What's Up With WC RPGs?

We report about a lot of fan projects, mods, miscellaneous fiction and so on, but one area of community activities that often goes unmentioned are Wing Commander role playing games. These were quite popular five years ago, and active RPGs continue today, but their recruiting drives seem to have slowed. This is the first in what we hope to be a series of updates highlighting a few of the active RPGs. Mad Cow is here to talk a bit about Battle for Enigma.

Wing Commander: Battle for Enigma is a free-form RPG based on character development and telling stories. We don’t roll dice or use any other kind of system aside from the honor system. Our game has been active since December of 2001, and we meet every Sunday at 9pm EST. In between meetings, role-playing continues on our message boards (which have logged a little over 6,000 In-Character posts since ’01). We are one of the most active, if not the most active, Wing Commander RPG around and we take a lot of pride in that. People can join either by posting in the open chat section of the message board, using the form on our website, or PMing me directly.

CorpNews Talks To Origin's MMO Creators

Everyone loves Richard Garriott interviews. In this one, the Corporation asked the founder of Origin about various massively multiplayer trends in 2004. This is his current area of expertise with the production of Tabula Rasa.

Corpnews: What emerging trend do you see as most affecting future MMOG designs?
Richard: Physics. MMOs try and create realistic worlds to explore and interact with. Thus, physics is a natural next step in crafting a real place. Plus, physics chips are now on the horizon, so we will be able to compute complex scenes quickly!

Origin and SOE's Raph Koster was also part of the interview.

Corpnews: What emerging trend do you see as most affecting future MMOG designs?
Raph: Well, I very much think that the "play single-player games alongside multiple people" trend is going to continue. Bluntly, I don't like it--I don't like it from a gameplay point of view because I as a player like the feeling of being in a world; I don't like it from a business point of view because I don't think people stick very well to that sort of game, or don't feel it merits a subscription fee.