Even though the patch cleans up a number of glitches quests, many are still upset because it doesn't solve their existing issues. If you've already run into and experienced a glitch quest, there's a good chance the patch will do nothing to fix it; the patch can't fix contaminated saves. Consequently, Bethesda employees have been recommending fans start new characters if they want to experience these quests.

9) What are your thoughts on the recent cancellation of the Premium Modules program?

It's sad. Everyone who signed the contract knew it was a possibility it could happen. ID was scraped once in the conceptual stage, I got lucky the reason why was an easy fix. The 1.67 patch, some would say free expansion, was a direct result of the premium module system. It's too bad we could not keep that system working into NWN2 and beyond, it was good for both the company and the consumer, a win-win, those are hard to come by.

We have gone gold! It has been an extremely long road with a lot of long nights to get here, but Titan Quest is finally complete.

I am very happy with the final product. There are certainly some areas where I would like to spend time and make the game even cooler, but the final product met or exceeded all of our original goals.

First is the look of the game. We set out to make a photo-realistic outdoor scene in our new 3D engine, and the final result takes your breath away. The world is very detailed: you can see individual blades of grass and flowers, you can see individual pebbles on the ground and each leaf even casts a shadow on the ground. The world is also very interactive, with the grass and brush moving out of your way as you walk through them, trees swaying in the wind, water moving and splashing as you run through it, and ambient creatures such as birds and butterflies moving in the world. This all has the effect of making a tremendously immersive world.

We finally had some more information abut the MMORPG that every Star Trek fan and not only them is waiting for. Enjoy this list of the most recent FAQ additions or read the complete FAQ at the official STO official website.

What area(s) of space will I be able to explore?
The primary gameplay area will be the Beta Quadrant, the section of the galaxy that includes territory of the Federation, Klingons, and Romulans among others. Other areas of the Galaxy will be opened up via game expansions.

What races can I choose?
The following playable races are being considered: Vulcan, Bolian, Human, Andorian, Cardassian, Tellarite, Bajoran, Klingon, and Ferengi. However this list is not yet considered final.

I'm conducting an investigation into surveillance within massively multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft and SecondLife. The questionnaire will take between 2 and 20 minutes to complete depending on how much information you're willing to supply. I'm interested in stories and observations so feel free to ramble.

Read more on my research below, or jump right to the questionnaire.

Many players are unaware of surveillance being conducted by game administrators, often justified as a means to enhance game play and control cheating. Players within some MMOs are also tracking and recording other player’s movements, and conversely, creating methods to protect the privacy of their own digital personas. The rise of surveillance (and counter-surveillance) techniques and technologies within these virtual worlds is an extension of the pervasive monitoring of individuals in real-world environments. Many real-world technologies (such as bugging, video recording and location tracking) are being reproduced in virtual worlds and can be classified as a form simulated surveillance.

Traditionally, there's a lot of character talk from David Gaider, be it the protagonist himself or the romance NPCs. There's also some talk about animal companions, dragons and cameos. Jennifer Hepler talks Myers-Briggs and Brenon Holmes discusses mysticism. Ferret Baudoin, the former Lead Designer for NWN2, makes his appearance as a brand new Senior Designer with BioWare working on Dragon Age.

I recently sat down with Chris Klug and Sara Baker of Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment (CME) to discuss their new MMO, “Stargate Worlds”. For those who aren't familiar with the series, Stargate is—in a nutshell—a world in which humans have found a strange alien device (called a Stargate) capable of transporting us to the distant reaches of the galaxy. After finding this device, we set up a special organization called Stargate Command to make use of it and see what's 'out there'. While exploring, we humans run into a hostile alien race called the Goa'ould, as well as other strange (and often-times dangerous) races and technologies. Being the meddlesome creatures that we are, humanity is pulled into the center of galactic struggles and must secure technologies to defend itself from threats as well as strike out to form alliances and make friends. It's epic, it's heroic, and it's the perfect backdrop for an action-packed sci-fi MMO that can impress and move. At present, Stargate Worlds is still in its early design, but after a lengthy conversation with our interviewees, we came away with about as detailed a look at the early game as we could have hoped for.

Hey, y'all, just a heads up. We're changing Pendragon to the Gaheris ruleset at 3:00 PM EDT this Friday to test the new Gaheris Relic Encounters. We'll be leaving it that way for the entire weekend, and change it back on Monday morning. If anyone wants to help us test out the new toys, look for Charon - he's a Mythic dev that will be online periodically during the weekend "playing taxi and rez bot."

EDIT TO ADD: The patch notes tomorrow will explain what Gaheris Relic Encounters are. Sorry, thought we'd hinted at it already.

NEW THINGS AND BUG FIXES

- Due to the extensive amount of feedback we have received from both our team leads and the player community, we have reverted the changes made on Pendragon yesterday to Banelord, and we instead have opted to do the following to this Master Level line:

All spells and Abilities in Banelord, except for Demoralization and Zone of Unmana, have been made to interrupt other players who are casting.

The radius on the following abilities has been reduced to 750: Primal Agony, Oppression, Inexorable Defeat, Tactical Insight, Chaotic Power, Agony Transmission and Demoralization.

Here is a proposed list of "third" ML lines. All you have to do is read this week's posts on the Herald to know this isn't final, but bear in mind that no list casters got Sojourner, and we gave pure tanks Banelord because no other line made sense. Please check out the 1.84E notes and this list, and log in to the game to take the poll. We'll decide what our next step is after seeing the results of that poll. Thanks in advance for your participation!

Have you missed a previous issue of the Community Spotlight? No problem, just visit the Community Spotlight Archive, where we've collected many of the Community Spotlights from 2005 and 2006. You'll find links to a lot of cool and useful web content about World of Warcraft there, so be sure to check it out.

I have to admit, I have a soft spot in my heart for Funcom, and an even softer one for Conan. As such, it's pretty difficult for me to be objective about this game at this juncture, but I'll do my best. Now, I've never read any of Robert E. Howard's novels. I've only seen the Conan films. Hell, when I was little, I even thought that Conan the Destroyer was a good movie. But even given that shallow level of familiarity with the lore behind it, I really dig the world. I think I "get" it. And from where I'm standing, it's clear that Funcom gets it too. Conan's world is rife with brutality, and judging from the demo that I saw at E3, this MMO's gameworld will reflect that. The villages are populated by crude buildings and even cruder inhabitants, and the combat system is probably the most savage I've ever seen in an MMO.

So where does Vanguard fit into this picture and what does it have to offer? Well, the gameplay follows more closely that of the classic MMORPG genre, with a few major differences. The focus however, is more towards creating a realistic world than a fantasy-based one. For those comparing, and I do make this comparison in a broad sense, think more along the lines of Guild Wars as opposed to EverQuest or World of Warcraft.

Vanguard takes place in the war-torn world of Telon, which consists of two large continents. Upon entering the world, players have the option of choosing between nineteen different races for creating their character, including Orcs, Goblins, Dwarves and Elves; fifteen different classes, which include the common Paladin, Ranger, Sorcerer and Rogue, as well as the less common Psionicist and Bard. Standard trade skills are available, as are mounts. However, instead of only having one mount, players will be able to collect dozens, all with unique attributes and purposes.

Auto Assault’s first Big Update is so close you can feel the heat, a huge meteor burning through the atmosphere and due to crash slap bang in the middle of the Central Wastelands some time soon.

And when the Big Update finally does hit the servers, with it will come new features, a load of changes, tweaks, bug fixes, new missions an interface update and more!

In 1991, the internet didn't exist.

That is to say, it did exist (and had for some time), but to the majority of Americans it might as well have been a huffalump until the creation of the World Wide Web in (approximately) 1992, when the internet would begin to become both widely understood, and easy-to-use (therefore "of interest" to most people).

It used to be the stuff of blues legend: Sign a contract at the Crossroads, lose a little bit of your soul, and get wealth and success until Ol' Scratch called in the contract at the end of time. Blizzard Entertainment may not have much in common with a poor man out of Mississippi, but both attained the stature of legend, and both may have lost a little piece of their souls. Blizzard made games so incredibly popular (World of Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo), their success transformed the company culture and managed to burn out the creative team that made them a household name.

Some things take the world by surprise. The popularity of Katamari Damacy came as quite a shock to Namco. Prior to 1997, no one had ever heard of Harry Potter or J.K. Rowling. World of Warcraft (WoW) didn't just catch the world off-guard, it knocked it flat to the canvas. In early 2004, the game's well publicized beta had fans slavering at the mouth. When the game launched in November of that year, retail outlets couldn't stock their shelves quickly enough. Since then, WoW has remained at or near the top of PC game sales in the U.S. and abroad. Today, over six million souls inhabit the fictional realm of Azeroth. Everyone, at least according to Blizzard, is playing World of Warcraft.

While this game has been built on the years-old Aurora engine created by Bioware for the original Neverwinter Nights, the developers have taken the engine to its limits and beyond with a new up-to-date graphics system. It’s now almost on par with many PC titles nowadays, and further enhancements could easily bring it up to the forefront of RPG visuals.

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is set for September 2006, a mere four months after the release of Heroes of Might and Magic V. Still, Dark Messiah is so unlike its companion game that there's little chance that players will feel overwhelmed by the sudden rush of Might and Magic titles. Dark Messiah's new AI seems to offer a legitimately richer experience than most other games can, though the real test will be seeing how it fares against a barrage of aggressive players once it's released. Between that and the multiplayer, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic should keep players occupied for a long time to come.

Issue 7: ‘Destiny Manifest’ raises the bar for villain mayhem and adds revolutionary new PvP zone

AUSTIN, Texas, June 7, 2006 — NCsoft® today announced the release of a free expansion to City of Villains™ and City of Heroes®, Issue 7: “Destiny Manifest,” in both North America and Europe. In addition to level 40 to 50 content for villains, the new feature-packed expansion adds the opportunity for villains to wreak havoc in new “mayhem missions,” and a player-versus-player (PvP) zone where villains and heroes clash to control a dynamically changing battlefield.

The expansion is free to both City of Heroes and City of Villains’ subscribers.

The new City of Villains 40 to 50 level content includes more than 300 new missions and a new zone for level 40 and higher players, Grandville. Grandville contains Spider City, the vertically built capital of Lord Recluse™, the leader of the Arachnos, the top villain group in City of Villains.

Highlighting the new mission sets are mayhem missions, which allow villains to enter instanced City of Heroes zones in Paragon City™. During these missions, villains may wreak as much havoc on the zone as possible, reaping unique rewards and loot. The mayhem mission zones are destructible environments where villains can unlock multiple random events, harass citizens and battle the new Paragon City Police.

A new feature to both City of Heroes and City of Villains is the unique level 40 to 50 PvP zone, Recluse’s Victory. Recluse’s Victory is a replica of Paragon City’s Atlas Park™, where villains and heroes battle for heavily armed control points. Depending on who has the upper hand, the zone will change from a neutral setting to reflect the peaceful and shining version of Atlas Park where heroes are victorious or to a dark and scarred vision of Atlas Park where villainous forces dominate. Heroes and villains can take battlefield control over powerful artillery including mobile siege weapons that can help turn the tide of battle. When one side takes an advantage in Recluse’s Victory, powerful signature characters may appear to aid the struggling side and help take back control points, allowing players to have toe-to-toe battles with the likes of Lord Recluse or Statesman.

How's the drive for the randomly generated streets of London coming along? Why aren't you taking the expected linear approach?

Bill Roper: We've always been huge believers and advocates of randomly generated content - or, perhaps more accurately, dynamically generated. The massive amount of work and planning that goes into creating systems that can make level layouts, populate them with appropriate enemies and rewards, as well as chance events and do so in a fun and challenging fashion is almost minimised by the term 'random'. The results are random, but the path getting there is anything but.

We think that random elements and dynamic generation provides the greatest amount of replayablility possible. Every time you go out into the world, we create a specific instance for you (and your group if you're adventuring with friends) that will be different from the last time you played, even if it was in that same area of London.

When was the last time you found yourself stranded and confused in Africa? Paradise, the latest point-and-click adventure from the creator of the cult hit Syberia, gives you that chance. Having been shot down over the country of Maurania, a young woman awakens with amnesia in the harem of a local prince. Not knowing her own real name, she calls herself "Ann Smith" after the author of a book on Mauranian wildlife that was found with her at the crash.

And this, really, is where the problems start. Ann's true identity is no mystery whatsoever - in fact, it's explicitly revealed in the game's opening cutscene. Once you discover why she's in Maurania, her amnesia hasn't made any difference; the game's events would have been roughly the same whether with or without her memory. Actually, without spoiling anything, not suffering amnesia might have made things a bit more exciting. It's symptomatic of the game as a whole, which sometimes throws in unnecessary complications for no good reason. It's also why an epic adventure that takes you to palaces, villages and emerald mines to return a black leopard to its home and beyond never feels as good or exciting as it should be.

Third, gold farmers have a reputation for being obnoxious and cutthroat. In some cases, this is true. But spend a little time around the regular people you find hanging around in the game, and you will see that this is only because people are, in general, obnoxious and cutthroat. My God, but World of Warcraft and EverQuest are full of the idiot children of married cousins. Gold farmers aren't even close to having a monopoly on cretinous behavior.

New Desert team would like to inform all interested parties that "Sigonyth: Desert eternity" project has been put on hold.

This situation is a result of lack of investors to fund further project development - we have reached stage when continued development of an MMORPG without financial support is simply unfeasible.

We would also like to emphasize that "Sigonyth" will not be completely abandoned - we will continue to develop the design part of the game and await changes on the market that will allow us to revive the project.

So let's talk about the storyline for a moment. Actually, I can only talk about the base story because as we were told, the full story isn't quite finished yet. Hey, it's coming out in 2007 so there is time. The character you play is really more or less.....you. We don't know the character's name, so it's really a game you can sort of feel personally connected to. In order worlds, simply pretend the character is really you. It is the 1950's-1960's era. Your plane has crashed over the ocean and you are trying to swim to get to safety. You see an buoy of some sort and head towards it. You're taken into this underwater city, known as Rapture. Rapture is, or should I say was a virtual utopia. Something right out of an Ayn Rand book. Irrational Games wanted to do something different. They wanted to get away from what they felt was the "Quake" style game where everything is, and I once again directly quote (because it's just too funny), "the turd-brown textures of a post-industrial warzone". This game isn't about war, or defeating monsters and aliens. In fact the game is really made up of humanoids. While you don't know how you found this Utopian place, or how your plane even crashed, you notice something awfully quick; something terrible has happened in this place. You are the seemingly the only one there who by this time has gone completely insane. And that is where our demo began. You had two goals. You must escape the city alive, and you must also unravel the mystery of just what has happened. Oh, and all the while, water is seeping into the city as leaks spring here and there.

Specifically, what you do in Oblivion matters. If you just saved a town or someone from impending doom, they greet you as a hero and love you. If you get sick or are about to die, they ask about that too. You can do things for selfish reasons, or be a hero and help the cause of good. In the end, the overall story is your "Fight evil through the power and fortitude of Good" tale that was satisfying for the most part. The questing system in Oblivion is a bit of an upgrade from Morrowind - If you're given a quest in Oblivion, you clearly get your objectives spelled out for you - making the game very clear for first time RPG'ers on a console (or for people who hate reading everything in order to figure out what to do!). All quests you agree to take on are listed in the game system menu, and depending on your personal choice, you set the one that's active. Once active, your objectives are loaded into your mini-map and you quest from there.

I’d realized something. I’ve never been a huge fantasy fan. I like fantasy, but it doesn’t hold the appeal to me that science fiction does. The trouble was, the sci-fi games I was playing I just wasn’t getting into – especially the MMOs. I started reading our MOG blogs here at GamersInfo.net, and while I was at E3 I stopped by the CCP booth to check out EVE Online. When I got home, I tried out the fourteen day trial – and in no time, I was hooked.

EVE Online is a slow, methodical, beautiful game. It takes an enormous universe, a kaleidoscope of stars and space stations, and couples it with an open ended game featuring everything from in-depth economic tools to the battle between lawlessness and order.

We recently got some hands on time with some of the different components that will make up Issue 7: Destiny Manifest, which some have taken to calling "Issue 1" for City of Villains since it is aimed squarely at the villainous side of the City of... universe. Wait till you get a load of the all the new toys! There's something for everyone - a new PvP zone, new costume pieces, new powers, destructible environments, and the last ten levels that finally raise the villain cap to level 50! So without further ado...

Walk us through how a piece of game art is created, from concept to finished art.

After something has been approved for creation, our talented concept artists will come up with some awesome concept art that gives a good sense of the colors, textures, and overall look that the particular piece of art should have. Once that concept has been approved by those in charge, it will be handed off to one of us to build in Maya. This process involves a lot of feedback and critique, and things can change slightly or drastically from the original concept sometimes. Once that is done, and all the shaders have been applied and everything has been approved, it’s time to talk to the design department and see what they have planned for the area. That way we know where we need to place it so that it will flow with the gameplay plans for that area.

Hi, dev log readers! I’m Kevin Loza one of the new members of the Flying Lab team. Specifically, I'm the artist that is creating the user interface for Pirates of the Burning Sea.

To give you some background on my work, I am trained in both traditional and digital art. My schooling spans sketching, painting, sculpture, and photography. The digital arena started through my own animation at home on the Amiga computer and, later, graphic design classes on the Macintosh. I studied 3D modeling, texturing, and animation, as well.

TMSBroadcasting and NCsoft North America are proud to announce the creation of Lineage Radio, the official online radio station devoted exclusively to supporting the Lineage® II gaming community in North America. LineageRadio.com will feature a 24/7 audio stream, with exclusive Lineage II interviews, news and features you won't find anywhere else.

Lineage Radio will set a new standard for Internet radio especially for gamers, calling on the expertise and success of TMSBroadcasting's Radio Network. The agreement between TMSBroadcasting and NCsoft will bring listeners contests, podcasts, events, and access to the development process, as well as interviews highlighting key members within the Lineage II community, including both fans of the title and NCsoft staff alike.

More information about Lineage Radio will be posted to the official website in the coming weeks at http://www.lineageradio.com/.

When I began to take a look at the new solo options in the Harbor I went back to the mentality of just starting the game. I tried playing different classes. My first impression of the new options for people to play solo is this “THANKYOU!!” One of the biggest challenges for a player beginning DDO, or simply beginning a new character is to find people to group with on these lower level quests. This, while still a challenge, no longer prevents a player from being able to enjoy the game!

Grab a ton of loot for Infinite Dungeons this week with a cool wallpaper, a new forum portrait, new screenshots, a new boss monster article, and an interview with the artist who created the Infinite Dungeons feature image.