E3 is coming up, and "festivities" will resume in approximately one week. This makes one part excited, one part suicidal. Being in the city block on which the games industry will probably hit critical mass is very exhilarating, but especially if you work for an online site, it's just as exhausting. The luckiest people are the ones that get to walk around, take in the sites, and basically partake of the interactive entertainment industry's largesse at their leisure. Online journalists several dozens rungs below them, in that ladder.

I wouldn't trade it for the world, though I might be tempted to next Friday night at 2:00 AM, when I'm glued to my seat in the IGN/GameSpy War Room, numb, starved, and sweaty. But that's not for a week, right?

Anyway, to commemorate E3, I've decided to put together a wish-list, of sorts. If all of these things happened, then I will leave E3 satiated, with a revitalized sense of purpose in regards to my profession. Yes, I'm the type that likes to set himself up to fail. But bear with me.

#5: Give EverQuest II Real PvP

Though I haven't touched it in quite a while, I'm actually a big fan of EverQuest II. I love the class variety, but more than anything, I'd love the opportunity to take on real, live players. I know that the Desert of Flames is going to include some kind of arena-based PvP events, but c'mon! I want some real PvP! I want live in fear of being ganked, and subsequently corpse-camped by lame High Elves! I would totally roll up a Ratonga assassin if it meant I could run into Antonica, camp the entrance to Black Burrow, and creep Qeynos chumps as they exited.

I acknowledge that there probably needs to be some hardcore class rebalancing if something like this were to get implemented, but I'm sure work in that area is already going on, given the PvP elements that will be added with the expansion. There really is no excuse not to add a couple of open PvP serves, once these changes are implemented. C'mon, Sony Online Entertainment. Make my E3 a little bit brighter by announcing this.

#4: The Announcement of Kewl Console MMOs

Since the unceremonious cancellation of True Fantasy Live Online, the prospects for console MMOs have been pretty barren. Sure, Final Fantasy XI continues to enthrall multitudes of carebears and J-philes on the strength of its elite grind, but apart from its inevitable next expansion, what is there to look forward to?

Hey, it's my WoW guild.

It's no secret that networked gaming is going to factor heavily into the strategies of the "Big Three" in the coming generation, and it thus seems only logical that they'll want a piece of the as-of-late incredibly lucrative MMO pie. I'm sure very few of these companies execs can look at World of Warcraft's 1.5 million subscribers without their pupils swirling into dollar signs. Speaking of which, WoW proved that you can make a very appealing MMO without incorporating the genre's most tiresome conventions into its design. How about someone take this step further, and streamline the actual interfaces we use to play these games? I guarantee that the first studio to design one of these games well around the use of a control pad will be very, very rich. Or, it'll watch in tears as Blizzards becomes much, much richer by refining its idea, and working it into a Diablo or Warcraft game.