Russian publisher Russobit-M sent along two new screenshots from the RPG GoldenLand. This is being developed over at Burut where they are also working on the first person shooter Kreed.

[ more shots ]

Only 300 years passed since that time when evil hordes under command of dark god Drah-Shoo were defeated, and scorched earth of Golden Valley has found quietness. Country of Golden Mountains becomes more beautiful, than ever before and people have begun to forget a terror of evil times. Great Heroes, those who defeated terrestrial entailment of Drah-Shoo were canonized and Cult of Heroes has possessed souls of people. Inhabitants of Golden Land turn their glances out of their celestial protectors, Gods of Light, hoping only on themselves.

You can read and see more from the game at the Burut website.

Over at EuroGamer are six new screenshots from another upcoming MMORPG. This one is called A Tale In The Desert and is set in Egypt.

Voodoo Extreme has posted a Dungeon interview, talking to Noah Decter-Jackson of Complex Games about this upcoming RPG. There's questions on what the game is all about, the storyline, the leveling system, main character attributes and plenty of other things.

Unknownplayer.com is featuring some interviews with guys around the MMORPG industry over the next week or so. They've kicked it off talking with Wolfpack Studios and Shadowbane.

A couple of different UO: Lord Blackthorn's Revenge diaries for you RPG fans out there. Have a look at the dual personalities of Jonothan Hanna as he writes a diary published on GSD as well as MGON.

Ok, so nothing can follow that glorious Pay it again Sam headline, oh well. Salon has a lengthy article on Richard Garriot, aka Lord British. You may remember a while back Destination Games was announced as his new dev house, well not any longer. Richard joined up with NCSoft instead, the developers of Lineage: The Blood Pledes. A MMORPG game that is huge in Korea and boasts 3 million subscribers. Yeah, if they charge about $10 a month that means $30million per month revenue. Here is Richard on EA, his former publisher:

"They thought Ultima Online was just kind of a niche or a fad," Garriott says. Instead, he says EA was trying to steer its content toward casual, nonsubscribing gamers. "Instead of making more epic games like Ultima, they were asking me and our team to participate in the creation of Java applet Web games ... which didn't fit with my vision of either what I liked to do creatively, personally, nor my vision from a business standpoint of what would really be the place to target for revenue generation in this segment."

If you really concentrate, you can almost ignore the author of the article!

The Stratics IRC Network is hosting an interview with Lord British at 8pm EST this evening (Thanks Blues). It will also be broadcat for Windows Media Player if you choose to open location with this address: 66.28.48.200:18692

CamelotVault (Thanks Mitch) has something interesting about 3 employees being fired due to alleged character tweaking on the public servers. It's not really known if they were cheating just to have cool characters or selling stuff on eBay.

"The person in charge of quest investigations for customer service and two part-time phone support people were let go on Tuesday," she said. "We don't comment on internal matters. We do extensively log all transactions within Dark Age of Camelot, and take this sort of thing extremely, deadly seriously." Mythic's response, which came at a time when they were embroiled in another controversy involving the defunct internet rant site, Slow News Day, should reassure their player base that they will not tolerate cheating in any form, even among their own staff.

This reminds me of a similar occurence with another company allegedly catching some employees doing something very similar situation. It makes you wonder just how many people with admin access are doing things like this in these games and selling off items? I mean looking at the pricing for DAOC items on eBay. You can make an absolute killing in there.

So everyone pretty much agreed that when Verant announced they were going to be doing a Star Wars MMORPG, when that game is completed a notable percentage of all computer geeks around the world will most likely disappear. What's gonna happen to the rest? They are gonna be playing the Magic: The Gathering MMOCG game being developed by Leaping Lizard Software. How the hell do you turn a card game in to a MMOCG?

Most of you will at least be familiar with the name if not the game itself, but the big news here is that Wizards of the Coast is making it even more accessible than it has ever been. They've been thinking about this one for quite a while now and have been in development for almost two years and come next year will be unleashing Magic Online upon the world. While the online version of the game isn't going to change anything drastically from what everyone knows and loves about the game, it is going to make it a lot easier to play for those that have found themselves wandering from the flock due to lack of competitors.

Yeah.. not quite sure how that one is gonna work out.

Here's a pretty good interview with David Gaider of BioWare, authors of Baldur's Gate2. Topics include particular features that were in BG2 and stories behind them, as well as how they had considered letting Druids talk to smart animals. Thanks Mick

Some video footage of the next EverQuest expansion pack is available for download at Games Domain as well as Computer and Video Games. (Thanks Blues) It's just over 5 megs for the download.

EBGames is sporting a Dark Majesty interview (Thanks Blues), the just released expansion pack for the Asheron's Call MMORPG title endorsed by Microsoft and developed by Turbine Games.

Here's some footage and a trailer for the new Asheron's Call expansion, Dark Majesty. The second movie includes about a full minute of gameplay footage and includes audio commentary by the developers.

Woah... nifty. Sega is planning on releasing Phantasy Star Online for the PC in North America. (In addition to the MS deal which mentions Phantasy Star showing up on the XBox)

Here's a preview of Motor City Online which has just shown up at GS. It's a hands-on deal from the guys who got to play around with a beta copy of the game.

RPGVault has posted the second part of their Black Isle Studios interview (Here's part1). Pretty lengthy and interesting discussing the evolution of the industry and of course particulars about Black Isle. Thanks Blues

GSI has a new hands-on preview of the upcoming Asheron's Call expansion pack. No doubt AC fans already know every possible thing about it, but perhaps you've been out of the game for a while and are considering a coem back?

If you're a massive multiplayer junky then here's a bigass article for you to spend some time with. Massive Muliplayer Online has a big old showdown of several different games. Thanks Daniel

More Future of Online Gaming to read over the weekend. These guys are smarty man experts so they know stuff or at least they lied really good on their job applications. Both count!

4) Do you think photo-realism in MMORPGs is inevitable, or is there an advantage to having less-than-real life graphics in an online game? How far away would you say we are from said photo-realism?

Richard Garriot: Just like in the animated movie business, there will be a strong push for increased quality. This does not mean photo-realism. Plus there will still be room for the art house avant-garde styles of fuzzy graphics and off the wall game play, but the core of money making games will have high quality polish in all aspects. For Virtual Reality style MMP's photo realistic graphics will be the norm. What will set them apart is how uniquely the world they envision is conceived. Creating a compelling and yet unique world will be the next round challenge. This first round of MMP's has created a bunch of pretty much the same games. They vary slightly in sci-fi ness and easy versus hard core features, but there is little true innovation yet.

I'd think once the technology is available for photo-realism it'll be the hip new thing for a while, but then we'll probably see a separation of photo-realistic games and the more artsy fartsy kind of stuff as both have something to offer.

PC.IGN has an interview with Cybernet, a massive multiplayer technology backbone created for licensing to developers to use with their massive multiplayer games.