Age of Conan launched in 2008 to mixed reactions, but much has changed since then. The development team has changed, the design philosophy has changed, items have become a lot more meaningful, and huge chunks of high-level content have been added. Now, the game's development team is hard at work on the next update for the game, Rise of the Godslayer, which will introduce a totally new area to explore--the faraway, vaguely Asia-inspired land of Khitai--along with tons of new gameplay options.

Rise of the Godslayer will add a whole new land to explore.

Khitai will be a huge land consisting of five contiguous zones filled with tons of new quests and new items. In addition, the land will house a group of about 10 new factions that will be tied to numerous faction-based quests and will offer dozens of new armor sets (in all of the game's armor types of light, medium, heavy, and silk), as well as one of two new riding mounts (either a tiger or a wolf) as rewards. While you can join more than one faction, joining them all and reaping each one's rewards will be nearly impossible because some these groups will have opposing goals, while others will flat-out hate each other.

In any case, it'll be worth it to try to gain at least a few loyalty ranks with one or two of them, especially the wilderness factions which have your potential new pet/mount. The new line of mount quests requires you to gain many loyalty ranks with the proper faction before you can even make the attempt. Once you do get in good with the right people, your character will need to strip naked (in game terms, that means un-equipping all your weapons and armor) and do battle with the mother she-wolf or tigress and actually steal one of its young. If you survive the battle, you'll have a wolf pup or young tiger that you must feed and care for until it matures to its "pet" state, at which point, you can have it accompany you into battle as a pet, much like any other pet in the game. However, you can perform an additional set of quests to fully mature your furry, fanged friend into a larger riding mount. Though if you do, your wolf or tiger will no longer be a fighting pet, so you'll have to make a choice.

We then watched a demonstration of some of the new dungeons that will be featured in the game. Like with some of the other, more recent dungeons in the game, the development team is designing new content that offers variety beyond what's already been seen in the game. In this case, one of the new dungeons, "Celestial Necropolis," will feature team-based puzzles that require members of your party to stand on certain tiles and perform a specific emote gesture.

One puzzle involves a chasm with a fallen bridge that will rebuild itself with the right combination, but requires some party members to stay behind and sit on their tiles while the others cross over and do battle with the bridge's guardians to secure the bridge from the other side. (These puzzles will be marked with hints that will tip you off about what kind of monsters guard the bridge and which party members you can leave behind on the far side.) The boss of this challenging dungeon, a meditating demon warrior, will use emote gestures of his own to summon floating stone monoliths to attack you, and you'll need to take careful note of those emotes to assemble the walkway to finally attack the boss. Another dungeon, "Pillars of Heaven," will be presided over by a bandit boss with the high ground who periodically orders his goons to pelt you with arrows from above. Unless you want to be Swiss cheese, you need to actually take cover in the surrounding areas to survive.

Come. Let me tell you of the time of high adventure.

Interestingly, Rise of the Godslayer will launch simultaneously in Age of Conan's regular territories, as well as in South Korea with Funcom's Asia publishing partner Neowiz. This studio has provided helpful insight into the preferences of overseas players, from user interface details to the appearance of the game's new Khitai race, which will look suitably exotic and "Asian" while remaining true to Age of Conan's low-fantasy setting of barbarians, brutality, and exposed bits of skin. Rise of the Godslayer is currently being tested on Age of Conan's beta server and will go live later this year.

Let's cut to the chase: It's GDC 2010, and game studios like Eve Online developer CCP are here showing their wares. We sat down with a few representatives from the studio to discuss Eve's present and its future, and we did our best to get some more details on its other projects. These include Dust 514, a console shooter being developed in China, and an as-yet unannounced game being developed out of Atlanta, Georgia, that may or may not have something to do with CCP's acquisition of White Wolf Games, which is the pen-and-paper game company that produces the tabletop game World of Darkness. What we came away with was a good amount of Eve, a little Dust 514, and absolutely zero on the third game.

Eve Online continues to grow even after seven years of operation.

In any case, CCP is extremely pleased with Eve's continued growth from its relatively small community of a few thousand players to its recent highs of some 330,000 paid subscribers (to say nothing of the looky-loos who are playing the game's free trial). The game has grown with CCP-developed expansions every six months and the studio is already working on the 13th expansion, Tyrannis. It will launch this summer and will add new mechanics for mining and exploiting resources.

This planetary gameplay will directly tie into Dust 514, which will be a console shooter based in the same universe as Eve. Though the CCP staffers were hesitant to divulge any details, they did again confirm that the game will work directly with Eve in that Dust 514 players will be terrestrial mercenaries who will form up in strategic groups that may report to the player-built "corporations" (Eve's version of guilds) from the original PC game.

In the meantime, CCP is also working an a separate expansion that will add an entirely new dimension--namely, one outside of your spaceship. The expansion, titled Incarna, will indeed let you finally step out of your starship and walk around on foot on space stations. This means your politically conniving pilot can finally go off the grid and engage in shady, underworld dealings. It also means that Eve will gain all-new character customization options that will require new artists and programmers to implement. In fact, the studio is looking to recruit some 150 new people to work on the three projects.

For the time being, CCP remains dedicated to continuing to develop the game and add new dimensions to it over time while remaining open to discussion with the community, but the studio is otherwise focusing on making day-to-day technical improvements to the game's graphics and, more importantly, to its network stability. Although the game's population has grown from a few thousand to a few hundred thousand, the studio refuses to split the population onto different servers in favor of keeping every single player on the same shard so that everyone can interact with everyone. CCP reaffirms that this is core to the game's philosophy and will never change.

GDC 2010 is underway, which means no shortage of new and like-new games is being shown in and around the Moscone Center in San Francisco. One such game is the ongoing free-to-play military shooter War Rock, which is celebrating its third year in operations. The game originally launched as a gritty desert combat game in a fictitious Middle Eastern country, but it has expanded beyond desert battles with loads of new maps (more than 50), hundreds of weapons, and a brand new team-based, objective-focused mode called Siege War.

War Rock's current focus is team-based siege war.

Siege War is a team-based mode that takes place in destructible environments with three different attack objectives that eventually lead to a missile launch. The attacking team must complete the objectives to trigger the launch while the defenders try to prevent it. This mode also introduces drivable vehicles, such as tanks, jeeps, and jets, as well as new environments, such as mountain passes, rivers, and lakes.

Next month, War Rock will introduce a new "gear" system that will let players wear new types of armor that will show up on their character models. It will also add both advantages and disadvantages when worn (heavy body armor will provide good protection but will make your character move more slowly, for instance). However, as before, the in-game cash shop that lets you buy in-game items for real money contains, and will continue to contain, all the game's weapons and armor. Some 90 percent of it can be obtained by spending in-game currency rather than real money out of pocket. And later this year, the game is apparently planned to once again reappear in North American retail markets as War Rock: Clan Warfare.

The Game Developers Conference event in San Francisco is rolling right along and so is Aion, NCSoft's 2009 massively multiplayer online game. If you recall, Aion is a game that let you play as a winged character belonging to one of two factions that inhabits a shattered world; a "light" faction and a "dark" faction. It also let you participate in competitive player-versus-player battles, as well as demon hunts in the void between the world's halves. While Aion had some interesting ideas, many players found the game to be too severe of a "grind," requiring many hours of slaughtering monsters to gain higher experience levels (which are required to access the game's top-level areas) and the conquering of instanced areas multiple times to get a chance at the game's best items.

NCSoft feels that Aion will continue to improve, especially with the upcoming 1.9 update.

In response to player feedback, NCSoft has implemented additional ways of obtaining bonus experience, such as "energy of repose," which, after you log out of the game, then later log back in, grants an experience bonus when you return that is similar to World of Warcraft's "rest experience." The studio has also recently implemented "energy of salvation," which is an active experience point enhancer that gradually gives your character bonus experience for as long as you're logged into the game. In addition, NCSoft has reduced the number of instances required to get to the better loot by increasing the "drop rates" of key items so that players are more likely to find them the first time around.

NCSoft is otherwise optimistic about how Aion has developed since launch, and representatives pointed out that there are still high-level instances that have not yet been conquered by players. This means the player base still has room to grow into the content. In addition, the studio feels that the upcoming 1.9 patch will help "lay a foundation" for a better game experience going forward by implementing such changes as letting two-handed weapon classes, such as the gladiator and templar, merge two two-handed weapons to create a more powerful item (to address a character balance issue), as well as a return of the game's final instance to make it more fast paced and action packed.

The studio has no official launch date pegged for 1.9 but plans to continue dutifully bringing over and localizing content from the game's Asian version as soon as is humanly possible, considering both translation to English, as well as modifying and adding content, to make it more comprehensible and more pleasing to Western audiences.

The Game Developers Conference 2010 is in full swing, and so are running press demonstrations of Allods Online, the upcoming free-to-play online role-playing game from gPotato. Those who find free-to-play games unfamiliar and scary will be in luck with Allods, since the game's graphics, art style, and interface bear a striking resemblance to a certain world where war is crafted, and its story and factions are also not dissimilar to the setup in last year's AION.

Allods Online GDC Preview

Allods Online is an alternate fantasy game with World of Warcraft-like fantasy elements such as wizards, orcs, and bows and arrows, but it takes that game's primitive clockwork technology to its logical extreme with interstellar travel on gigantic astral ships. The world of Allods has been rent asunder by a great cataclysm, leaving it in fragments (or "allods") controlled by wizards of great power. Some wizards are worshipped by the League, the game's "good" faction; others are worshipped by the Empire, the game's "evil" (but not really evil) faction, while a third faction of astral demons prowls the intraplanetary space and is hostile to both player factions (hence the similarity to AION, which has a "light" and a "dark" faction fighting over a shattered world where demons live in between).

In any case, Allods will have the quests and player-versus-player gameplay you might expect from a large-scale online RPG but will attempt to distinguish itself with its endgame. The current plan is to launch the game in North America with a level cap of 40, at which point you can commission an astral ship of your own. Astral ships are enormous floating airships that currently carry up to six players but will eventually carry more. Astral ships have numerous moving parts, including engines, steering, and propulsion, and gPotato suggests that you'll need a smart team connected via the real-time voice chat application Ventrilo to really get the most out of your ship's speed and handling. Ships will also have jump pads that can be used to board other ships, though you'll need to make sure you line up your jump properly or risk flinging yourself into the void.

Astral ships act as floating bases and also as the literal vessels for high-level gameplay, since you can use your ship to explore far-off allods that may house hidden treasures; you can get into astral ship PVP if you sight a ship belonging to a player of the opposing faction; and you can use your ship to go hunting for astral demons. We watched a demonstration of demon hunting, which is easier to get into than you might think, since demons can be tracked by your ship's astral map. Once you've located a demon, which look like phantasmal blue monsters, you can attack it primarily using your ship's deck cannons, which you must manually aim and fire. Unfortunately, demons fire back and will damage your cannons and your hull--you'll need to commission your ship's repair goblins (yes, repair goblins) to fix them by running belowdecks, picking one up by the scruff of its neck, and dragging it to the ship damage. Should you lose an astral battle with a rival ship or a demon to the extent that your ship suffers critical damage, everyone on board will die and need to respawn, while your ship will end up as a nonfunctional wreck in your hangar and will need expensive repairs.

Allods Online GDC Preview

Allods will, like many free-to-play games, let you play for free, but it will also offer a cash shop where you can purchase in-game items for real money. The game recently went into open beta, and the most popular stuff currently includes convenience items, like a larger container and experience-point enhancers. gPotato feels that the mitigating factor of letting players actually purchase powerful swords and shields will be that players can also take these cash shop items and sell them in the in-game auction house for the in-game currency of gold, so that players who don't necessarily want to spend the cash (or don't have the cash to spend) can acquire such items with in-game currency, as well as in various free quests.

Despite its more-than-passing similarity to other games on the market, Allods looks to distinguish itself with its unusual high-level gameplay. While the company has not yet confirmed an official, final launch date, the game has gone into open beta and is already available for anyone to try, complete with a functional cash shop. [Editor's Note 03/16/10: gPotato has contacted GameSpot and stated that more-powerful weapons and armor will in fact, not be sold at the cash shop.]

With GDC 2010 in full swing, it only makes sense to sit down with Nexon's free-to-play hybrid brawler role-playing game Vindictus. The game (originally known in Asia as Mabinogi Heroes) takes its lineage from Nexon's Mabinogi, another free-to-play online RPG that has been up and running for some time. But Vindictus won't be a cutesy game where bigheaded characters beat up roly-poly critters that disappear in a puff of smoke. This will be a much more mature game with graphic violence and plenty of blood…and more than a little skin bared.

Vindictus will let you play dress-up with a character, then use it to beat the daylights out of an army of monsters

Vindictus draws loosely upon Celtic legends that suggested that a mysterious goddess would reveal paradise to those who defeated the enemies of the state. In this case, the enemies in question are the "fomors"--a blanket term for a wide variety of monsters that will include undead monstrosities, giant polar bears, and helmet-wearing demons. The goddess in this case has remained eerily silent even though the weary characters of the world have been at war with the monsters for as long as they can remember. The people are starting to doubt, as are the monsters.

In Vindictus, you'll play as a character who belongs to a specific character class, which is currently gender-limited; for instance, the heavy melee character that uses two-handed weapons is male, while one of the game's spellcasters is a sorceress that uses a giant scythe-like weapon. While this may sound limiting, the game will have an extensive character customization system that will let you create characters with varying skin tones, facial features, tattoos (facial, full-body, and otherwise), and scars, along with hundreds of different clothing, armor, and weapon options. Interestingly, the game will have an ongoing armor damage system that will actually be shown on your character's model--if you've been taking a pounding from a bunch of demons or skeletons, or what have you, your chain-mail suit will start to deteriorate, revealing the clothes you're wearing underneath, and should you continue fighting, even your clothes will wear away. (Fortunately, all characters will be at least partially clothed at all times in their skivvies.) Even without apparel damage, many of Vindictus' armor choices seem revealing enough on their own--for whatever reason, Nexon feels it's important to push not only the game's heavy character customization, but also the potential sex appeal of having young muscular characters wearing tight-fitting clothes.

What's far more interesting than any shirt or clothes is the game's combat system, which seems based on the brawling mechanics from classic side-scrolling beat-'em-ups like Final Fight and Double Dragon, taken a step further. While your character can perform various combination attacks with his or her equipped weapon, as well as use any magic spells or abilities he or she has access to, you can also manipulate your enemies and the environment. Vindictus is being built on Valve Software's Source engine--the engine that made a name for itself with Half-Life 2's then-impressive implementation of in-game physics.

Savage beatings, scantily clad women, and blood everywhere. This isn't like other free-to-play games.

In Vindictus, not only will you be able to whack your enemies senseless with your weapons, but you'll also be able to grapple with them, lifting them and carrying them as living shields against oncoming attacks. You can also pummel them into environmental geometry (one portion of the demonstration showed a character pummeling a werewolf right through a stony wall that chipped away beneath the onslaught). In addition, your character can pick up environmental debris and use it as a melee or thrown weapon--pillars, small boulders, and shattered wooden trellises are all fair game. The Source engine's physics can also be used to set up attacks, such as cutting down a rope bridge with enemies on it, or pulling loose a set of logs that's restraining a boulder you can send crashing down on enemies below. The physics can even be used to solve puzzles, such as releasing the same boulder to splinter a filmy wooden barrier above a subterranean cave. And in addition to interesting physics, Vindictus will encourage group tactics with unusual mechanics like chain harpoons, which can be hurled at larger enemies (like the aforementioned giant polar bear) to drag them to the ground and restrain them so that your teammates can deliver a proper beating.

Vindictus' interesting physics, high-quality graphics, and surprising violence definitely help it stand apart from other free-to-play games. It's scheduled to launch later this year.

Online Games Blog
Spotlight On:
Everquest II: Sentinel's Fate

We recently took an advance look at Everquest II: Sentinel's Fate, the sixth expansion pack for Everquest II. The expansion is intended to mainly provide more monsters to stomp and more shiny treasures for high-level players, though it will also launch with new functionality to welcome newer players into the fold, such as a new "storyteller" system. This system will guide new players along a specific route through hand-picked zones in the game determined by expert players to be the easiest and most efficient way to gain experience points and advance a character.

Do we look familiar to you? (Hint: Check our foreheads.)

Among other things, The Sentinel's Fate will increase the game's experience level cap from 80 to 90, as well as add two new overland zones, a dozen new dungeons, and an entirely new kind of gameplay: battlegrounds. These will be cooperative, team-based player-versus-player battles that will take place on medium- to large-sized maps. The expansion is also scheduled to ship with two six-on-six battlegrounds and one 24-on-24 battleground.

As you might expect, the new expansion will continue Everquest II's ongoing story arc that involves the fantasy world of Norrath recovering from a ruinous cataclysm while being set upon by a new threat, The Void. The Void will play a key role in the expansion's story, though it's suggested that even this mighty foe may soon give way to a new nemesis that will threaten the land.

There will be many new monsters to zap and much more loot to grab.

In the meantime, the expansion will add Odus, the longtime home of the copiously cranial Erudite race from the original Everquest, as well as the Ruins of Old Paineel, better known as The Hole--a dungeon that also appeared in the original Everquest and will be entirely underwater. The Hole will be home to mysterious doings, including an evil plot hinted at in writings on the dungeon walls. The Hole, as well as other dungeons in the expansion, will have a toggle for "normal" and "nightmare" difficulty to let more casual groups tackle dungeon content but will reward high-end raiding guilds who take on "nightmare" level dungeons with the best rare items the expansion has to offer.

Everquest II: The Sentinel's Fate is already up and running on Sony Online's beta server with about 10,000 testers and will launch in a retail box on February 16 packed in with the original game, as well as all previous expansions. It will also be available as a digital download on February 23, but in the meantime, see more new screenshots of the expansion in GameSpot's screenshot gallery.

GameSpot has three continuous days of The Secret World coverage lined up for today (Wednesday), Thursday, and Friday. Each day will unveil a new video trailer for one of the three secret societies in the game.

Today's story is already up, and it focuses on the Dragon secret society--one of three societies in the game.

All players will be able to join one of these three shadow groups to take up the fight against the mysterious occult legends that have come to life to threaten the modern world.

Members of the mysterious Dragon society have been sighted!

Today's update includes an exclusive new video trailer on this organization, which you can preview below.

The story also includes some in-depth discussion with Ragnar Tornquist of Funcom on the faction, its combat skills, its diplomacy and questing skills, and what role Dragon characters will play in the game. Will this shadow group be right for your adventuring needs? (Hint: Maybe.)

Preview the trailer here and be sure to read today's story.

Also, visit GameSpot's The Secret World gamespace for more information on the game.

If space is the final frontier, then Star Trek Online may represent an opportunity to boldly go where no nerd has gone before. The online game from Champions Online and City of Heroes creator Cryptic Studios will let you play as an officer with either the Federation or the Klingon Defense Force. It will let your virtual space cadet pilot a starship and also lead an away team on foot.

Someday, you too can seek out new life and new civilizations. You can also wear a really cool Federation uniform, too!

Our tour of duty this time around was a different--but definitely not the first mission in the game--and mostly self-contained task that required us to respond to a distress call in a distant sector. From the in-game "astrometrics" star map, which abstracts the humongous distances between star systems in space, we charted our course and hit full impulse power, carefully avoiding any encounters with enemy starship squadrons that appeared on our map.

Once we arrived, we found the space station under attack by Orion pirates, who appeared in small, varied squadrons. Though there will be several different ship classes for your character to control in the game, there will also be different classes of enemy ships. These include larger cruisers and carriers, as well as much-smaller, faster fighters. Depending on what sort of ship you're using (and the ships of any teammates you've brought with you), you'll likely want to focus your fire on specific targets. Taking out any fighters first seems like it's usually a sound plan because these ships are faster and nimbler than any capital ship--plus, they go down quite easy. Unfortunately, cruisers and some other enemy ships will compensate for their slower speeds with additional tricks. These include heavier shields and heavy-hitting photon torpedoes, as well as painful space mines, which certain enemies can drop in abundance.

Getting caught in a minefield while being strafed by enemy fighters zipping past you and having larger warships dump photon torpedoes on your head seems like a more intense experience from what we'd seen in our previous, easier tutorial missions, but even though there's definitely a lot more going on, Star Trek Online's space combat still isn't a hectic game of clicking wildly. Combat is still paced like a naval battle--larger ships take time to come about and each of your ship's four shields (fore, aft, starboard, port) are usually pretty good at holding out long enough for you to either divert energy to the chewed-up shield area or activate an engineering special ability if you have an engineering officer that can instantly repair your shields to full.

Winning battles on the ground with an away team is just the beginning.

Actually conquering your enemies in a space battle really seems to be a matter of carefully timing and lining up your shots just right--kind of like what you'd expect from a system inspired by the traditional broadside-based combat of the Age of Sail. Most of the time, you'll be at the helm of a ship equipped with both phasers (the laserlike beam weapons that deliver continuous bursts of damage while in play) and hard-hitting photon torpedoes, which aren't very effective against shields but deal huge amounts of damage to an exposed hull. And as it happens, if you have a good science officer onboard, you may have the ability to fire a special tachyon beam that will cut through a shield like a hot knife through butter. So, bringing down an enemy capital ship is all about keeping your foes within firing range while tearing up your target's shields, dropping them with tachyon fire when available and following up with a well-timed torpedo salvo that will hit home after you've dropped your enemy's shields but before those shields have had a chance to regenerate. However, you still can't afford to keep your enemies too close because aside from abilities, like the aforementioned mines, destroyed enemy ships still go up in a fiery explosion that deals heavy damage to any nearby ships or targets. This explosion can be even more dangerous in the middle of a minefield if nearby mines sustain enough damage to go off themselves.

After fighting off the first wave of pirates, we zipped about the quadrant picking up clusters of dilithium crystals floating in space to help repair the space station by simply flying within range and pressing the "F" key to "interact" with it (to collect it, in this case), which was similar to Champions Online. After dropping off the crystals at the station, we hightailed it to another quadrant where various strange anomalies had been sighted. While these particular anomalies were tied to the second leg of our quest--specifically, we were tasked with approaching each one, then scanning it--other anomalies can exist elsewhere in the universe and occasionally yield treasure caches of minerals. There are also other objects if you take the time to explore and find these hidden goodies. Unfortunately, each anomaly was guarded by Klingon forces, who, as it happened, were laying siege to another space station embedded in an asteroid.

We beamed aboard the station itself in an away team that consisted of ourselves, a Cryptic staffer, and three computer-controlled officers. As in our last session, our characters were set to be on a much higher character level than our foes (to make sure we didn't keep dying). Star Trek Online's hand-to-hand combat remains a pretty dynamic experience that, as we've explained in our previous coverage, gives you access to two different weapon loadouts, each with three different combat skills that recharge fairly quickly. Our character was equipped with a hand phaser with one loadout and a phaser sniper rifle with another. By using the powerful sniper shot ability on our rifle, we were able to take down those dirty Klingons at a distance while our teammates rushed in and used melee attacks. This particular mission was fairly straightforward and required us to simply clear out a few Klingon details guarding the control room. Then, we took the control room and guarded it from a few waves of Klingon invaders looking to take back the station, though they didn't last long against our powered-up party of the Federation's finest.

The final frontier will be here next year.

That ended our latest session of the game, but it left us intrigued to try out more combat, particularly with some of the higher-end starships that will have more options to mount additional weapons and more crew slots to access officer abilities. Star Trek Online seems like it will offer a colorful and highly authentic Star Trek experience in a streamlined, accessible package. The game will launch in early 2010.