Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (WAR) may be the most highly anticipated MMORPG slated for release this fall.  Despite the chagrin that has surrounded WAR during its shaky 3-year development, WAR has won the acclaim of critics at every stage of production.  Mythic Entertainment recently announced that the North American open beta for WAR will start September 7, 11 days before servers are launched worldwide.

“Players can get into the North American open beta by pre-ordering Warhammer Online from select retail partners. Participants of the North American closed beta will automatically be granted open beta access.”

Update: EA Games just published their latest Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning cinematic trailer, that features stunning RvR:

Kotaku also reports that Counterstrike “in the vision of specialists, teaches war techniques” and that Everquest “takes the player to total nonsense and heavy psychological conflicts, because the quests he receives may be good or bad.”

More amusingly, Everquest is not even officially sold in Brazil, and the offensive Counterstrike content where “Rio de Janeiro drug dealers kidnap and take to a slum three UN representative s” and “the police invade the place and are welcomed with bullets” refers to a user created map, CS_rio. Lol, it’s ok Brazil, we have politicians like that too in America; they’re called Hillary Clinton.

EA Games and Namco Bandai have officially stated that their online RPG Hellgate: London will be released this summer.  The graphics look amazing.  I hope they release a demo soon.  Here’s the press release:

EA and Namco Bandai Games America Announce Summer 2007 Ship Window for Hellgate: London

Hotly-Anticipated Action-RPG From Flagship Studios Set to Heat up PCs This Summer
LAS VEGAS –(Business Wire)– Jan. 8, 2007 Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:ERTS) and NAMCO BANDAI Games America Inc. today announced a summer 2007 worldwide ship window for the highly-anticipated online action RPG Hellgate: London(TM), the first original PC title from premier developer Flagship Studios.

“We are all committed to making Hellgate: London absolutely the best game possible,” said Bill Roper, CEO of Flagship Studios. “The anticipation surrounding the game is immense and we are looking forward to its launch being a truly worldwide event.”

Hellgate: London combines the depth of role-playing games and the action of first-person shooter titles, while offering infinite playability with dynamically generated levels, items, enemies and events. The player creates a heroic character, completes quests, and battles through innumerable hordes of demons to advance through experience levels and branching skill paths. A robust, flexible skill and spell system, highly customizable appearances, and a massive variety of randomly generated equipment allow players to create their own unique hero.

Here are some more exclusive screenshots of Hellgate: London:

Tristan Louis, an application development VP for HSBC, recently made public his economic analysis of the pertinent numbers available on Second Life’s website.  For those of you who don’t know, Second Life is the highly controversial MMO 3D digital world in which paying subscribers interact in ways analagous to real life.  The only things truly connecting it to reality are a) subscription fees for high-tier membership plans, and b) its in-game economy, which can be exchanged for real money.  Like all real currencies, the exchange rate  from “Linden Dollars,” as the currency is called, to USD fluxuates.

But back to Louis’ economic survey of Second Life.  By dissecting the pecuniary affairs and the raw number of users who’ve subscribed since last August, Louis arrived at a conclusion that affords us a new perspective on Second Life:

On average, the number of logins over a 60 day period seems to be about 35 to 40 percent of the total population reported. The people who log in, however, seem to spend a fair amount of money ($50-60 a week) within the Second Life economy.

GigaGamez accentuates the highlights of Louis’ findings concisely:

If accurate, this would mean that some 200,000-230,000 active Second Life users are on average currently spending more on their in-world experience than any existing online world by far. (For comparison, a World of Warcraft subscription is but $15 a month, and that’s money paid to the Blizzard/Vivendi, not user-to-user.)

To summarize Tristan Louis’ conclusions, Second Life is relatively sparse according to its amount of active users, but absolutely economically lively based on the average amount of cash trading an active user’s hands.  Furthermore, even though Second Life doesn’t have an enormeous amount of active users, Louis predicts that that’s all going to change:

[I]t looks that, under the most conservative growth rate, we will see 3.5 million users registered and over 600,000 using the service by the end of April 2007. Under a liberal interpretation of the data, those numbers would shift to 9.6 million and just under 7 million. However, in the most likely case, it is probable that there will be 7.2 million users registered with 1.6 million logging in over the previous sixty days. Not too shabby.

“Not too shabby,” Tristan Louis concludes, but he also advises his readers “to go with the most conservative estimate because [his] data set is still relatively small. Even then, this type of growth mirrors some of the growth patterns we’ve seen in the early days of the commercial web and seem to support the contention that LindenLab is going to be a very strong player in the future.”

In response to Tristan Louis’ analysis of Second Life’s economic situation, Tateru Nino analyzed his analysis, ultimately judging that although many of the user-to-user transactions aren’t meaningful, there is still significant economic activity:

The way money moves in Second Life with tip jars and alternate accounts and refunds means that probably about half of the value given is double-counted. That would leave us with roughly 75% that we could count on, but let’s go the highly conservative route and say a mere 40% of that figure represents actual meaningful transactions, where there’s a net change in the distribution of funds that is in line with the stated figure. Averaging out Tristan’s weekly samples for December 2006, and then applying our own conservative 40% figure to it, we get a daily movement of L$ equal to $269,848 USD.

You can read Tristan Louis’ analysis of Second Life here, and Tateru Nino’s response here.

Perhaps “bonanza,” a word that literally means “an extremely large amount,” is the only word that can fully encompass the extent to which Blizzard is banning customers who violate their Terms of Use.  In the month of May alone, they banned over 30,000 accounts that were using third-party programs to farm gold and disrupt equilibrium in many other ways.  Furthermore, perhaps the connotations of the word “bonanza,” which include “profitable” and “rewarding,” are also accurate speculations as to the motives of Blizzard.  Cutting 30,000 accounts assuredly lessens Blizzard’s band-width and maintanence costs, and the 5-digit banning marathon in May leaves us wondering if Blizzard’s employees have a banning quota.

MMOG Chart has released updated figures concerning the state of the MMOG market, that is, a comparitive ratio of the number of subscribers of many MMOG to the whole MMOG market.  It turns out, to little surprise that Blizzard’s World of Warcraft (WoW) dominates the free market.  But the extent to which WoW has possession of the market is quite startling.  Holding 50.6% of all MMOG subscribers (indicated blue in the above graphic), WoW has an overbearing, exclusive grip on the market.

6.31 Changelog:
===============

* Morphling remake.
* Recoded Grow to not refresh cooldowns.
* Improved the top left Scourge terrain to make things a bit more fair for the Scourge side.
* Mac disconnect bug fixed (as far as i can tell from my limited mac testers).
* New Trigger prevents Furion or Ignis from teleporting into the base if no allied creeps are there.
* Leavers’ gold is now properly distributed throughout the game as they gain gold.

* Smokescreen duration decreased from 7 seconds to 6 seconds.
* Paralyzing casks now deals damage to creeps.
* Headshot doesn’t work on allied units.
* Reduced the Dual Breath’s range to match the animation, mana cost increased.
* Witchdoctor’s attack animation improved.
* Bounty Hunter wind walk damage and mana cost improved.
* Mask of Madness recipe cost reduced by 50 gold.
* Tossed unit takes less damage now, but damage improves with Grow when it is an enemy (thanks Mare05).
* Arcane Orb’s damage type is now magical (a nerf).
* Eul’s Cyclone duration from 5 to 4 seconds.
* Last word AOE from 500/600/700/800 to a constant 700.
* Scepter can now be made by anyone, but only improves the ultimates of the ones listed.
* Assassinate level 3 cooldown from 5 seconds to 10 seconds.
* Split Earth casting range increased from 525 to 650.
* Viper’s Poison Attack manacost reduced from 30 to 20.
* Necro’lic’s Level 3 Revenants are now spell immune.
* Leviathan’s Ravage from 250/350/500 to 200/300/400 damage and duration buffed from 1/1/1 to 1.4/1.8/2.2 seconds.
* Slithereen Crush area increased by 50.
* Nightstalker’s Base Attack Cooldown improved to 1.7 like most other heroes. Small armor boost as well.
* Greater Hawk’s Truesight is removed, but it gains Permanent Invisibility.
* Hand of God’s cooldown from 70 to 120 seconds. Manacost from 150/200/250 to 200/300/400.
* Aegis is now undroppable (this is probably temporary while a chargeless version is thought out)

* Fixed a rare bear item drop bug.
* Fixed a minor bug with Wild Axes that causes Rexxar to become slowed if they hit a unit with Frost Armor.
* Fixed a bug that allowed you to get two heroes by repicking during astral imprisonment
* Fixed a -sc pathing issue
* Fixed a minor bug with obs mode.
* Fixed a Spirit Breaker bug with charge of Darkness movespeed in -dm.
* Diabolic Edict no longer causes its caster to take return damage or get slowed from Frost Armor.
* Fixed a Timewalk error when trying to timewalk into Blackhole.
* Fixed various range neutral creep camp abuses.
* Fixed a bug with Lothar’s Edge that did “50!” text after breaking Windwalk.
* Fixed an observer mode bug, the old missle through fog vision.
* Fixed a bug with Astral Imprisonment where the int drain doesn’t get restored if the unit is dead 60 seconds after cast.
* Fixed a minor Haunt target buff bug.
* Fixed a bug with a fast “swaphero and repick” combination that allowed you to have two heroes.
* Fixed the damage area on Sanity’s Eclipse. It was a constant 325, unlike the effect and tooltip aoe.
* Divine Rapier recipe now costs 2 lumber instead of just 1.

Check out www.pro-g.co.uk/media/screens/1536/0/ for more Neverwinter Nights 2 screenshots!

Empyrean magic has once again fled this world. The battle for Dereth continues on a different plane now. As his final act in this realm, Asheron sealed every portal to contain the expanding horde and protect what is left of the races who called Dereth home.

As of December 30, 2005 the AC2 service is no longer available. Turbine and the AC2 development team would like to express our thanks to the many players who’ve been part of Asheron’s Call 2 over the years. We hope you’ve had as much fun playing the game as we did creating it for you.

It’s never easy to say goodbye to a place you’ve called home, but we hope to see all of you in Turbine’s other worlds.

Businessman: Girls!

Businessman: Sexy is what sells.

Businessman: You get my drift?

Girls: No.

Businessman: (Turning into an orc) What do you mean, no?

Businessman / Orc: (Roars)

Girls: (Turning into elves) No is no.

Girls / Elves: (Attacking the orcs)

Businessman / Orc: (Takes some damage)

Girls / Elves: (Drinking Coca Cola)

Final Screen! You can download the video yourself from Tokyo-Genki. Funny that they run a WP blog, but don’t publicize the trackback URL…