Between January and March we have a huge milestone we'll be working on. I'm not sure what to call it... some might call it an 'alpha' although those terms are used so loosely now, I'm not even sure what one is. One might say it's our production mode, but then our environment team is already in production mode.

I guess it's better described: we are putting together a small subset of the game, and both a subset in terms of geography as well as gameplay. We're taking a small section of the world and filling it out with art assets and content, and then making sure the graphics and gameplay programming is there to support it.

Why? Well, there are a lot of reasons. One, we've seen many MMOGs put off 'putting most things together' until too late, especially gameplay. Two, it proves a lot both to ourselves and our publisher. And three, it really gets the game designers away from the 'designing' and heavy into the implementing and tweaking and testing of gameplay. It is SO important to us for that to be true, and to be true soon. I still feel very strongly that one of the reasons EQ turned out so well was because we had gameplay, albeit simplistic, in and usable very quickly. So many other games, including projects I've been involved with since, seem to have waited a long time for that... waited until the tools were 'just right' or the engine 'just right' or until the content on paper is fleshed out 'just a little bit more'.