The Wall Street Journal and Winning Workplaces team up to annually recognize the top workplaces in the United States. This year, Themis Group ranked as one of the top 35 finalists out of over more than 850 nominations. Themis Group, runs WarCry, The Escapist and other gaming related companies.
Click below to read the details of the selections.
At an event in San Francisco last week, Flying Lab Software gave us a rather unique twist on the usual Pirates of the Burning Sea demo. They concentrated exclusively on the supernatural elements of their game, something they had not often talked about before.
FLS understands some players come to their game partly because of its grounded setting and they were careful to ensure that those supernatural elements included were both within the legend of their setting, and completely and totally optional as part of what a player must do to advance. This means that while there are a slew of missions for players to enjoy that deviate a bit from what is strictly possible, characters can in essence choose not to believe in that kind of thing and avoid them altogether.
The supernatural elements of the game are confined both through story and geography. Players must undertake missions to experience that content and it is confined to specific areas. While there are "ghost ships" (players cannot capture them) in the seas around these areas, the majority of the content is land-based.
Find out more about the spooky stuff after the jump.
The new Wizards of The Coast online initiative "Gleemax" has entered Alpha. For those of you who aren't familiar with Gleemax, think MySpace for gamers. Gleemax is trying to bridge the gap between the pen & paper and table top gamer with the online gamer. They will be doing things like bringing all the Avalon Hills board games online, as well as several custom made games just for online play, and of course, Gleemax will play a large role in Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition.
You can sign up for the Alpha at the Gleemax site.
You can read more about Gleemax and what they hope to do in Our Interview with Gleemax at PAX.
James Phinney, Lead Designer of Guild Wars 2 has posted a new Developers Diary. In it, he talks about how the idea of Guild Wars 2 came up, why they couldn't do this with an expansion, and what to look forward to with the new game.
Every great game starts with a simple question: What do we want to play next? If you aren't passionate about the game you're working on, it is already doomed to mediocrity. And the best way to make sure you're passionate? Make something you want to play.
For the team at ArenaNet, the idea of making Guild Wars 2 started with a single conversation about all the things we wanted to do in the next Guild Wars® campaign. Very quickly it became clear that we could move the game forward by leaps and bounds . . . but only if we were willing to rebuild it from the ground up.
Click "Read More" to read the entire diary.
IBM and Linden Labs - the people behind Second Life - hope to allow players to take a single character across multiple virtual worlds. Really, the idea is just that, an idea. However, it is something analysts in the article believe is either inevitable or impossible, depending on who you ask.
Currently, people who create a character, or avatar, in one virtual world cannot take that identity into another service.
Designing a detailed avatar can take well over an hour, so a closed system discourages customers from abandoning that investment. But it is also a barrier to growth since few people bother to start the process anew in multiple virtual worlds.
Read more here.
Cryptic Studio's goes through a relatively predictable set of steps when it comes to new issues: feature update, some interviews (and screenshots!), and finally the issue hits test. A few weeks later a new Issue is out of the oven and on live servers.
It's a torturous process, but Issue 11 is now on test server, so we're almost out of the gate! Soon there will be Dual Blades scrappers, brutes, tanks, and stalkers running wild through both Paragon City and the Rogue Isles.
There are no patch notes as the beta is closed at the moment, so if you're one of the unlucky saps not in the closed beta. . . Well, I've got a box of kleenex. Alas, Lighthouse assures this closed state of beta will not be nearly as long as the Issue 10 closed beta. So it won't be long till we can all try it for ourselves. You can currently patch your Training Room client and check out the character creator. If you can't be bothered, we have some links from the forums to some useful (and public) information posted thus far.
Dual Blades and Willpower Power Descriptions
Screenshots of the new weapons in weapon customization
Yahtzee, the foul-mouthed Brit behind Zero Punctuation has found his way into an MMORPG: Tabula Rasa. Every Wednesday, Yahtzee releases a new video review/preview on our sister site The Escapist.
A warning for our readers, the language may not be safe for work.
Click below to enjoy his video.
Stargate Worlds released ten new images (9 screenshots and 1 concept) revealing more details about the landscape behind Tollana!
Art Director Howard Lyon's latest concept art piece pictures a Tollana recreational area (featuring the Statue of Shar'mal). These new screenshots feature the city in both intact and damaged states, during the day and after dark. Broken buildings, ruined bridges and a scarred landscape are vividly detailed in these shots!
Check the rest in our galleries!
Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising has effectively been canceled and the majority of its development team laid off today.
WarCry will continue to bring you details as the story develops.
Perpetual Entertainment has indefinitely delayed (essentially canceled) Gods and Heroes. The company will continue work on their development platform and Star Trek Online, and continue its operations in the same San Francisco studio under the same management. Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising, though, is no more.
Read the full story after the jump.
Every week, we plan to bring you a set of journal entries from someone on the EverQuest II team. This week, we begin our series with the worlds of Emily "Domino" Taylor, a Game Designer who specifically works on tradeskills specifically in the upcoming Rise of Kunark expansion. She records her work for us.
Once the spreadsheet is complete -- which, for tailors, took well over a day's work -- then I run a perl script that reads in each line of the spreadsheet and spits out each recipe. There was an old script that my predecessor had used, but it didn't work for all recipe types so I had to modify it. I have taken only one perl training course, and that was about a year ago, so I am still pretty slow at that type of thing.
The recipe files are just created on my local machine, so I copy/paste them into the appropriate folder for that type of recipe and give them a quick look to make sure nothing too obvious is wrong. If I do spot something wrong -- which has happened quite often, even if it's a small thing like forgetting to enter the recipe level or marking something as a common when it's a rare -- then I go back to the spreadsheet, fix things up, and re-run the perl script.
For more, make the jump.
