New team members and E3
24 June 2009

* The MMO Magic team is growing! We've recently added two new people to the Quest Writing staff. Our game takes a very special type of writer and we are constantly looking and testing people to find those capable and foolish enough to want to take on this difficult task. Writing just one of our quests is like attempting to write a detailed outline of an epic fantasy novel, and that story changes every time you read the darn thing. It takes the average Quest Writer more than a month to write just one of our quests. It takes a kind of masochistic writer to want to punish themselves in writing in this style. However, we have found two more writers who do it quite well. Since each of our quests takes an average of a week of play to complete, you will only go through about 50 quests in a year, but due to the time it takes to write each of these epic changing stories we are increasing the size of our writing staff to handle the work load.

In art we have been working hard on NPC animations, additional structures for villages and towns.

Level Building continues to add to the world as they try to get ahead of those who will be adding our 'living' NPCs to those same areas. Right now placeholder terrain is used, since the real terrain system is still under construction (hence, no screenshots released yet).

The Trident3D engine is nearing the next build. There have been a lot of requests from the game designers on changes to features in the Enact tool and they are attempting to get a build out soon.

We took off some time and most of the company went to the E3 game industry show. We were both disappointed and thrilled to see that there wasn't a lot of competition for CoS in the MMO arena. We were disappointed in that there were no game coming out that we wanted to play (we are game players, even if we are also working on our own game). And we were thrilled because there still wasn't anything like Citadel of Sorcery being shown. The games we saw demonstrated had the same old game play and technology that we've seen for several years. Our company goal of releasing a new type of MMO game using new technology are still on track. :) We returned to work ready to redouble our efforts to bring this game to the public as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, there is still a lot of road ahead of us. Fortunately, most of that road involves the more exciting parts of development, writing, building and testing quests and combat, for example.

One last note, we continue to get emails constantly asking us if we are like this game, or that game, if we are PVP or PVE, if we will have crafting, etc. We want to state again, you have to forget other MMO games when talking about CoS. This is a new type of game, and therefore we don't have what other MMO games have, we're simply not like other MMO games. Expect something different and stop trying to fit us into some pigeon hole. For better or worse, this game will be something new. We hope you will like it.

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I'm just an impatient witch waiting for this...