Fear and Levelling in Las Vegas

When Smedley idly dropped in that every attendant of Fan Faire would be receiving both expansions for free, the ensuing roar was so loud, I thought an A380 Airbus had chosen that moment to pull off an emergency landing on the buffet table behind me. It hadn't, of course. I was just witnessing the full power of fan-service; staring into the eye of a terrifying new-media volcano, and watching as it erupted. As the applause died down, Smedley seemed genuinely moved as he explained, "You came from all over the globe, you dressed up in costumes. It's the least we could do."

Although cast as permanent second fiddle to Blizzard, SOE remains utterly capable of inspiring this kind of devotion. Despite its past upsets, Star Wars Galaxies seemed to be in fine health, for example, with plenty of players cheering its every mention from Smedley, and lines forming around its booth. With the game reaching its fifth anniversary, producer Chris Field emphasised the importance of keeping a dialogue with the players, announcing a new playable Hoth area and a trading card game.

Equally, the company's more niche titles, such as Pirates of the Burning Sea and Matrix Online - it's a sign of the company's rocky road to self-awareness that they managed to make a Matrix game niche, even if they did inherit it half-broken from Ubisoft - were well-represented. That said, Pirates learned the hard way that if you offer up a dense technical talk on art design, in Vegas, while there are free donuts being served at a Women in Gaming panel across the hallway, you're going to pay a price in audience turnout - and you're going to have to talk about greyscale and colour charts while the echoes of boisterous laughter and sugary chomping bleed cruelly through the walls.

The Matrix Online panel was perhaps the most intimidating session of the entire weekend, as many of the attendees were dressed in leather coats and sunglasses, and Ben Chamberlain, the single individual responsible for creating almost all of the game's daily content, from quests to live events, bears a disturbing resemblance to Agent Smith. Tellingly, most of the hour was spent allowing Chamberlain to gauge how well his efforts were going down. In a bizarre and - considering these games are meant to be massively multiplayer - financially worrying development, as the talk progressed, I slowly realised that everyone in the room except for me knew one another. It still provided a fascinating insight into the task of running a live game with a small team, and said a lot for SOE's bravery in keeping more modest products afloat.

While there's already a significant range to SOE's catalogue, as Smedley pointed out in his address, the company's new games will take this even further - and may be the key to SOE's resurgence. DC Universe Online is a case in point, levelling like an MMO, but playing like an action game. Its familiar characters and appearance on both the PS3 and the PC may make it an excellent gateway drug for those who've yet to taste the joys of Azeroth or Norrath. It doesn't hurt that it's also a solid chunk of Technicolor fun, and even a few minutes of throwing cars and frozen enemies around Metropolis suggest that it's the physics as much as the licence that may come to define this massively-multiplayer brawler.

With a regular queue forming at the preview pods, DCUO had an excellent showing. The only hiccup, in fact, was when my arrival at the demonstration stand magically coincided with the spontaneous emergence of long-dormant electromagnetic superpowers hidden deep within my body, as I managed to fuse three dev-kits and black-out at least five HD displays simultaneously, just by picking up the control pad - presumably also frying all traffic lights within a five-mile radius and sending slews of pink stretch Hummers into balletic collisions. (These same superpowers were possibly responsible for the scariest moment of the entire trip, causing my hotel room television to randomly switch itself on at three in the morning, filling my blurry consciousness with the disembodied voice of Barry Manilow urging me to check out the swimming pool.)