Ive got a pair of Video Reviews for FFXIII for everyone this evening. Over the next few weeks I am going to be posting a collection of tips/videos and...

This week's MMO Report finds host Casey Schreiner talking up a host of industry topics including Star Trek Online's new episodic raid content, signs that World of Warcraft may have finally peaked (again), and Square-Enix's Final Fantasy XIV teasers bundled with the newly released Final Fantasy XIII for the Playstation 3.

We know most of you are here to see Casey's customary shout out to Massively.com, and you'll find that around the 2:25 mark. If you want to keep watching, well, don't say we didn't warn you.

Don't forget to check out the complete video embed after the jump, and watch for brand new episodes of The MMO Report every Thursday here at Massively and at G4TV.com.

Continue reading This week on The MMO Report

Filed under: Video, News items, Opinion, Humor, The MMO Report

This week on The MMO Report originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The event kicks off on Wednesday March 17, 2010 at 1:00 PM PST and is expected to last approximately two hours. To join in the festivities, head over to the SOE UStream channel and get ready to chat with the Everquest Community Team and other special guests.

In addition to the usual St. Patty's Day carousing, party-goers can expect to watch interviews with various Everquest alumni, assist the Community Team in making special St. Patrick's Day crafts, and chat live (via text) with both the EQ Community and Development Teams.

Filed under: Fantasy, EverQuest, Events, in-game, News items

EQ wants you for St. Patty's Day originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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“Dave Allen didn’t ‘depart’. I fired him back in February for insurbordination and for acting against the best interests of the company, the LLC investors (who I represent), the game and the team.” ~ Derek Smart

Quoth Cryptic's Bill Roper, in an interview with Massively:

"If a game comes out and it's not what the players believed it was going to be, what they think they deserve, what they were promised -- the amount of rage associated with that is kind of frightening, to be honest."

Where do players get these crazy ideas from?

For example, imagine that a hypothetical producer was out making comments about how some equivalent for gameplay-effecting items in the real money item shop will be available through in-game means. Why would someone reading that statement be surprised if, less than six months post-launch, the game announces plans for a paid "expansion" that is no larger than the content patches that all of the other games on the market include in their monthly fees? No one promised that new content would be included in the monthly fee, regardless of whether or not it looks suspiciously like "content that didn't get finished in time for the game's full priced retail launch".

Besides, it's not like trust matters in the MMORPG marketplace or anything.

As we mentioned last month, id Software luminary John Carmack will accept the Lifetime Achievement Award at the GDC Choice Awards tonight. And thanks to the internet, you can watch it happen. Grab some popcorn and head on over to GameSpot to view a live stream of the show. It all begins at 9:30 EST/6:30 PST [...]

The story of what happened to PMOG. Justin Hall, “Fate of a Small Social Games Studio” Justin started writing online 1994, did game journalism until 1998-2004, then USC Interactive Media Division 2004-2007, whih led to GameLayers Inc. In mid 2006 saw ppl playing WoW, this sounds great but we are already on computers all day working, why jump [...]

The Raid has almost reached it's donations goal and has come out with one of it's first videos to help boost interest for that last leg!...

I have been introduced to a new game lately, and I find myself playing a lot of it; quite against my will. The game is called “hide and go aggravate” and is a new twist on one of everyone’s childhood favorite game that involves seeking – and believe me if you find yourself an unwilling [...]

Recently Disney and Marvel had a little corporate love-making, and Disney made Marvel part of it’s plot to take over the world. Here is an interview with Stan Lee talking about what this could mean for Marvel & Disney’s franchises and characters, and some ideas or places they could go with it. While that in [...]

Recently while cruising the insanity of the internet, I stumbled across this little baby and suddenly… All my child hood dreams were robbed of me. The artist has his own site here! Share on Facebook

Filed under: News items, Champions Online

Recently we spotted an interesting post from Bill Roper, Design Director for Cryptic Studios' MMO Champions Online. On his Facebook page he showed a slightly blurry picture of a developers booth with the simple caption "GDC 2010: The developers of our Facebook Game." Sure enough you can now play a Mafia Wars style Facebook game while wearing your tightest spandex! It runs in your browser and hooks up to your Facebook account so that you can choose to announce level ups and achievements. You can also invite friends to form a superteam, customize your secret base and even attack other players.

Developer Lolapps claims to have "over 40 million active users per month, and has the largest network of social games and applications on Facebook." It looks like they know what they are doing, so it is definitely worth a look. Head over now, make your hero and get to stopping crime!

Get your Champions fix on Facebook originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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All EverQuest Live Servers (except Al’Kabor) will be coming down on Friday, March 12, 2010 at 3:00 am PST (PST is -8 GMT: 4:00 am MST, 5:00 am CST, 6:00 am EST, 11:00 am GMT, 12:00 pm CET) for an Emergency Game Update. The servers are estimated to be unavailable for 5 hours. News republished from [...]

With so much information being posted in the EQII Official Forums at all times, it can be very easy to miss some real gems and opportunities to share. The Treasure Chest is here to highlight interesting, unusual, and humorous posts. News republished from official EverQuest 2 website.

Steamworks is Valve Software's cloud computing solution for games.  For a big fat price of free, it allows game developers to integrate with Steam and it's many tools: anti-piracy, cloud, matchmaking/lobbies, and DLC.  Epic, developers of the Unreal games and graphical engine, have announced they will be integrating the Unreal Tournament 3 engine with Steamworks:

Epic Games and Valve Software have announced a mutually beneficial partnership to bring Steamworks to Unreal Engine 3. Valve's full suite of tools will now be offered to Unreal Engine licensees completely free of charge.

Steamworks allows developers to utilize any of the features of Valve's digital distribution platform in their own products, including Steam Cloud save importing, Achievements, user stat tracking, and DRM authentication. It's normally available for free, but its integration into the latest version of the Unreal Engine should encourage even more developers to utilize Steamworks.

"Valve has created a world-wide phenomenon with Steam and we're excited to be able to have the Steamworks suite of services available to Unreal Engine 3 licensees so they can take full advantage of all that Steam has to offer," explained Epic's Mark Rein, adding, "With Valve offering these services free of charge, the idea of providing the Steamworks SDK to all Unreal Engine licensees was a no-brainer."

I'm very curious to see where this leads. 

The number one annoying aspect of Steam is that so many games don't use its core functionality.  This forces gamers to track a dozen different game IDs and logins.  For example: Games for Windows Live games sold through Steam or games that come packaged with Gamespy for multiplayer.  Steamworks gets rid of all that and plugs a gamer's Steam right into the game, no extra managment required.  It is nice to finally see some bigger developers come on board with Steamworks.

SteveManly over at FFXIVCore has come across a cornucopia of information and images of Final Fantasy XIV from this month's issue of Famitsu.

Massively.com is reporting that Alganon's David Allen has parted ways with Quest Online and is no longer involved with the game. Allen has been replaced by the often controverseial creator of the Battlecruiser 3000AD series.

This week's Community Spotlight focuses on the thread "Sooo... The Future for MMO's? - 5 Things you would like to see" by Breezeycouk. Breezeycouk's thread is an attempt to channel a lot of the dissatisfaction and negativity many of us are feeling into a positive discussion on what five things you would like to see in future MMOGs.

Please note: You must be 13 years of age or older to participate and a legal resident of the United States (excluding the State of Rhode Island, and excluding Guam, Puerto Rico, U.S. territories,...

Massively: How do the Champions and STO teams collaborate between each other?

Bill Roper: I think it's really good the way the company interacts back and forth -- "Hey, this worked for us, you guys should do that too." "This totally didn't work for us, don't do that, do something different."

Craig Zinkievich: "Hey, you know, about three-and-a-half weeks after launch, don't have a free 90-day promo! Don't do that! That didn't work well!" [Laughs]

Continue reading GDC10: A chat with Cryptic's Bill Roper and Craig Zinkievich

Filed under: Events, real-world, Star Trek Online, Champions Online

GDC10: A chat with Cryptic's Bill Roper and Craig Zinkievich originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The idea of virtual worlds and MMOs based on established brands is not a new one, and Virtual Fairground is a company that's been in the market for a bit. They've had the time to fine tune the concept and find exactly what they want to offer their audience. We spent some time with Maarten Brands and Ilja Goossens of Virtual Fairground at GDC this week and heard all about what the company is working on and what their goals are.

Follow along after the jump to see what they had to say.

Continue reading GDC10: Massively's interview with Virtual Fairground

Filed under: Interviews, News items, Virtual worlds, Kids

GDC10: Massively's interview with Virtual Fairground originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Champions Online's upcoming Revelation update is coming very soon and Cryptic's answered a bunch of (somewhat random) community questions regarding the substantial free content add-on. We're not sure if there was any kind of theme to this Q&A other than, "Hey, what would you like to know about Revelation?" Perhaps there were a couple people dressed up a vampires, in spirit of the new zone Vibora Bay, but that's a somewhat commonplace thing nowadays -- vampires, we mean.

Before we spin-out into a crazy off-topic rant about kids and their vampire tendencies, we'd like to point out that it sounds as if Cryptic is moving towards a more staggered update approach. Instead of spending six months creating one big update, they're looking to push out smaller chunks of content on a more frequent basis. They haven't specified whether that means every month or every few months, but we do know some new missions with longer storylines are coming -- as is some low-level experience curve smoothing. It sounds good to us, but we'll let you be the judge of that.

Filed under: Super-hero, Patches, News items, Champions Online

Ask Cryptic fields Champions Online Revelation questions originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Antonica has seen the Festival of Unity, the Commonlands has seen the Festival of Discord, now Greater Faydark is getting in the mix! If you’re of goodly alignment (or you’re looking to fight with Kelethin’s finest), come visit the Faydwer Faire in Greater Faydark! This solely player-run event in Kelethin will be a blast, offering [...]

I got my snark out of the way.  Before I continue, let’s rewind a little bit to the Volume 3, Book 1 Prologue.  The Oath of the Rangers starts off with a journey to Rivendell, where I eventually met with Lord Elrond to discuss a letter sent by Lady Galadriel regarding Aragorn’s need for the [...]

We've 24 new screenshots and a fancy new Convorteum trailer for you to enjoy!Don't forget about the screenshots! Ranging from images of the...