How does it look? Amazing. Where KOTOR looked like and Xbox game (and for some reason Jade Empire didn’t) Mass Effect looks like a true second generation Xbox 360 title. Character detail is… well, detailed. The graphics of each character model are superb. Environments rich and lush. This truly is an immersive world – and that’s just the visuals. We didn’t get to hear a lot of the game, but what we heard was great. It seems that the nerds have completely taken over the shop at BioWare in that attention to detail is no small matter. Even with just a basic setup you could hear the Doppler affect of shots fired. Maybe that was my imagination. I hope not.

I do know this, Mass Effect looks to be one of the games to beat for game of the year, yes, Oblivion may have met its match. We’ll find out later this year.

Bottom line: Himalaya has done a bang-up job, and the game will be well worth the wait. Al Emmo & the Lost Dutchman's Mine has all the makings of a classic adventure game—good story, humorous dialogue, lots of interactivity, beautiful graphics and great gameplay. Personally, I can't wait to play the rest of the game.

Himalaya Studios is planning to release a demo—containing the entire first chapter—sometime this month. The full game is scheduled for the end of this month.

All in all, Bitter Harvest made for a few fun months of weekly games for myself and other players from Neverwinter Connections (thanks to Darius Sarnak, DirgeSinger, GoldenAvenger, Guybo, Kalia D'Malen, LadyRolePlay, and Mpskydog). If you are a regular weekly group looking for a new campaign (the module was designed to be slipped into any existing campaign without much difficulty), or just someone looking for some extended multiplayer fun, I would definitely give this adventure a try.

The setting of ancient Greece, Egypt and China allows for some very interesting quests. The villages are full of quest givers, and no sooner have you started than you are quickly levelling-up. The monsters come in all shapes and sizes with some being impossibly huge. Expect to see hags, draconians, tiger men, croc men, mummies, djinn and many other creatures of legend. In the footage we saw of the later stages of the game, creatures also attack you on savage mounts that must be defeated first to get at the rider.

RPGDot: Can you summarize Drakensang and the gameplay it will offer?

Bernd Beyreuther: The most telling description of DSA: DRAKENSANG might be something like Baldur's Gate in 3D, but based on The Dark Eye, Germany's biggest RPG system. This means: classic party-based RPG, no irritating button mashing, but tactical, pausable combat, a skill-based dynamic dialogue system, unique characters and an epic story as a primary element. All this set against the backdrop of a classic low fantasy world with elves, dwarfs, orcs - definitely no spaceships and time travel, but an almost historical and very deep medieval world.

You begin play with a single avatar that you steadily improve – complete quests for experience points that level you onwards to greater power and abilities, collect items like rings and weapons and armour for increased aesthetic glory, and amass your personal wealth. As the game progresses, you'll collect up to seven other individual heroes that will always sit just under your main character in power, but you can tweak them in all the same ways. This isn't a million miles from Dungeon Siege; however, gameplay never devolves into merely tapping a key for health potions, and as such, SpellForce 2 comes across as more dynamic than Microsoft's squad-RPG. Underneath all of this are the strategic aspects: resource management, base-building, tech-tree advancement, and large troop tactics.

In order to bring the stealth and invisibility systems closer to the D&D Core Rulebooks, we’re redesigning how the systems work.

Monsters that think they have detected a hidden target will no longer unerringly home in on the stealthed character. Now, alert NPC’s will begin making “best guess” attacks near the last suspected location of their target (the last location they either saw their opponent, or heard them if they made noise), and will search in a progressively wider radius until they find their foe. A monster that physically bumps into a stealthed player will automatically detect them and begin attacking.

With the pending theatrical release of the sequel to Pirates of the Caribbean, it's no surprise that this year brings an influx of pirate-based games to all of our favorite platforms. From handhelds to consoles to the PC, they're everywhere. It's also no surprise then that Akella, who seem to have the high seas under their control with an extensive library of pirate games, are showing us the latest builds of two games based on this common theme. Age of Pirates: Caribbean Tales and Age of Pirates: Captain Blood were both on display at the Playlogic booth this year at E3; we take a look at the former, a mix of the RPG and action/adventure genres that allows players to make their own choices regarding the gameplay and its outcome.

The main objective we have tasked our gameplay designers with is finding out what makes an action RPG fun. Our first step was to get rid of a lot of things that are not fun, such as spending a lot of time traveling to and from town to sell your wares and micromanaging inventory, and instead focusing on the action and adventure elements that really drive action RPGs. We created flexible character classes and modifiable skills to let players really customize their characters to match their play style. To make the loot-collection part of the game even more exciting, we added a lot of unique equipment, each with hand-entered stats and art. And we kept the action and combat fast-paced and visceral, because that is what fans of this genre love about these games.

The story is boring, it doesn't appeal to me and I sometimes couldn't follow it, mainly because of the references to the first Spellforce. In this campaign the loading times are also too long, luckily this isn't the case in the other game modes. The quests do make playing fun because of their variation.

Get Registered for Beta! - June 05, 2006

We are getting closer and closer to kicking-off the official Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising beta program, so now is a good time to sign-up for your chance to get in! How do you sign-up for your chance to get in? Well, the best (and right now the only) way to get signed up is by creating a personalized Perpetual Entertainment Platform Account HERE. This will also get you registered for the message boards, so if you already have a message board account, you are already signed-up for your chance at getting into beta.

As we get started with our beta program there will be numerous opportunities for you to become involved with Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising. Throughout the many stages of open and closed beta, we will have a limited number of slots available to bring people into the game, and several stages will be filled with randomly selected PEP account holders?

As the beta progresses, there will be other opportunities to get in on the fun though special promotions we will be holding with our partner sites and various fansites. Be sure to keep an eye out for those exciting moments, but most of all, be sure not to miss the first few chances to get into the Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising Beta, create your PEP account today!

The smell of alcohol and anxious sweat lingered in the warped wood and chipped paint, long baked into the cement floor under the heat of the incandescent lighting. Cutting through it all was a whiff of burnt chemicals from the autoclave, humming away to itself in the back corner. The walls were covered with yellowing posters of flash, the clichéd tattoo designs so often chosen by drunken frat boys and wannabe gangsters.

Lounging at the front counter was a large, burly Chinese man – the tattoo “artist,” chosen more for his abilities as a bouncer than any inherent talent. Found throughout Paragon, but especially in the neighborhoods of Talos Island, Independence Port, and Steel Canyon, tattoo parlors such as these acted as fronts and gathering points for one of Paragon’s most ambitious gangs: the Tsoo.

SWB: Hi Dan thanks for your time !

DAN: Pleasure.

SWB: Do you know at this time when the publication date is?

DAN: We are still in the pre-production phase of the project so it is too soon at this point to narrow down a specific publication date.

SWB: Will the character use a DHD (Dial home Device)?

DAN: Of course, yet how that is interfaced with the player is still going through iteration.

All clients will find 7 MB of files awaiting them the next time you log in to play. Most of these files are redone art files. Not redone visually, but performance... ly. The point was to make small improvements to your framerate in Shrouded Isles zones. Any improvement should be seen immediately after patching.

Sorry, guys, I had the wrong date on my desk calendar, and mindlessly repeated the error in the grab bag. The correct date for the Ohio Roundtable Roadtrip is Thursday, June 29. We're going to be in town for Origins, and Thursday was the only night we could swing it. Yvonne the Content Queen and Missy the Herald Princess will be there to rock Columbus... or Hilliard, as the case may be.

DnD Vault: When will the level cap be increased, and by what increments?

Jones: We will be adding ranks 50 through 60 this fall. This increase will unlock level 6 arcane and divine spells from the D&D rules. We are also adding new benefits and enhancements for all classes and races with this rank increase. We will be adding new items and equipment to support the higher ranks as well.

DnD Vault: When will the next module be released?

Jones: The Twilight Forge module will be released in July and offers an entirely new system to support solo play as well as a new playable race the Drow. We’ve been listening to the community and hear the message loud and clear that sometimes players just like to do things on their own, or at least have the opportunity to do quests while they wait for their friends or guild mates to login.

In QA:
These items are in QA and should be a part of the next update.

UI

* NEW - The Guild message of the day will be able to contain punctuation.
* NEW - We have changed the text of the in-game help request for "Stuck" to reflect the best procedure to follow if you get stuck somewhere in-game. Previously the instructions directed players to log out of the game, which is not the best course of action. Instead you should submit a help request and wait for assistance.

WoWBreak and Fantasy Flight Games are giving away one complete set of the World of Warcraft Set One Limited Edition figures for our June contest! These bronze heroes from World of Warcraft are cast in bronze with a black ink wash, bringing out an incredible level of detail. This is the complete Set One, including the Night Elf Warrior, the Orc Warrior, the Tauren Hunter, the Gnome Mage, the Dwarf Hunter, the Human Warlock, the Forsaken Warlock, and the Troll Priest. We will be giving away the "Set Two" version of the Limited Edition figures in another contest we will hold in July.

Though there are a few subtle puzzles for you to get snagged up on, it will likely take well less than 10 hours to get through Daemonica, but the game's generally unpleasant presentation will make it feel like much longer. Despite the morbid, supernatural nature of Daemonica, the world itself looks flat and bland, and it's so small that you'll know the whole thing front to back before it's all over. There are only a few different unique character models that get recycled a few times, all of them uniformly crude in design and stiff and mechanical in animation. As mentioned before, the voice actor for Nicholas is quite bad, sounding like someone trying very hard to do a stern British accent and failing miserably. There are a few pieces of music that kick in pretty much randomly. Some of the music is actually okay for setting the mood at first, but it all repeats so often that the effect wears off quickly.

The core concept of an online world targeting more than just the gamer audience is definitely interesting. Your on-screen persona will be highly customizable in terms of body and face shape, clothing and pirate touches like tattoos, scars, peg legs and eye patches. Initially, you'll have only a small boat at your disposal, but as you advance, you'll be able to acquire larger ships, outfit them and assemble a crew of other scallywags. The play will include quests on land and sea; naval, melee, ranged and voodoo magical combat; and other activities such as card games in which, befitting your pirate persona, you'll even be able to cheat. With a minimum processor speed of only 800 MHz, the title will run on almost any hardware.

Jonric: Will Hero Online have many different weapons, armors and items in general? Will using them be restricted in any way? Will upgrading be possible, and how important will they be overall?

Jack Stanley: There are tons and tons and tons of items and variations in this game, and they will each have their own look and feel when equipped by the characters. As far as variations are concerned, there will definitely be upgrades, alterations, enchanting, disenchanting, and crafting for players to use to build their perfect weapon and armor. Items will have minimum requirements to equip based on three things: level, stats and sex.

With Guild Wars Factions now five weeks old and the third season of the Guild Wars Factions Championship underway, let's look at some of the new character builds in rotation and how they impact the game.

Assassin
Used by: I Black Widow I [Wi] in game one against The Last Pride [EvIL]

* Golden Phoenix Strike (Dagger Mastery)
* Shock (Air Magic)
* Falling Spider (Dagger Mastery)
* Twisting Fangs (Critical Strikes)
* Shadow Refuge (Shadow Arts)
* Dark Escape (Shadow Arts)
* Caltrops (Shadow Arts)
* Aura of Displacement [Elite] (Assassin No Attribute)