Flying Lab Software has announced that they will be upgrading their servers to build 1.5.46.0 on Tuesday July 1st.

We will be upgrading our live servers to build 1.5.46.0 during the usual maintenance window (1:30am-4:00am Pacific / 9.30am-11.30am British Summer Time) on Tuesday, July 1st.

You can find information on the exciting changes in 1.5, including our new epic mission Fortaleza da Luz, in our Developer Logs section.

We appreciate your patience, and look forward to hearing your thoughts on the new patch.

Read more here.

Arenanet has released a new FAQ page relating to their upcoming MMORPG, a follow-up to their successful Guild Wars franchise; Guild Wars 2.

Will there be a subscription fee for Guild Wars 2?

Nope. Like the original Guild Wars, there will be no subscription fee for Guild Wars 2. You just buy the game and play it online without paying a monthly fee.

Will Guild Wars 2 be an MMO?

Yes. Guild Wars 2 provides a massive, online persistent world.

How is Guild Wars 2 different from other MMOs?

While Guild Wars 2 adds a persistent world, it retains the unique nature of the original game including a strong narrative, extensive instanced gameplay, an anti-grind design philosophy, and strong support for competitive play.

Read it all here.

The makers of Top Secret, the MMORPG being developed by the community, have announced the winner of the design contest. Michael Zummo will be offered the Director job on the project, under the watchful eye of Executive Producer David Perry.

Los Angeles (June 27, 2008) – Today Project “Top Secret” officially reaches the most anticipated milestone yet as we announce the winner… No, scratch that – the winners of the Top Secret Design Contest.

This project has claimed three major game industry milestones.  It’s the biggest development team in history (60,000+ people) on a single game development project.  It’s also the biggest user-generated game design team.  And it’s the biggest career hike ever given as a prize (from outside the industry to Game Director).

Before we announce today’s winner, we want to say that we have had winners all along:
Within two weeks of Project “Top Secret’s” launch, David Perry (the project’s Director) hired Michael Liebwein, who designed a new game for Acclaim that’s now in development.
Soon after hiring Michael, Perry hired Paul Lipscombe directly from the forums (based on the reputation system the site used).  Paul who was #1 at that time, is now directing a new project with David Perry to celebrate Flash Game Development talent - www.thefanawards.org
Matt Edwards was hired (again from this community) to be the programmer for www.thefanawards.org
Michelle Montierth, co-director of the Top Secret Advisory Board, has just been hired as the head of Acclaim’s new localization department.

All of these talented and dedicated individuals came from our Top Secret community.

“I think we’ve proven that this is a great way to find super passionate people, by creating an incredibly difficult task, unleashing it on a massive amount of people who live for games, using the latest internet technologies, and hiring the ones that rose to the top.  It’s a win-win and you can be sure we will be doing more of it in the future,” says David Perry.

In fact, Acclaim is already interviewing other members of the community so you can expect more of our Top Secret standouts to be working in the game industry, just as we hoped at the beginning of the project.  Moreover, each finalist will receive a personal industry letter of recommendation from David Perry describing their contributions to the project.

And now the winner of the Directorship – Michael “Doran” Zummo. 

Mike will be offered the biggest career bump in the industry as he’s offered the directorship of an upcoming game from Acclaim Games, working with David Perry as Executive Producer.

“This was a closer contest than some people might think,” says Assistant Director Rusel DeMaria, “but Mike was always among our top choices.  His dedication to the project has never wavered for almost a year and a half of consistent effort – while holding down a full-time job!  Mike has a steady, honest and humble demeanor, a great attention to detail and a phenomenal work ethic. He has all the makings of a great game director.”

Congratulations Mike!  You have joined a small, but growing group of Top Secret members who are getting a giant leap forward into the industry they love.

“We offered to change one person’s career path forever,” says Perry, “and we ended up doing it for five.  I call that a success, and I’m excited to see what they all come up with!”

Read more about it here.

MMORPG.com is pleased to announce a partnership with OneBigPlanet Corp. This partnership will see MMORPG.com members receive discounts on a number of retail items through OneBigPlanet. This is, of course, 100% optional for our users and requires nothing on your part in order to participate.

New York, NY – June 26, 2008 – OneBigPlanet® Corp., the leader in loyalty platforms for social networks and organizations, has signed a contract with MMORPG.com, the most important provider of information and tools to the Massive Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game (MMORPG) players. OneBigPlanet will provide the member benefits program to MMORPG.com’s registered members.

“Creating loyalty with today's sophisticated consumer is becoming a major challenge,” said Craig McGregor CEO and President of MMORPG.com. “That’s why we brought OneBigPlanet on board – to provide our members with advantages and benefits that they find valuable. We felt they were the only company who shared our concerns for our community’s privacy needs. Also, their platform will provide our members with the best overall benefits program. Our intention is to help our members save as much as possible while shopping from their favorite local and online retailers.”

One-Stop Consumer Portal to Improve Member Loyalty

OneBigPlanet offers a branded Commerce and Loyalty platform dedicated to social networks and organizations, such as MMORPG.com, looking to foster long-term relationships with their members as well as help make their business more profitable.

Via its One-Stop Consumer Portal, OneBigPlanet will empower MMORPG.com members to Save, Simplify and Share, thus helping them enjoy a simpler and more rewarding consumer life. MMORPG.com members will benefit from unique personalized incentives (instant savings), useful consumer tools, and a simplified consumer life where they will be able to easily share ideas and deals with friends and family.

“Loyal members are the key to a strong and profitable business,” said Christopher Hill, Vice President of Marketing at OneBigPlanet Corp. “Our portal drastically improves loyalty by offering great value via unbeatable instant discounts on a full range of products and services from popular merchants nation wide. We are really excited to provide MMORPG.com’s members with an enjoyable and convenient shopping experience, allowing their members to save time and money.”

Check out OneBigPlanet here.

Another MMORPG joins the ranks of the fallen as Face of Mankind announced recently that their MMORPG is canceled, citing financial issues as the first reason.

We all know that you are eagerly awaiting Face of Mankind: Rebirth and we are very greatful that you stayed with us. This makes the following announcement even more sad for us.

The development of Face of Mankind: Rebirth has been canceled. There are several reasons for this decision, of which some you might understand and others you won't. The main reason is the lack of financial resources to develop the game and finish it the way we want. FoM, as many other MMORPGs today, is a game that relies heavily on visual content. For us, being only a small development studio with very limited resources, it would be nearly impossible to make the game we want it to be. You might wonder what there is to change? It runs fine and works in a way. That's right, but not the way it's supposed to. And spending so much more power and private funding into the project made not much sense anymore. There might be a time for FoM in the future, but it's just not now.

We thought about several ways to get the financing done. We tried finding a new publisher or getting investments from other sources. The best solution for the game would have been a publisher who is not solely interested in making quick money. Especially when it comes to MMO's, that have so much financial potential, the only way to go is careful development, testing and a well planned release. This doesn't necessarily have to mean a big multi-million budget. Many games are just oversized these days.

After all, this is not the end for Duplex Systems. We have tons of ideas and plans and are fully dedicated to develop those MMO's that the current market needs. In a certain way, I have to admit that FoM was oversized as well. We accomplished more than we were actually supposed to for such a small company. Many wondered if Duplex Systems was just a one-man show. Altogether this is obviously not true, but at times it was. And it made me crash down physically by the end of 2005. Even though I was able to bring the development of FoM to an end, it made me change my life and the way I run business drastically.

Beyond many other ideas, I always had the idea of a game that doesn't rely so much on graphical resources, but is more module based and generated in a way, and in the end could be done pretty well by a one or two man team. During the latest months I made this idea more concrete and developed a game concept for it. The result is Nanoverse Online, a very fresh concept in the MMO realm. At this time I don't plan to release any kind of details just yet. This is to keep our ideas safe and unique, which I hope you will understand.

Check it out here.

In Part Two of his interview with Adam Gershowitz from EA Mythic on the subject of career design, Managing Editor Jon Wood discusses the issues of balance and how the company plans to keep 24 different careers running smoothly an faily against one another.

Greetings and welcome to part two of our interview with Adam Gershowitz, the Combat and Careers Strike Team Lead on EA Mythic’s highly anticipated upcoming MMORPG, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning.

In last week’s part one, we discussed the fact that Warhammer Online is taking a unique approach to class design for an MMORPG, choosing to create four unique classes (called careers) for each race rather than using a fixed set of classes that can be applied to multiple races. We also talked about the three major ideas behind EA Mythic’s career design.

Today, we’re going to expand beyond the ideas behind the design and look a little bit at the results of the design and what it takes to balance the game. To start with, I asked Gershowitz why EA Mythic decided to create race specific classes for their MMO.

Read the whole interview here.