Some information about RIFT Patch 1.5 was released yesterday at Gamescom including a 25 min video showing off the Hammerknell raid as well as some unreleased content.

• RIFT patch 1.5 will go live at the end of Sept – beginning of October
• There will be “single-dungeons” as part of the “Chronicles of Telara”. These dungeons are for more casual players who don’t have the time to complete full raids. You can easily clear this dungeons with 1-2 players (depending on the equip) and the difficulty will not scale with the amount of players in the dungeon. Hammerknell will be the first “solo-dungeon” so that casual gamers are able to see that type of dungeon as well.
• There will be the “Master-Mode”. Which are more challenging and meant for gamers between full raiding and casual. Right now, Darkening Deeps and Deepstrike Mines are the first dungeons in testing phase. There will probably be more depending on which dungeons the community wants to see.
• The new “Hammerknell”- Warfront “Library of the Runemasters” will be released
• The first parts of the new “Planar Achievment System” will go live. From level 50 on players will receive points for earned EP from daily quests etc. These points can be spent in 6 extra bonus skilltrees to adjust the characters a little more and give them some finetuning.

other facts:

• The new 10-man-dungeon “Rise of the phoenix” won’t be released with 1.5 because they are focusing on other things (see above) and it is still in testing
• The new 10-man-dungeon will be as hard as Hammerknell just with 10 man!
• The new Zone won’t go live with 1.5
• But there will be new Raid-Rifts with the new zone (1.6 or later)
• The aspect “social-life” was discussed. Developers are planig some fancy features like a “barber-shop” whre you can change the face of your character.
• The “Warrior and leather” issue was discussed. They want to have every class have their own class equipement. So warriors won’t prefer leather instead of plate anymore in the future.

Check out the 25 min Gamescom RIFT gameplay video by continuing below.

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Carbine Studios is continuing to show off its newly announced MMORPG Wildstar, today releasing some gameplay footage.

When I first saw the trailer I was a little worried about Wildstar being targeted at a younger audience as a water-down MMO game, but after watching some gameplay footage, I think my worries have been laid to rest. The art design is impressive and it looks to have some solid gameplay mechanics, so I’ll looking forward to seeing and learning more about Wildstar.

Check out the Wildstar Gameplay video below by continuing below.

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Bioware just released a new video for Star Wars: The Old Republic showing off the PvP Warzone, Huttball.

The video begins with the Director of Production for Bioware explaining a little bit about what Huttball is. Basically players get a ball and try to run it into the other teams “endzone” to score, while trying not to get killed. After the brief intro there is about 2 mins worth of solid PvP gameplay footage of Huttball. Continue to below to see the video.

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Today CCP announced that Eve Online Incarna 1.1 will be released on August 30th, via the Eve Dev Blog. No patch notes have yet been released, but are expected before the deployment of the update.

CCP also commented on the question of when the rest of the Captain’s Quarters will be released, stating,

later this year we plan on deploying the remaining racial quarters to Tranquility as well as the next Incarna feature, establishments.

Still no solid date or even a ballpark estimate, so it looks like Eve players will just have to wait a bit longer.

A lot of information came out about Guild Wars 2 this past week at Gamescom, which was touted as the place where ArenaNet would finally release detailed information on its PvP system.  And while they did release a lot of info, it turns out it was all the information that I really didn’t care about.

What ArenaNet presented was a battle arena PvP system that is completely independent of the main persistence world. You don’t use your GW2 character, instead you select from a pre-made character that is already at the max level and you select where your skill points go. Once you exit, you go back to your PvE character. I mean you could literally rip out the PvP system shown at Gamescom and make a completely separate game out of it without effecting the current game.

Keen, at keenandgraev.com, seems to have the same worries I do.  Where is the World vs World vs World combat system?  Where is guild vs guild combat? I sure as hell hope those are not being cut or down-graded.  No persistent world PvP, no playie-playie.

What ArenaNet presented at Gamescom in regards to Guild Wars 2 PvP system is an outstanding addition to the game. I just hope it’s not the main PvP system. Hopefully we’ll get to see the real PvP system at PAX Prime next weekend.

We have some good news for MMOCrunch readers.  Turbine was kind enough to send us 5 Rise of Isengard beta keys for their upcoming Lord of the Rings Online expansion to giveaway to our readers.

Normally we would setup a giveaway page to give out the keys, however since we have a very limited number of them, we’ll be running this contest a little different.

• To enter simply reply to this post stating why you think you should received a beta key to Rise of Isengard.
• After 24 hrs, we’ll select our five favorite answers and send them a beta key using the email address used to comment. So make sure you enter a valid email or you won’t get the key.

Good luck to everyone.

Update

And the lucky winners are:

• Joe
• LotroSurviver
• Eoldred
• Grinili
• Jason

You’ll each receive an email shortly with the beta key and instructions on how to use it. If you don’t get it check your spam folder. Congrats.

While we couldn’t make it to to Germany for Gamescom this year, WarTower.de was and they’ve been uploading some great gameplay videos of Guild Wars 2 today.

Three new GW2 videos were released today, two short ones showing off character customization for the Sylvari and Asura races, plus the Charr cinematic cut-scene.  Then a third monster video showing off 40 mins of gameplay including PvP the Charr homelands, Asura gameplay and an epic boss fight against the dragon Tequatl the Sunless. The video also gives many insights about the skills and general gameplay mechanics.

You can check out all three videos after the jump.

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Some details to the next World of Warcraft update, patch 4.3, were released today introducing a new featured called Transmogrification, which will allow players to copy the appearance of one magical item onto another.

Transmogrifiers will setup shops throughout the capital cities of Azeroth where players can bring in their gear to transmogrify. This new feature will not affect stats, merely the appearance of the item.

There’s also some restrictions on what gear you can transmogrify. Players will only be able to transmogrify items that they are able to wear, so any high level items that are currently unusable to you will not work.

All gear and weapons must stay in the same item class, so you can’t change Breastplate armor into robes or a one handed axe into a two handed axe.  The only exceptions are between guns, bows and crossbows.

Since players who will be using this feature will now be holding on to more items, Blizzard is also introducing a new Void Storage service, although no details have been announced. Anytime I hear the word service, I get the feeling it’s not going to be free, but we’ll see.

The debut trailer to WarGaming.net’s newest free-to-play MMO , World of Battleships has just been released.  World of Battleships is a  free-to-play naval action MMO based on epic sea battles of the 20th century which will completes Wargaming.net’s “World of” war trilogy.

Check out the World of Battleship trailer by continuing below.

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Yesterday at a press conference at Gamescom, Blizzard co-founder Frank Peace stated that they are far too busy with their current lineup of projects to begin work on a Stacraft MMORPG.

if there was a development team within Blizzard that was free and available to create a StarCraft MMO and that was something they were really passionate about then we would certainly consider it.

But right now, as you can see based on the presentations these guys did tonight, we’ve got our hands full with everything we’re doing. So we don’t really have any plans to do anything beyond the StarCraft RTSes and the expansions right now.

But anything’s possible, because we have created such rich and cool universes,

Quite honestly that’s a horrible excuse.  Blizzard could obviously just hire some more people with the billions they’re making.

But, lets take look at what Blizzards current projects are and what the developers are working on.

1. World of Warcraft – This is basically an on going project with no end in sight and I would highly doubt at this point it would have any effect on any upcoming projects in regards to freeing up developers.
2. Diablo 3 – The rumored launch is late 2011 or early 2012, so this should free up some resources after the launch, even if they do begin working on an expansion right away.
3. StarCraft 2 – Sure they have 2 sequels on the way, but the game is already launched.  All the really big pieces are done, so making 2 more expansions is not taking up major resources imo.
4. Warcraft 4? – With SC2 just released last year and two more SC2 expansions on the way, I would highly doubt Blizzard is working on WC4.
5. Unamed Titan MMO – OK, this is a big project which can take up a lot of resources. I’ll give him this one.

So basically once D3 launches, Blizzard will only really have one major project left. You could argue the expansions for D3 and SC2 take up some dev resources, but I’m sure those teams are a lot smaller post launch.

I think Blizzard will definitely make a Starcraft MMO eventually, it would just be stupid not to.

Source: Eurogamer