Welcome to MMORPGamer.

In the week after Thanksgiving, usually one would eat nothing but leftovers, but today I devour some delicious red beans and rice. If you haven't yet had any, try Zatarain's. It's delectable. If you can get the real thing, though, do it.

This week we've got a lot of interviews from around the web on some awesome MMOs. With no further ado, your news:

MMORPG.com features an interview with an Age of Conan developer each week, and this week was Loremaster Elliott Kingdon's turn. In the interview, he speaks about how he got into the business, his experience at Funcom, and the Conan IP.

The interview sheds some light on the Hyborian environment as well as shows how well the team is keeping up with continuity. Kingdon lists one of his duties as "researching huge amounts of Conan material from pastiche novels and classic black and white comics to the modern Dark Horse graphic novels."

I love my PvE and lore, so when I read this I could not have been more excited for Age of Conan. I might even buy a Conan novel before release.

Gamasutra covered the Final Fantasy XI Fan Festival pretty closely, including a great interview with the developers. In the interview, the devs spoke on their lack of concern over World of Warcraft subscribers as well as their next MMO.

It's no secret that Square Enix has another MMORPG in the works, but there have been nearly no details released. In the interview, the devs let out that the team is currently not even decided on the IP. It may not be another Final Fantasy MMO after all.

This might scare a few of you FFXI fans, but I think it's a good idea for SE to try to develop another IP. If another Final Fantasy MMO came out, many users would just switch over, but if SE released a sci-fi MMO or a Dragon Quest MMO it might pick up users from other MMOs or from out of the status quo.

The Warhammer Online beta is not yet revamped, but the developers dropped some release notes for their latest update. There are notes from numerous teams on their projects.

The cities team is hard at work on actually building the inside of huge buildings they're calling "Marvels." The items team is working on armor dyes. According to the team, players will be able to dye their armor many colors except for a few that are reserved to have "in-game meaning."

The animation team also pokes its head in to say that they've been swamped by animating elves and their mounts. They're swift to say that this means nothing for player mounts. We'll just have to wait and see on that one.

I love the details on the Marvels. I've heard from many sources that these structures will be an environment for epic battles, and anything epic and indoor will be awesome. However, the item details are less than exciting. Armor dyes may not be present in the most popular MMO at the moment, but that doesn't mean that they're breaking news. I'd rather hear information on gameplay changes, not the cosmetic bread crumb here.

Videogamer.com spoke with Frank Pearce, executive vice-president of product development for Blizzard, regarding future plans for the World of Warcraft IP. More specifically, Videogamer asked Pearce if there was a sequel in the works.

Pearce said that there wouldn't be one in the near future, saying that the team has a "huge wishlist of exciting features" to include in the current installment of the MMO. He also goes on to speak fondly of WoW's competitors as "very promising."

I hope nobody's surprised here. The biggest IP in MMOs is not planning a sequel. We all know that Blizzard's working on a top-secret project, and if it's an MMO, it's most likely based on Starcraft. Like Square Enix above, there's no reason for any developer to seek to cut its own market in half.

I guess I could be the last FFXI fan who hangs around here because the last time Firemyst made a post about Wings of the Goddess I was the only one who commented on it. Anyway that's gonna be one cool expansion pack just from the first hook that roped me in, but some fun fans are having le Sony issues with the PS3. It seems that the new Vana'diel Collection 2008 for PS2 won't work on the backwards compatable PS3 systems because Sony didn't fix the firmware to allow the new installs to find the PS3's HDD. This is kinda a slap in the face to many of us fans who pushed to have the PS2 installs reprinted so that we could perhaps garner some new fans to play with on the PS3. I'm not really trying to crusade on RPGamer since I tried emailing Sony's tech support simply to inform them of this, but I haven't heard back from them. I really just thought I should warn someone else...well if you wanna print the letter...

The only workaround for this problem (and it only works with the discontinued PS3 60gig since FFXI installs lockup on the 80gig) is to get one of the original Êinstalls and install the Playonline Viewer which will find the rest of the installs from inside itself.

Well write you again later...

Shadowcat A.K.A Jon Davies**

otaku nick again

ask and ye shall receive heres the address for darkeden http://www.joymax.com/darkeden/ and as an added bonus heres one for the other mmo i'm toiling with right now age of armour.. dunno again if anyone but me knows about its existence but its fun and you can create transformers when you get leveled up high enough.. i've seen bumblebee from the first gen cartoon rebuilt aswell as some other things

http://www.aoaus.com/

there you go 2 half decent indipendantly made mmorpg's that are free to play.. which is about all i will play cause i'm a cheap punk

later days

This week's features on interviews, the Loremaster interview in particular, showed me that MMOs really have a lot of odd jobs involved in production. This week's topic for e-mail submissions: If you could have any job related to an MMO, what would it be?

I think loremaster sounds like an awesome title and job, or voice actor. Wouldn't it be great to voice the next great raid boss?

My sweet ambrosia of red beans and rice is running low, so I've got to fetch more. See you next week.

Until then,
Jake Miller (mail me)