Last week, Rerollz had the fortunate opportunity to ask famed author, R.A. Salvatore a few questions about his experiences and thoughts on the MMORPG genre. In case you didn’t know, R.A. Salvatore is the author of the Drizzt series of books (among many others) and is now currently working creatively with Curt Schilling and Todd McFarlane at 38 Studios on an MMOG project code named Copernicus.

Remember, R.A. Salvatore’s answers do not reflect the ideas or design directions of 38 Studios, but they reflect his own thoughts and experiences while playing these games for the last decade or so.

So if you want to know about his thoughts on Warcraft’s WOTLK, the revenge of Wizard Salvatore and his thoughts on story telling then read the whole interview after the break. Follow the link below.

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If you haven’t noticed we’ve been giving out beta keys for Gala-Net’s upcoming title “Allods Online”, a Russian based Free-to-Play MMOG that mixes science fiction and fantasy. I got a chance to ask Katelyn Olmstead a few question about their game and here they are for your viewing pleasure.

Rerollz: Before we start can you please introduce yourself and tell our readers what you do for Gala-Net and Allods Online?

Katelyn: Howdy! I am Katelyn Olmstead, InaraKatt on the forums, and I am the Community Manager for Allods Online. What does the CM do, you ask? As the CM I get to make sure the community runs smoothly, as well as reach out to the various gaming communities out there, like Rerollz!

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Do you recall that Lance Robertson was recently hired by NetDevil to work on Jumpgate Evolution? If you want to learn a little more about him he talked a little bit about the game with MMORPG.com.

MMORPG.com:

In regards to PvP what can players expect when fighting in Jumpgate, will there be factions to work for?

Lance Robertson:

There continue to be three nations , fighting over control of space in Jumpgate Evolution. This worked quite well in the original Jumpgate as well as Dark Age of Camelot. It’s a proven formula and we’re looking to use that as a solid jumping off point for JGE. Your job will be to support your nation by running missions, upgrading battlestations and ultimately conquering and holding sectors (just to name a few of your challenges). The heart of the game is the nation vs. nation war.

Thankfully he doesn’t mention Warhammer. Hopefully he can take the fun parts from DAOC and bring them to Jumpgate and leave out the terrible PVE elements.

GameInformer got a chance to ask Lani Blazier, associated producer a few questions and received a few screenshots of their own. It was a pretty generic interview, but we did get one update on the localization process.

GI: How has the localization process been going? What kinds of things do you look out for when bringing a Korean-style MMORPG to Western audiences?

Blazier: The localization process has been going extremely well. For our beta event last weekend, we released new Asmodian content for levels 1 through 10. The feedback was very positive! We focused a lot of time and energy on localizing the game. It was important to us that this wasn’t a quick direct translation job. We wanted the quests and story to be meaningful to the western market and culturally relevant. All of the culturally tied lore, in-game fables, and inside jokes in the Korean release were reviewed and rewritten for the Western market. We have a team of highly creative published fantasy writers who have been working on localization, and we couldn’t be happier with the results.

The bottom line is, in terms of gameplay and art, Aion is an extremely polished game. We wanted no less for localization.

GI: Are there a lot of gameplay tweaks that need to be made, or are they primarily related to language and cultural references?

Blazier: We focused the majority of efforts localizing and culturalizing the game. The core gameplay itself was not tweaked for the Western audience because there was no need to. From the drawing board, Aion was designed to appeal to a global audience.

[View with PicLens]

If you would like to see some of Draegan’s own screenshots from his time in Beta last weekend; you can find them here.

If you wander over to MMORPG.com they have an interview up with Q&A developer Jarle Snertingdalen about their upcoming update.

Why did the team want to change the items and statistics system?

While there were several reasons for changing the items and the statistics system, the most important one was that we wanted to increase the contribution to character power from items. One of the goals pre-launch was for Conan to not be an item-centric game, but we quickly discovered that we had taken that vision too far.

If you want to learn more about what they have in store check out the rest of the interview.

Check out the latest video interview from the developers of The Agency by GameTrailers.com. The video has a series of new gameplay videos as well as design philosophy. The philosophy they describe is immediate fun all the time. They want you to be able to log in and immediately have small chunks of fun without having to wait for groups to form. The FPS gameplay promotes player skill and not rank or equipment superiority according to the video.

The video also introduces the “Operative” system. These are in game contacts that change depending on how you treat them. These operatives are what drive the story driven content and one unique feature is that they can be managed outside the game, remotely, and you can even receive updates via your cell phone.