Ranga14 writes "The recently announced Command & Conquer 4 seems to be following the same path of Blizzard's Starcraft 2 in having no LAN/offline multiplayer. They will require users to be logged in at all times to even be able to play any facet of the game. What will this mean for LAN parties, gaming events and those who don't play online? Is this a sound business decision, or do EA & Blizzard not get that this method of attempting to thwart piracy will fail like others have?"

ajs writes "There has been no official announcement yet, but a number of moves by Blizzard Entertainment seem to indicate that the next expansion for World of Warcraft could be titled Cataclysm. Speculation began when Blizzard trademarked Cataclysm recently, and then later when a test server briefly popped up with the word 'Maelstrom' in its name. If true, the name would fall neatly into the WoW lore and expected expansion list. The Cataclysm is another name for the Great Sundering, an event that created a swirling vortex of water and mystical energies (the 'Maelstrom') that has appeared on the world map in-game since release. There are also indications that early design work included some of the islands in this area, which has long fueled anticipation of a Maelstrom-based expansion involving the former Night Elf noble, Azshara, queen of the Naga and the Goblins whose main city is in the south seas."

EA has officially announced that Command & Conquer 4 will be coming to the PC sometime next year. They say it will bring the Tiberium series to an "epic conclusion," while introducing "new class-based gameplay, mobile bases and persistent player progression throughout all game modes." In an interview with Gamespot, designer Samuel Bass elaborated: "Our 'offense class' is your classic RTS faction, tank-oriented and focused on frontline combat. With the 'defense class,' however, the emphasis is on infantry, bunkers, and turrets, which lets you build complex defensive grids and really hold down a section of the battlefield. Lastly, we come to the 'support class,' which is based around utilizing a selection of aircraft and custom vehicles to traverse the environment. Once engaged in combat, support players can fight directly or assist their teammates with a variety of powers and [healing abilities]."

Ken Stanley writes "Just as interest in user-generated content in video games is heating up, a team of researchers at the University of Central Florida has released an experimental multiplayer game in which content items compete with each other in an evolutionary arms race to satisfy the players. As a result, particle system-based weapons, which are the evolving class of content, continually invent their own new behaviors based on what users liked in the past. Does the resulting experience in this game, called Galactic Arms Race, suggest that evolutionary algorithms may be the key to automated content generation in future multiplayer gaming and MMOs?"

D1gital_Prob3 writes with this excerpt from a story about David Myers, a Loyola professor who spent some time studying superhero MMO City of Heroes/Villains: "... he aimed the pointer at his opponent, the virtual comic book villain 'Syphris.' Myers, 55, flicked the buttons on his mouse and magically transported his opponent to the front of a cartoon robot execution squad. In an instant, the squad pulverized the player. Syphris fired an instant message at Myers moments later. 'If you kill me one more time I will come and kill you for real and I am not kidding.' ... As part of his experiment, Myers decided to play the game by the designers' rules — disregarding any customs set by the players. His character soon became very unpopular. At first, players tried to beat him in the game to make him quit. Myers was too skilled to be run off, however. They then made him an outcast, a World Wide Web pariah that the creator of Syphris — along with hundreds of other faceless gamers — detested."

jasoncart writes "Veteran gaming man Dave Perry has shown off his OnLive-rivalling, cloud gaming service called Gaikai in a new video that is drawing a lot of attention. As you can see from the video, Perry plays World of Warcraft, EVE Online, Mario Kart 64, Spore and more — all running on a bog-standard computer through the Gaikai website, itself running in a normal version of Firefox." More details about the service are available at Perry's website. He spoke about Gaikai in an interview a few months ago, and he seems confident that this will work better than OnLive (which we've discussed in the past).

incognito84 writes "The development team responsible for the creation of the freeware game America's Army 3 has been canned, days after the launch of the highly flawed game, which was distributed mostly via Steam. 'The anonymous America's Army 3 developers in touch with Kotaku unsurprisingly didn't sound too pleased with the current situation, venting that "a lot of good people [worked] insanely long hours on this game that was butchered by outside sources.' The game's launch was plagued by massive server authentication issues which inhibited most players from playing it even two days afterward. One of the developers made a post on the official forums saying they were 'effectively stabbed in the back,' and that much of the funding was filtered to the bureaucracy. A patch has been released to address some of the game's issues."

Aeonite writes "As the title suggests, Game Design: A Practical Approach presents a practical approach to game design — one that is almost too practical in places. The book does a good job of covering many of the foundational elements of game design (called "atoms" by the author), but in places the level of practical detail — and the heavy focus on Lua code examples — is a bit hard to work through. Readers allergic to code may find themselves skipping over swaths of text instead of actually reading it." Read below for the rest of Michael's review.

Kheldon points out a lengthy interview at MMO Gamer with developers from BioWare Austin about their upcoming MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic. They provide details about the game's method of storytelling, and discuss how they divide up the scenes and conversations such that one player may not always see what the player next to him does. Lead writer Daniel Erickson said, "What we wanted to do was be able to separate out people just long enough for the parts that were important for it. If you're going to go have a discussion with your dad Darth Vader, you probably want to go do that by yourself. Or, with your party, you can bring your friends with you. But you probably don't want a thousand people there, especially if a fight's gonna break out, because it wouldn't really make sense." Bioware also recently showed off the Smuggler class, and revealed that the game has hundreds of voice actors performing "hundreds of thousands of lines of dialogue."

An anonymous reader writes "We've all heard about user-generated content for games that have fixed toolsets — but this interesting piece on Develop has got me thinking about the idea of games production being opened to a community before development finishes. A new iPhone game (Aztec Odyssey) did that with its soundtrack; could someone do it with the game's art assets? Or level design? A great comment under the story says that LittleBigPlanet would have been more interesting if it was just shipped as a toolset with no pre-built levels. I'm inclined to agree!"

simoniker writes "Over at Gamasutra, a new feature article discusses how much money free-to-play MMO games make, with specific real-world stats from game developers willing to discuss how they make money with microtransaction-based PC games. In particular, Puzzle Pirates co-creator Daniel James reveals that 'the average revenue per user (ARPU) is between one and two dollars a month, but only about 10% of his player base has ever paid him anything. As a result, he says, approximately 5,000 gamers are generating the $230,000 in revenue he sees each month.' It's obviously quite a different model from the regular $15/month for World Of Warcraft, but it evidently works for some companies."

Karen Hertzberg writes "Over the last half decade, gamers have been forced to wander through familiar worlds and universes. Studios have been licensing IPs left and right, grabbing everything from the Wheel of Time to Star Trek. Originality seemed to be a lost art, and although these worlds were fun to adventure in, many didn't hold the same sort of magical spell that original titles like EverQuest or Dark Age of Camelot once enjoyed. But change is coming. Blizzard Entertainment revealed that their next MMO would be an original IP, and this year's E3 lineup featured more brand new games than titles derived from existing worlds. So, why the sudden shift? To answer that question, Ten Ton Hammer's Cody 'Micajah' Bye sent a number of questions to original IP development teams across the world."

Briareos was one of several readers to write with news that TellTale Games, along with LucasArts, will be bringing new Monkey Island games later this year. Tales of Monkey Island will be a series of episodic games released for PC and WiiWare in the coming months, and The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition will be a remake of the original 1990 game, available on the PC and Xbox Live. A trailer is available for the former, and this is what the press release says about the latter: "The development team at LucasArts is bringing the game into the modern era with all-new HD graphics, a re-mastered musical score, full voiceover, and an in-depth hint system has been added to help players through the game's side-splitting puzzles. Purists will also delight in the ability to seamlessly switch between the updated HD graphics and the original's classic look." Grumpy Gamer has a nostalgic look back at the franchise.

EA and Crytek teamed up for an announcement at E3, confirming that Crysis 2 was under development for the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360. Details are scarce (and the trailer is no help), but the game will use CryENGINE 3, which will be able to scale performance such that it will look good on consoles while still pushing the limits of PC graphics. Quoting: "When asked if that sounded like a contradiction, [Crytek's Cevat Yerli] responded that you have to think of technology as a tool that can scale. He said the game's content scales to the platform it's on. 'The PC version will look better, because of the fact that the PC can do more. It will be scaling up. But on the consoles, you're competing with console games,' he said. 'The goal is to be the best looking game on PS3 [and] the best looking game on 360 in the entire market.' On the PC front, Crysis 2 will compete with the original Crysis, which still sets the bar for PC graphics."

hansamurai writes "Left 4 Dead 2 has been announced at E3, and a trailer for the game has surfaced. It will be released November 17, 2009, just a year after the first game. Gameplay changes include a new focus on melee weapons, especially the iconic anti-zombie weapon, the chainsaw. The cast of characters is brand new, but the plot appears to take place during the same zombie outbreak." The game is being developed for the PC and Xbox 360, and Valve says it will make use of a new version of their AI engine, which has the ability to "procedurally change weather effects, world objects, and pathways in addition to tailoring the enemy population, effects, and sounds to match the players' performance." Rock, Paper, Shotgun got the chance to do a hands-on preview, providing details about the gameplay and confirming that "it's a coherent new imagining of the game, this time bigger, smarter, and far more elaborate. Oh, and gloriously more gory."

spidweb writes "The common theory is that games like World of Warcraft are addictive. But what are the exact qualities that make it so? Are there specific elements of the design that can be pulled out, distilled, and used at will to give a game drug-like properties? Is it wrong to do so? A new article at IGN RPG Vault attempts to isolates the exact qualities that go into making an addiction-based design. From the article: 'If a game uses rewards of any sort to entice you to experience highly repetitive content, you should see what it's trying to do and which of your buttons it's trying to press. If you don't mind, that's cool, but you should understand it.'"

simoniker writes "Over at Gamasutra, there's a massive new interview with Epic (Mega)Games founder Tim Sweeney, the guy who's still a key technical figure at the Unreal Engine/Gears Of War developer. He discusses his early programming days, the story behind classic shareware game/tool ZZT, the origins of Epic, the '90s shareware business, and even a bit about the future as well. Particularly neat is his revelation that you can still order ZZT via mail, with orders fulfilled by his dad: 'My father still lives at the address where Potomac Computer Systems started up, so he still gets an order every few weeks... he's retired now, so he doesn't have much to do. Every week, he'll just take a stack of a few orders, put disks in them, and mail them out.'"

True Vox writes "My fiance and I have recently taken interest in City of Heroes (she's currently got a character on my account). She's got a cute little netbook, but nothing nearly powerful enough for a 5-year-old MMORPG, let alone if we take interest in Champions Online! I am reticent to buy a new gaming computer simply for what amounts to a passing phase. Has anyone had any experience using one computer to control two monitors with two sets of input devices (e.g. two keyboards and two mice, or one keyboard, one mouse, and a 360 gamepad, perhaps)? I have seen one solution that might work, but not much information from users that I can find. In short, does anyone have any experience with setups like this?"

On Tuesday, the video game tie-in to the Terminator Salvation movie was launched for the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC. Most reviews pegged the game as solidly mediocre; IGN said, "the action is fairly tame throughout and the cutscenes are stunningly ordinary. And yet despite the poor presentation, there are some clever gameplay elements that make Terminator enjoyable. Too bad that joy only lasts a handful of hours before the credits roll." However, customers who had purchased the retail PC version ran into installation errors, leaving them unable to play the game. Now, publisher Evolved has issued a recall for that version of the game, saying, "a defect occurred during replication," and promising a replacement plan for people who had purchased it.

One year after its rocky launch, Age of Conan has stabilized and seen a growth in its player base, reports FunCom. What's more, they say, is that players seem to be playing for longer periods of time as well. Game Director Craig Morrison said in his May letter that work on the next major update, 1.05, is nearing completion, and provided some more details about the new features. This is the same patch which, due to the sweeping stat and equipment changes, will allow players who have a character at level 50 or higher to create a brand new character already at level 50. Reader Kheldon points out a two-part interview with Morrison in which he discusses the laundry list of changes they've made in the past year to improve the game, as well as some broader thoughts about storytelling in the MMO genre. FunCom also released some early details yesterday on two new, free-to-play MMOs they're working on, one of which is browser-based and one of which is Java-based.