Later this month Runes of Magic will go into open beta in France and Spain.

Announcement of French and Spanish Runes of Magic open beta
Open beta still set to launch in France and Spain this month

Berlin, 03.07.2009: The French and Spanish language closed beta version of Runes of
Magic has now been running from July 1st 2009. Both language versions are running stably and the feedback from the community is very encouraging. In view of this positive
development the publisher Frogster has now set a firm date for the launch of the open betaphase. The starting flag goes up on the launch on 28th July 2009.

At the launch of the open beta version, which will be open to all players, all characters from the closed beta will be deleted and an extensive range of updates implemented. Frogster will not be imposing any further ‘character wipe’ at the switchover to the release version in September, thus enabling players to carry over their open beta characters into the launch version.

The Item Shop will also be available on the French and Spanish servers right from the launch of the open beta.

The Mystic power sets covers the sorcery and supernatural power sets and are sets that come close to the 'regular' fantasy wizard skills. read all about them on the official site.

Currently, Sorcery is one big power set with many different aspects to it. You've got "Circles of Power", which create areas that, if you stay in them, give you a very strong buff. If you leave that circle, you lose the benefit. "Auras" grant a buff to you and your teammates. "Circles of Summoning" summons a critter that can leave the circle to attack an enemy as long as you stay in the circle. Circles of Summoning and Circles of Power are mutually exclusive, meaning you can only have one or the other up at any time. You can also have one Aura up at any time in addition.

Supernatural is a set intended to let you create a character that is supernaturally inspired: angelic, demonic, etc. Their powers are like, "Condemn your enemy with bolts of holy doom," "Infect your enemy with clouds of pestilent flies," "Bite your enemy and drain their living essence to yourself," and "Summon animals from the wilderness to serve your will." There's definitely a very wide variety of skills in this single power set. It is our intention to break this power set after launch into multiple sub sets. We have plans to add more to these sets in our ongoing post-launch power expansions.

Andy Velasquez, an associate producer on the Star Trek Online team is the next in line to explain what he does in the development team.

What do you do on Star Trek Online?

I am an Associate Producer on Star Trek Online and I work with a wide variety of our development departments, from powers and systems design to the ship team all the way to our amazing concept artists. This is great for me because I get to argue with all kinds of different people! I get to say things like, “Hey that Romulan cloth sash looks CRAZY!” one minute and then say, “That Borg assimilation power seems super powerful” the next. More tangibly, though, I create and manage schedules, set up and run meetings to deal with any new craziness we try as well as helping unblock any of my fellow STO teammates by finding what their problems are and making them disappear.

Warcry has a video up from Fallen Earth showing how different they are from the average fantasy MMO.

At the SOE Fanfair MMORPG managed to corner Vanguard Lead Designer and Acting Producer Salim Grant and ask him about the current state of the game.

"We've worked hard. Very hard in the past two years," he said, "to make Vanguard what it should have been at launch. Finally, we are at a point where we are deciding what to do next instead of asking what we needed to fix next."

Vanguard: Saga of Heroes was always meant to be a sequel to EverQuest. "That was Brad's goal," said Salim, "a graphically updated EverQuest with new content and features which were not then technologically possible, so you'll find many parallels to EverQuest and the designs of dungeons in Vanguard have the best EverQuest dungeons as their touchstones."

Fans of EverQuest and fans of the "hard" game had looked forward to Vanguard, and to this date, Vanguard has its own cadre of passionate fans of the game; a community of dedicated players who have remained steadfast through the game's rocky beginnings.

Here is the latest on the state of Champions Online at this moment.

Today is the first day of the rest of July. And that means we’re turning up the heat here at Cryptic, both literally (our AC went out today – go heroic repair guy!) and in terms of getting more polish, balance, and final features into the game.
We’ve been getting some incredibly useful feedback in the beta forums that’s really helping us push forward in numerous directions. Our testers are going to start seeing some big changes in regards to balance and power sets in the next week or two, as well as tons of UI tweaks and tunings. As always, we’re incredibly grateful for the input, so please keep it coming!.

I wanted to address a couple of questions from the beta boards this week, talk about a couple of new features in the beta build, and tease some upcoming additions and re-introductions.

One of the heroes in Champhions Online is Amphibian who feels perfectly happy both in and outside the water.

Even as a child, Geoffrey Lamb took to the water like a fish. He was such a natural and excellent swimmer, his swim club coach thought he might have a shot at Olympic competition. But that was all before Geoffrey’s life took a distinct detour. He was nine years old when he and his parents were caught in a storm at sea just off the coast of Florida. Their boat capsized. That was when Geoffrey’s mutant aquatic powers manifested for the first time, allowing him to breathe under water. He tried to save both of his parents, but simply didn’t have the strength to do so. Shocked and traumatized, he stayed near the capsized boat for nearly a day before he was found.

The aquatic superhero, Sea King, rescued Geoffrey. Even through Geoffrey’s shock, he was able to see a young boy with the potential to become a hero - if he was given a chance to recover from the loss of his parents and explore his superpowers in a safe environment. So Sea King, in his secret identity as businessman Rodger Bright, adopted him.

Massively interviewed Game Studio Director Isa Anne Stamos from the indie developer Mindfuse who are working on their steam-punk MMO Gatheryn.

Massively: We first took a look at Gatheryn at GDC earlier this year, and liked what we saw so far. Can you describe some of the major feature changes or updates to the game since then?

Isa Anne Stamos, MindFuse: Generally, we've been focusing on building out the early stages of the Gatheryn experience – adjusting the layout of the city, adding variations to character customization, and creating a deep casual gaming experience that players can enjoy the minute they enter Gatheryn. Specifically, we just added a Player Health feature that measures your avatar's fatigue and gives us some creative options for healing items and quests. We're also filling in a lot of the quests and minigames – we've probably added a few since you saw us at GDC. We're also working hard to build up the community tools because we rely heavily on them to communicate with our beta users - they're crucial to getting player feedback in these early stages of development.

MMORPG has made an editorial about the enforcers and criminals in APB.

Law and Order is on the brink of collapse in the famous metropolis of San Paro, the major city of All Points Bulletin (APB). But before you start playing one must first choose your allegiance with the city. Will you be there to protect the city from becoming corrupt, or have a hand in its criminal uprising?

While creating a character in APB, the user must choose their faction from either an Enforcer or a Criminal. Once this faction is chosen, the player will not be able to switch sides to the opposing faction. Since APB is not going for the original MMO feel there will be no leveling. Characters will only progress by enhancing their own gaming skills forcing players to build reputations within the gaming world. This will lead to unlocking clothes, items, cars, and of course more powerful guns. Also, by forcing the players to build a reputation, the game will feel like it's a more persistent world. Both factions Enforcers/Criminals have missions that will help them build a reputation in addition to the fight against one another. Once players build a high enough reputation they will be able to create there very own squads or gangs, complete with there own tattoos, clothes, colors, and the ability to fight for control of turf in the city.

Ten Ton Hammer has a list up covering what in their eyes are the best MMORPGs at E3. There are different categories but the best of the show was....

Best of Show - Star Wars: The Old Republic

Maybe it was the absolutely phenomenal trailer that BioWare led off with (which many at E3 were calling the best Star Wars cinema in 30 odd years), or the retro-styled booth where they were doing the demo of the highly convincing bounty hunter and smuggler classes or the revelation that a game can go full voiceover without obstructing gameplay. SWTOR is still a long way away and we have much, much, much more to see, but not only did Bioware bring the full package to this year's premier games event, the core of the  game looks very compelling and so far, worthy of the hype.

A description of the Warrior archetype in Aion can be found on Ten Ton Hammer.

When you first begin as a warrior you won’t have a lot of trouble dispatching a majority of the even level enemies you’ll encounter. More often than not you’ll likely be looking for something else to kill before you finish fertilizing the landscape with the unfortunate creature you’re pounding into the ground. Don’t worry though, there’s a bit more to mastering a warrior than running around grunting, “Hulk Smash!” and you’ll start getting a taste of that when you get your first combo. A big part of Warrior combat will involve utilizing your combos effectively.

As a warrior, there are two things that will decide whether you stand victoriously over the monkey stomped carcass of your fallen enemy or end up having boot leather surgically removed from your backside by the local soul healer. Those two things are gear and combos. Being a heavy tank you’ll have access to armor that some of the other classes won’t be able to wear. This is one of your perks, so enjoy it. You’ll need it if you ever get snared.

A description of the developer tour of Dungeons & Dragons Online Unlimited can be found on both Massively and Ten Ton Hammer.

Next in line in the class archetypes explained on Ten Ton Hammer is the Scout.

You are playing a scout, so the first thing that'll you will notice is fights are fairly quick.  Even starting out, you do a nice bit of damage. Just don't compare yourself to the early mage, because they gave me a little bit of damage envy.

You have the skills to carry a sword or a dagger, and it is your choice which you decide to equip.  I'll get into the differences between these two weapons a little later on.  You also get the dual wield skill as a scout, which made me all sorts of happy.

In the first 10 levels you are granted a hide skill that is very handy, a buff that boosts your evasion, and another buff that boosts your attack.  The buffs saved my rear repeatedly and you will want to use them often.

And there are some Asmodian screens from the last beta.

According to the Dutch site Gamerz.nl Spellborn Works has filed for bancruptcy. As most of you probably didn't take Dutch classes, here's a translation:

The Fallen Earth developer journal on MMORPG is about the names of bosses and NPCs in the game.

Boss/Creature Names

• Arbiter Reinhold Coleman: The leader of the villainous Judges in the Central Plains. He's a Judge and his first name is Reinhold. Inspired by actor Judge Reinhold.
• "Dr. Corman," the evil Tech boss that players have to fight in Watchtower, owes his name to horror director Roger Corman.
• "Dr. Eddings" is a mad scientist who leads the Shiva's Favored inside New Flagstaff University. His name is an homage to the late fantasy author, David Eddings.
• "Shifty Devlin" is a Traveler thug whose last name is an homage to "Independence Day"/"Stargate" writer Dean Devlin.
• "Dennis Conroy" is a Union leader in New Flagstaff whose last name was inspired by Pat Conroy, author of "The Lords of Discipline" and "The Great Santini."

More about the power sets in Champion's Online can be found on Ten Ton Hammer covering the psychic power set: Telekinesis, Force, and Telepathy, where they interviewed Bill Roper about it.

Can you tell us a little bit about the Force, Telepathy, and Telekinesis power sets, the themes with them, and some of the secondary powers players can have when they pick these powers?

Bill Roper: Sure. Force is almost more kinetics than telekinetics. Force features a lot of powers that shove people back. There is a lot of knockback involved. It’s more of a physical presence, a kinetic power set.

Telepathy is definitely a straight mind set where you are doing things like summoning pets you use, other illusions or creatures of the mind, as well as some direct powers like mental bolts.

Telekinesis features a lot of what you'd expect out of this power set, but it also has the ability to create weapons out of mental energy. A lot of what we are putting in right now is being able to do things like being able to pick up objects with your mind and throwing them around.

And there is some info about power replacers on the official site.

Power replacers are items you can equip, which will change the effect of specific powers you use in the game. These items are not widely available, and will not be available for every power nor every power set. At launch, Martial Arts and the sets that have something to do with using items will have them. There’s talk about letting Sorcery have wands, but it’s still a “maybe”. The amount of time it takes for us to make and develop power replacers is much longer than the amount of time it takes to create a brand new power, oddly enough. It’s our opinion that the majority of players would prefer having a new power than an item that simply makes a cosmetic change to an existing power.

And finally you can take a look at five new screens.

Here is an update of the news on Star Trek Online from the last couple of days. First there is a short story about the destruction of the Klingon ChoS battle group, featuring an unknown ship.

To: Martok, Chancellor of the Klingon Empire and leader of the High Council
From: Quen, Klingon Intelligence
Re: After Action Report, choS Battle Group

Chancellor, I regret to inform you of the loss of the choS Battle Group. The crews fought with honor, sacrificing everything to send back to us intelligence about a new threat to the Empire.

The image included in this missive is of the ship that destroyed the battle group. We know little about this starship other than that, and what we do know is due to the heroic actions of Captain D'rakal and his crew. They died well, and I honor them.

In its continuing investigation into the events of the Hobus supernova, agents of Imperial Intelligence have been looking into reports of incredibly advanced starships appearing in Romulan space.

There must be some validity to these rumors. The Narada was a civilian ship captained by a common miner. Nero was no warrior, and yet he defeated a fleet of our finest starships! I cannot look in the faces of the mates and children of blooded Klingon warriors and tell them that these great men and women were killed by a miner! Even if all of the Fek'lhri had fought at his side, this should not have happened. I will not rest until I have uncovered the truth of all that occurred.

Secondly a new wallpaper featuring the Type VII Commercial Laboratory Ship can be found here.

And lastly a transcript of the recent dev chat can be found on the Star Trek Online forum.

Goldfarmers packing bags and moving shop.

Virtual currency, as defined by Chinese authorities, includes "prepaid cards of cyber-games," according to a joint release issued by China's Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Commerce on Friday.

"The virtual currency, which is converted into real money at a certain exchange rate, will only be allowed to trade in virtual goods and services provided by its issuer, not real goods and services," the Ministries said.

The Chinese government estimates that trade in virtual currency exceeded several billion yuan last year, a figure that it claims has been growing at a rate of 20% annually. One billion yuan is currently equal to about $146 million.

The ruling is likely to affect many of the more than 300 million Internet users in China, as well as those in other countries involved in virtual currency trading. In the context of online role playing games like World of Warcraft, virtual currency trading is often called gold farming.

MMORPG points out that Land of the Dead is live, and also points to patch notes.

The Call to Arms! campaign culminates today with the opening of the Land of the Dead. The Land of the Dead is a large RvR gated zone taking inspiration from Dark Age of Camelot's "Darkness Falls".

The zone features a new dungeon, several instances, and tons of new items, including the all new Tyrant armor set.

In addition to the included content, Patch 1.3 features countless bug fixes, new quality of life features, such as the ability to pass on Keep or Public Quest loot rolls, improvements to crafting, including a new crafting inventory bag, and more.

Unfortunately, for those who were expecting the big balance changes in Patch 1.3, those were pushed off to a later date so that they would have more time to be tested and iterated.

For the full patch notes, go here.

IGN has an excellent interview with Ken Levine and other Irrational team members on the Freedom Force series.  It's a lengthy 7-page article and well worth a read for fans:

IGN: Definitely! So, that actually is a great segue to my first question. It's been more than seven years since the first Freedom Force and four years since the sequel, Vs. the Third Reich. Considering the sequel left open the possibility for a potential third installment, would you be willing to comment on a new installment or spiritual successor to Freedom Force?

Ken Levine: We're not currently working on anything like that. Freedom Force was sort of like the classic joy and pain experience in the sense that with the first game we did, we had such a great time on it. Rob and I, being comic book nerds: the job description was, 'go create a comic book universe.' So we got to be mini-Stan Lee/Jack Kirby there, go off it and coming up with this whole world and all of these origins and all these characters and just had a great time working with Rob on that. After that first game we ended up having some run-ins with the publisher in terms of the rights of the franchise. We ended up working that out, but that sort of delayed the second game for a long time and kept the second game from coming out until after City of Heroes came out, which I think may have eaten our lunch a bit by the time we got the second game out.

We ended up self-publishing the second game; we were a private company at the time. That meant it was a complete a labor of love and a labor of financial love as well, because John and I, the owners of the company, paid for the development and publishing of that title out of our own pocket, basically. That cost us a fair amount of money and when the game came out, it was probably a combination of -- I don't think we did enough different from the first game and it was just a little too late and too long for the sequel. It just didn't sell very well – it sold a fraction of what the first one sold. I thought it was a better game.

So, it was very tough, and I think getting enough future titles set up may be tough, but listen, we've made people give us money for stupider things before (laughs) – financially stupid, I don't think creatively stupid, but we love the franchise. It's the first franchise that we've ever created before BioShock out of whole cloth – System Shock 2 was somebody else's IP, and so it was always something that was very near and dear to us. A lot of us are hardcore comic book nerds, so I think we'd love to do it, but I don't see it happening in the very near future.

In an interview SWG's lead producer Chris Field had with Massively he talks about the challenges of working on a six year-old game, their ongoing process of integrating fan feedback and what we can expect for SWG going forward.

Generally speaking, what are the advantages and disadvantages of working on a six year-old game?

One of the advantages is the ability to look back historically and think about what worked and what didn't. That, coupled with the fan feedback about what they'd like to see next, really defines a lot of the decisions that are made regarding where to go with the product.

As far as disadvantages go, sometimes it can take a while to adopt new tools and technologies that you'd like to take advantage of because the original game was written prior to the release of these new tools and tech. Zbrush is a good example. Our artists love using Zbrush but it took some wrangling to work it into our pipeline as it wasn't commercially available for the majority of the time Star Wars Galaxies was originally in development.

A video preview of the Belashan zone in Aion is to be found at Ten Ton Hammer.

Funcom recently put together a walkthrough video for recentely added area Tarantia Commons in Age of Conan. The video is narrated by game director Craig Morrison and gives an overview of the dynamic, faction-based rioting in the city streets, and a leper colony in the outskirts where players run the risk of contracting the disease carried by the locals.

MMORPG spoke with the husband and wife team of Fernando and Kate Piaz from Turbine's Dungeons and Dragons Online to talk about the game's transition from a subscription based title to the free to play model. Formerly known as Dungeons and Dragons Online: Stormreach, the new incarnation of the game will be called Dungeons and Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited.

The DDO Dynamic Duo explained that they felt it was necessary to rename DDO due to the new business model. "It's also to reflect," he elaborated, "just how far the game has come since launch." He went on to list a number of major elements that are present in today's game that weren't around at launch: soloable, PvP elements, outdoor adventures, a higher level cap, and more.

Dungeons and Dragons will be among the first major subscription based MMORPG to make the move to an item shop model. While this may seem like a good idea on the surface, industry insiders have warned that the key to the success of an item shop game is that the store not be "tacked on" at the end, but rather be fully incorporated into the game's original design.

"I think we're really fortunate with DDO,' answered Kate Piaz, "in the sense that D&D has always followed the notion that you would buy a module and play it and when you were ready to move beyond it you would go down to the hobby shop and you would expand your experience... It's not that it's a big change for us. We've always been the different MMO. We've always had mechanics that were more diverse than the other more classic MMOs so for us, this felt like a relatively easy migration because we're not trying to sell the endgame, we're not selling raid loot, we're enhancing the overall experience by providing conveniences, luxury items, cosmetic items and stuff like that that's really going to enhance the kind of gameplay that you have but don't in any way change that moment to moment gameplay."

Executive Producer Craig Zinkievich talked to AbleGamers about taking gamers with disabilities into consideration.

AbleGamers:  Do you know if anyone on the development team is disabled?

Zinkievich:  I am aware of several people at Cryptic Studios who are colorblind. Although there may be others who have disabilities, that tends to be personal information.

AbleGamers:  8% of men in the US are colorblind; do you think they will have a hard time playing Star Trek?

Zinkievich:  I hope not. As I mentioned - there are several colorblind employees here at Cryptic. We bring them into the review of anything in the UI where we are using color as a major factor in the communication of information. That being said - good UI never has a single method of communication, so any place we use color it tends to be a secondary or tertiary marker.

AbleGamers:  Game sound is an important factor, especially in a game with such well-known sound effects such as photon torpedoes, phasers, and a well-known opening title.  Will I enjoy the game with no sound at all? Without sound, will I know what is going on? And are there visual cues as well as audio cues for an event or quest advancement?

Zinkievich:  You will definitely know what is going on, and I really do think that you will be able to enjoy the game with no sound.

Good game audio can provide emotion or a sense of place and give extra cues to events that are happening. That being said, our policy is to make sure for any important game event there are multiple UI cues. Nothing is ever indicated only through audio. If there is voiceover, there is text.  If there is a warning claxon, there is a visual UI cue as well.