The latest Eve Online expansion Crucible is now live and today we have the official trailer for it.

Eve Online: Crucible introduces three new battlecruisers, three new Captains Quarters, brings backs engine trails, a massive graphics update, time dilation and many more UI improvements and balance changes.

Crucible marks the 15th free expansion to Eve Online, which is quite a feat in itself. I gotta say, CCP makes some kick ass trailers although everytime I watch one I wish Eve had real flight combat.

Check out the Eve Online: Crucible trailer below.

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We all like having plenty of options to select from different characters and classes, but I don’t think I’ve ever played a game like League of Legends that has so many to choose from. Going back to my days in Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter II, if a game had more than 10 it was considered a lot. Since then games have grown to include 20-30 characters, but I don’t think I can name one game that comes anywhere near LoL.  Honestly, how many characters do we really need?

I went and counted up the amount of selectable champions and tallied up a total of 88 including the upcoming champion Volibear. Since Oct 1st there have been five new champions which averages about 30 per year. So in 5 years are we really going to see 238 champions in League of Legends? Ugh, I don’t even want to think about having to learn that many characters and their skills. Even five in two months is WAY too fast, I’m not even comfortable against Fizz yet and will soon have Volibear to worry about who I have no doubt will be just as over-powered as Fizz was.

In the long run I don’t see how RiotGames can continue introducing more characters into an already crowded game.  Not only is it overwhelming for new players, but it seems like most of the new characters have recycled skills. Watching the Volibear spotlight trailer, it looked a mish-mosh of skills taken from other characters.

I think LoL will eventually hit a tipping point where they’ll have so many characters they’ll scare away any potential new players and veteran players will feel run down having to learn a new character ever few weeks. Honestly I’ve only been playing for 2-3 months, but ever time I hear a new champion is coming I cringe.

I get that RiotGames probably make most of their money from new characters, but seriously, slow things down a bit. A new character every 3 weeks isn’t needed.

The rivalry between Star Wars: The Old Republic and World of Warcraft isn’t limited to just the players, it seems the CEO of Activision Blizzard, Bobby Kotick, has some words for EA during the Reuters Media Summit on Monday.

It seems Mr. Kotick’s isn’t worried about SWTOR taking players away from WoW as he downplayed it during his speech, then went on the offensive stating that he doesn’t think EA will earn much due to licensing rights.

Lucas is going to be the principal beneficiary of the success of Star Wars,” Kotick said. “We’ve been in business with Lucas for a long time and the economics will always accrue to the benefit of Lucas, so I don’t really understand how the economics work for Electronic Arts.”

EA has stated in the past that SWTOR will become profitable once it reaches 500,000 paying subscribers and considering they’ve already hit 900k pre-orders I’d say they have a very good chance of that. While SWTOR might never become as profitable as WoW since Blizzard doesn’t have to pay someone else for licensing costs, there’s little doubt the SWTOR will be successful in term of profits.

The latest World of Warcraft patch is upon us and today Blizzard released the official trailer for Patch 4.3: Hour of Twilight.

WoW patch 4.3 introduces a new raid called Dragon Soul, three new dungeons to explore and continues the epic storyline in the world of Azeroth.  The patch also brings in a new tier or armor sets, the legendary item “Fangs of the Father” in the rogue quest line and three completely new features, Transmogrification, Raid Finder and Void Storage.

The patch also included balance changes to all the WoW classes.

Below you can watch the Hour of Twilight trailer as well as read the full patch notes for Patch 4.3

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The third major content update to the sci-fi space combat MMORPG, Black Prophecy, was announced over the holiday weekend entitled Episode 3: Rise of the Boids.

Today Gamigo revealed the first details and it looks like Black Prophecy will be getting some PvE raids. It will be possible for highly skilled and well equipped groups of 8 to 10 players to complete, however the recommended amount will be over 10. The raids are also about one hour long each, but no word yet on how many there will be.

Above is the first image released of one of these new raids, this one called Ezor – Rudenko Sphare.

MMO’s can roughly be divided into two categories, those that strive to entertain the players and those that strive to let the players entertain themselves.

These two fundamentally different ways of thinking about game design have become more and more distinct in the MMO space over the last 5-10 years. Some players swear by the unconstrained freedom of MMO’s that leave it up to the players themselves to create the gameplay, while others thrive on the content stuffed MMO’s that take you on a more or less pre-planned journey from one end of a fantastic world to the other.

Let’s take a closer look at these two design choices and what it means for the players that play them.

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Good news for sandbox and D&D/Pathfinder fans: Paizo has licensed out Pathfinder to Goblinworks for a swords and sorcery MMORPG. Announced just a few days ago, Pathfinder Online has been described by Goblinworks as a sandbox with theme-park elements, with a developing skill system rather than levels. They’re describing an open world with complex social and economic systems, where players will be able to found their own settlements and kingdoms as well as participate in more classic theme-park styled quests and scripted encounters that will build into stories and adventures that shape the course of the gameworld. Based on the Pathfinder RPG, initial races will be dwarves, elves, gnomes, half-elves, half-orcs, halflings, and humans, and like any good sandbox game they’re promising a wide selection of skills that will allow the player to become a classic pen and paper RPG class or more unusual classes like merchants, farmers, spies and explorers.

As might be expected by what seems to be the current MMORPG norm; it will be a hybrid free to play and subscription model. Pay a monthly fee to access all standard game content, or buy features a la cart. They’ve stated they’ll be offering premium costumes, mounts, and adventure modules in their game store – and I’m already wondering what “standard” content means. Will subscribers have to buy adventure models as well as pay their monthly fee? In any event, this one looks like it could be interesting and I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on it. One of my big weakness is the promise of a sandbox game, very little will grab my attention more quickly than that magic word.

Want to know more? Visit the Goblinworks official site, read more about the pen and paper version of the Pathfinder RPG, and participate in the Pathfinder Online forums.

How’s 100% off for a sale? Today Trion announced their Thanksgiving Day sale and are giving away copies of RIFT for free.

Looks like Trion’s usual sale price of $4.99 wasn’t low enough to entice gamers, so they dropped the cost completely. The Ashed of History Edition is also on sale for $10.00.

You know the first step to making a game free-to-play is to make the game free, so check-mark that. Honestly who is going to buy this game once the sale ends? No one, so I foresee in the near future RIFT being free permanently.

While TRION recently stated they have absolutely no plans currently to go F2P, giving your game away for free is a pretty big step. I mean WoW has been out for 7 years and they still charge new players for the game. RIFT’s only been out for 9 months or so and it’s already free. I’ll put my money on RIFT going F2P before its two year anniversary.

Bigpoint, the social gaming company who’s titles include DarkOrbit, Battlestar Galactica Online and Zoomumba to name a few, is known for their pay-to-win business model. Now while many gamers, including myself, wouldn’t touch a pay2win game with a ten foot pool, it seems over 215 million players world wide would.

Today via GamesBrief it was revealed that Bigpoint recently sold 2,000 in-game items that were prices at €1,000 or $1337 each. That’s $2.67 million dollars from two thousand players.

What virtual item could possibly be worth that much? It turns out it was a drone. In the image above you can see that players can add drones, up to 10, to their ship for added protection and abilities. Well it seems the 10th drone is extremely difficult to obtain, so Bigpoint decided to make it available in their store and players have been jumping at the chance regardless of the price.

The first thing that comes to my mind is who has $1337 to spend on a virtual item? and second is how does that not ruin the game? If I was a regular player of DarkOrbit who spend a few bucks here and there each month, this would just piss me off. How could you possibly compete with players who have thousands of dollars to spend?

Today MMOCrunch is teaming up with Zemi Interactive to bring you a 4Story Gift Code giveaway with 5000 keys available. The keys are valid until the end of this year, Dec 31st, 2011, after that they won’t work.

The keys can only be used on new 4Story accounts and will give the player the following in game items.

• Panacea of HP – 30
• Panacea of MP – 30
• Saddle of Swiftness
• Sturdy Sack – 3
• Premium MP increase potion – 30
• Premium HP increase potion – 30
• Super Drop Rate potion – 5
• Super EXP potion – 5

Plus all players who play for 30 hrs during the first 30 days will also receive 3000 game points worth $30.

To receive your free Gift code and instructions, just head over to our 4Story giveaway page here.