Most MMOs have at least a few holiday events, but BioWare has yet to reveal any of its plans for holiday content for The Old Republic. What’s the best holiday content you’ve ever played in a game, and what do you want to see from holiday events in TOR, DCUO, or any other MMOs you’re playing?

I ran out of my spawn area on League of Legends’ Dominion map and made a move for the nearest capture-point, which an enemy Sona was stealing from us. I was confident I could take the flimsy healer and reclaim our home point, but before I can get in range, a burst of flames erupts around me and burning-man Brand bursts from the bushes. He’s now pacing side-to-side between me and Sona, tossing out flames if I get close, but stubbornly refusing to let me drag him off point, where I could safely kill him.

Now, Brand running interference on a point in Dominion isn’t that unusual—but this Brand is a bot, and he’s ruining my day, courtesy of the improved AI and bot rosters being added to League of Legends in the next few weeks.

I’ll get into the details in just a second, but first, a word of warning: Brand Bot is the new Annie Bot. That guy was everywhere during my four matches against the improved AI last week at Riot’s headquarters, and he burninates all the peoples without hesitation.

Brand, being a jerk. Just like usual.

On top of being added to Dominion, the other most exciting change for LoLers who play co-op regularly (and Riot says that most users play at least one co-op-vs-AI game a week), is the influx of 26 new champions added to the AI’s roster. Existing bots have all been retained, with revamped AI to make them play smarter. But these new-and-improved bots aren’t meant to be drastically more challenging: Producer on the project, Mark Norris, told me that the developers’ goal was to keep the difficulty level of the two AI settings, Beginner and Intermediate, about the same in combat.

Instead, the improvements to the existing AI focus on improving their behavior near towers to nullify players’ cheesy tactics and on making better big-picture strategic decisions. For example, when bots ace the player team, they’ll know to press their advantage and push a lane while the players wait to revive. And when I over-extended myself on top-lane, the bots triangulated on me from the jungle on every side, alternating their CC on me to keep me stunned from full health to death. Current bots tend to all spam their CC at once, resulting in wasted attacks.

The devs told me that Cassiopeia is one of the most brutal bots on Dominion.

The biggest change to bot AI is their ability to use skill-shots: spells that require precision targeting that often relies on predicting a players’ movement. None of the old bots had the ability to use skill shots effectively, which is why Riot chose champions without them the first time around. But no longer! Karthus, Cassiopeia, and Morgana and the rest of the skill-shot crew are all welcome on the bot roster now—and they’re really strong at predictive aiming, if my time spent getting blasted by Brand and Graves is any indication. On top of that, they’ll even dodge incoming skill shots you send their way, much like a Noxian Agent Smith.

They’re also better at using items, and can now use items with active abilities like Zhonya’s Hourglass, which can make them invulnerable for a couple seconds. Norris told me that Fiddlesticks in particular loves to use it to run right up to you and melt your face with impunity.

To balance out this newfound power and keep the bots from being too strong at current skill levels, the devs have baked in a chance for the AI to “make a mistake” and target the wrong area or juke the wrong way with skill shots. This’ll happen much more often with Beginner bots, which are tailored for brand-new players to go up against.

In addition, bots are still unable to jungle or counter-jungle effectively, and while they’ll check brush to see if you’re hiding there, they do so by running face-first into it. During my games, I was still able to pretty easily ditch bots by ducking into brush. Sr. Game Engineer Thomas James confirmed that they’re definitely smarter about knowing that you still exist when you go into brush, but admitted that “they have a very short attention span” when it comes to remembering you’re in there. All things considered, my team of 5 experienced LoLers had no real problems beating the AI two times each on both Dominion and Summoners Rift.

I have yet to take a screenshot of Renekton that doesn't make him look ridiculous.

That said, the developers’ work on improving the bots has only just begun, and we can expect to see more frequent updates going forward. Norris explained to me that the programming structure they’ve built the new AI onto allows them to share AI logic across all the champions where it makes sense, which makes it significantly easier for them to make fixes to things like tower-awareness or even to add new champions. I don’t think we should expect a new bot being added every week, but it certainly sounds like the developers are eager to release updates and new bots more frequently.

On top of that, the developers are certainly capable of creating some more difficult challenges for us—even if they aren’t including them in this update. Norris told me of one instance where a Tristana bot double-Rocket Jumped (the ability resets when she gets a kill, and it reset while she was in mid-air and she used it again) her way to quad-killing four-fifths of the entire dev team. The devs playing argued over whether that was even possible in the existing rules, but upon further FRAPS review, it definitely was. Fortunately for our win:loss ratio against bots, the developers decided that they didn’t want the bots performing at quite that level and restricted Tristana Bot from performing any such feats of godliness when this update hits.

Comp stomps for quick daily IP rewards just got quicker!

Norris wasn’t able to to give a firm release date on the AI update yet, but told me that players can expect it to come in a patch in the very near future. A full list of the bots that will be available is included below.

All 14 existing bots that have improved AI:
Annie, Ashe, Cho’Gath , Miss Fortune , Nunu , Renekton , Ryze , Shen , Soraka , Taric , Trundle , Warwick , Malphite , and Sivir.

The 26 bots being added:
Amumu, Brand, Caitlyn, Cassiopeia , Fiddlesticks, Galio, Garen, Graves, Irelia, Jax, Karthus, Kayle, Kog’Maw, Leona, Lux, Malzahar, Morgana, Rammus, Shyvana, Sona, Swain, Tristana, Udyr, Wukong, Xin Zhao, and Zilean.

Karagga’s Palace exists in the game right now, but only has one boss fight, reminiscent of Return of the Jedi, where players have to take down a massive Rancor in the Hutt palace pit. Next week’s patch will update that boss fight, hopefully curing most of the bugs currently plaguing raiders, and add four new boss fights to fill out the Operation. Hairy Tooth Gaming put together a nice walkthrough of the existing boss if you want to see it in action.

But that’s old news. Let’s get onto the upcoming boss fights! The new fights will still be considered Tier 1 difficulty, on par with existing Operations content, and will unleash the first part of the game’s next big story arc that will carry through multiple updates, according to Amatangelo. This will be a full story Operation, with different consequences happening depending on the decisions that your group makes in the Operation.

[SPOILER ALERT] The story of the Operation is that the Hutts have been harrassing locals, and you’ve been sent to either “set them straight” or “settle it diplomatically”, depending on your faction. You’re given the option to engage or shoot your way through the palace, or try to settle it diplomatically–a choice that will affect later events. By the end of the dungeon, you discover that someone else has been coordinating the Hutt attacks, and that will be the spark that launches the next big wave of story content that’ll carry across multiple updates.[END OF SPOILER ALERT]

Nothing but a giant robot, right?

When I first saw the above screenshot, released weeks ago to tease the update to Kragga’s Palace, I thought it was a cool giant droid and went about my business. If you saw the same, go back and click on that image to see it at full resolution. Look all the way at the top of it.

That's right! That's a freaking Hutt controlling a massive mech walker armed with missile launchers and giant drills.

Amatangelo told me that, “We were able to have fun with answering the question: how would a Hutt fight, anyways?” and warned me that the cut-scene revealing Kragga’s fighting “style” would show all the characters’ jaws dropping, but I wasn’t adequately prepared me to see my first MechWarrior Hutt.

If that’s not enough to get you to play this Operation, I don’t think I want you reading my article. Go ahead and hit that Back button on your browser now. Alright, now that those joyless saps are gone, let’s talk about the big element, other than story, that BioWare’s been using to make their raids stand out from the rest: puzzles. The Eternity Vault and a few Flashpoints have decent puzzles in them for your group to solve, and Kragga’s Palace is keeping the trend going with a Towers of Hanoi puzzle.

You may not know the classic Towers of Hanoi puzzle by name, but you’ve probably encountered it before–it’s been used in many games, including Baldur’s Gate and Mass Effect. It’s based on moving different sized discs between two points, according to specific rules about which discs can be stacked on which. In one particular fight, players will find themselves battling a large sentinel droid inside a droid factory. While most of the team keeps the droid at bay, other members will have to solve Towers of Hanoi puzzles on the conveyor belt as fast as possible to pour lava over the droid, making it vulnerable to attack.

While the raid is considered a Tier 1 difficulty raid, meant for new raiders, Amatangelo says that the puzzles in Kragga’s Palace will be significantly harder than the ones in Eternity Vault.

You might think twice about ogling that hot new Smuggler alt running around in the skimpy Leia slave girl outfit when you know that she’s the daughter of a terrible Sith Lord with a bad temper.

Amatangelo describes the system this way: “It essentially allows you to, instead of just having a bunch of alts that have no relation to each other, you can actually create a family tree where your alts can be related to your main character, either as, you know, a sibling, a son, a father, a family friend, or a husband and wife. You can actually choose the relationship your characters will have with each other.”

He went on to tease that the system will also give you perks for customizing new characters and making the leveling up process easier, without giving any specifics. We still have been unable to confirm if the Legacy system will prevent you from accidentally kissing your own sister.

It’s easy to forget that the world of Star Wars is filled with dirty, scary places–it’s not all Gungan cities and Ewok campfires. BioWare’s tapping into this darker side of Star Wars in the first Flashpoint added to The Old Republic after its launch, in the big Rise of the Rakghouls update coming on January 17th. It looks spooky, frantic, and – most importantly – will feature a full story with group choices and consequences, much like the game’s first two Flashpoints: Black Talon and Esseles.

A mad scientist has been working on developing a new strand of the rakghoul virus–which players will remember has already turned everyone on Taris into crazed, bloodthirsty beasts. And like all mad scientists, he’s been quite liberal in his test-subject policy and his strand has caused another planet to be overrun with the virus. In this new level-50 Flashpoint, your four-person group must descend to the run-down wasteland of the ruined city planet and take out the scientist and all the people-turned-rakghouls that get in your way.

Being turned into a mindless killing machine does not excuse poor parking skils.

When the city world plummeted, so did the infrastructure–meaning there’s no electricity and most of the world is dark. Players will have to find flashlight probes, one at a time, that cast a cone of light in front of them to help them make their way through the ruined corridors. It’s not all spooks and ghouls, though–you’ll have the opportunity to lay the smack down on plenty of baddies. Lead Flashpoint, Operation and PvP Designer Gabe Amatangelo walked us through some of the Flashpoint’s boss fights, including the first one, which has players backed up against a wall as waves of Rakghoul swarm in on them. One player can jump on a turret to mow down the attackers, while others set explosives and shoot whatever they brought with ‘em to keep the hordes at bay.

You can turn off the flashlight probes if you're feeling brave, but I'll keep my nightlight, thank you.

The Flashpoint has the usual 3 regular bosses, with another bonus boss that can be unlocked by completing side objectives. At the end of the Flashpoint, players will uncover who was behind the research, which Amatangelo tells us will open up the story arc for a follow-up Flashpoint, which will come in a later expansion. While Kaon Under Siege doesn’t extend players’ class quests, each class will have unique dialog options to chime in with during the course of the Flashpoint.

Amatangelo estimates that anyone level 47 or higher should be able to easily get through the Flashpoint on normal difficulty. After your team takes it down in normal mode, you can jump straight into Hard Mode, which is designed for coordinated groups of level 50 characters with full sets of blue-quality gear and a few epic items.

In addition to the new Flashpoint, the patch will also smooth out the difficulty bumps and bugs in all Flashpoints currently in the game.

The biggest surprise in the forum thread comes at reply #5, which is made by Congressman Jared Polis of Colorado–avid League of Legends player (he prefers Maokai and Anivia) and opposer of SOPA and PIPA–who expresses his objections to the bills and also urges LoL fans to contact their representatives to oppose the bill. Riot has confirmed his identity, made a special forum image for him, and granted him the rank “United States Congress” on the forums.

If you have questions about the two bills, or why Riot opposes them, hop over to this Reddit thread, where Riot’s lawyer is taking questions about their stance on SOPA/PIPA in an “Ask Me Anything” post all day long.

If you want to contact your representive to let them know your feelings on the two bills, you can use Congress’ official website or use the pre-written message that Riot recommends through this site.

Too fashion-forward to allow your League of Legends champions to get caught wearing the same ‘ol attire day after day? Start the new year with a fresh look! In this Protip, Josh demonstrates how to find and install custom League of Legends skins to make your champions the best-dressed little warriors on the block. Check out the introduction above, and watch Josh’s complete instructions in the consecutive videos, as well as a rundown of the PC Gamer US office favorites…

Update: We contacted Riot Games to clarify their stance on using custom skins in League of Legends, and were informed that while there is language in League of Legend’s EULA designed to stop players from hacking or botting the game that could technically be stretched to apply to using custom skins, Riot does not actively enforce against installing custom skins, and doubts that they will ever need to. They simply want to reserve the right for extreme circumstances. Additionally, individual developers at Riot have, on multiple occasions, expressed their admiration of the modding community and the work that they’ve done. So you can install these custom skins with confidence, and we’ll make sure to keep you up-to-date if Riot’s policy changes.

How to find League of Legends skins

How to install League of Legends skins

PC Gamer’s favorite League of Legends skins

The announcement is not entirely unexpected. LEGO Universe is a subscription-based game and, like so many others before it, had a very tough time convincing people to adopt another monthly fee on top of whatever game subscriptions they were already paying. Update:The original publishers, Gazillion Entertainment, dropped the game pretty quickly after launch, handing it off to the LEGO Group and making major cuts to the original dev team at NetDevil (many of whom were picked up by the LEGO group to continue development on the game).

The trouble is that LEGO Universe didn’t really go free-to-play. Sure, they said they did, and had the fanfare and big announcement right around the time that everybody and their mothers were going free-to-play. But the beauty of the free-to-play business model is that it gives the gamer options for what they want to buy, and how much they want to pay for it—and LEGO Universe didn’t do that.

I'll miss flaunting my racing skills over kids in elementary school.

It’s especially frustrating, because LEGO Universe is probably the best candidate for a free-to-play MMO that I’ve ever seen. People are already accustomed to buying real-world LEGO bricks in microtransaction packs to build specific vehicles or space forts or islands with buried treasure. The existing business model translates almost perfectly into LEGO Universe, where players can build anything on their properties, and breathe life into whatever they build with interactivity via animation and functionality scripting.

Instead, LEGO Universe let free players stagnate in the first zone, burdened with debilitating restrictions (like being unable to chat with anyone they group with) and demanding that they pay the developers $15/month or nothing at all.

For free-to-play to work, you have to give players options. Let free players enjoy the game for free, and they’ll spend a buck here or there on specific brick packs or tools for building cool creations on their property. Let those players who aren’t interested in building delve deep into the game’s pet system, and then give them the option to pay a few dollars and finally own that rare dragon pet that’s been eluding them for weeks. Let combat-craving players really enjoy the game’s Last Stand-style minigames by allowing them to talk with whoever they’re grouped with to discuss strategy—and then ask them to throw in a few bucks for alternate maps.

It's incredibly fun to explore all of the crazy contraptions people build on their properties.

LEGO Universe is a wonderful MMO, whose supremely high production qualities and lovable charm make it alluring to gamers of all age brackets. Its deep achievements and collections systems have had me hooked on and off since launch, and its diverse minigames always surprise me. But the main story is short, and there isn’t enough here to make it the go-to game for any hardcore gaming adult. This is a game, much like DCUO, whose fun-first, content-light design requires a free-to-play business model to succeed in a world filled to the brim with compelling MMOs. DCUO acknowledged that and made the jump to a full free-to-play model this week, which has seen them inundated with so many players that the servers can’t keep up with the demand.

It’s truly a shame that the LEGO Group wasn’t bold enough to take the full leap into a real free-to-play business model. There’s nothing in the game’s design or content that rationalizes why this game is being shut down so soon. I hope someone sees the potential here and picks it up for a re-launch, a la APB: Reloaded. Until then, I’ll keep building up my LEGO tower in a tribute to one of my favorite MMOs.

Of course it’s not all daisies and roses for players trying to get into the game during this massive spike in activity. Even during non-peak hours, servers are having stability issues and, anecdotally, login queues have thousands of players waiting to get in and play. SOE loves to boast about DCUO’s “super servers” that allow all players to all play on the same realm within the game, which has a lot of awesome benefits (like never having to pay to transfer servers and always being able to play with your friends who are online), but hopefully they can resolve these stability issues before too many people run away from the game because of them.

If you haven’t already jumped into DC Universe Online, you can download the client for free on the game’s official site. Free players have access to almost all of the game’s content and character power types, can join guilds, and all that good stuff. You can read full details on what’s free and what’s not here or read our review from the beginning of this year while you wait in the login queues.

Most of us at PC Gamer US are playing on the Hero side, and since the game’s tech allows for all users to play on a single server (alternating between PvE and PvP phases at will), you’re guaranteed to be on the same server as us! Send a message to any of the following characters in-game for an invite to the PC Gamer guild, and let us know if you’re interested in being an officer!

Coconut Monkey guild contacts:
Alpheias
Jah Glory
Yogitus

PVE Scenarios

These are short instances made for a few players, designed to replace open-world group quests. These will be more epic events, held within tiny instances, that players can participate in while leveling in open world areas.

They will scale with player level, so that high level players can go back and complete any PVE scenarios that might’ve missed. Because they’re designed to be casual, there will be no role requirements in the tool that you queue up with, and the devs said that it’s designed to be short enough that you can complete one while waiting for your dugneon/battleground queue to pop.

As a part of their plan to let players progress through whatever content they want to play, these will reward Valor Points (the currency used to purchase high-level gear).

The first example the devs gave for a hypothetical Scenario was a Goldshire scenario for low level human players to kill the notorious Hogger elite NPC. This would be a staged event that tasked you with killing 35 gnolls in the area. Once you do that you get a task to escort a human guard. He leads you to Hogger, who is the final boss you must kill. You take him down and you’re done–nice and easy.

The second example was designed to feel more like a PvP experience, without actually pitting you against real players. The first task would be to kill 50 horde soldiers, then you assault their base to destroy 5 catapults and a few towers. After that, the Horde leader, General Drake emerges from the keep and you have to take him down.

The two examples feel a bit grindy, but these were just hypothetical examples, so hopefully the real ones will have more creative tasks for you to do.

No time to kill, just dragons

Challenge Dungeons

Dan, our office’s current Orcs Must Die leaderboard master, is going to love this one. Challenge Dungeons are essentially time trials that have you race through dungeons as fast as you can for bragging rights and some sweet-looking loot.

Each challenge dungeon will have a leaderboard that lets you compare your best scores against your friends, guildmates, or your entire server. All of your gear will be scaled down to a standardized level during these challenge runs, so you won’t have the time-old “well, your gear was just better than mine” excuse when your buddy bests your score and bumps you off the top of the leaderboard.

But not all rewards are social (although the best ones are), so there are also rewards for people that achieve the Gold, Silver, and Bronze medal times. Those will reward Valor Points to buy new gear, as well as unlock a unique set of gear, exclusive to Challenge Dungeons, that has no stats on it but looks awesome. The purpose is to let you use the new Transmogrify system to show off your awesomeness with the gear’s appearance.

I can’t wait to compare challenge run times with my guildmates. Bring it, Dan!

Update: Blizzard’s J. Allen Brack announced during an interview after the panel that the dev team wants to get the pet system playable on the WoW mobile app. He said “it would be a huge undertaking,” but assured that the team has talked about it.

One of the main goals of the system is to give players a new type of activity to do in World of Warcraft and to make it accessible to as many players as possible. While some of the vanity/companion pets will be excluded from the system, they said that “almost all pets” will be usable in the new combat system.

Pet battles are very similar to pokemon duels: they’ll be turn-based battles between teams of 3 pets per player (PVE and PVP). Pets gain XP from battle and can level up to level 35, unlocking up to 6 abilities along the way. Each pet can take 3 of those 6 abilities into battle each time. You’ll also be able to name all of your companion pets now (My winter gnome servants shall be called Interns).

It’s going to be a little more difficult to collect pets now. The ones you already have should almost all work in the new battle system, but there will also be Wild pets out in the world. You’ll need to track them down and battle them with your existing pets to beat it down and capture it to train it as your own (sound familiar?). But finding these wild pets may be the trickiest part. The devs said that wild pets will have complex variables that control when they appear in the world. One example they gave was that one pet might only appear in Terrokar Forest, while it’s raining in the nighttime. Wild pets will have random stats when you capture it, so you may want to keep recapturing the same wild pets until you get one with stats you want.

The good news is that all those captured pets won’t go to waste while you wait for the best one. wild pets will be able to be traded and sold on the auction house for in-game currency. More importantly, Blizzard is “working very hard” to make sure that pets will be account-wide, so that you won’t have to capture them on multiple characters.

And you won’t be scouring Wowhead for secret tips on how to find these pets. Blizzard will be adding an official Pet Journal in the game that will show you all the pets in the game, along with their abilities, and where to find them all in the world. This will work similar to the dungeon journal.

You will also be able to earn items to boost pets, and you can track down pet masters around the world to challenge them. If you can best them, you’ll earn a special ability that you can brign into battle to help your pets win.

This system sounds incredibly deep and complex–it sounds like, if you wanted to, you could pretty much spend all of your WoW time in this new pet battling system. Pet masters, ready yourself!

Blizzard has 4 main goals for this expansion

• Give players new things to do, not just new raid bosses. New types of activities.
• Get players to leave cities and spend their time out in the world. To do so, they’ll be adding a lot of outdoor raid bosses, like old times
• More options to progress your character. You can get valor points through daily quests, pvp, raids, etc. But raids will still be faster.
• No more cookie cutter builds in talent trees. (We’ve heard that before, but hopefully they’ll have good plans for it

Mists of Pandaria details

• It will be a single continent, like Outland and Northrend (not like Cataclysm’s content)
• That new continent will have an auction house
• Alliance and Horde will crashland there during a naval battle, and then both try to take over the land for resources (just like every piece of land they find)
• Pandaren will be neutral form 1-10, and then you make a choice
• The island is on the back of a giant turtle

Other people on the island:

• Jinyu: race of wise fish-men. Can stick staff in the water to hear what’s going on around them
• Hozu: wise monkey-men who stand on two feet.
• Verming: “the new kobold” — it’s a cuter rabbit-type varmints that are tunneling underneath the farm land and stealing vegetables.
• Mantid: sentient insect race that’ve lived on the island, but cut off by a giant wall from the pandas, and have begun to go a bit crazy.
• Mogu: the big villains, they used to control the island before the pandas kicked them out. They’re back and they’re pissed. Looks like orc/ogre hybrid
• Sha are demon-dragon looking spirit creatures that manifest anytime bad thigns happen on the island, lore-wise. Will be major

Jade Forest zone:

• Alliance and Horde entry zone
• Horde teams with Jinyu, alliance with the Hozu
• Because we’re fighting with each other and with the wildlife, our violence will start to make the Sha appear, which pisses the peaceful Pandaran off.
• This is the theme of the first dungeon: outdoor beautiful mountains/valleys has been taken over by the Sha. You have to go in there and cleanse them out to undo the corruption you’ve caused
• The closest look is probably Stranglethorn Vale or ZG.

Valley of the Four Winds:

• Zone in two partsnorth side is panda farms, south side is jungle
• Players can choose to go one way or the other. Can come back later, but don’t have to.
• They want the dungeons to “fit in the zone” — physically see it, give it a presence in the zone. This dungeon is Stormstout Brewery
• This zone will have your first interaction with the mantid insect race
• The wall of the island borders this zone, and they’re beaking through a bit

Playable Pandaran race info:

• You start out neutral, and at level 10 you get to pick Horde or Alliance
• They can be everyhing but Warlock, Death Knight, Druid, and Paladin. They are the only race so far announced that can be Monks
• Racial ability: increased stat benefits from food
• Racial ability: Cooking skill increased
• Racial ability: Rested experience lasts twice as long
• Racial ability: BOUNCY – you take 50% less fall damage
• Racial ability: You put a target to sleep for 3 seconds

• Mists of Pandaria will have 9 new dungeons
• 6 of those dungeons will be in Pandaria itself
• Many of them will take players indoor and outdoors to keep it interesting
• There will be 2 more classic dungeons redesigned as heroic dungeons: Scholomance and Scarlet Monastery
• Mogu and the Mantid will be featured in the 3 raids that will be available at launch
• The Raid Finder will be available for all raids, meaning that there will be 3 diffculty levels (Raid Finder, normal, and Heroic)

Protoss

Upon analyzing data from their most recent battles, the protoss have identified a few areas of improvement that would help them maximize effectiveness against their enemies. Based on their findings, the protoss have augmented their arsenal with a second psionic unit, a new way to counter flocks of Mutalisks, and a new form of enemy harassment.

Tempest
Description: The tempest is a new capital ship that deals massive area-of-effect damage to air units. It also has a standard ground attack, but its chief role is to help gain air superiority.

Oracle
Description: The Oracle is a psionic warship, built from a Stargate, that uses several unique abilities to raid and harass the enemy. The first is Entomb, which can temporarily block mineral fields from being harvested. Another ability, Preordain, grants vision of a targeted enemy building, allowing the protoss to see which units or technologies are being researched. Rounding out its kit is Phase Shift, which phases a target building, preventing it from being attacked, using its abilities, or granting technology. Not only can structures like missile turrets be prevented from attacking, but using this ability on a zerg Spire would block the production of Mutalisks, Corruptors, and air upgrades.

Replicant
Description: Replicants have one ability: to transform itself into any non-massive unit. They’re expensive, so cloning a Zergling would not be very cost effective, but transforming into a specialized unit like a Raven, Infestor, or Siege Tank could open up interesting strategic options for the protoss.

New Abilities
A new ability called Arc Shield has also been added to the nexus — this ability will temporarily add additional shield and building armor, as well as a weapon very similar to a photon cannon. The weapon does the same amount of damage as a regular photon cannon but only damages light units. This ability will help the protoss buy time to defend in the case of an unexpected drop from an enemy. Another ability, Mass Recall, has also been added to the nexus, which allows protoss players to teleport armies from out in the field back to the nexus. The recalled units are stunned for a few seconds when recalled.

Retired Units
As we add units to the multiplayer game, sometimes it’s necessary to remove units or alter others’ abilities to maintain game balance and eliminate redundancy. In the current design of Heart of the Swarm, the protoss are not able to deploy Motherships and Carriers, though these and other units that don’t exist in Heart of the Swarm multiplayer will still be available in Wings of Liberty multiplayer and the solo campaign.

Terran

The resourceful terrans have also been improving their technology to better survive their battles in the Koprulu sector.

Description: The Shredder is a new unit built from the Factory that allows the terran player to control the battlefield. In its mobile form, the Shredder has no attack — but when set to stationary mode, it channels area-effect damage to both the air and ground. If a friendly unit enters the range of the Shredder, the weapon shuts off.

Warhound
Description: The Warhound is a small, walking ground mech that wields an effective anti-air weapon with splash damage, much like the Thor from Wings of Liberty. The difference is that the Warhound is smaller and much more nimble, though it gives up some range on its anti-air missiles in exchange for this mobility. The Warhound also wields a small ground attack weapon that does additional damage to mechanical units, making it particularly well suited to taking out enemy Siege Tanks — though it’s not particularly effective against non-mechanical units.

Thor (Modified)
Description: While it was always quite effective against ground and air, one of the biggest problems with the Thor has been that it’s too big and bulky to move around well… so the terrans decided to made it even bigger. In Heart of the Swarm multiplayer, terran players will be limited to having only one Thor at a time, but this new behemoth hits even harder with its regular ground weapons and can absorb a tremendous amount of damage. The terrans have also swapped out the Thor’s anti-air weapons for a bombardment ability that does a huge amount of damage to a wide swath of ground. The Thor will need time to set up its bombardment cannons, as well as time to repack them after an attack, much like a Siege Tank. Of course, fielding such a powerful weapon requires a hefty investment in technology, so both an Armory and a Fusion Core will be required before a Thor can be built.

New Abilities
The Hellion has been upgraded to a transforming unit similar to the Viking. When transformed into its new battle mode, the Hellion will gain in hit points and get a stronger flame attack that covers a short arc in front of it. This makes the Hellion more effective in late-game fights against large clusters of light units such as Zealots. The Ghost’s Cloak ability has also been modified — it will no longer be a toggled effect. Instead, there will be a one-time energy cost to activate Cloak for a specific time duration. Energy regeneration will continue while cloaked, and Ghosts can re-cloak while nuking without interrupting the call-down. The Battlecruiser will gain a speed-boost ability called Redline Reactor, which is governed by a cooldown. And finally, the Reaper no longer has a special building attack, but instead has a passive health-regeneration that allows it to recharge hit points quickly when out of combat.

Zerg

The zerg continue to evolve and adapt to changing environments, particularly the dangers they face on the battlefield. New creatures will help the zerg stage more effective sieges and add unique enemy-manipulating abilities to their arsenal.

Viper
Description: The Viper is a new flying unit with three unique abilities. Blinding Cloud temporarily reduces the attack range of all ground units inside the cloud to melee range, and prevents energy-based abilities from being used. Abduct allows the Viper to physically pull a unit to the Viper’s location. Finally, the Viper has a one-time ability called Ocular Parasite, which allows it to detach its eye stalk and meld it onto any friendly, non-massive unit, turning that unit into a detector.

Swarm Host
Description: The Swarm Host is a slow-moving ground unit that has no standard attack. When burrowed, the Swarm Host spawns a continuous stream of slow-moving melee units called Locusts that can be used to lay siege and pressure entrenched enemy positions.

New Abilities
The Corruptor’s Corruption ability has been replaced by a new ability called Siphon that allows Corruptors to target buildings and slowly damage them. This damage is converted into resources for the zerg at the same time. Ultralisks have a new Burrow Charge skill that lets them dive underground and instantly surface at a target, allowing them to initiate the fight faster on a crowded battlefield. Finally, the Baneling has evolved tunneling claws similar to the Roach, which allows them to move while burrowed — this new evolution will mean other races will need to be even more wary about hidden drops and making sure to have detectors with their army. Finally, the Hydralisk has a new upgrade that allows them to move faster while not on creep.
Retired Units
The Overseer has been cut; its detection ability has been replaced by the Viper and its Ocular Parasite.

Andrew Kuhar: When making the posters, I knew that Bosses like C’Thun and Ragnaros are so visually recog­nizable that I didn’t want to stray too far from what most players probably remember about them. I remember seeing server-first Ragnaros-kill anno­uncements all the time, with guilds posing for a picture around the fallen Hand of Sulfuras.

At the same time, C’Thun’s giant eye was, and still is, absolutely terrifying. I had some conceptual fun in the C’Thun poster by making the text (comprised of various phrases he whispers to you as you descend underground) look like a vision test. That sort of juxtaposition—a sentiment against an image—also allowed me some liberties to acknowledge both the old and new worlds in the other two posters.

In the case of Shadowfang Keep and Deadmines, the spotlight fell on Lord Godfrey and Vanessa VanCleef. Both are new characters, but are busy filling in the shoes of two old-world veterans: Archmage Arugal and Edwin VanCleef.

The SFK poster is an image of the keep’s silhouette at a distance. Godfrey’s words are quite true: he replaced the only human character that was left in the instance.

The in-game flashback of a young Vanessa seeing her father assassinated is very moving, and I decided to tie that into who she becomes later in life: a radical movement leader in the Deadmines dungeon. The poster is definitely the most abstract of the bunch. The only thing drawing the scene is Edwin’s blood: in a pool beneath him, smeared from the battle, across his sword, and on Vanessa’s hands. As a small homage and foreshadowing, I drew in the red bandanna worn by Defias members, which is now worn around Vanessa’s face.

If you’d like to see more of Kuhar’s art, you’re in luck. His portfolio/website is readily available at http://andrewkuhar.com, and you can read his various game design musings at his blog Digitalchemy. You can also follow him on Twitter here.

However, once the team started working on the project, Smedley revealed, they got so excited about its potential that they decided to scrap their plans and make a full-fledged sequel instead. That’s why the original teasers for “Planetside Next” talked about release dates that have long since passed at this point–they were originall talking about a simple graphics revamp.

Once the decision was made, SOE started to work on building a new graphics engine entirely from scratch in-house to support it, and the modest graphics and business model upgrade became the impressive Planetside 2 we’re currently drooling over.

That’s (roughly) SOE’s reasoning for creating a massive three-year plan for Planetside 2′s development, which they’re going to share with gamers before PS2′s launch to give them the big-picture perspective.

Planetside 2 is still in its early stages of development, so the long-term plan isn’t anywhere close to finalized just yet, but SOE has a few ideas. And all MMO devs do; drafting this sort of long-term plan is standard practice, but most teams guard its secrecy with their lives. They don’t want to get fans’ hopes up or stir up any problems by talking about features or design plans that may never see the light of day.

During a community panel at Fan Faire this morning, president John Smedley told the audience a bit about what the three-year plan is, and why they’re going to share it with gamers. The plan will cover all the changes planned for the game, including expansions, feature additions, and content updates, in those first 3 years post-launch. It wouldn’t be detailed down to the level of specifying the exact day features would launch, but would be in broader terms like the the general time-window for when they want to launch a feature, and then the timing for adding additional elements to it over the next few months.

Sure my gun looks plain now, but check the plan: three months from now it's gonna have sparklers attached to it.

Smedley and the various dev teams I’ve seen at panels and talked to in one-on-one interviews all gave the same reason for this sort of transparency: they want to work on the features and content that the most players want in their games. That doesn’t mean they’re going to add fluffy bunnies to Planetside 2 if some loud-mouth forumers demand it, but it does mean that they want the playerbase to be more involved in the design process. And there’s really no easier way to do that than pull up the skirt on the design process, show everyone what you’re planning, and let the players give input before the content/features are made.

That’s the main goal: let players give feedback on potential design decisions. Not just to help steer the game in a direction that they want, but to also help players see the big-picture vision, which forum whiners love to ignore. Maybe feature X isn’t perfect at launch, but if you can see the long-term goal for that feature and see what it’ll do in three months, maybe it’ll sound much cooler to you.

What do you think? Is this a good way to get players involved, or will it just lead to players whining louder, this time about feature X that was “promised” in the three-year-plan but was later dropped off the plan?

It’s a tough act to follow, but John Smedley knows there’s a sure-fire way to one-up a dwarf: lasers, futuristic jet fighters, and explosions. In other words, the official announcement trailer of PlanetSide 2.

We all knew the big reveal of the sequel to their 2003 hit MMOFPS was coming sometime tonight. The game was confirmed to be in development as far as a couple years back, and a counter has been working its way down to zero on www.planetside2.com, set to expire at the launch of Fan Faire.

As for me, I’m running out to hound the development team through the deserts of Vegas (or at least the smoky rooms of this air-conditioned casino) to ask them all the questions I have about PS2. Expect more details on the site tomorrow morning, when the embargo lifts.

It’s no surprise that SOE plans to add more items and services to the cash shop in the future (there’s already a Styles section of the store, although it’s currently empty). What surprised me, however, is that fan reaction on the forums has been extremely positive. Most of the complaints I’ve seen so far are people complaining that SOE isn’t selling enough items to them for cash. Movement respecs and styles are things that players have demanded most often so far.

Take your time smashing each of those prize boxes in the Vault. You paid good money for 'em!

As much as I wish that this was an indication that DCUO will be jumping on the free-to-play bandwagon soon, I don’t think that it is. The developers have talked about adding a cash shop to DCUO since before the game launched (the shopping cart store icon was even in early pre-launch builds of the game I played). But while they’ve had it planned for so long, if the cash shop does well, hopefully SOE will consider taking DCUO free-to-play. It’d certainly be a great fit for this excellent MMO that still falls a bit short on worthwhile content.

UPDATE: The winners have been chosen, and will be contacted shortly. Thanks to everyone who entered! Even if you didn’t win a Premium Membership, you can still get the full experience of this “sexy, savage, and brutal world.”

Only a month after its announcement, Age of Conan’s free-to-play incarnation, dubbed Age of Conan Unchained, is to be released tomorrow, and we’ve got the exclusive look at the official launch trailer to celebrate it. We’re excited: we previously discussed the details of how the business model works, and now it’s time to try it out for ourselves.

First up, I think I’ll pick out a new companion to accompany me on my journeys from the store. Funcom gave us the exclusive scoop on new “tempress” pets being added to the game’s cash shop that’ll replace your silly non-sexy pet that currently follows you around with a seductive lady of the night. There are several different varieties, and while interaction is limited, Funcom stressed that this was a change they could only do because they’re now free of any rating restrictions in the new free-to-play mode. Of course, the usual lineup of weapons, armor, potions, and all that jazz will also be available in the cash shop.

Read on to learn more about the new content and characters as we talk with Executive Producer Craig Morrison to hear what he’s doing on launch day and get his tips for those jumping into AoC for the first time. We’re also giving away 11 60-day Premium Membership subscriptions—details inside.

Update: Funcom sent us over a list of several other companion pets that’ll be available in the store tomorrow. They are: Arctic Hare, White Khitan Tiger Cub, Black Khitan Wolf Pup, Hippo Calf, Wolverine Kit, Panda, Polar Bear, Obsidian Ravager of Jhil, Ivory Ravager of Jhil, Ashen Fu Dog ,Pleasure Priestess of Derketo, Pleasure Priestess of Morrigan, Pleasure Priestess of Ishtar, Pleasure Priestess of Yun, Social Pet: Owlet, Social Pet: Loyal Crocodile, Social Pet: Fearless Crab, Social Pet: Tamed Baboon. Personally I’m most intrigued by that Hippo Calf–for example, can it blow cute little bubbles and pop them while giggling?

We haven't seen official shots of the new 'tempress' companions yet, but Funcom sure isn't shy about mature content.

To win one of the premium membership codes, send an email to contests@pcgamer.com with “Ladies love premium members” in the subject line. 11 random winners will be chosen tomorrow, July 1st and have their code emailed to them.

PC Gamer: That was fast! It wasn’t too long ago that you announced AoC was going free to play at all, and here we are on launch day. How long has the team been working on this transition?

Executive Producer Craig Morrison: We didn’t want to have too long of a delay between the announcement and the release, mainly so that people wouldn’t put off trying the game because they wanted to wait for the new offer. These changes have been considered for some time, and it was always an option that we knew we were likely to use at some stage in the product’s life cycle.

In some ways, parts of this have been in motion for almost two years. Since we knew it would most likely be something we’d do eventually, we were able to lay the foundations in other systems from the start. We’ve always felt that it’s good development practice to be flexible in [regards to business model]. We also benefited from our work with Neowiz in launching the game in Korea, where we’ve been using elements of this business model since it launched there last year.

In terms of concentrated work–the supporting systems, shop integration, and inventory–we’ve been working in detail since the beginning of the year so we could get everything in place for the summer.

Undead or no, a dude that gross deserves whatever trouble he gets when adventurers stroll in.

PCG: What areas are the dev team monitoring most closely for player feedback in order to make quick adjustments? (i.e. store prices, leveling speed, security issues)

CM: We’ll definitely be paying attention to how the new players integrate with the existing players. The game itself hasn’t been altered in terms of progression for free players, so the speed of leveling should be pretty much the same. In terms of the sales through the item store, yes, we definitely pay attention there and will be monitoring players purchasing habits with interest.

You always think you have a pretty good idea about what will be appealing to players, but if you learn anything from working in this genre, it’s that the players can always surprise you! So whenever you do something new like this you are watching the results closely.

PCG: What are you most excited to do today? Are you going to be analyzing player’s actions/choices on the backend, lurking out in the chat channels listening to what people are saying, or just out enjoying playing the game?

CM: I think I’m probably most looking forward to showing the game to more new players than ever before, and to welcome back those [I played with] who haven’t played in a long time…I will definitely be in game quite a bit, as I usually am, as you get a lot of invaluable insight from just listening to and playing alongside the players.

Raawr, it feels good to be free!

PCG: What tips would you give someone that has never played Age of Conan before who’s going to jump in today?

CM: The game feels and plays a little differently from other, more traditional MMO titles. In particular the combat system, so be prepared for a little adjustment. It isn’t too steep [of a learning curve], however–once you get the hang of bringing down your wrath on your foes without things like an auto-attack, the combat system provides a really engaging and layered experience. It really makes for a more exciting gameplay experience than you may find elsewhere.

PCG: Is there any race/class combination that you’d recommend for new players?

CM: That depends on your playstyle to a large degree. If you want to dive right into the front lines with a melee class that uses the combat system you should look at the Soldier or the Rogue archetype. Priests can be fun as healers in Age of Conan, and can also take an active roll in combat–they aren’t just back line support characters.

But if you find the concept of the dynamic combat system a little too intimidating, you can try one of the Mage archetypes as they largely use spells rather than combos, which plays a little more like a traditional MMO.

Of course, for the true Conan experience the Barbarian class in the Rogue archetype is everything you need to follow in Conan’s footsteps!

These terracotta murderers must be stopped or orphans will die! Are you really selfish enough to NOT play?

PCG: What’s one thing that everyone that plays AoC F2P absolutely has to experience?

CM: I would urge people not to ignore the low- and mid-level dungeons. They’ll require you to make some friends and find a group, and some are premium spots, but there are some really fun and interesting encounters to be found in them. The desire to level fast is an easy trap to fall into, but it’s well worth your time to check out dungeons like The Black Castle, Sanctum of the Burning Souls and the Amphitheater, to name just a few.

Also if you’re one of those who are prone to the odd hardcore PVP desire, you might want to check out the upcoming Blood and Glory server ruleset, which will provide a very harsh “old school” open-PVP environment for those brave enough to try it.

PCG: Personally, what’s your favorite part of the new content being added today, and why you enjoy playing it so much?

CM: For me personally, it’s rewarding to see the new team members that we brought aboard after the expansion (when some moved across to work on The Secret World) mix in with the veterans. I’m usually a little nervous when I do the first few internal playthroughs of content from a new team setup, but this team have really pulled it off. So as a player, I really like the new instances…they play really well, and I think the players are recognizing, and appreciating, that.

I also love that each of the new areas have great atmosphere and their own distinct feel to them. The art team did a wonderful job giving them all unique elements that allow you to immediately identify with the area. From the awesome vistas in the Forgotten City, to the bleak and stormy environs of the Breach, through the brilliantly twisted nightmare section of The Refuge of the Apostate, and the grim corruption of the Paikang districts. Our Dreamworld engine is capable of creating some of the most atmospheric and amazing environments that can be found in any MMO, and I think it brings that dangerous and brutal world that Robert E. Howard described in the Conan stories to life brilliantly.

 
Sound like fun? You can download the client at Age of Conan’s website right now and play! Let us know what you think in the comments or, as always, at letters@pcgamer.com.

Players that like what they see can purchase the game and the Burning Crusade expansion (which increases the level cap to 70, opens Outlands, and unlocks the Blood Elf and Draenei races) for only 20 bucks. In addition, anyone that currently owns the original game, but did not have the Burning Crusade expansion, now has that expansion automatically added to their accounts for free.

What do you think? Will you play around in the new endless trial mode? Is this the Blizzard’s first step in making WoW free-to-play? And is that a change you want Blizzard to make for WoW?

Update: Blizzard has released a full FAQ on the new system, which details (among other things) the restrictions on the trial accounts. It looks like our pie-in-the-sky dreams of building a guild full of level 19 PvP twinks on free trial accounts might be out of our reach…for now.

The full restrictions are:
- A level cap of 20.
– A maximum of 10 gold.
– Trade skills are capped at 100 ranks.
– Unable to trade via the Auction House, mailbox, or player-to-player.
– In-game access to public chat channels unavailable. Players are limited to communicating using only say, party, or whisper.
– Characters will be unable to create or join guilds.
– Characters are not able to send whispers to other characters unless they have been added to the characters’ friends lists or have received a whisper from a character first.
– Characters will not be able to invite other players into a party.
– Characters will not be able to join parties with other characters above level 20.
– Voice chat disabled on Starter Edition accounts.
– Realms experiencing login queues will prioritize players who have full, paid accounts.
– Starter Edition accounts are not eligible for character transfers
– RealID features are disabled on all Starter Edition Accounts.

This was a change that Blizzard snuck in under my radar, and I expect a lot of players will be surprised to see arrows next to their toons’ names on the chracter select screen when servers finally come up and everyone is able to log in. Clicking the arrows simply moves them up or down the list accordingly. Nice and simple.

Why all the big hubbalub over a tiny feature, you ask? Well, this is the sort of change that I only expect hardcore MMO players to fullly appreciate. When you’re selecting characters from a list several times a day for years, the fact that your most frequent selections are scattered between lumpy undead corpses you haven’t touched since Silithus was a threat starts to grate. I for one am happy to finally lower my level 60 undead rogue down to the forgotten depths he belongs at, and rocket my goblins and trolls to the top. Take that, Forsaken jerks!

Ah, the joys of fighting alongside 50 million other players killing the same mobs as you on patch day.

New daily quests in Hyjal

A lot of servers are still down at the time that I’m writing this post, but once your server comes online (and you’ve patched enough addons that you aren’t getting spammed with a wall of error messages), you’ll want to head up to Hyjal to find the new daily quest hub. The message boards in capital cities all have a breadcrumb quest that’ll lead you to the exact location if you’re high enough level. Once there, you’ll get a quest to help an NPC army open a portal to the Firelands–it’s a simple kill waves of minions quest that culminates in a simple boss battle and some jibba jabba from Malfurion Stormrage. Lore junkies’ll love it, but the rest of us just want to hurry up and get ahead of the rest of the patch day pack.

The Hyjal quest hub is still surprisingly peaceful on my realm: Alliance players were fighting alongside Horde without even glancing at each other. Don’t expect it to stay that way for long, though–early questers are usually so focused on beating content that they’re happy to ignore one another, but the gankers will be on later tonight. If you can get on now and start the quest chain, I’d highly recommend it. Otherwise, be ready for some epic pvp fights tonight!

The new currency is Marks of the World Tree, rewarded from quests in the new hub. The first few quests have you fly around the zone defending different NPCs from attack; they took be about 15 minutes to defeat and then I’d unlocked the first phase of the daily quest hub. There are only three daily quests available at first: one to kill enemies and summon a ghost wolf to howl over their corpses and one to collect berries. Upon completion, you get a follow-up quest to go summon a kill a felhound nearby.

Oh yeah, take that, fire bad guys!

The quests are all very simple, straightforward stuff and not very exciting. I ended up with 12 Marks of the World Tree, with a quest to collect 20 to unlock the next tier of daily quests, like the Argent Tournament functioned in Lich King expansion. It looks like you can gain four Marks a day through the three daily quests (which will likely rotate), so we should be able to unlock the new tier of daily quests by Thursday if you stop by every day. And you should: it’s super quick to do, and you know your guild will want you to be attuned and ready to raid asap! After all, there’s a whole heap of new loot waiting for you all inside Firelands.

UPDATE: There is another quest chain available in capital cities (found near the portal to Cataclysm zones) that sends you to Hyjal to meet with Thrall near Nordrassil. It leads to a long cinematic with a ton of lore and some crazy fire-dragons that I don’t want to spoil with screenshots. All in all, this is an 11-step quest chain that takes you to all of the new Cataclysm zones for unique encoutners. Without giving away the details, you absolutely must play this if you care about lore at all. Even if you don’t, it’s worth your time for the fun group encounters along the way and the ilevel 365 epic cloak you get at the end.

If you’re stuck at the office for now, you can pass the time by reading the full patch notes, watching the video for Thrall’s epic questline, and taking a look at the new Ragnaros raid boss.

UPDATE: The match is over! Congratulation to LoL’s first-ever world champs! (whose name has been edited out for the sake of spoilers–go watch the replay videos!)

This weekend’s Sweden-based Dreamhack esports tournament has hosted some amazing matches for all the competitive games, but League of Legends is my personal favorite to watch–and almost 1,000,000 people have tuned in at one point or another to spectate the LoL portion of the tournament.

The finals match starts today at 3:00 PM PST, and you don’t want to miss it! Two European teams, aAa and FnaticMSI will be duking it out for the $100,000 and all the pride, bragging rights, and nerd cred that comes with being crowned the champions of League of Legends’ first Season.

You can watch video recaps, dynamic brackets, and all sorts of other goodies on Riot Games’ website.

Massively revealed the official announcement today, along with some rudimentary details about how the free-to-play system will work. In short, there will be four levels of payment that you can adopt: nothing (the whole game will still be open to you), less than the current sub (all the same content as current subscribers, plus an XP gain), the current sub (same as previous, but with extra rewards and cash shop currency to spend), and higher than the current sub (which has everything already mentioned, plus it gives the bonuses to anyone you group with–and it can stack with other top-level subscribers for ultimate domination).

The cash shop will sell cosmetic items, convenience items that reduce crafting times, and other unspecified goodies. GamersFirst is selling balanced guns in APB: Reloaded, so I would expect them to do the same in Fallen Earth, although that hasn’t been confirmed yet. The shift to free-to-play is expected to happen within the next few months.

It’s every gamer’s dream to someday run their own clan or guild. Even if you don’t want all the hassle that comes with being a leader of loot-hounds in an MMO guild or of ego-maniacs in a shooter clan, you want that sweet, sweet prestige and sense of superiority that comes from being the man or woman in charge. (Plus you totally get to pick the guild colors yourself, so you can make sure they match your gear nicely.)

And every guild/clan worth their salt needs to have a professional-looking website to attract new recruits, keep everyone up-to-date of upcoming events, and give members a place to unwind and talk shop while they’re not in-game. Good news, loyal PC Gamer readers–today is the perfect day for you to launch that guild or clan you’ve been dreaming of! It’s time to throw off the shackles of your oppressive guild leader and strike a new claim in your own name, rallying other players to your side! And we’re going to help 10 of you get started by giving you a free one-year subscription to Enjin.com‘s ultimate guild/clan website hosting package! Read on for full details.

Enjin offers free website hosting supported by ads for everyone, but the Ultimate package (normally $23.96/month) that we’re giving away tosses in all the goodies your gaming collective needs to thrive–including dedicated voice servers, event planners, DKP tools, site chat, and 50GB file storage–and removes the ads. Enjin’s tools lets you build the website by piecing together different customizable modules modified to your liking, and apply any number of the 189 themes currently available.

To enter the giveaway, just send an email to contests@pcgamer.com with “I will lead my people to victory” in the subject line. 10 lucky winners randomly selected on Monday, June 20 will receive their codes for a one-year free guild/clan website hosting with Enjin.com’s ultimate package via email. We’ll also give five hundred top-secret, completely inconsequential bonus points to anyone that has an awesome idea for a guild name in the comments!

To get your creative juice’s flowing while we wait, here are a few of my favorite guild/clan websites that I found on Enjin’s network for all different types of online games. Hopefully they’ll help inspire your website planning over the weekend!

Minetown, home to a dedicated batch of Minecrafters playing on a single server

The Elder Guardians, an EU MMO guild currently playing WoW and dabbling in other MMOs

Crimson Ravens, a super organized shooter clan that has members in the UK, US, and Japan

Dogs of War, a shooter community with a focus on member interaction with community spotlights and public chat

Thunderbrew, an MMO guild with tons of in-game videos, screenshots, and quickie flash games on their site.

Collective, a multi-MMO guild that splits its different guild chapters into different websites.

The digital-only expansion will only be available for pre-order on Turbine’s official website – not in-game. Turbine only wants to sell things in the cash shop after they are available in the game, so that there’s no confusion of, “Hey, I just paid for this, why don’t I have it?” in the cash shop. To that end, the Rise of Isengard expansion, set to release September 27, will be availabe in the cash-shop after that date, but will be unavailable for any pre-order bonuses.

Fortunately for mankind, the Man of Steel and General Zod have bigger spines than I do, and stood by our group the entire raid helping us down the baddies as they came in waves. Although he/she wasn’t shown, the developers confirmed that one other iconic character would be making an appearance in the raid as well.

Victors will be rewarded with Tier 3 armor, which consists of four different armor sets (one each for Controller, DPS, Tank, and Healer), and is themed after Kryptonian armor, marking the first time yet that a Tier armor set is NOT themed after your mentor chosen at character creation. And although it is not required, it would be very wise for all attempting raiders to have gotten their full set of Tier 2 armor from the Bat Cave raid. This is definitely more challenging, and you won’t stand much of a chance without the shiniest of the shiny gear on your shoulders.

Wakfu is one of my favorite game names of all time. You can’t help but repeat it several times with different inflections–and I dare you to say it without smiling even the teensiest bit.

But it’s more than just a fun name to say, it also looks like a fun game to play! We want to send you into the closed beta to try it out for yourself. Details on how to win a closed beta code, and details on how you can commit monkey genocide below!

Wakfu’s turn-based combat looks to keep things steady, but gives you bonuses for making your choices quickly–and (my personal favorite feature) killing animals in the world actually contributes to their extinction as a species. A robust political system will allow elected officials to reintroduce certain species back into the wild to keep them available for players to hunt/nurture, but it’ll be a delicate balance. Frankly, I love the idea because you know someone is going to adopt a crazed-monkey-killer persona and make it his lifelong vendetta to ensure that no monkey ever walks the face of the earth again. Should be good times.

To win one of the 100 closed beta codes we have to give away, simply send an email to contests@pcgamer.com with “I am the exterminator” in the subject line. 100 lucky winners will be chosen at random on Friday, June 10 and will receive their closed beta codes by email.

Contestants were tasked with making a 1-minute video designed to convince people to play Guild Wars 2 at launch. As Guild Wars 2 has what is probably the most rabid fan base I’ve ever seen, it’s no surprise that ArenaNet received almost 500 submissions (enough video for more than 4 full-length feature films).

The two grand prize winners are:

Icelandic Viking by Leo from Iceland

News Report by Dan from the USA

See the full list of winners and more details on ArenaNet’s official blog.

For full details, be sure to read the official announcement and FAQ on Age of Conan’s forums.

PC Gamer: What was it that made the team decide that now is the right time to go free to play?
Craig Morrison: To be honest, the possibility [of going free-to-play] is something we been keeping under consideration for several years now. As a company, we’ve never been afraid of mixing up the business model if it serves the product well. BLC [Funcom's recent F2P MOBA title] is certainly another good example of that. This isn’t new ground for us. We’ve always felt that [going free-to-play] is a natural progression for an MMO title at a certain stage in it’s life cycle.

PCG: What motivated you to go with the hybrid F2P model in particular, as opposed to a F2P-only game?
CM: Most of the business models that borrow the ‘Free to Play’ mantle, in particular in western gaming, like Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Everquest 2 Extended, or our own Anarchy Online, are really a hybrid offering, as they retain an element of subscription in addition to a micro-transaction store. We were really pioneers with this format back when we did it in 2005 with Anarchy Online, so it was natural for us that we would adopt a similar approach for Age of Conan.

PCG: Do you see this hybrid F2P model as the future of MMO business models?
CM: To be honest, I think it already is established. The future is now as it were. All it means is that you can create revenue streams on these games by both subscription and micro-transactions, while allowing players to play portions of the game for free. Even those games that are still full subscription titles are incorporating item sales (like the special mounts in World of Warcraft, or the vanity items in the NCSoft store for Aion)

Hey bro, wanna buy this outfit for ten bucks? I'm telling you, the ladies love it.

PCG: What sorts of things will you be selling in the cash shop? Specifically, can you address the following: XP boosts, weapons/armor, additional content, gameplay features such as guilds/chat functionality/character limits, and cosmetic items?
CM: Pretty much all of the above, either at launch, or in the future. The inventory has been designed around covering all those kinds of bases. There will be some items from all of those categories in the launch inventory for the store. The store inventory has been balanced with the good of the game in mind, not just trying to make a quick buck or gouge people! It was very important for us that people do not view the store as being required to mitigate some kind of arbitary roadblock. We want people to want to pay, not feel they have to.

For example, to help eliminate that concern, we made very sure that we reduced the grind in the previous game update that came out last month, by fixing and improving the progression speed through game-play. So people already enjoy the progression before any convenience items came along.

PCG: Will everything be available for purchase piece-by-piece, or will some things be reserved ONLY for subscribers?
CM: Most of the elements can be purchased in some form from the item store, but often only for a limited time, so there are still clear benefits for being a premium subscriber.

If nothing else, you should try out AoC for the unique combat and siege warfare systems.

PCG: What would you say to someone that played AoC in the past, but hasn’t for awhile? How would you convince him to spend his time checking AoC out again?
CM: I’d tell them to come back and try it for themselves: it will cost you nothing to see what you think. Don’t take anyone else’s word for it, whether that is me being positive or the various internet trolls being negative. Nothing beats trying it out for yourself and making up your own mind.

The game is really one of the most unique settings out there for an MMO, with a mature focus for our storytelling, and a really brutal and bloody combat system that’s more visceral than most of the other games in this genre. Hyboria is an unforgiving place…with over three years of content… With the vicious mix of adventure, betrayal, corruption and combat that so identifies the world created by Robert E Howard all those decades ago. I don’t think there’s anything quite like it on the market at the moment.

PCG: What will returning players be surprised to find in AoC?
CM: Since launch, we’ve added an entire new continent in the Rise of the Godslayer expansion, added whole new zones in Cimmeria (Ymir’s Pass) and Acquilonia (Tarantia Commons), added over a dozen new dungeons, introduced a PVP levelling system, a PVP consequence system, new PVP minigames, introduced a Guild Renown system that allows guilds to level up, and decorate and expand their player city with new NPCs, functions and even quests. We’ve added the alternate advancement system for high level players to provide extra depth and horizontal progression at maximum level.

PCG: Aside from the shift in business model, what’s the biggest change coming as a part of this next big update?
CM: The new dungeons are really fun to play through. They scale between levels 40 and 80, so almost anyone can use them on a daily basis. We’ve been strengthening the solo content available for people, first with a level 80 solo instance, The Refuge of the Apostate (released earlier this year), and these two instances build on that. They’re called The Breach and The Forgotten City and take the player on fun, story-driven, solo experiences that are engaging and interesting to play through, and feature some really cool locations (I particularly love the view from the Forgotten City).

The Naga Epic detaches that irritating tail and throws in a docking station and customizable grip plates—great features that live up to the new name. The battery lasts a full work day (around eight to 12 hours in my testing), and swapping between wireless and wired mode (by attaching the USB cable to the docking station or the mouse directly) is quick and painless. Plus, the three different, detachable grip plates provide support for a wide variety of hand sizes, ranging from ogre to dwarf.

The battery pack adds a heftiness that was lacking in the original, almost-weightless Naga, and the slick driver software gives you easy access to its capable insides, adding macros, tweaking DPI and keybindings, and playing with the color and power settings.

One change leaves the Epic feeling a bit neutered, however: two buttons have been moved from the side of the left mouse button to directly below the scroll wheel. It’s horrible placement—I can’t reach either of them without straining my fingers or lifting my hand off the Naga; this effectively removes the buttons from the mouse.

It’s a shame you have to sacrifice button-count for wireless capability. The Naga Epic is a good mouse, but with awkward button locations and a price that’s $50 higher than the wired Naga, it falls a bit short.

$129, www.razerzone.com

Mad scientists, rejoice! The latest profession announced for Guild Wars 2, the Engineer, will let you mix chemicals, create robot monstrosities, and otherwise wreak general mechanical havoc on the world around you to your heart’s content! Described as a “master of mechanical mayhem,” the Engineer looks to be a mind-blowing mash-up of multiple Team Fortress 2 classes and Belle’s dad from Beauty and the Beast with a thirst for war. These tinkerers have a wide array of weapons and tools at their disposal to help allies and control enemies, along with some crazy mechanics that let them swap out their skill bars and use temporary weapons on the fly.

I was sold as soon as I read “explosives, gadgets, alchemy, and all manner of deployable devices” in the introductory infortmation posted on ArenaNet’s official blog. Describes some of the varied weapons, tools, and skills in the Engineer’s arsenal, and gives us a pretty decent idea of how the class will work.

The Engineer is an improviser. As far as I’ve seen from playing the game at events, no other profession has as many ways to completely swap the tools at their disposal as the Engineer does. Backpacks, turrets, weapons, elixirs–this profession can change it all!

Backpacks

Like the Elementalist, the Engineer can completely swap out the set of weapon skills on their bar on the fly by activiting different kits, instead of by switching weapon sets mid-combat. It’s unconfirmed, but it certainly sounds like the Engineer’s Backpacks will function similarly to the Elementalists’ different “attunements”–which allow Elementalists to swap out their entire weapon skill set mid-combat–since the blog describes Backpacks as completely replacing the Engineer’s current weapon skills with skills from the Backpack kit.

For example, Engineers will be able to activate a Bomb Backpack, which replaces their weapon skill set with skills that let him throw smoke bombs, concussion bombs, and fire bombs. Other Backpack kit options listed are Mine Kit, Grenade Kit, Tool Kit, and Med Kit.

Left to Right: Health Kit, Flame Kit, Bomb Kit, Mine Kit

Weapon kits

Sometimes the mad scientist just needs a flamethrower right away, and simply can’t wait. That’s where the weapon kit Utility Skills come in handy. One click, and a brand new weapon pops into the engineers hands–again, swapping out the players’ full weapon skills bar.

The Flamethrower is a short range AOE torcher that gives players skills like Immolate (which lights nearby enemies on fire), Air Blast (which’ll deflect ranged attacks), and Backdraft (to pull enemies in close enough for you to burninate them). The Elixir Gun is another option that lets players “shoot elixirs” at allies to support them.

For full-time use, Engineers can equip a rifle, two pistols, or a pistol and shield combo as their standard weapons.

Turrets

Ah, the classic immobile friend of warmongering mechanics across all games. GW2′s Engineer as a bunch of different types of turrets, all designed to defend and control an area in different ways. It sounds like the Engineer will be able to have multiple turrets up at once, but only one of each type at a time. The Engineer can pack up turrets to move them around with the fighting, although there is a cooldown between deployments. Each turret also has a unique overcharge skill associated with it.

The Thumper Turret does constant AOE damage, but can be overcharged to do a sudden massive attack that also knocks down all surrounding enemies. Other turrets listed are the Rifle Turret (likely single-target DPS), Net Turret (likely ensnare large groups of enemies), Flame Turret (likely cone-based DPS turret), and Healing Turret (which should heal, or else ArenaNet’s naming convention is all messed up).

I can't help it: the Health Turret (left) reminds me of Macinarium, and the Rifle Turret (right) of a creepy man's shoe.

Elixirs

This is where the mad scientist part comes in. Engineers can chug pre-mixed potions during battle to gain temporary effects, but not all of them are well-documented. One elixir in particular gives the Engineer a random Elite power from another profession (much like the Thief’s Steal ability in PvP).

Tool Belt

The tool belt is an extra skill bar above the weapon skill bar that’s designed to “enhance the effectiveness and functionality of the Engineer’s utility and healing skills” by granting access to unique skills customized to to whatever the Engineer is currently doing. For example, when you equip a turret, the tool belt has a skill that lets you self-destruct that turret.

With the Mine Kit, you get a skill to detonate all your mines. With the Grenade Kit, you get the Grenade Barrage skill. With a Med Kit out, your tool belt has a self-healing skill.

The update is being tested on the PTR alongside patch 4.2, but it’s unclear whether Blizzard plans the new feature with the major content patch or not.

Nethaera also warns that “certain elements of the cross-realm Real ID party system will be premium-based,” which is a nice way of saying that you’re gonna have to hand over some money to unlock parts of it. She went on to clarify that only the player sending out the invitations will need to have those premium features. It seems likely that you’ll have to pay the premium fee in order to create a cross-realm party and invite friends, but that it will be free to accept the group invitations of those that have paid. What do you think?

Kormac, the spear-wielding warrior will likely be a popular companion, considering his ability to do the thankless-and-slightly-boring job of tanking enemies to buy you time to turn them all into a fiery explosion of blood that rains loot or the even-more-thankless-and-more-boring job of healing you constantly. His only downside is that he’s a straight-laced Templar with “a tight and very strict code of ethics” (translation: he will disapprove of everything you do). Lyndon sounds like my type of companion: a carefree attitude laced with a dark humor and plenty of clever quips alongside the arrows in his crossbow quiver. Eirena is a mysterious sorcereress who can mess with people’s heads to cause damage or support your character with buffs.

The three characters will be central figures in the main plot, with their own backstories and reasons for wanting to fight evil alongside you, which you’ll uncover over time. They will auto-level with your character, and have their own, unique ability trees that you can progress through. You won’t control them directly, but their AI will change based on the skills you select for them to help them fill the role you want them to (such as the Templar being a tank for you).

For more info, look at their character pages below, and read the full reveal on Blizzard’s official site.

What we know for sure:

• Marvel Universe will be free-to-play, and was planned that way from its inception.
• It’s being developed by Secret Identity, a sub-group of Gazillion that was formed in late 2009 specifically to build Marvel Universe.
• You can play as Marvel characters, and other players can be the same hero as you at the same time, which the devs believe creates “lots of problems and lots of opportunities.”
• You won’t have to choose only one character, but will be able to play as all of them.
• Some of the characters you will play as are: Captain America, Iron Man, Wolverine, Hulk, Thor, Spiderman, Nova, and Squirrel Girl.
• Doctor Doom will be the game’s main villain (at least at launch).
• Brian Michael Bendis is writing for the game
• According to Brian, “no corner of the Marvel Universe will be left unturned,” although he was likely referring to over the game’s lifetime, not necessarily all at launch.
• You will play through existing stories that are told in the comic books.
• The game world exists within the canon Marvel Universe–this is not an alternate reality scenario.
• Marvel Universe is being made primarily for adults (as opposed to Gazillion’s other kid-focused Marvel MMO, Marvel Superhero Squad). They want to target core gamers first, and also make it accessible for everyone else.

 
What we suspect (not confirmed, but hinted at):

• There has to be lots of content that isn’t based on existing comic book stories.
• It will likely be released on consoles after it’s on PC. When asked about a console release, one of the developers said that it would come to PC first, but that they want as many people as possible to play it and other platform releases were “TBD, no wait, TBA!” That he felt the urge to clarify it was going to be announced, not decided, makes me think it will be coming to consoles.
• The game should have some open world environments: references were made to “hundreds of Wolverines” running around, which the developers feel is less of a problem than no one getting to play as recognizable characters.
• When asked if it would be browser-based, the developers insisted that accessibility was a crucial part of their game design, but they also stressed that they would be delivering a AAA-quality game. We’ll have to wait to find out this one for sure.

 
What we will rampantly speculate on (not even close to confirmed; pure guesses):

• You might be able to play as a villain. It’s true that Doctor Doom was described as “the main villain” for the game’s main story–not just for heroes–but it’s possible that he’s gone rogue, and both sides have reasons for wanting to stop him. (confidence in prediction: 50%)
• It seems like the best way to keep the whole “everyone can be Wolverine” problem contained is to provide a heavily-instanced experience. I would not be surprised if they follow a similar route to Guild Wars, and Gazillion’s own Marvel Superhero Squad: centralized hubs for chatting/hanging/crafting and instanced missions. (confidence: 60%)
• If it is a browser game, they’re likely using the Unity engine. No other engine that we know of could come close to providing the experience they want to deliver in a browser. They would not confirm if they’re building a new engine or using an existing one, but it seems likely that they’re using an existing one since the game has only been in development for a little over a year. (confidence: 20%)
• A major form of monetization in Gazillion’s Marvel Superhero Squad is purchasing new heroes to play as. In Marvel Universe, you might have to buy/earn the many heroes that you want to play as and to experience their stories. (confidence: 60%)
• I’d be surprised if you could “swap” between Marvel heroes on the fly like you do in Gazillion’s other Marvel MMO, Marvel Superhero Squad, that would feel very weird in story-driven missions where you’re playing out a specific character’s story from the comic books. (confidence: 30%)
• I’d guess that the game should be in open beta in mid-to-late 2012. It was specifically said that the game is “still a ways out,” but open betas usually come quickly for free-to-play games. (confidence: 50%)

Knowledge is power, and we just made you three parts stronger. You can thank us later. Of course, if you crave more data about City of Heroes (subsequently increasing your overall power in a general, abstract sense), you’ll want to check out the infographic below. City of Heroes is turning 7 next month, and NCSoft put together this collection of data bytes about CoH’s statistics and player behavior to celebrate it.

As a bonus prize, from May 3rd (next Tuesday) through May 10th, anyone that has a City of Heroes account will be able to play the game for free–no active subscription required. So if the nuggets of info intrigue you enough to want to give the game another shot, feel free to do so next week with no commitment required!

Personally, I think that ArenaNet has some of the best concept and game art in the entire games industry. Here are two pieces of official Charr art for you to drool over.

What? You demand even more, bonus Charr eye candy?! Well fine, have a laugh with a couple of screenshots I took while playing the PAX East demo build.

Personally, I prefered my Charr Guardian's more colorful armor style.

Bonus female Charr shot for all your ladies out there!

PCG: What was your experience like on day one? Were most players ready to go with full groups, or were they skeptical?
Nate Birkholz: Players were more than ready to go as soon as the servers came up. I hopped onto Virtue, my home server, and immediately started using the Team Up Teleporter to run Incarnate Trials. I spent much of the day playing along with pick-up groups (PUGs) and enjoying the enthusiasm that people displayed for tackling the challenges. I also defeated a couple of Behavioral Adjustment Facility runs back-to-back late in the day, which was very satisfying as a player as well as a developer.

PCG: What size groups have been the most popular in Incarnate Trials so far?
NB: No particular size seems to be more popular [than the others right now]. The Behavioral Adjustment Facility requires a League of 12-24 players, and Lambda Sector requires 8-16 players, [so it's all within those ranges].

PCG: Are you happy with how the difficulty scaling has worked so far? Is one extreme of group size seeming to have an easier or more difficult time than the other?
NB: We’ve been very happy. The numbers, as well as our personal experiences in the game, indicate that the scaling is working very well. In fact, both the smallest groups and the largest groups have been able to earn the “Master of..” badges that we award for completing the Incarnate Trials as close to perfect as possible.

The trick is to travel in single file, to hide your numbers from the scaling AI.

PCG: What’s your personal preference for raid size?
NB: I like about sixteen players. I feel like that size gives a great cross-section of archetypes and gives a lot of tactical flexibility. Fortunately, the endgame scaling is working well, as I noted, so it’s fun with any number of players, but that size just feels right to me.

PCG: What boss encounter design do you think has been the most successful so far? Are there any encounters that you feel need to be tweaked?
NB: Players were regularly defeating the Siege and Nightstar battle first, but we expected to see that. The Marauder battle is more integrated into how successful you are with the rest of the Lambda Sector Incarnate Trial, so we knew it would take a bit longer to get into the groove of his fight. We are seeing players defeat Marauder now that more and more people are familiar with how the event works.

PCG: What are the most popular Incarnate Powers so far?
NB: The Judgment and Lore powers are very visual, and players are really digging them a lot.

Ready to jump into sure-death situations over and over again.

PCG: What are your personal favorite Incarnate Powers?
NB: As a tank, I really dig the Interface powers. The debuff proc I have been using reduces enemies’ chance to hit, and that quickly adds up to some real survivability for me and my team.

PCG: Looking back at the first week of the new endgame, what lessons have you learned already?
NB: We have had the Incarnate Trials in beta since last Autumn, so a lot of the really big lessons are well behind us. One lesson we learned during beta is that players are very determined to defeat any encounter, no matter how big the challenge. They will keep trying to win even after the tide of battle has clearly turned against them and they’re no longer making headway. Players underestimate their power and skill at times, but that doesn’t affect their spirit.

PCG: How are you going to apply that lesson to future content?
NB: We learned that every stage of an Incarnate Trial has to have a way of ending [good or bad], or players will just keep going–until server maintenance if they have to.

PCG: If you could summarize the average player’s feedback on the patch so far, what would it be?
NB: “We want more Incarnate Trials!”

What do you think, heroes and villains: Is everything peachy in the Incarnate Trials, or what would you like to see changed?

The dichotomy between the two elements is almost surreal.

What is chessboxing, you ask? Why, it’s only the most sophisticated of sports played between true gentlemen, you Philistine! In short, two gods-among-men alternate between boxing rounds and making moves in a chess game–the first to KO or checkmate his opponent is hailed the victor. For more info, read our preview of the match.

CCP promoted the event ahead of time, and used the opportunity to raise over $8,000 for a local charity that provides assistance to special-needs children.

You can watch the whole thirty-minute video on CCP’s YouTube page.

The only hitch is that you have to go to a very specific URL to redeem the code (both are listed below). So if you share the code with your friends (or tattoo it on your body), be sure to include the URL as well.

Explosions > facebook crawling for your lunch-break entertainment.

Beta code: c9p3hmwgg79o
URL: http://www.gunshine.net/?utm_source=pcgamer&utm_medium=weblinks&utm_campaign=week15

I jumped into the beta this morning, played for about an hour and had a good time. I went with a doctor character, and have been tag-teaming with some bruiser freedom fighters to lay down the law of liberty on the oppressive guards trying to control us. I don’t think so, freedom-haters!

Gunshine.net has an awesome feature that lets you recruit AI versions of your friends’ characters even while they’re offline, so if you find yourself in need of some healing, add “Nereus” as a friend and we’ll team up! We recently featured Gunshine.net in our 15 multiplayer browser games article–head on over there to read more about the game, and look for a full preview in an upcoming issue of the magazine!

A bare-chested man with that creepy of a mustache deserves whatever beatings he gets.

The most surprising element of the new raids, labeled Incarnate Trials, is their ability to scale to the number of players you bring in the raid. Grab anywhere between 7 and 23 fellow players and the encounters will scale their difficulty (not just hit points, but the number of adds that spawn and other boss mechanics) to match the size of your group. Even better, the new League system is a nostalgic tip of the hat to old-school raiding, allowing you to form groups of up to 48 players to tackle content together. Content scaling is very difficult to balance, but if done right, I believe it provides the best compromise for players: no matter what size raid you prefer, you can play it. I’m looking forward to hearing from City of Heroes’ newly-elected raid leaders about how well the difficulty-scaling works.

The system launches with two Incarnate Trials, both revolving around taking down the corrupt dictator of Praetoria, Emperor Cole. You can ransack his secure prison the “Behavioral Adjustment Facility,” where you have to stop the prisoners from escaping while taking down the massive guards, or blast your way onto a military base in the Lambda Sector to battle Cole’s genetically-engineered super soldiers. Either way, it ain’t gonna be easy.

Luckily, you’re getting some added power to help tackle ‘em. The Issue also adds new tiers of Incarnate Powers: endgame-only ability slots that add extra oomph to existing powers or open up new options altogether. For those not quite ready for the endgame, the Issue also adds 2 lower-level Task Forces to tackle as a group. The official launch trailer is posted below. Be sure to let us know what you think of the new raid content in the comments below, or email us!

The skin and champion each cost exactly $7.50 worth of Riot Points (the in-game currency). According to my back-of-the-napkin math, that means that the skin/champion were bought roughly 21,657 times over the six-day period! What’s even more impressive is that the skin and champion had already been available for awhile before the fundraiser, so the players that bought them during that six-day period were likely primarily interested in donating.

Riot Games' CEO Marc Merril presenting the check to a Red Cross representative.

As an interesting aside, the $160,000 total raised for the Red Cross by LoL players matches the same pace of Team Fortress 2′s Hats-for-Japan fundraiser, which raised $300,000 in six days. EVE Online players also raised over $40,000 for the Red Cross. Well done, gamers!

The big highlights:

• SOE is closing it’s Denver, Seattle and Tucson studios. 205 employees are being let go.
• The remaining employees at those studios will be moved to San Diego to work on Planetside Next and an upcoming Everquest game.
• The Agency has been canceled.
• None of the layoffs affect live games–such as DCUO, EQ and SWG–most of which are maintained by the Austin studio.

SOE’s full official statement:
“As part of a strategic decision to reduce costs and streamline its global workforce, SOE announced today that it will eliminate 205 positions and close its Denver, Seattle and Tucson studios. As part of this restructuring, SOE is discontinuing production of The Agency so it can focus development resources on delivering two new MMOs based on its renowned PlanetSide and EverQuest properties, while also maintaining its current portfolio of online games. All possible steps are being taken to ensure team members affected by the transition are treated with appropriate concern.

This strategic decision will have no impact on SOE’s current portfolio of live games; additionally SOE will transition development efforts for the Denver and Tucson studios’ suite of products to its San Diego headquarters. This strategic alignment of development resources better positions SOE to remain a global leader in online gaming and deliver on its promise of creating entertaining games for players of all ages, and servicing the 20 million players that visited SOE servers in just the past year.”

We send our best wishes to those affected by the layoffs, and hope that they find new positions quickly.

Meet the new neighborhood watch.

Darkfall and a few other MMOs have proven that persistent city-building can work, with guilds proudly constructing, protecting and showing off their self-built cities. And the trend looks like it’s growing: two new fantasy MMOs, War of Angels and Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising, plan to expand city-building features even further this year.

But what good’s a city if you can’t fight over it? In War of Angels, guild towns can only be built on specific plots of land, which must be wrestled from other guilds’ control if you want one. And you do want one—whoever’s in control can decide what buildings are built (ranging from skill-boosting research huts to banks and armor-making blacksmiths), collect taxes from the NPC vendors that’ll sell to all players and hire NPC guards to keep the peace.

You'll have to start small--Rome wasn't built in a day.

But the developers at Heatwave (who took over development of the Roman mythology-themed Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising from the now-defunct Perpetual) plan to expand city building in a different direction with their player-built Estates—in an instanced valley, players will grow a small army camp into a thriving city. More than just a vendor hub, Estates will be a major source of gameplay, with resource management that’ll require you to complete quests out in the world to keep things running smoothly. Kill a big boss? Why not chop off its head, drag it back to town and build a statue in honor of your intense badassery? The peasants may even come by to admire you.

Watch your kingdom grow
In WoA, your city will start off humble. Wisely upgrading its buildings– such as the blacksmith, post office, skill research lab and inn, will reward you whole guild.

Times are tough. The economic turmoils of late have cost some people their homes, their jobs and even the shirts off their backs! Well, PC Gamer is here to right this wrong and bring a little more justice into this cruel, cruel world like an unstoppable superhero made of pure gaming bliss.

This weekend, we’ll be opening our cargo holds to give away 30 articles of clothing–all of which have been conveniently branded with different videogames’ or developers’ logos and artwork by the PR contacts that distributed them to us. While their fashion value may sometimes be questionable, their ability to cover your body and advertise your gaming inclination to the world is unquestionable.

To enter this fine contest, simply send an e-mail to contests@pcgamer.com with the phrase “I am naked” in the subject line (US residents only, please). Optionally, you can include in the body of the email which articles of clothing you want most. We’ll draw thirty lucky winners on Monday, April 4th, but cannot guarantee that, if selected, you will receive the article of clothing you so desperately desire–once we get down to the bottom of the barrel, you’re getting whatever we grab first. And you’ll like it!

Heroes of Newerth (XL), Dungeon Fighter Online (XL), Perfect World (XL)

Mafia II (M), Left 4 Dead (M), Dawn of War II (XL)

Duke Nukem (M), StarCraft II (L), World of Tanks (XL)

Microsoft (XL), Dead Space 2 (L), League of Legends (M)

2 Dragon Oath (XL), 4 Lord of the Rings Online (L)

Combat Arms hoodie (XL), 10 Heroes of Three Kingdoms hats, 1 S2 Games hat

I occasionally toss in a few burrowing bugs or ice elementals to back up my chemically enhanced dragons when the mood hits me. With almost 500 cards to pick from, there’s plenty of tinkering to be done in my 20-card deck in BattleForge, one of our favorite online, card-based strategy games (read our full roundup of CCGs). There are a lot of good strategies out there—and you’ll no doubt invent your own in time—but here are a few surefire combos to get you started.

Don’t own it? No problem! BattleForge went free-to-play awhile back, so there’s nothing stopping you from logging in and starting the killin’!

Warstorm – Dominate PvE with a solid Nature deck

1. Breeding Grounds: You can’t rush the enemy in PvE—you need to whittle them down with wave after wave of soulless drones who are ready to march to their deaths in your name. Breeding Grounds lets you do that on the cheap by reducing the summoning cost for all units near it by 25 percent.

2. Regrowth: It’s fun to send armies to their deaths for no other reason than your own amusement, so why not let them amuse you a while longer? Regrowth will heal your troops and keep ‘em alive—giving you more time to watch them get picked up and flung around by that impossibly large Stone Giant.

3. Giant Wyrm: You’re going to have to end the match sometime, and there’s nothing quite like a wall of Giant Wyrms gassing an entire town with their AoE acid breath to rein in that W. This guy’s even more useful if you’re building a hybrid deck—it only requires one Nature orb.

Head-to-head – Hit ’em hard with a strong PvP Fire deck

1. Skyfire Drake: You can rush early in PvP with a swift unit like Scavengers, but the heavy hitting starts as soon as the second phase, so don’t dilly dally. The Skyfire Drakes are your key to victory, flying high and spitting splash damage below—the Mutalisks of BattleForge.

2. Ravage: Any healers you bring onto the battlefield might as well have a giant bullseye on their heads—players know to take out the healers first. That’s why you need unkillable healers like Ravage, an unintuitively-named heal-over-time spell that’ll keep your most important units alive.

3. Ice Barrier: This little popsicle isn’t going to do much on its own, but the craftiest PvPers can use it as a tool to thwart their rivals.This ice pillar is built fast and cheap, can be used to block large creatures from taking certain paths and allows you to use abilities that were designed for defense, like Home Soil (40 percent damage buff near buildings), while on the offense.

Until that issue of our magazine arrives on your doorstep, sate your thirst for Guild Wars 2 info with this 10-minute video of raw, bloody combat of multiple professions in Guild Wars 2!

My personal favorite thing to do with videos like this is watch them frame-by-frame, trying to spot little bits of info, easter eggs or hints in the background. And I know some of you (I’m looking at you, Guild Wars 2 Guru folk) are doing the same. What insight are you able to glean from this?

PCG: So let’s clear up some facts before we get into anything else. There doesn’t seem to be a reward for completing the starred options in group-finder queue.

Chris Cao: That was a total bug. We just put in the fix with the Feb update, but you [should be] getting a tier 2 badge if you are doing the Alerts or Duo dailies–you’re actually getting the highest armor badge. If you do a Duo daily, you get 1 tier 2 badge and if you do the alert you get 2 tier 2 badges.

PCG: And that’s a one-time-per-day reward?

CC: A one-time daily reward. It lets you slow boat your raid armor. Some of our guys playing here don’t have as much time as others running around in tier 2 batsuits but we are getting up there to start buying our pieces. Even if you can only play with one other person it gives you a route to get that end game armor

Together we must stop the giant bird people!

PCG: How do raid lock outs work? When do they reset? Are you locked to a single instance?

CC: This is actually something we’re adding in the near future: an in-game help resource which will be explaining a lot of things including these things because there are a lot of subtleties that are unique to our game. Actually what’s interesting is some of the players don’t understand roles fundamentally because they haven’t played MMOs before. While we do list them and show them the abilities, we need a clear place that goes “OK, here is how this works”.

So in the case of the lock out timers (which are actually victory flags), when you look at your UI you’ll see that red flag which means you’ve actually taken loot off a boss. Coming up in this update or the next we are going to tell you per instance when you queue for an instance if you have victory flags for bosses in there. Our loot system doesn’t actually lock you out of the instance, it just keeps you from getting loot off a boss. The reason we did that is because we wanted people to group with their friends so you can raid as much as you want per week but you can only get loot off a boss once within a given a week and then it resets. The dailies and the weekly victory flags reset on the cycles so you can do that stuff but you can’t get loot off that given boss.

PC Gamer: I often see readers comparing the amount of content or polish in DCUO to MMOs that have been out for 5+ years already. It’s gotta be tempting to go for that quantity approach just so you can say, “Look we have as much content as these other games”, right?

Chris Cao: Exactly. I think those games had more [at launch]. If you’re taking about City of Heroes or Champions, its interesting because if you compare it to WoW (which only had 9 classes at the beginning, total)–I don’t often compare game to game but the reason I’m doing it is because they controlled the number of interactions. That’s what made their game fun in the endgame. They presented diverse classes that had different combos, that players could play test and have fun at endgame with. It’s never been tempting to me [to go for quantity over quality].

Batman didn't know that Captain Uppercut would soon betray him.

Some people may go for the popular side of that choice, but we know that in order to create an endgame that will have robust raiding and awesome pvp, Mark, our lead combat designer, I and a few other people are going to have to play every combination. And so we already have 300 something combinations in-game. If you take our movement types, our weapons types, our power set–that’s already a ton, not even counting roles. We did a good job, but we found a few things that didn’t work out. Super strength can do a ton of damage and if you’re Bane in the legends system it creates this awesome, kill-the-other guy scenario. Which is another layer upon top of it, but to answer your question, I’m always wanting to go with a quality experience over a quantity experience, because it goes with the content we built in the game.

Ultimately it has to get to an endgame and the games the [players are comparing DCUO to] don’t really have an end-game. We built a game that would be fun to play with your friends for months. There is gear at the end, PvP, the Legends stuff, Collections. There’s a bunch of stuff that’s fun. But why make the process take longer to have your fun? Yeah, it’s [shorter than other some other MMOs], but what’s funny is that it’s still longer than most action games you play. I think, honestly its funny our reviews are polarized: some are really good, some are really bad. And I think its because people go “OK, I’m going to compare this to the other thing that’s like it”. Which is completely natural. But when you do so, you don’t just play it and see if you have fun with it. We decided to make MMOs more fun to play moment-to-moment and those are the guns we are going to stick to.

Collectables don't prevent you from being hit really hard.

PCG: Another major element of endgame is collecting. But collections haven’t really come into their own yet, because of the lack of auction houses. You’ve said before that crafting professions don’t make a lot of sense in a superhero world, but do you ever foresee crafting professions being added to the game?

CC: First off, the Broker is going out in the February update so that will help in the collection side–a lot–because people haven’t discovered what cool things there are from collections yet. Collections give you things like temporary pets, unique abilities, superpowers and clickable things that you can get. There’s a lot of stuff there and there isn’t a great way to trade them, so its hard to complete those collections.

At the end of the day, MMO guys get into the checklist side of things: I’m an MMO gamer and I see this new game and I go, “OK does this new game have this checklist?” and then I play it and then I complain that its exactly like everything else I play. At the end of the day we changed combat, we changed movement and we changed it to some degree that we still have very classic endgame very classic PvP matches. We have badge hunts and the rest of it. But it’s the interesting [elements] that are specific to DCUO.

First, in DC you move quickly, which is the reason collections are so big. If you notice when you stand to them, they are half the height of a character because its hard to see things at the speed that a superhero is moving at. I bring this up, because what I like out of most trade skill systems is the harvesting side of it, not the combining side of it. That hunt and peck for something you do in the universe, we’ve got that. Its not just, hey go out and go pick the same thing to make the same thing. That’s the part we don’t have.

We want you to go look for the stuff, trade with your friends and get cool rewards on the other side by collecting it. I can see putting [crafting] in there. But there’s fundamentally two types of games: Games that have cool harvesting and that’s part of the regular gameplay, and games that have trade skills where they dedicate time to the actual crafting of items–I don’t think that’s ever in DCs future. That isn’t the superhero style.

That doesn’t mean the harvesting side won’t be there or we might not continue to build on our collections. But I think its still gonna be something you can do at your superhero speed in those cases that ultimately get you those rewards. I’d like to see how collections pan out for people. I think ultimately, because they are not making armor repeatedly or making a hat, the hardcore people will go, “This isn’t trade skills!” But at the end of the day what you really want is something else to do besides fighting.

That’s what you’re looking for: rather than “trade skills,” you’re thinking, “Hey what is something else I can do?” Like I said ,downtime is a different kind of fun. Not an end of the fun. It’s gotta be something else you can do that’s fun that you can do while you’re waiting for a queue or your friends. There needs to be something more that you’re doing that isn’t necessarily beating on a guy.

We have races and we have this collections and investigations, and we are going to continue to fatten out that side of things as well as add more dudes for you to punch in the head. That’s our tactic. I’m not going to say “never,” but I think when you go with the MMO checklist, you get locked into the MMO checklist and you don’t look at what it’s going to make a great experience based on the game you’ve made.

And the flip side of that it works as the same thing, we are just at the beginning of this game. This game is evolving and what we are talking about at launch is just the tip of the iceberg of what players are going to experience.

PCG: Mod support is a great way to let the players’ create their own workarounds for UI issues. Are there any plans to add mod support in the future?

Chris Cao: Possibly. We made a decision to not have a modifiable UI because [it's easier on] the development side. We already cleaning up some issues with the UI, but the updating the UI on the PS3 is the unfriendliest thing that there can be. So we’ve had to be really careful with it. What we thought we would do is, “First off, let’s launch the game and figure out what works well, then [see what] options we have to work with it.”

I think that’s a good reason why we split the two platforms. Not the UI specifically, but because sometimes there are things that need to go to one audience that doesn’t need to go to another. That said, there are things we could do that are much more PC-sensible, without necessarily trying to create a disparity between the products. [For modding in particular], we want to make sure, that that we’re allowing it because we really value it, not just “Hey, the PC guys want to be able to mod their UI,” but more, “As a product, how are we going to make DCUO for both audiences? And what can we do to customize it to each one?”

Curse you, social menu, bane of my existence!

We had discussions internally about allowing modding, but haven’t come to any decision yet. It’s the obvious that a lot of other games allow modding, but they don’t have the same constraints that we do: we have to keep making stuff for both audiences. I don’t have a final word on it, but we’re watching and seeing what’s going to be the most important thing.

I think i some cases [we'll do platform-specific changes] even the little things like, we’ve now added support to make it easier to use a keyboard if you have a Bluetooth keyboard for PS3. Quite a few people are using it for text chat, so we’ve said, “OK, for that audience we need to do PS3-specific things to make it easier to communicate there.” On the the PC, we’ve done some of the same things to help people have better access to slash commands. Overall, for the customization, we’re going to start off with careful steps to improve the UI, and then look at the other things. I don’t want to say there won’t be mods, because these games live for years and obviously more stuff is gonna be added, but we have to be careful that it doesn’t create such a disparity between the services that suddenly the game gets different at a root level.

We may not be able to mod, but they can't stop us from DANCING!

PCG: Do you think it’s possible to keep the two platform versions similar in the long run, with only small deviations along the way?

CC: I think the big deal is that there will be camera and control and UI changes that will be at the forefront of everything as we find what works better [for both platforms]. Moving social elements to the Quick Menu is a good example: having a few extra steps of delay whenever you wanted to look at your PDA [or friends lists] was clunky. So we moved it to the Quick Menu, because the Quick Menu has become a great place for us to put the things we do repeatedly.

Those types of changes are easier to make because what it comes down to is: if we do anything that starts to affect gameplay balance in PvP or PvE, we have to start balancing the game in two different ways, and that starts to create two different experiences. As soon as I start to imbalance the experience on the PC vs the PS3, one is easier than the other. I think a good example of this is our races. Some people find races easier on the PC than the PS3. We didn’t intend for that to happen, but because of the nature of the race [which you hurdle around the city at break-neck speed following through a series of rings -Ed.], having a mouse point where you want to go directly is easier, with some movement modes, than controlling the camera independent of movement with a stick [on a gamepad].

My personal favorite graphic in the game at launch: placeholder rockets!

In those cases that [the controls cause the difficulty to] actually diverge, and we have a case where in some ways its easier on the PC than the PS3, we aren’t gonna try to forcefully lock-step them. We’re going to take that in stride and do what we can, but we want to be careful of those because we don’t want it to be so radically different that when you’re talking to your friend about playing DCUO and he looks at you funny because on the PS3 it was completely different. We still want it to be one universe conceptually, because then its easier to tell the story and keep things going.

PCG: A few of my comic book-savvy friends are upset that they can’t perfectly recreate a character like Superman or Flash because the game’s six power sets don’t really match those characters. Do see that as a problem that needs to be addressed or is it just a side effect of turning a comic book universe into a fun MMO?

Chris Cao: I know there are a lot of people who want to make a specific character, maybe you have a character concept in your head. There are other comic hero MMOs that create power sets that have no powers because it lets people do certain things. We are looking at it, but what it comes down to is that there are two types of people playing DCUO: those who want to create a specific character concept and that’s more important than the game play or cosmetic variety, and those who want rocking gameplay and abilities that tie together. That’s the spectrum: I don’t think players are one way or the other, you’re somewhere between that.

For us, the developers, we’re staying towards the gameplay more than anything, because adding a new Power type is the biggest change we can make in the game. A new power type affects literally everything we do. So our options are either give you a Power set that really isn’t very different because that’s the only safe way to add to it (giving you something that you already have and put different effects on it). Those character concept guys [want that sort of thing]: they’re like, “I don’t care if it’s different, at least cosmetically, I can get more into my character.”

I want to be just like these guys, except that Grundy fellow. He's kinda gross.

The other alternative (on the gameplay-leaning side) is to say, “Hey, if we’re going to add more powers (and we will), let’s do it as totally different powers that feel different and provide different gameplay choices.” I think our weapons show how different we try to make things. Two-handed feels very different than Bow or Dual-wield and the rest. We’re trying to strike that balance [between new types and truly different types], and I think we’re always leaning on the gameplay side of those options. I’m not trying to stretch the answer out, but it’s really about different people playing the game and a lot of different points of expectation that they’re going to have. And we are always going to err on the side of things that makes the gameplay rock and gives it tactical combos and tactical multiplayer choices, rather than just trying to satisfy a player’s specific type of hero/villain concept.

One particular case is the Superman and Wonder Woman thing: they have power with no powers. We have their powers in the system, its just people want it called something else. We have Brawling in the game, and if you want to punch guys and smack things around, take the Brawling power set and Super Strength skill and you’re doing the Superman thing. Yes, you may have to pick Ice as a Power set, because we made a balanced system where everyone has a weapon, power, and movement mode. But if you want to get into that debate: we do have flexibility in our system. You can role play Superman no problem. You don’t have to use the Ice powers that are offered to you for tanking and those sort of things. You can mix your Power and Skill points, but its fundamentally a MMO, and that means it needs to play well as a multiplayer game with roles and abilities. That’s always going to be our first foot forward. On the cosmetic side, we’ll always try to put stuff in for it, but its gotta work as a game first.

Bop! Bet you didn't learn that trick in martial arts school, Batjerk.

PCG: The iconic powers that everyone can access seems to be a good container for things like Superman’s laser eyes and Wonder Woman’s lasso.

CC: If you made a system that was perfect on the customization side, it would fall onto the gameplay side because they are at odds. You can choose one or the other. Really, DCUO’s the kind of game you want to play and we want to make it fun to play with your friends as well as give you the cosmetic side of it, but that’s secondary.

PCG: As far as adding new powers in the future, the most obvious one currently missing is the Green Lantern’s light powers. You could also do Cyborg’s techno-augmentation. Are there any power sets that aren’t implemented yet, that you peronsally want to see added sometime in the future?

CC: Designing power types based on one specific hero or villain is the main paradox in making a superhero MMO–if you’re making a game that only has one main hero: like a Superman game or Batman game, its probably less of a problem, because the abilities are customized to that character. But anytime you create something that’s more broad (like a power set in DCUO): your inspiration is specific, but your results have to be general.

Superman is a great example: he breaks all the rules. He’s super strong and super smart (he’s actually an incredible scientist). His story is full of alien technology, heat vision, cold breath, all of the sonic clap abilities, the pounding and ripping, and everything else that goes on. He’s a very specific case that people identify with and if you’re making  a game about Superman, you can replicate those abilities one for one. If you’re making a system of abilities [for players to pick and choose from to build their own character] you have to generalize and ask yourself, “OK, what bucket does this ability fall into?” Like th Ice power set in our game: ice is actually two sets of powers (all of the power sets are broken up into two main buckets of abilities). And even though they’re different from each other, they are not radically different, so we put them in the same bucket so, anybody who has elemental-like powers will be using, at the start, either Ice or Fire.

The Bee Knee's wardrobe for this episode was provided by GAP.

PCG: Did any power sets get cut during development?

We tested Earth internally, but we couldn’t make it different from those two just yet, and we didn’t want to put some kind of brown ice out there, so we put it on hold. It wasn’t cut, but personally I would love to add Light. We’re actually talking right now adding Light. It has a fiction and a lore–especially with the movies upcoming, there’s a lot of support–and when we do it, we want to make sure it’s cool and not just, “We colored some other abilities or we changed the particle effects.”

I think this is pretty key to our game and what’s interesting about it: there are other MMOs, superhero or not, where fidelity is traded for variety directly. You get something that’s lower fidelity because you get more of it. It goes back to your earlier question: Do you want fidelity or variety? Obviously everyone wants both. I think a lot of times, MMOs pretend to promise both. In an action game, [a type of combat or game feature] means something completely different fidelity-wise, and when in an MMO, players [may make the excuse] and go, “Oh, well ,that fidelity isn’t there because they had to make so much of it.” Whatever we put in DCUO, we’re going to put it in carefully and we’re gonna make sure it has its own value. Whether it’s another power tech or weapon–whatever we add, you can be sure that it will make a totally different experience. We figured as long as you like the existing game, we can build more over time. But we’ll only get that once chance to make a good first impression, and if two of our powers are too alike, you’re going to think that we cheaped out.

At one point, they had almost double the number of weapon types that made it into live.

PCG: Do you think there’s room for more weapon types to be added as well?

CC: Totally. We had 15 or so weapons that we played around with in development and we boiled it down to 9. In some cases, we did stuff creatively–like we had this Wand weapon type that’s a little bit like a Harry Potter superhero. And while it was cool and there are characters in the DC universe that used wands, we just couldn’t come up with enough badass combos. At a certain point, the guy with the wand is bicycle kicking and back flipping. It just didn’t work. So the quality-over-quantity thing came into play and we said “OK, lets boil down”.

Another example is we had Single Pistol in for a while, instead of Dual Pistols because there are a lot of DC characters that use just a single pistol. Again, we looked at it and ask ourselves, “Whats cooler? OK, dual pistols it is.” And how different are single pistols going to be from dual? We thought our time was better spent making a Two-Handed weapon type or making a Hand Blaster that will really be radically different [from anything else], rahter than making a Single Pistol.

A good example [of making weapon types feel unique] is Martial Arts vs Brawling. They’re different, but both are hand-to-hand. So really, we wanted to be different. We wanted you to be cool because, there’s a lot of weapons and powers that we give you, in addition, there’s a lot of cool stuff in movement types. Like the Flash is a great example. A lot of the Flash’s abilities come from Super Speed, not a power type. If you try to re-make Flash in DCUO, you’re gonna be bigger and better in a lot of cases, because you are gong to have more options.

But where are the kitten mittens?

PCG: The original plan was to release major content updated every month. But you’ve said more recently that the quality of the updates is more important then releasing them exactly every four weeks. Do you have an idea of what the absolute longest time you’d be willing to wait between updates, and what’s a realistic expectation for fans to have?

CC: It’s a tricky question because people are wondering, “Am I going to get something every month?” The general answer is, “Yes, we are going to try to get it to you every month.” But because we have internal processes we need to go through as well–especially because being on the PS3 inherently means there’s more [hurdles to release] than if you were just a PC game. Typically on a PC game, you can just build your own thing and put it out there, and no one else checks on you. But with the PS3, that’s obviously not the case and we have a higher standard to hold to.

So really, what we’re trying to do is: it takes X long to build an update; let’s get ahead of ourselves. As we are now, we’re building stuff for April and May potentially right now. Again, based on where stuff is going to fit [in the updates], we try to package it up and go, “OK, where does this fit best?”, but sometimes we cut stuff. There was actually stuff that was suppose to go in the February update that when I looked at it, I said that hasn’t cooked long enough, or in one case, it just didn’t end up being fun, so we cut it.

The reason I’m trying to expose our internal process to the player base is because it’s not as simple as saying, “Hey, here are these things that we’re gonna plan and they’re all going to end up being fun and cool.” At the end of the day, we play what we’ve built and go “Wow, that wasn’t or was cool.” And sometimes we go, “That’s good enough–we could have made it 10x better with 10x the time, but we aren’t going to invest that.” And other times, we go, “Wow, we’re lucky that worked out.”

What we’re tying to do is [release the major content update] roughly every month. The main reason for “roughly” is that it can’t be “X day of every month”, because different months have different number of weeks, so it starts to get off cadence. But basically, you are paying us a subscription fee each month and we want to make sure to give you value each month, and give you fixes in every update and add more and more stuff to the game. I don’t want to set players expectation that, “Yes its this,” and then they’re disappointed because we didn’t meet the date, but met the content. Judge us based on what we add, and not when we add it–and we will add it as fast as we can at a regular pace.

I will grind this instance for months if that whip has a chance to drop.

PCG: Are these content updates going to be targeted to end-game or low-level content? The February update seems to have a bit of both.

CC: For the first one, we knew that we had to give everybody a little something because we’d still have people hitting max level. Right now we don’t have exact percentages, because we are still running to the end of the month. But more and more people are hitting end game than there were in beta, obviously because they’re invested in their characters and are going along with it. There are still a large amount of people who are still leveling up. As funny as it is, you have the sort of MMO guys who are like, “I’ll eat the whole game in one day,” but then you have the other guys, like the PS3 players saying, “Cool, I come back a couple times a week, and there’s still more for me do to!”

So with that breath of an audience, that’s why we have everything in this first update, from the holiday events (whatever level you are you can get in) to the level 30 stuff. If we’re going to add new stories, we want to have it be available to the most people. So while we are still looking at a few things we’ll add in the leveling game to broaden it out, we want to make sure to add the new stuff at the end. That’s where we have the raid and the duo and we’ve actually added even more than that to the endgame [in our plans for content updates].

A good example by comparison is in the March update. We are looking at our metrics and see that most people are Duo’ing or are about to dou–we really see where the audience is and where the bubble is. Since we’re growing and people are still coming in, there are a lot of people who are still leveling, but they want to see what happens to them in February [before they decide to subscribe or not]. And so that’s why we made it as broad as we did.

PCG: Thats got to be tough, at this point to not even be sure what you are going to be doing in March. That’s gotta be crazy.

CC: Actually we’re building March [content updates] right now, so while we haven’t released the details on it yet we’re watching the metrics [to see what players are enjoying most in the game], so we can build the stuff into the game that’s popular–whether that’s what you do by yourself or friend or a couple of friends or a lot of friends. So we have these sort of LEGO building blocks of content than we can go, “OK, lets add one of these here or there.” We’re obviously going to add more Batcave [the hardest Raid in the game right now], because even in beta, people played the Batcave.

We have to finish that series of Raids, but we’re building other stuff all the time: Alerts or Duo modes or whatever. And that way, at any time, we can go, “Well, which ones do we want to fit together to make March, based on the audience?” Some of the updates we’re building are dedicated to the focus character [like Catwoman in February], while others are meant to add to what we already have. So for example, we had to pull Bane into the February update because we saw that people were liking Duos, but we didn’t have a Duo lined up for February at the time. We were working on making Bane into a Duo alreayd anyways, but we didn’t know when we were gonna use him. So we pulled him into February, so people would have stuff to do with one other person. It’s a flexible strategy, because we have to react to what the players want. And if we don’t react to what players want, then we’re going to be off in left field and everyone’s goings to wonder why we’re building more X when they want Y.

No word on when giant electric hamster balls will be released

PCG: You’ve mentioned that the February update will add multiplayer races. Is that going to be like Mario kart, where we’re cruising around shooting people? Or how is that going to work?

CC: What’s funny is that we have multiplayer races in the game right now, but I don’t think most people realize what they are, because we put them in a starting stage [and you can play them by yourself]. There’s these races that turn you into great apes in the city that actually are multiplayer races. So if you got together with your friends, you guys would all get shape changed into one of the evolved or devolved (how ever you want to look at it) apes that you can race as.

In the February update, what we’ve actually done is taken it a step further. In the Valentine’s Day event, there’s another one of those multiplayer races, but it has “good” and “bad” hearts along the way. The good heart will give you speed boosts and the bad hearts will drop you out of the race. So think of it as our way of moving towards the Mario kart side of racing. You’ll still have to get together with your friends to do it, because its in a shared zone. Ultimately what we’ll do, if player think they’re fun enough, is take them to private zones and let people queue for them. It’s basically: superhero movement is so fun that races are a natural downtime activity for it.

PCG: Is the amount of content in the Catwoman update, not including the holiday part, going to be fairly standard for what players can expect to see on a monthly basis?

CC: It varies. The last time I played it, [the Catwoman storyline] took 35–45 minutes to complete. It’s a tricky instance, because it has 5 boss fights in it. Its not hard, but each boss does have different elements to fighting them. There’s some shared world part, but what we found was working well for us, is the instances give us higher fidelity content. There isn’t a lot of ways to have players be in a shared world with someone who’s as exclusive or elusive as Catwoman. She’s very much a one-on-one type of character. A lot of the stories that circle around her are robberies and what you’re doing with her. So we chose more of an instanced approach.

In the future we might choose to do more of the shared world content and less of the instance-based character stuff. Really what we’re doing is telling a story with individual characters. Our efforts are always going towards what’s going to play best for this character, and of course for Catwoman, that’s going into a place she’s robbing to beat up on the guys and finally face against her.

Sorry, Grod, Marketing just isn't a fan. We're gonna have to let you go.

PCG: One character that really stood out to me as I was playing, that didn’t think got his due was the Penguin. He got one tiny cut scene saying, “I’ll be here in the future!” What are some of the DC characters that you are personally looking forward to seeing how they pan out in DCUO?

CC: I can say this with Penguin: I understand where you’re coming from, because we treated him doubly unfairly because his restaurant got bottled up by Braniac! You can actually stand there and look at his poor house inside. But I can tell you, coming soon in the near to immediate future, Penguin’s coming in.

We have a lot of those characters–even Catwoman is funny, because you fight alongside her as a villain, and you see her a few places, but you don’t get to see her back story. So we definitely are punching her side of it up and we’re really looking for the highest profile characters that maybe didn’t get as much treatment as they would. Ambush Bug got way more mileage then he ever had [in the comics], but that’s because he’s a cool character that fits in the gameplay we added him into. And we are just going to keep pulling that up.

For me personally: The Rogues. A lot of cool stuff happens with The Rogues. We have them in a boss fight in Stryker’s Prison, but I think there’s more we can do with those characters and the Flash stories in general. We have a couple of Flash story arcs in there, but Flash is obviously a high-profile guy. Of course the Justice League stuff: we put two of those episodes in there, but we actually have reserved some JL stuff, because we want to keep it for awhile and make sure we do it right. We’re working with DC to figure out how to get that in. Some stuff, we built before launch but didn’t ship with it, because we looked at it and said, “Is there a better way to fit it in the game?”

And other than that, we’re going to be playing up a lot of those characters that we’ve introduced but not a lot of people really know. The big 6 everyone knows. They are classics and we used them well in the stories, but I think people like the Flash–maybe not Gorilla Grodd because marketing would kill me if I put more monkeys in the game–but I think that that tier of character is there [for us to use]. They’re not “secondary”, because they have their own book series–it’s just that they haven’t been in the forefront of the public because they haven’t been as big in movies or anything else.

PCG: What do you see as the top priorities for the dev. team to address?

Chris Cao: Well, I can tell you that we don’t’ spend a lot of time making a list–we just start working on fixing problems. Right now we’re actually working on chat actively and we released some more fixes this last weekend and early Friday morning [to help improve the stability of chat on live servers]…. We’ve found that [the problems with chat] have been very population-dependent. Because our leagues are so big (like I’m in a league that has 750 people in it) its’ basically stressing our systems so we had to put in more tech to make sure that that whole thing works.

Voice chat is the same thing. We’ve done a bunch of changes there, but there are more coming in the February update. Communication is the number one thing. for us right now. Actually to that point, as a part of the March update, we’re re-designing the social pane and moving a lot of aspects currently in the social menu out onto the quick menu, so that they’re much easier to get to, instead of it being buried in the PDA.

Grouping is fun, but it could definitely be easier to get started.

Basically, right now, the thing that’s making everything not work or more annoying is the chat and communication. Right after that, is grouping and group queuing. The queuing logic that we have in there right now, we actually had hot fixes go out for it–I think it was Friday again. We’re starting to address these issues. We tried out a configuration for launch which favored Duo Modes over Alerts–it let Duos suck up all the available cues instead of letting more of the alerts show up. We’re looking at re-balancing that right now. [Balancing that sort of thing] is just a matter of finding out what people like to do and whose using what. We’re also adding in logic that makes sure that incomplete or dead instances get killed off faster, because they are also taking way too long right now.

So those are the two biggest things, because (1) If you can’t talk to people, it isn’t an MMO. And (2) If you can’t do things easily with other people then, that’s an issue. Now of course, there are lots of issues. Like we sped up the load time on the PS3 for a lot of menus which will speed it up on the PC even faster. That’s just basic usability stuff. That’s the thing: we have a great fun game, but there are some bugs and stuff that’s making it hard to use, and that’s really what we are focusing on more than anything.

And of course adding more stuff for everybody to do, but the focus is really split between making it easier to group and easier to see whats going on. Swapping group loot and cycle stance, which is a minor thing, but you look for group loot a lot more often than you cycle stance. So it’s those little things. We’re playing end game, we’re playing the leveling game, trying to get those things that we just want to smooth out and not like a rough edge to you.

PCG: That’s a lot of the changes that I, personally, was hoping to hear you mention.

CC: Yea, and there’s a ton of other fixes going in there, like in some cases, there were duos where you could get locked out of a boss fight. There are a ton of that type of changes going in. We usually don’t wait for the [major monthly] updates for those, because its server side. We actually change that stuff as fast as we can. If it involves physical assets that we have to do in the game, though, then we have to patch those and we wait for the update for that.

I could really use some help right about now... guys? Anyone?

PCG: Another major problem that you didn’t mention is the animation glitching that people are seeing in PVP, which lets cheaters chain together a crazy number of abilities. Is it going to be difficult to fix that? Is that even fixable?

CC: Well we’re actually trying to find out what’s going on, to be honest, because what’s interesting is that what people are calling “animation glitching” [isn't really a bug at all]–it’s inherent to our system. It’s complicated to explain, so let me know if it comes across. Our system allows you to interweave weapon combos with abilities in your ability tray. That means that, in some cases, your ability tray needs to override your combo animation. In other words, if you gotta heal, you gotta heal right now because someone is about to die. So what we do is actually cut off the animation you were doing with your combo, and just instantly play the healing animation.

So sometimes people see what looks like a “glitch animation” which is actually our fail safe for when you need to heal or when you need to taunt or when you need to stun right away. We’re gonna override our own animation and make sure that that ability gets played, [but it's not resulting in additional attacks]. The reason I bring that up is that this issue has actually grown [out of proportion] in peoples’ heads in the community, because we didn’t communicate well that “Yes, our system actually does allow inner animations to get interrupted.” Now at the same time, we’ve been watching the YouTube videos and doing detective work to figure out how the guys are doing 20 attacks a second. We’ve actually found in some cases that its a data problem, because we’ve allowed abilities to continue through [weapon attacks].

If I were animation-glitching, I might actually be winning.

So we fix some of those. We also have cheat detection which I won’t go into the details on how we do it. But we’ve been logging and learning a lot of that stuff and fixing it back end on our side. In an MMO, you are always racing against the people. The game’s evolving in both gameplay and technologically, we have our logging in place and are applying fixes (which I won’t talk about specifically, but we are addressing these types of glitches). We don’t seem to have anything duplicating what we saw in beta, where we had a few exploits like the track and field ones or the specific one with the Amazonian gauntlets where you could stack stuff up.

Obviously, when you’re in PvP and you get unfairly ganked, it’s one of the most emotional things that can happen. That’s just gonna piss you off. But what’s happening right now is that I’ve been playing a ton of PVP and I’ve never had [animation glitching] happen to me; and I’m on a pvp server! Obviously, this is anecdotal, but what I have seen is people calling out what I already do (which are my normal combos and abilities) and call that glitching.

The way to really tell if someone is glitching is to look in your combat log. If you see that you got hit repeatedly by someone in a span of time–instantaneously twenty or thirty times or constantly dodging or rolling–that’s the exploit that we are hammering down on. We’ve already done a bunch of fixes on it, but because of our combination of systems, we gotta make sure we’re covering all the holes. We don’t have them all yet but we are working on it.

If you Google for a solution, you (like me) will find forum posts and How-Tos recommending a ton of different solutions–ignore them all. Before Nexon updated the client to be officially compatible with Windows 7 in 2010, there were a lot of problems, but nowadays there’s really only one: MapleStory requires Microsoft Visual C++ 2008, but oddly does not include it in its installation process.

To install Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 on your computer:

• First check Windows Update to see if it’s listed as an option in there. If so, download it through there.
• If it’s not listed in Windows Update, download the 32-bit version or the 64-bit version manually from Microsoft’s website, depending on whether you’re running the 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows 7.

Additional troubleshooting steps:

• Make sure that none of the executables (launcher and game client both) are set to run in compatibility mode. Most guides I found recommended running them in compatibility mode, but MapleStory would not run until I turned this option off.
• Try running the launcher executable as Administrator (right-click the executable and select Run as Administrator).
• If you’ve done a lot of additional tweaking trying to solve the problem already, it’s probably best to simply re-install the game. Download the installer here.

 
Did that solve your problems? Do you know of other solutions? Let us know in the comments below!

Abilities List

• Rabid Bite: Trundle bites his opponent, dealing damage and sapping some of their attack damage.
• Contaminate: Trundle infects a target location with his curse, gaining attack speed, movement speed, and crowd control reduction while on it.
• Pillar of Filth: Trundle creates a plagued beacon at a target location, which becomes impassable terrain and slows all nearby enemy units.
• Agony (Ultimate): Trundle immediately steals his target’s health and a percentage of their armor and magic resistance. Over the next six seconds the amount of health, armor, and magic resistance stolen is doubled.
• Decompose (Passive): Whenever an enemy unit near Trundle dies, he heals for a percentage of their maximum health.

Trundle's ability to steal his target's attack damage will give AD champs trouble.

Trundle’s backstory
Trolls have never been well-regarded beings on Valoran. Generally speaking, they are barbaric, cannibalistic, and sneaky [my kind of dudes -Josh]. They are creatures relegated to the murky recesses of the world, hidden away from most intelligent beings. Despite their maleficent natures, however, the Ruhgosk tribe of trolls never deserved the grisly fate that was visited upon them.

Generations ago, a twisted necromancer known as Hakolin the Bonecrafter attempted to enslave the Ruhgosk tribe. The trolls of this particular tribe are considerably more genteel than their ill-mannered brethren, although still uncouth by human standards. The Ruhgosk fought tooth and claw against the necromancer, ultimately driving him from their land. But as a parting gift, Hakolin afflicted the trolls with a leprous disease, forever cursing them and their descendents. The leprosy would have rotted their flesh away to nothing were it not for the trolls’ natural ability to regenerate. Caught forever in a hideous rotting state, the Ruhgosk endured their curse while desperately in search of a cure. They never found one.

A wise Ruhgosk shaman learned that he could magically bind the disease to a single troll, provided that the troll could bear the weight of the entire tribe’s curse upon himself. However, there was no such troll…until the birth of Trundle. His ability to regenerate is so profound that it appeared that he did not even carry the disease. As Trundle grew, he came to understand his gift and what it could do for his people. When he came of age, he took the curse from his tribe in a baptism of searing agony. Through the shaman’s ritual, Trundle became a horrifying creature whose flesh constantly sloughs off his body, only to be re-grown in an unremitting cycle. He has joined the League of Legends in hopes of eventually finding someone who could dispel the heinous curse completely.

Nothing soothes the burn of an undying disease like bloody club-clomping.

Favorite quote: “I’ve learned a thing or two about pain! Let me show you.” –Trundle

Personally, as someone who always chooses Troll as my race in any game that allows it, and usually picks a melee debuffer/poison-based class, Trundle sounds like he might be the perfect champion for me. I can’t wait to give his abilities a try as soon as he’s introduced to live servers (probably within two weeks, based on Riot’s typical champion release schedule). And you can expect a hands-on Champion Appraisal–a recurring feature we’ve started doing that judges every LoL champion as it’s released, telling you what to watch out for when facing them on the battlefield, how to succeed playing as them, and whether or not its worth your hard-earned cash– for Trundle on this site as soon as he’s available.

Contaminate lets Trundle claim a section of the map, like Zerg creep.

I look forward to smashing you with a club soon!

PCG: Let’s start simple: what exactly is happening in the big 4.0.3a patch?

Brack: [Today] is basically the day that the world is going to change. So, right now, everyone has two copies of Azeroth on their hard drive. They have the copy of the world that they’ve been playing for many, many, many years, and then they have the differences between the old version and the new version. The big thing for 4.03 is to change what data we’re using, what data we’re referencing. When you get 4.0.3a and launch the game, you should get the new intro, the new login screen, and you’ll log into the post-shattered world.

PCG: Even if this patch isn’t bringing the new races and the new zones, is this patch–the reshaping of Azeroth–the bigger change for players, you think?

Brack: I do, because the number of zones that you’re going to get, and the number of zones that are going to change is just hugely significant. You’ll be able to experience that immediately. Additionally, all the new race/class combinations that we’ve talked about, those will go live with 4.0.3a and the shattering as well. You don’t have to have the expansion to get those. So if you want to roll the Tauren Paladin or the Gnome Priest, then you’ll be able to do that on the day that we release 4.03a.

PCG: So for you personally, is there a race/class combo you’ve been itching to try?

Brack: I’ve played a lot of classes and I’ve played Warrior, but I’m thinking of doing more Warrior stuff. Maybe a Blood Elf Warrior, because they haven’t been able to be Warriors up to this point, and that’s exciting. And obviously everyone is excited about the Night Elf Mage.

PCG: What do you think players are going to do first after this patch and after Cataclysm goes live?

Brack: Well, I think most will take their main character and start working that up to 85. You’ll have some people that want to do a race change to either the Goblin or the Worgen, which we’re not restricting on day one. And you’ll have people who want to start a legitimate path to basically being the Goblin or Worgen, enjoying the new race experience. The new race experience for both those are the best new starting experience we’ve ever done, and that includes the Death Knight, which I thought was very cool. So, I think a majority of people will be doing the 80 to 85, and then there will be a second segment doing the new race, and the new race combos.

PCG: There’s a lot of exciting stuff for players, but as a developer, what’s the most fun part of seeing the patch and expansion go live?

Brack: Well, there’s just an intense satisfaction whenever you’ve got something you’ve been working on–I mean, we’ve been working on Cataclysm for close to two years now. So the idea for players to actually get to start experiencing that… You have some of that in beta, where you get to sort of unleash it, and you get your fans and friends giving feedback. That’s a great moment, but then actually having it on the shelf, and having people “doing it for real,” as the case is… that’s a really exciting piece, and a really exciting time.

There’s also, I think, one of the more appealing aspects for doing Cataclysm was this idea that we get to go back to the old world and make things right. Make them the best that they can be. Being able to redo Azshara, and making it really exciting and really good for once–that’s awesome. Having the questing being triple-A in Darkshore is just incredible and awesome to think about.

PCG: Yeah, when we ‘ve talked before you often mentioned that, as the developers at Blizzard, you were your own biggest critics, and you loved being able to go back and remake the world to make it greater. Are you content with it now? Is it as good as it can be, or do you still see things that you want to tweak?

Brack: Oh, there’s never any part of the game that we feel is perfect. We always have things that we’d like to do. If we had five more years to go back and work on the old world we would do it, and it would be the best old world ever. But, would there be stuff that we could still do after that? The answer is absolutely. So, no game is ever what any one developer wants, and there are always ways to improve. Particularly at Blizzard, where our whole culture is based around this iterative development, based on working in passes and making things better, you know, there’s always more passes you could take to make things better.

PCG: But you’re pretty content with the way it is? You don’t have any misgivings with putting it out the door the way it is now?

Brack: None whatsoever. This is the best expansion that we’ve ever done, and it’s the best content that we’ve ever made by far.

During our time spent with Steenberg at the PC Gamer compound and conventions during the past year, we’ve gotten to see just how slick all of the tools he’s build (including the animator) really are–as an artist, Eskil’s crafted programs are as elegant in their simplistic design as they are easy to use. You can always download the latest version of the animator tool here, and be sure to follow Eskil Steenberg on Twitter to get the latest updates on when the tool, and LOVE, are updated.

PCG: What can players do with the animator tool you’re giving away?

Eskil Steenberg: First of all, it’s a fun toy to play around with, and it gives you an idea of how the animation in LOVE works. But it’s also a tool for other game developers–who don’t have access to a lot of animators or motion capture tools [like large, corporate developer studios do]–to create fully-animated characters in their games.

PCG: How many hours have you put into designing and tweaking the animator tool?

Steenberg: I wrote the majority of it while traveling in California (and visiting PC Gamer) earlier this year. And after that I took another week to clean it up, so all in all about 2 – 3 weeks of work.

PCG: Did you make all of LOVE’s animations with this tool?

Steenberg: LOVE’s animation system is based on a library called “Confuse” that handles all animation [in the game]. It is specialized for games because it can do most of the animation automatically, such as finding places to plant a character’s feet when it’s walking dynamically, depending on terrain. It can also take a simple pose like aiming a gun and then modify that pose if you’re aiming in another direction. It also handles things like picking up and putting back weapons and tools that you carry on different parts of the body. In games, characters often need to be able to do many things at once–like walking, aiming a gun and pressing a button all at the same time–and this animation system can figure out how to blend the different animations to do [all of those actions at the same time without designing multiple specific animations].
The animation editor was built to edit the data of this animation system so that you can do more advanced animations more easily than typing in numbers by hand.

PCG: Is the animator tool that’s being released a stripped down version of the one you use, or the full version?

Steenberg:It’s the full vesion. And the release even includes source code for the tool and the Confuse library, so that you can modify or port it, or use it in your own projects license-free.

PCG: After making such a useful animator tool, what made you decide to give it away for free?

Steenberg: This year at the graphics conference Siggraph [link] someone asked Ed Catmull–who is the President of Pixar and the inventor of texture mapping among other things–how Pixar decides what to show publicly and what they keep secret for competitive advantage. Ed answered that most of the things they don’t show publicly, they keep secret not for competitive advantage, but because they are so embarrased about them. Giving something to the public is a very good way to ensure that you don’t do a hack job. If you know that others will see or use [the tool you're making] then you will fix more bugs then you otherwise would, and in the long run, that turns out to be very good for you too. I have given away almost all tools I’ve made and it has proven to be very good.

PCG: While we have you, can you share any plans you have for animations in LOVE in the near future?

Steenberg: In the past, the tribes [camps of NPCs located around the world] in LOVE have mostly only fought you, and that required them to be able to aim a gun and not much more. But now I’m writing a much more advanced version of the AI that you can become friends with. The AI can now befriend you, help you, follow you, show you things, sell stuff and much more, and that requires the AI to be far more expressive then it has been before. Some of the friendly AI behavior is already in the game but the players still usually end up shooting the AI, simply because the AI are unable to express its intentions.

You can always download the latest version of the animator tool here, and be sure to follow Eskil Steenberg on Twitter to get the latest updates on when the tool, and LOVE, are updated.

Updated with clarification from ArenaNet

In discussing Guild Wars 2′s business model–which continues the stand-alone, subscriptionless model of the original that required players to purchase the game, but not pay a monthly fee afterward–Flannum told us that he believes subscription fees can cause a developer to get lazy, because they’re making money whether they actually support the game or not. He continued, “The thing I would say [about not having a subscription fee] is that we actually have the continued support development model that encourages us to make cooler things than anyone else… If we have to sell you additional content like microtransaction content or anything like that, we have to give you something that you’re going to want to buy. We have to earn your money.”

“We don’t get to say, ‘Oh well, you know, we don’t have to release this content this month, since they’re all going to give us their subscription fee anyways. Let’s just wait until next month and release this cool thing.’ We’re actually kind of bound because if we need income, if we need this game to make some money, we better provide things that people want to buy.

“There are not many subscription-fee games that have equaled [what we've put out for the original Guild Wars since Prophecy shipped] so I think our content model ensures that you’re getting your money’s worth, because as the consumer you have the option to say ‘You know, I’m not going to buy that. That’s not good enough.’ Whereas the monthly fee [business model] takes it out of your hand. You better be getting something good every month for that–but that’s just not the case with a lot of games.”

We asked Flannum point blank if they would be releasing more dungeons post-launch that would be purchased as microtransaction purchases. Flannum confirmed to us that they’re definitely open to the idea–and more. “Yeah, we’re going to look at what the demand is. Look at what players want more of and we’re going have to release that stuff, because that’s the stuff that players are going to be willing to pay for, and that’s the stuff that’s going to make our company profitable.”

ArenaNet has already revealed that they’ll be selling Transmutation Stones, one-time consumable items used to customize your gear, in their cash shop. And although they won’t confirm if traditional cash shop items like XP boosts and fast travel consumables will also be sold, Flannum’s responses certainly makes it sound like there will be–if there’s demand for it from the playerbase.

But for now, ArenaNet has only hinted that they might sell dungeon content as DLC and confirmed that they will sell the transmutation stones. [See below for clarification] What do you think? Would you mind paying for an extra dungeon here and there if it means more fresh content coming out for GW2 on a regular basis, or would you rather they stick with the one-time-only payment and slow down development between expansions?

UPDATE:

Eric Flannum sent us a note to clarify a couple of things about their plans for Guild Wars 2 post-release content:

“We haven’t decided on what exactly we are or aren’t going to offer for money post-release. We’re open to whatever our players seem most interested in. If, after release, you guys would like more story content, more dungeons, more events, more maps or whatever, it’s something that we have to consider because ultimately making you happy is what makes us successful.  Whether we release that in DLC (like the bonus mission packs in GW1) or whether we do it through expansions (Like Eye of the North) is yet to be determined. As to whether or not there are going to be items like XP boosts available in the in game store, I can only reiterate what we’ve said before (and will continue to say,) that we’ll release details on it when they are available, and that our core philosophy of not requiring you to spend additional money to play the game and not making the game difficult or painful to play in order to encourage you to buy things from the store still stands.”

Giveaway: Leave a comment telling us where you would pillage if you were a Viking in today’s world and guaranteed to succeed to be entered to win one of 20 Vikings of Thule Posters (picture at the end of the article). This contest is open to everyone, everywhere (yes, even Canadians).

VoT just launched an expansion titled “Chapter 1: Slayer of Wyrms”, which introduces the game’s first questline. Before now, the game was all about dueling other players in turn-based combat by using abilities in the deck of powers, movements, and buffs that you’ve collected by winning duels. The quests are a more story-driven experience (although I still wouldn’t consider it a reading man’s game), with less combat choices and more watching cool art flash across the scene as dice rolls behind the screen calculate the outcome. It was a fun change of pace from the rest of the game, but I wanted to know more of Gogogic’s plans before I was sold on the new direction.

PCG: What did you want to accomplish with single-player content that you felt like you couldn’t do in the existing multiplayer gameplay?

Andrésdóttir: We read through a lot of feedback, and many of our players were requesting single-player quests. We instantly liked that idea because it enabled us to come up with more content within Vikings of Thule–mini-games, new storylines and other cool things. We would like to add more quests, but the frequency and size of them really depends on player reaction.

PCG: Combat functions fairly differently in single player–with a very hands-off approach to deciding who wins–than even fighting against AI in duels. What inspired that decision?

Andrésdóttir: As this was the first quest we were going to release for VoT, we wanted to add something new to the game. The first quest is basically introducing some new story elements while broadening the scope of the game. There is a real possibility that we will use the “traditional” combat system used in duels for future quests. We may even make a hybrid of the two.

PCG: The story feels very Norse-y, but how closely are you actually sticking to authentic Norse lore?

Andrésdóttir: The story is inspired but Norse lore, but it is not supposed to follow it to the letter. We are definitely writing our own stories while doing our best to keep the look, feel and stories authentic. In that sense the game serves as a good introduction for those who want to learn a bit about Norse mythology and Viking-culture. For example, the quotations from Norse poems found within the game all actually date back to the time of the Vikings.

PCG: Will players be able to make decisions that affect the story or will every player’s story play out the exact same?

Andrésdóttir: The game can be played in different ways. You can focus on gaining riches and maximize your economic gains or you can go berserk and fight your way through the game. How the game plays out depends on the preferences of each player. So, yes, the story you write for yourself within the game really depends on your own personal approach.

PCG: Right now, there’s just the one questline implemented into the game. How often do you want to release new quests in the future?

Andrésdóttir: Ideally, we would like to release new content on a monthly basis. Again, this depends on player reaction and the size of our ideas. Right now, there is no shortage of new content and potential features which we hope to include.

PCG: What are some stories you’d like to explore in future quests?

Andrésdóttir: As the game is rooted in Norse mythology and the incredibly rich Viking culture and history, there are many areas to explore. We would like to expand on different conflicts between mythical creatures and the gods. We may also have the players involve themselves more in the day-to-day life in Thule. Another idea is to build up quests and specific storylines for each of the map’s four major settlements to get a sense of their own identities. The possibilities are endless, but we will first hear what our players say before moving forward.

So what do you think? We all know Vikings are the epitome of masculinity, so what heroic Viking feats would you like to see made into a quest in the game?

Enter to win this poster in the comments!

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