Hardcore and Casual don't exist, at least not in the ways the words have been applied lately.

There are the informed and the uninformed.

Be careful when you woo the uninformed masses that you don't just sell them shiny new things. Uninformed doesn't mean stupid, you can only hawk baubles for so long. The Mii-toos of the music game genre are one example of paste sold as precious jewels.

Don't repeat 1983.

The craze for anything with pixels left a jaded mass-market in its wake and for decades afterwards the videogame industry struggled for relevance. The buzz is that we've arrived? We've been here before.

Am I trying to be an alarmist? Maybe just a bit, although some ringing in executive ears won't stop this sort of thing. I can only hope they keep up the greater creative effort rather than standing at the base of the money-tree and collecting the dollars that fall. E3's opening pitches this year are not a good sign.

There have been some great examples in recent years of delivering solid gameplay to the masses, but the next wave seems tired.

I know that a lot of my readers are more PvE-oriented, so to offset the PvP footage I just posted, here's an excellent interview and gameplay video of PvE team combat in Age of Conan, which highlights combos well.

The video was taken at E3 last month and is split into two parts. I love the polearm action that does look like something right out of a fighting game ala Soul Calibur. The Necromancer's small personal army of pets is pretty damn cool too.

Once again though, Funcom overdoes their god-mode cheats during demonstrations, in this case they 3man and Solo a raid dungeon designed for 24 players (standard team size in Age of Conan is 6), although that does let them show off a couple bosses.

I'm trying to be patient... March.. heh.