Ten Ton Hammer reports back from E3 on NCSoft's upcoming offering, Aion.

I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that, visually, Aion is the artistic successor to Final Fantasy XI. But how does its storyline stack up? Quite well, though the details are comfortably dim at this point. While developers are quick to point out that the two player factions are neither necessarily good nor evil, the angel-like Elyos control one half of the eaten apple-shaped world and the demonoid Asmodians the other half, with the damaged Tower of Eternity as the apple's "core." No good story limits itself to two sides, and as the foil, we have the draconic, server-controlled Balaur, who fight on whoever's side they "choose." The factions used to live together in harmony, but at some point the war began and the tower partially broke apart. The rest you'll have to discover as the game unfolds.

Ten Ton Hammer chats to Jack Emmert and John Layman of Cryptic Studios about their involvement with Marvel Universe.

While we were on the subject of quality, I asked whether we should consider Marvel Universe the natural successor to Cryptic's flagship titles: City of Heroes and City of Villains. Jack grappled with the question for a moment before arriving at a definitive no, intimating that he loves Cryptic's flagship franchise at least as much as its fans (as does the rest of the Cryptic Studios staff, if you've read our interview with Matt Miller and crew earlier this week) and has no plans to shift staff or resources away from the live games. "It's only a successor in that we're going to use what we've learned," he stated,

Ten Ton Hammer speaks to Brian Green, founder of Near Death Studios and Meridian 59 veteran.

TTH: First off, before you started making games, you had a very rich and diverse background. Could you summarize what you did before you were hired on at M59? And how did you land the coveted first job as “game designer”?

Brian: As I tell a lot of people, I was a game designer from an early age but didn’t know it.  I used to create little board games on pieces of scrap cardboard.  I got into programming because I played computer games back in the day and wanted to learn how to make them.  

Ten Ton Hammer talks to Cindy Bowens, the former Community Manager at Sigil Games about recent happenings with MMOs.

TTH: Recently, you wrote an article that was published at MMO Gamer where you compared the growth of the gaming industry to the growth of movies and Hollywood. Many of us were surprised to see your name in print again; it’s been so long. This is the first we've heard from you in quite a while: Where have you been hiding?

Cindy: I left Sigil on February of '06, just as they were entering Beta. I thought I was taking off for a few weeks to recover from surgery, but I had some complications and was very ill for some time. So ill, in fact, that I moved back to my home town to be near my family. I have been spending the past year recuperating and getting my strength back. Finally, I am doing well and I’m more than ready to get back to work. It's been a long year but I am really looking forward to the future.

Also at Ten Ton Hammer today, is an interview with NetDevil regarding the company's upcoming MMO hybrid, Jumpgate.

“Jumpgate is a shooter game, plain and simple, but it holds all the other aspects of an MMO like character customization, a free-form world, crafting, mining, etc.,” Scott said. There’s no dice-rolling or random number generators, the game relies on the skill of the pilot and the dexterity of his aim. In short, it’s space-combat/flight-sim MMO (SCFSMMO?) and shouldn’t be confused with the “other” space-based MMOs.

Gavin Longhurst of BigWorld Technologies talks to Ten Ton Hammer about his company's products and focus.

What makes developers turn to BigWorld, and why should gamers care? There are a couple of compelling reasons to consider:

The first reason is time. BigWorld can help your highly anticipated MMO get to market sooner. “[The BigWorld Suite] can virtually cut the development time in half,” said Longhurst. “Developers can jump in and start designing a game right away. They can concentrate on making the game instead of making the technology to make the game.” Not having to create or modify a graphics engine or other tools allows game developers to get into the meat of making a game world much faster. Longhurst mentioned a Chinese MMO, built using the BigWorld Suite, which is poised to release within 12-18 months as opposed to the usual MMO development time of 3 or 4 years.

Ten Ton Hammer chats with Victor Wachter and Shayne Herrera of Cryptic Studios about working on Marvel Universe.

Research was the next topic of our discussion. As any comic book fan knows, some of our favorite super-heroes have histories and backgrounds that go back four or five decades. Each hero’s story morphs and twists and changes as news writers and artists are recruited to work on particular brands. I was curious about the extent that Cryptic was pursuing the research of particular characters.

“Yes. Each of our designers are given a set of comic books that they are to read from beginning to end,” Victor said. “They are given characters that they are to become intimately familiar with. It’s a better job for some cases rather than others.

Ten Ton Hammer talks to Rob Meiners of Multiverse, the company behind the upcoming Firefly MMO.

Though many of Firefly fans may know of Multiverse through the Firefly MMO announcement, there’s still many that don’t know the other side of Multiverse - the indie developer side of the fresh-faced MMO platform. On their press information, it states that the Multiverse platform “is a highly flexible, comprehensive client-server infrastructure with tools and fully documented sample code and assets.” In layman’s terms, this means that Multiverse is creating a technology that allows individuals to develop, market, and publish MMOs at a very low cost and with maximum efficiency.

John "Boomjack" Hoskin reviews the year that was and several  MMO developers (Cheyenne Mountain, Perpetual Entertainment, EVE Online, SOE, Flying Labs) chime in with predictions for the year ahead.  Here's a sample:

– Theresa Pudenz, Public Relations - Flying Lab Software

“MMO = Elves and Orcs? A change in the wind, says I. Yarrrrrrrrr!”