Loads of screenshots posted on the offical site from the beta test.

Fresh out of the Spellborn oven comes this new batch of Screenshots taken by some of our Community Beta Testers.

In these shots you'll see different areas of the game such as zones located on the Shard of Parliament and Quarterstone as well as some hostile humanoid factions which are scattered all over these Shards.

You can find these new shots in the Screenshots section on our website.
Let us know what you think in the forum thread linked below! Enjoy!

As this new age beckons for EVE players CCP have a new web additon here.

EVE Online is a massively multiplayer game. Hundreds of thousands of players compete within a single persistent universe for military, economic and political power. Players explore the suns of New Eden, mine and refine resources, drive the economy, and wage war on one another in a richly detailed virtual world set 35,000 years in the future in a stellar cluster far from Earth.

This summer, CCP will bring EVE into the Empyrean Age. The four major Empires of EVE have broken their long-standing peace and are marshalling their forces for war. The outcome hinges on the actions of the galaxy's immortal pod pilots, allowing players to direct the course of the conflict.

The events of Empyrean Age have been a long time coming, building upon nearly a century of political tension. Access to Jovian technology ushered in the age of the pod pilots and shattered the balance of power, and recent events have sparked a march towards total war.

The events leading to the outbreak of war in New Eden unfold in EVE: The Empyrean Age, the first EVE novel, written by Tony Gonzales and published in the UK by ORION Books.

I can't view it atm but the Knut Avenstroup Haugen is here.

While attending the launch event for Funcom's Age of Conan, MMORPG.com Managing Editor Jon Wood had the opportunity to talk with Knut Avenstroup Haugen, the game's composer, about what it was like to work on the highly anticipated game.

Patch notes can be found here.

Oli Welsh has a long interview with Jeff Kaplan and Tom Chilton (Designers), and J. Allen Brack (Producer) about WotLK, upcoming MMORPGs, new classes, raiding etc etc etc. 

Eurogamer: You've got a couple of fairly heavyweight competitors launching this year - Age of Conan and Warhammer Online. Those games both have a heavy focus on PVP in the endgame. Do you think you might lose quite a few PVP players to these games?

J. Allen Brack: We don't really think about it like that. We don't make games in a vacuum, we don't just play World of Warcraft, I love online games, I play a lot of online games, and I'm really excited about those games coming out because I want to play them. I think that's fairly common across the board.

I think there's room for all three of those games to be successful. I mean, the worst thing for our industry is for online games to come out and fail. They cost so much money to develop, and it's so difficult, and it's such a huge labour of love to launch an online game, for it to fail is sad for everybody.

Eurogamer have an exclusive video of Midnight Hour.

The Midnighters are the scholarly branch of humanity's resistance against the Rikti, bringing their arcane knowledge to bear against the ravaging alien bastards. Book 12 is their time to shine as they strike back against the invaders which hit them so hard.

Dedicated servers heading Australia's way(ish) from Gamespot.

GameSpot AU: You've decided to set up an Australian server for Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, is that right?

Josh Drescher: This is something that we've wanted to do basically from the beginning of the project. We wanted to make sure that in terms of localisation and offering support for players around the world, that we try and give as many people as possible home turf servers to use. And the Australian fans were actually extremely vocal early on in the process. It's been something we've wanted to do for quite some time, and when we were bought by EA it became something that was a lot more viable for us, so we're very excited to get some dedicated servers over there.

GS AU: So it will be locally hosted?

JD: I don't know the exact location, but we'll be hosting the server somewhere in East Asia, so it will be in the correct time zone. At the moment we are targeting it squarely at Australia and New Zealand. Once you get outside of those two territories you run into linguistic problems, which will need independent servers elsewhere.

Q&A round-table with some of the makers of Stargate Worlds.

GameSpot UK chatted to three people involved in the MMOG in a roundtable discussion: Stargate Worlds studio head Dan Elggren, FireSky senior vice president of strategic operations Joe Ybarra, and FireSky's senior vice president of product development Rod Nakamoto.

Ybarra is a veteran of the games world, who started in the industry more than 20 years ago as a producer for Electronic Arts. He has worked on titles including M.U.L.E., The Bard's Tale, The Seven Cities of Gold, and The Matrix Online.

Nakamoto is also an industry old timer, having started out developing one of the first sound cards for the Apple II computer, and has worked for (among others) Electronic Arts, Activision, and Sega. Games with his name on include Wing Commander: Prophecy, Eternal Champions, and NASCAR Thunder 2003.

Elggren describes himself as a "Stargate enthusiast," and got his break in the industry working as a QA tester. He formerly worked for Electronic Arts as development director, and developed games including three Medal of Honor titles, and Command & Conquer: Generals Zero Hour.

Eurogamer reports that The Agency will have RMT supported via Live Gamer. Making this possibly free to play though EQ2 runs this as well and is still subscription based.

SOE president John Smedley seemed to hint as much in his comment on the deal. "We are actively exploring free-to-play and other revenue models, and always looking for new ways to engage and entertain gamers," he said. "Live Gamer is a proven partner that protects and supports our gamers who participate in RMT [real money trading]. We trust them to handle this area of the business for us so that we can focus on creating and growing our games."

Live Gamer president Andrew Schneider added that The Agency and Free Realms were "titles for which the idea of RMT has been built in from the very early stages of design". The press release notes that The Agency will allow players to customise their characters through "attire, weaponry, gadgets, vehicles, gear and aliases that tailor their game play" - all of which could be sold.

Calvin Crowner mentions SA news to come shortly.

What about KR? What about SA?

As far as Kingdom Reborn is concerned – We have a couple of fixes going in this publish: walking as a ghost across the bridge in the Wind dungeon, and a legacy toggle issue with pink tiles around cave entrances. I’m not a fan of the color pink, sorry about the delay on this. There are a few others, but know we’re still working on more goodies. Also, we’re still investigating most of the topics discussed here on the boards. To this end, in the near future we’d like to do some server load/stress testing. We’re discussing between 20-25 players chasing a few devs and GMs around. Please be prepared to share frame rates, machine and OS specs.

Also know all new content will be updated for both Kingdom Reborn and the Legacy clients for the Epic Event.

Sighs. So much for the light publish.

Begins to walk away...

"WHAT ABOUT Stygian Abyss?! ..." He pauses slightly, without turning, a mild chuckle pressing the corners of the room, “We announced the expansion over a year ago, and you should be hearing more news about it soon.” He continues a slow shuffle into a dark room, most likely to be eaten by a grue.

Door closes ... footsteps fade. Following you open the door to discover a beach at sunset. There is a blue page here.

Warcry have a Q&A piece with Masthead's CEO Atanas Atanasov.

WarCry: What will gameplay be like? How will the average player spend his time in Earthrise?

AA: Earthrise is a skill-based PvP sandbox MMO featuring sophisticated crafting and player controlled territory. An average player can do a lot of things in the game starting from character development through PvE and questing, going through PvP fights with single enemies, Guild vs Guild or the epic territory conquest. Those players who don't want to engage in PvE or PvP fights will find the crafting, trading and social advancement an excellent way of spending their time while online.

WarCry: What is the skill system like? Will there be a lot of grinding, or is the progression fast?

AA: Earthrise will feature a large amount of skills with a wide range of active and passive abilities, further customizable with Tactics that enhance their effects in new directions, allowing players to customize their arsenal of skills to their liking. The game will require players to take on quests and kill many mutated species, regenerate robots or bandits across the island of Enterra in order to advance their skills, but the progression won't require too much of them. In fact, if players want to develop only a small group of highly specialized skills, they can reach expertise fairly quickly, and within a couple months they would be ready to match with the end content, but if they prefer variety and customization that guarantees their survival in many situations, they will have to spend considerably more time on honing their skills in-game. However, player skill remains the most important of them all - both in achieving the best suited build for their taste and how to actually play it well.

Josh Drescher (EA Mythic Senior Designer) talks about releasing after WoW, working with EA and MMO subscription numbers.

Q: How is working with EA compared to being independent?

Josh Drescher: Compared to being an independent developer it's awesome. When we made Camelot in 2001, we knew we had a great product and it was really difficult to get attention from the media. There's a tendency to want to focus on proven quantities in the industry and as a result when you're kind of alone in the wilderness and no matter how good your product is it's really tough to get time and attention - so first and foremost it's a lot easier to be visible.

Second, they've given us the resources to dramatically expand what we're doing with the game. When we were an independent studio we had a very rigid schedule of when we had to be out the door and it really didn't matter how far along we were, like the lights were going to be turned off if we didn't have the title out by a very certain point.

The first thing they did when they came to us was they said: "Have some more money, have some more time, have more resources, have a larger staff and do everything that you want to do in the game," - and they've been very supportive.

Chuck Osborn plays some multi-player AoC.

In fact, the biggest obstacle I encountered in multiplayer while playing the beta was that framerates dipped dramatically between nighttime and daytime modes. Tortage City, in particular, was plagued by stutters and stops that often turned the game into a sword-and-sorcery slideshow. Turning graphics settings down to “fugly” helped some, but I could almost hear my powerful machine whimpering in protest.Crashes were also very common in multiplayer, occurring most often when the game loaded a new area. Funcom says that the crashes are due to a known memory leak that will be fixed before launch, but wasn’t able to explain away my framerate issues quite so easily. Long story short: I shouldn’t have had them, say the devs, who suggested a lack of pre-compiled shaders may be the culprit. The final game will ship with a shader library that they - and we - hope will alleviate this problem. I also experienced an array of minor glitches, like absent animations, invisible enemies, and a broken quest or two, but these sorts of problems often get fixed by bleary-eyed developers in the final weeks before an MMO launch. Crom, if you’re up there, please help guide Funcom in ironing out these technical issues

Short preview at Gamespy.

To its credit, the early quests in WAR seem to impart a definite sense of "place." Think about how the early quests in WoW make you feel as if you're "clocking in" to quest-givers, subsequently running out into the field a few yards to fulfill objectives, and returning to clock out by delivering your quests and collecting rewards. There doesn't seem to be as much of that in WAR; rather, the early environments seem to be designed around highly-visible events, the consequences of which are evident all around you. In the Dwarf areas, the context is a Greenskin invasion, with the tunneling goblins and squigs and the orc-manned artillery beyond the ramparts. For the Dark Elves, it takes the form of an invasion mounted from enormous naval structures called "arks" -- think a floating city the size of an island.

Quest areas don't seem to be places that wandering monsters simply arbitrarily inhabit; at least in the two areas we checked out, there was a definite rhyme and reason for mob X to be patrolling site Y. The effort to build the environments like this go a long way toward negating one of the most common criticisms levied against MMOs: that they feel like static wax museums inhabited by staid 3D models which, at best, represent nothing more than statistics in the form of gold, experience, and levels to be transferred to your character.

Interview with Vanguard producer Thom Terrazas.

Allakhazam: Looking back at Vanguard, there were undeniably some issues at launch. What would you say was the greatest issue facing this title, and where does that issue stand today?

Thom: Performance; Optimization; High System Requirements. Everyone may have a different name for it but at the end of the day, optimization challenges were the biggest hurdle faced at launch. We lost too many customers at launch due to the inability to run the game smoothly and we have been making huge improvements in this area in every update since. I can speak to this first hand actually: When I started playing at launch, I experienced some horrible “hitching” while moving from one area to another on what I consider an average gamers’ computer. When I began to play more extensively a couple months later, I noticed some considerable improvements to my frame rate. Today, it is night and day superior than it was at launch. Optimizing the game has been one of our top priorities and in the last six months, we have made some considerable strides in improving the player’s experience. If you haven’t logged in recently or if you gave us a look in the beginning and haven’t been back since, check it out now - I’ll even flag your account for free for a period of time if you want to go in and prove me wrong.

Open Beta to begin on the 15th.

The World of Ethergia beckons to worthy Temperions to challenge the horrors that walk Ethergia’s lands. An opportunity to take up this challenge is coming on May 15, 2008.

We will begin our Open Beta test on May 15, 2008 at 7pm PDT. This Open Beta test session will be open to all currently registered accounts as well as all the new Temperions that decide to join us.

All accounts and characters will be reset prior to this test session and will be placed in a new starting zone called Truba Island.

The new Requiem game client, which is available on our Client Download Section, is necessary to play during the Open Beta test.

Please note that this is still part of the beta testing process, and as such, does not fully represent the final product. Players who participate during this period may experience some lag or connection issues as we work to fine-tune and optimize our server capacity.

If you have questions, comments or wish to stay updated on the progress of the Beta Test please Register for news and notifications or check our Forums.

Article at Eurogamer on EVE's Council of Stellar Management.

We've just entered a two-week voting period in EVE Online, in which every subscriber is being given an opportunity to vote for their choice of representatives from the player-base. This democratic process allows players to decide which of the 31 candidates gets to represent them in the regular Reykjavik summits between developers CCP and the inaugural Council of Stellar Management (CSM). Nine councillors must be chosen.

Players will be deciding who they trust with their voice, and who they think will have the best influence on the issues raised at the talks. That is, of course, if they bother to vote. Just as in the real world, voter ignorance and apathy seems rife, and even the hardest of hardcore players seem indifferent to the entire affair. Has CCP done enough to promote the entire business?

MMORPG have another 2 tracks from the in development MMORPG.

And I Shall Remain

The cataclysms of the Third World War have left cities in ruin, filled only with death and despair. Those brave enough to inhabit these areas can sense the ghosts of the men and women lost; their ghost-voices calling to them in the dry winds. Amidst the devastation, the old cities hide unknown treasures and secrets that may prove to be deadly traps for explorers. The weathered streets of these perilous cities have become battlegrounds for short, but fierce, clashes between government loyalists and rebel forces.

You can download the song here.

Shifts and Tides

The island of Enterra is dense with the remains of a lost civilization. The landscape is dominated with ruined structures and fallen monuments of ancient technology. Memories of the long-dead humanity live only through tales conjured in the imagination of venturous travelers and explorers; an evidence of the ever-shifting tides of fate, invoking uncertainty in their own future...

You can download the song here.

Offical site updates, info on new dungeon.

The dungeons section of the World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King web site has been updated with a new dungeon from the upcoming expansion. Learn more about the blue dragonflight's home base in Northrend, the Nexus.

Check out the new Nexus page now!

AoC announces over 1 million beta sign-ups.

Funcom and Eidos are proud to confirm some of the impressive figures powering the Age of Conan launch, and the two companies are happy to reveal that the Age of Conan Beta has passed 1 million sign-ups! As one of the most anticipated MMO’s ever, the 1 million mark confirms the amazing interest in the game.

“Funcom has not been able to find any higher beta numbers for MMOs in the western world,” said Morten Larssen, VP of Funcom Sales and Marketing. “We believe it represents the largest ever beta sign-up figure in the history of the genre.”

Adds new trailer also.

This brand new trailer shows clearly that the women of Hyboria are just as dangerous and deadly as any man.

News on the latest update for EQ2 on EQ Players.

Yes, you heard it! Game Update 45 is coming to a US server near you, the morning of Tuesday, May 13th 2008! Less then a day to revel in the new weaponcrafting changes, less then 24 hours to hear that audible sigh of relief from your overburdened bank as you get more spaces, only mere hours until all the other great additions and changes arrive in EverQuest II!

There's a preview also on Players here. 

Incgamers have a Blizzard press release, fueling the possible Diablo 3 announchment.

Blizzard Entertainment® gaming convention returns to Anaheim Convention Center 10-11October

MARLOW, UK – 12th May, 2008 – Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. today announced plans for its third BlizzCon™ gaming convention, to be held at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California on 10 and 11 October. BlizzCon is a celebration of the global player communities surrounding Blizzard Entertainment®’s Warcraft®, StarCraft®, and Diablo® franchises. In response to the demand to accommodate more attendees, this year’s event has expanded from two convention halls to three.

“Whenever we’ve been able to meet and interact with Blizzard gamers from around the world, it’s been a great experience for us,” stated Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. “We’re looking forward to seeing even more of our players at this year’s BlizzCon and delivering another entertaining and informative event for them.”

BlizzCon will offer a wide variety of activities to help all attendees get the most out of the two-day event. In addition to serving as a gathering place for the different Blizzard Entertainment gaming communities, attendees will be able to enjoy:

• Hands-on play time with upcoming Blizzard Entertainment releases
• Discussion panels with Blizzard Entertainment developers
• Competitive and casual tournaments for players to showcase their talents
• Areas and activities devoted to licensed products such as the World of Warcraft® Trading Card Game
• Costume, machinima, and character sound-alike contests with great prizes
• Commemorative merchandise based on the Blizzard Entertainment franchises
• A silent auction
• More exciting activities to be announced

Tickets for BlizzCon will go on sale in the next few weeks at a price of $100 USD per person. As the event draws closer, further details will be announced on the official BlizzCon website: www.blizzcon.com.

Or so says The Inquirer.

The World of Warcraft licence agreement explicitly forbids the use of programs like Glider. Blizzard claims that Donnelly's enabling users to breach its licence.

However, Blizzard is also claiming that, because its licence prohibits the use of programs like Glider, Glider users are also committing copyright infringement every time they load their copy of the WoW client software into RAM to play it.

If the court accepts Blizzard's position, Glider users could find themselves liable for statutory damages which might start at $750 for every time they use Glider.

Blizzard's argument would also give software vendors the right to prohibit the use of any and all third-party software that interoperates with their products.

But WoW players each own their copy of the client software, and Section 117 of the Copyright Act says they all have the right to copy it -- that is, load it into RAM -- if that's necessary to use the software, which it is.

Blizzard argues that its WoW players don't own their copies of the WoW client software, but merely licence them. But courts have held that whether or not a user is an owner under Section 117 depends on the substance of a transaction, not just how one party describes it.

If you buy a copy of piece of software, install and use it on your own computer, and don't have to return it to the vendor when you're finished with it, that likely means you own it.

MMOs like 3d graphics.

Speaking to the Seattle Times, president John Smedley said that Sony Online Entertainment - the operation he runs which recently became part of Sony's PlayStation-managing Computer Entertainment division - is banking big on this philosophy when it comes to new titles, including its next game The Agency.

"I would say [MMOs are] getting more mainstream. If I were characterizing it, I would say think of the video-gaming industry five years ago. That's kind of where I think we're at. ... Five years ago, do you think Grand Theft Auto IV would have done $500 million [in opening-week sales]? To me, video games are just reaching the real mass-market now. That is going to translate to the MMO side of the business.'

Creative director says following the WoW template adds no value for customers.

In an exclusive Q&A with Develop, available to read here, NCsoft Europe's creative director Marc D'Souza has described the firm's new UK studio's upcoming tiles as 'novel game experiences', saying the team doesn't want to 'make copycat games in anyway'.