming in Asia and the state of East-West partnerships happening at an increasing rate around the world (Activision and Blizzard, Neowiz and EA, THQ and Shanda to name a few).

Crossover from West to East already has some success stories (NBA Street, e.g.) while the East to West crossover is still fairly nascent. Suh spoke to a fundamental paradigm shift in the way games are made and played in both markets as part of the reason so much of this crossover is happening now. He stressed the importance of prioritizing human and cultural connections as predicates to success for Western companies hoping to break into Eastern markets, indicating that even if the business and financial plans make sense, companies are still prone to fail if they misunderstand or gloss over the critical steps of establishing real human relations and corporate culture due diligence when aspiring to do business in Asia.

All of the slides from the keynote are available in our gallery.

This is becoming a popular topic. Adam Martin, lead core programmer at NCsoft, tackled this topic today in one of ION's morning sessions entitled "Web 2.0: How I learned to stop worrying and love the internet." In light of the low cost, high audience model of web destinations like Facebook and Myspace, are MMOs even a good idea at all? Is WoW the last major MMO we're going to see?

Martin started off with a brief history of MMOs starting with Ultima Online and Lineage in 1997. UO did well for years, remaining in the top 3 or 4 properties in terms of subscriber numbers, while Lineage was absolutely dominating the Asian market. When Everquest came along two years later it addressed a number of the technological problems that had been massively underrated previously, although patching was still a big and painful issue.