Overall, while I was just an observer at E3 (like everyone else), Mass Effect still left a lasting impression on me – and that was just after a thirty minute demonstration. The game showed more polish, and more scope than anything else I saw at E3, and that is single handedly why I picked it as my Best of Show for E3 2006. There were some really great titles at E3 this year, many of which will be must own games when they ship in the coming months. Mass Effect, however, reigns atop my list for the time being. Bioware is currently targeting a winter 2006 release for the game, and I cannot wait to find out more.

Creating episodic games obviously has some advantages and disadvantages. Now that Sam and Max 2 is also brought out this way, I guess Telltale is satisfied with how the episodic games are received. So what are your experiences with this kind of developing? For instance, what is the hardest thing to do when making an episode?

Dave Grossman: Making small games, episodic or no, is kind of like writing short stories or poems in that it forces you to focus on what the essential core of the experience is going to be. As quickly as we're doing these, something that takes four hours to animate could impact the schedule, so we really have to plan fairly exhaustively and be sure that every moment contributes something to the whole. Ideally you should do that with a larger game, too, but you'd have a little more breathing room. Also, we have to sway our thinking towards elements that are going to be useful over and over again, episode to episode, rather than one-off gags, which is not necessarily something we're used to doing -- at least not with adventure games.

What was the most fun part about making an adventure game? And what was the least fun part. And why?

It's hard to say. It isn't clear if it was all fun, or none of it. Building a game is an extremely long, tedious process. On a given day, you don't tend to see much progress. It would be far more exciting to watch paint dry. Probably, the best part is watching someone see, and play the game for the first time. That was always a very cool feeling, when we would blow people away. The worst times were probably the times when we didn't think the game would ever ship, or where the stream of bugs felt endless.

When the research group originally released its figures for the 2005 PC industry back in January, it noted the deficiency of its existing system of accounting for total PC sales. While the company's figures showed a decline in retail sales, its feedback from consumers indicated that playing PC games was actually on the rise.

Prior to undertaking the main quest, you will be required to create a character. You’ll have the ability to select gender and randomly generate your face, but don’t expect a character creation system akin to that of Oblivion’s. After being satisfied with your appearance, you will be placed into a luscious world filled to the brim with evil warriors and dark menaces. The first objective will be to meet up with a few of your friends – because after all, there’s power in numbers! Shadow Wars’ entire gameplay revolves around this concept. You literally wouldn’t be able to finish a battle without your little tag-alongs. However, this idea is actually what makes this title so satisfying. Controlling your army of heroes is very enjoyable and rewarding, and not to mention made easy through a new control layout that enables you to perform spells and attacks right in the heat of the battle. There’s no more watching your characters brawl as you sit helpless and dumbfounded. You can toggle to a specific player, and depending on how far along your arsenal is developed, will able to select from a plethora of distinctive moves to take out your foes. After deciding on the action you wish to carry out, click once more for who you want to be on the receiving end. This stunning element is aptly titled the ‘’Click-‘n’-Fight" system.

Once you do successfully start a quest, the classic D&D gameplay comes alive. Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach uses all of the heart pounding excitement of rolling dice (although it does this in the background) found in the original game. I feel that Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach could have been better if the combat was done turn-based instead of real time (like the real game), because the game adds some layers of difficulty that are just unnecessary and annoying. The enemies keep moving around, so you must constantly turn to face them or your attacks and spells will not work. This is extremely irritating: D&D is based off good character creation and some luck, not whether I can turn. You can auto-attack enemies, but you still need to turn, block, use shields, use spells, and dodge on your own, as auto-attacking just means the game will slash at the bad guys as often as possible. Dungeons can contain rest areas that will regenerate health and spell points and serve as a location to resurrect fallen allies. This is a completely necessary addition, as spell points for casters will run out far too quickly. Dungeons are scattered with trucks full of stuff to steal that will go into your inventory. The inventory is not very well organized (see Oblivion for a good inventory) and it’s difficult to determine which weapons you should (or can) use. While you complete quests, you’ll gain experience (although you level up very slowly in the game) that will grant new enhancements and better skills. All of this we’ve seen before in other RPGs, and Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach doesn’t add anything new to the genre, just a marriage of past ideas and the D&D license.

The designers want players to be able to adventure freely within the galaxy. Obviously there are places that you don’t want to hit as a low level character but it’s about freedom of choice here. So how does this whole gig work? I want to level, I want to gain rank. What will I be doing to obtain this goal?

When you take out a ship, you’ve got lots of options. While crews can fly together—and there are some great benefits to working within a crew—lots of people will also be piloting solo ships. And even within crews, the focus is on making the player interaction fun and powerful, and not on punishing the group if one participant isn’t contributing. You don’t have a science officer in your crew? You won’t have access to some of the cooler science abilities, but the ship will still function well. Players are purely additive,” said Glen. "You’ll pull your friends on board without the need to have someone manning engineering just to keep the ship running. “Our intention is to pay off on the Star Trek fantasy without making the experience unapproachable. We’re looking to be fairly casual-friendly.

We are starting a new network wide contest here on Gameamp. You will have a chance to win not only your very own free copy of Dungeons and Dragons Online, but also the 3.5 D&D Core Rulebook Gift Set and an Eberron Campaign Setting book signed.

Module 2 will be introducing a number of new enhancements (purchased with action points) that will let players further customize and specialize your characters. Almost everyone will be getting some new enhancements to choose from; over the next few weeks we will be posting in-depth descriptions of what these new enhancements are and how they work.

On the RPG environment, your quest through is a beautifully wrought, 360-degree and 24-hour world with ground mists, rolling clouds and sun/moon risings/settings that paint the screen with dramatic lighting changes. Time is measured in hours and seconds, but speeded up. All this adds to the real-seeming effects except your characters and the allies you gather for the party along the way are not required to sleep or nourish themselves.

The world of EverQuest II is constantly evolving. As it evolves, so does the art behind the game. Each time we produce new zones, new items, or anything that is visually fresh, we create concept art and refine it before making it something three-dimensional that will go into the game. The following pieces of art come from various areas of EverQuest II, from the old world to the Desert of Flames. Enjoy the concept art and the world that became of it in a piece we call EverQuest II: From Concept to Reality.

Space Rangers might not ring a bell to anyone but the most hardcore gamers. I didn't even know the game existed until a month ago and now that I've played it I have to say it's no wonder that it isn't known too well. It's not a bad game, mind you, but the time investment to get anywhere in it is really too much for any but the most dedicated gamers. And that is precisely what I didn't like about in this game.

Actually, "eagerly awaited" is an understatement of Rumsfeldian proportions. Maybe "changed my PIN code a couple of months ago to reflect Oblivion's impending release date" better reflects my attitude. To summarize, Oblivion is a vast role playing game in which you initially find yourself imprisoned. The emperor of the land, voiced by Patrick Stewart, comes into your cell with a bunch of guards, looking for a way out of town. He says he's seen your face in a dream. Then, your group is beset by mysterious assassins, and the emperor is viciously murdered. But before he dies, he gives you a sacred amulet to deliver and says that you must help save the world from marauding demons, who are opening portals to hell everywhere, and will soon destroy civilization as you know it.

Calelena - *Foxtrick* Hi to the staff, I'm a recent new player to the game and was wondering if you had any - even very rough, time scale for release of the expansion?

AmonGwareth - At this time we do not have a time-frame for release of the expansion. We're sticking with the goal of "when it is complete".

Calelena - *Arcat* - Expansion: Will the expansion be available for Europe? If yes, will it be free of charge for existing EU customers?

DavidBowman - The Horizons: The Settlements expansion will be available to all existing customers. It will be part of the regular updates to existing customers, but Horizons will no longer be free to download from that point.

What can you tell us about the multiplayer modes?

The game will be playable as a team-based multiplayer mode, playable with up to 32 players. We have dedicated a whole team just to develop that part. We are lucky to have an engine that powers games like Half-Life 2 death match Counter-Strike and even crazy multiplayer physics experiments such as Gary's mod.

Vanguard was recently featured on the cover of Computer Games Magazine and in that issue we included codes that will allow for closed beta access to the game. We add new beta testers in regular batches however we have not yet added any CGM codes. Because of the publisher change for Vanguard, we are discussing where the beta will now be hosted before we add any new people into the process. Just as soon as we have a solid date for a beta hosting change, we will announce it here. A reminder, however: the CGM codes will not all be activated at once. We will add people in batches and you must register the code you received in your magazine. Please follow the instructions here to register your code with us and we look forward to seeing you all in game just as soon as we can!

The Online Arena

This wouldn't be so different since the single player version is already included in the game. The online arena would be the ideal venue for players to put their character development choices to the test. Once downloaded, this mod could be accessed as players enter the arena in the single player game. At the entrance door, the option would be given to enter either the offline or online version of the arena. Choosing online brings you to a list of current online arena lobbies waiting for players to join. You could choose to join one or create your own. To add some variety, the servers wouldn't be limited to one on one battles. Instead, up to eight could hop into a server for a three round tournament.

When a higher-ranked guild bowed out of the competition before the brackets were set, I Black Widow I [Wi] capitalized on its playoff berth in the top sixteen by upsetting the number-one-seeded guild, The Last Pride [EvIL]. Wi then advanced to Round Two of the GWFC season two playoffs.

We're happy to announce the opening of two new realms: Demon Soul and Jaedenar, two PvP realms. These realms are located on our latest World of Warcraft site, which feature all new hardware. This will provide an opportunity, to new and old players alike, to begin fresh adventures in Azeroth!

The bestiary page for World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade has been updated with two new creatures from the upcoming expansion. Learn more about two of the new species you'll encounter in Outland, the mystical warp stalkers and the vicious ravagers. Check out the updated bestiary now!

The first thing you notice when you’re staring at Gothic III in action is just how believable the environment looks. Sure, the excellent graphics add to the realism, but everything from the surrounding mountains to the diverse buildings shows a great amount of detail. Aspyr producer Blaine Christine tells me that this is because the team has hand-crafted every area in the game, all the way down to the foliage. Absolutely nothing is tiled, which is an impressive feat for a relatively small development team working on such a large game world. In fact, the continent where Gothic III takes place spans over 75 square kilometers, making it three times the size of the island we ventured on in Gothic II. The continent has also been broken out into three distinct regions, including a cold Viking-like mountainous area (Nordmar), a lush coastal area, and a dry desert region on the south side of the land mass. Players will obviously need efficient means of traveling across such a large area, so the team is implementing both horses and journey stones that allow for teleportation.

The actual patch notes are small in B, but that's only because our programmers were focusing on optimizing the network code this week. The changes are the kind of performance things that you feel rather than see. "Made network gooder" is a really silly patch note, right?

In the real world a reputation is something that other people associate with you. For example who could forget Alexander the Great or Richard the Lion-Hearted?

In 9Dragons we wanted to capture this same sense of reputation. But of course you don’t get to spend the same amount of time in the game world as you do in the real world. You don’t consume media there as you would here. So instead we have invented a method for you to take your reputation around with you in the game. You gain a reputation by carrying out special quests, killing special monsters, or killing other players in battle.

TOG 1) What is the major difference players should expect from the minions one is able to have in Gods and Heroes as opposed to say, henchmen in Guild Wars?

Hedlund: Our squad systems are very robust. First of all our minions are entirely user controllable, through a variety of means: they can be placed in different following and fighting formations; stances can be used to set their general behavior; and they can be given a wide variety of orders, from general to unit-specific.

Further, there are the three different minion roles of Infantry, Skirmisher and Spellcaster, each with a tremendous variety of minions that can be recruited and used in those units. Plus, rather than acting as a substitute for grouping, our minions are in addition to grouping. There’s a lot more, but this should give you some idea.

Dan Brown. Love him or hate him, you've got to admire the skill with which he's managed to write a clutch of successful novels which are practically bloody identical. Take some pathetically simple cryptography, one twist, a lemon - usually the lead character - and a bunch of two-page long chapters and voila, one Brown book. The best-seller of these templates, The Da Vinci Code, has spawned a film, a court case, and now the inevitable computer games, of which this isn't one. Well, it's obviously cashing in on the impending Hollywood blockbuster, but unlike Take-Two's official Da Vinci Code console license, this has absolutely nothing to do with murder in the Louvre.

Is it hard to get excited about another high-fantasy MMORPG? When there's an MMO for every letter of the alphabet rolling out this year it's easy to become more than a little jaded, but there are two things about Lord of the Rings: Shadows of Angmar that make us lift our heads.

First, that this is freaking Lord of the Rings. Tolkien's Middle Earth is one of the most meticulously detailed and endlessly imitated worlds ever conceived. It's the foundation of the entire high fantasy orcs, elves and wizards shtick. Hell, it inspired this whole role-playing thing long before we had computers to make our rolls or break down the barrier of physical distance.

You've probably heard the joke about how games are like sausage: Best to just enjoy them and not think too hard about how they're made. For those like me, there is no sparing us the greasy intestinal details of design and production. We live it and love it. And like it or not, I'm going to share a bit of it with you. I'm going to tell you a story. A story about a boy, a coffee machine, and a dream. A story about the crafting system in The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™.

Before I launch into the explanation of our crafting system, I'll share this with you: At a certain point in the game's development, crafting was almost cut.

GameSpy: How did you start doing music for video games?

Jeremy Soule: It was literally my first paying job. Well, beyond the usual high school-type jobs. I was working at Squaresoft at about nineteen. I had submitted my portfolio to both LucasArts and Squaresoft, and I don't believe LucasArts ever listened to my package (I think they have a "no unsolicited package" policy), but Squaresoft listened to it, and they just happened to be looking for a composer at the time.

This is the latest in a series of exclusive articles for RPG Vault introducing 9Dragons, the first authentic martial arts massively multiplayer online game. Think of the world of Hero, House of the Flying Daggers, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or even Jackie Chan's classic Drunken Master - if you are old enough or into martial arts enough!

That world is created for you in 9Dragons. You can rise from a poor beggar to being a master of the martial arts through training with some of the greatest masters of ancient China.

I haven't even got to the little cool features, such as the game featuring over 60 different locations and buildings that are based on real Middle Age blueprints. The day cycle of The Witcher is two minutes real equal 1 hour of a day. Weather effects are varied, as the player can experience a cold rain one day, light foggy steam the next, and even all out thunderstorms. And consider it an attention to detail, but Geralt can actually drink in the game, and when Geralt gets drunk his vision starts to blur (ie your screen), he staggers around the more he drinks, and eventually, if he gets really wasted, will pass out and sleep it off where he lands.

A target ship date has yet to be announced. While this has some positive connotations, it does allow for questions as to how smoothly development is progressing. There is also a fair amount of information that hasn't been discussed in much detail, including some major elements like the complete list of character classes, and how the skill systems will function.

*{AC7}Sasuke-Wakashi-gs* How will Dungeon Siege 2 be different from Dungeon Siege?

[GPG]Marcie: When we started BW, we wanted to make more than a standard expansion pack we wanted to give people more of what they liked in DS2, and then take it up to the next level so there are a lot of new features that are designed to really heighten the experience for the advanced players like new tactical combat, a really dynamic, fully developed new world, and - of course - a conclusion to the DS2 story.

Ultimately, this is a game for the fans - we spent a lot of time reviewing feedback from the community and players around the world this was a great project and we had a terrific time making it.

Heroes V is a tough call. On one hand, you can't ignore the game's various shortcomings, the lack of editing tools and failing multiplayer. But on the other hand, it's hard to dismiss a game that eats up late night hours faster than G-String Diva reruns on HBO, leaving you desperate to finish a campaign mission at 3AM before you pass out. Despite some obvious flaws and failure to try anything spectacularly new, the fun in Heroes of Might and Magic V manages to win out.

All combined, there are 60 different skills available within all the different player classes. As the two teams will battle each other, players on both sides will be able to gain experience and find new equipment. Each round played will impact the next one and determine which map is played next, as well as which items and skills each team gets. Also included are the more conventional deathmatch and team deathmatch modes. Dark Messiah of Might & Magic is scheduled to ship for the PC this September