13 final episodes for the best thing Star Wars has produced since Empire. And even better, when this debuts on March 7th, Netflix will also get the existing episodes.

If you haven’t watched it, you should give it a spin. Let the fact that it uses prequel characters go and look for the deeper themes the series embraces. It’s surprisingly complex and more than a little fun.

Brian Crecente with a rather interesting interview piece with SOE’s John Smedley (among others):

EverQuest Next Landmark, free-to-play like all of Sony Online Entertainment’s games, hits this winter and uses the same building tools used by developers to create Next, but gamifies the process so players need to mine for material and craft, while building in the varied terrain.

That sounds familiar; not sure where I have heard about something like that before…

The solution is to create a game that uses multi-classing. There are no levels in Next, but there will be more than 40 distinct “professions” to choose from at launch. Each of those professions will have their own multi-tiered abilities and specialized weapon skills to collect and master.

Yup. Definitely getting some déjà vu.

Players can sell their creations to one another for real money for use, if appropriate, in either or both games. Players can also sell particularly good creations to Sony Online Entertainment for an “appropriate” fee.

“If we get one million people playing Landmark,” Georgeson said, “and ten percent start making things, and ten percent of those finish and ten percent of that isn’t crap, that’s still a thousand people making cool stuff. And we don’t have 1,000 people on the development team.”

I’ve got it! At some point, maybe they should take a look at the balance sheets for Star Wars: Galaxies and see how that went.

Great and Small:

So, Vader takes an Agile approach.  He prioritizes the features list (“Look, we really need the big laser thing; our customers will just have to come to us at first.”), and he works in vertical slices.  At the end of the movie, it seems to have paid off.  There are still huge pieces missing and construction is nowhere near complete, but “Those weapon systems are operational!”

Funny. And somewhat true.