Yeah. It’s a cheesy article title. Sue me.

We havn’t done a podcast in a while and I havn’t written and editorial pieces lately but I wanted to share with the community what I’m playing right now and hopefully get you guys to post what you’re playing!

Right now I got sucked into going back to Age of Conan to see if their latest patch fixed the game up. So far so good, but I havn’t even gotten close to “end game” areas yet. If you couldn’t get the game to run smoothly before I bet that you can now. They did a real good job cleaning it up. If you can run DX10 it’s worth downloading the trial and giving it a shot.

I’ll also be giving Aion’s beta event this weekend a go in between hotdogs and hamburgers.

What are you playing?

Picture from MMO-Champion

According to MMO-Champion, you can now trade BOP, bind on pickup, items with other people who were eligible to loot the item. This should alleviate the “You gave it to the wrong person!” cries that raids almost always get. Looks like GM’s got tired answering all those petitions every night.

This change was on the PTR, so it isn’t a sure thing that it will be placed in game when the patch goes live.

Also, make sure you visit the main page on MMO-Champion and check out the latest pictures and information on the new Coliseum Raid Zone.

Another volume of Ask Crypic has been released, this time about Star Trek Online. Read the fan submitted questions and the developer’s answers.

BreachAndClear: Will there be any missions that come up spontaneously? For instance, will Starfleet or the Klingon High Council contact me with work that needs to be done that is unrelated to missions I actively seek out?

Absolutely. Star Trek mission development is not like a standard MMO. You’re not going to go to a town and see an admiral with an exclamation point over his head, and when you click on him he tells you to go out and kill 10 Klingons and come back. That doesn’t happen in Star Trek.

Read the rest of the Q&A session here.

GameInformer got a chance to ask Lani Blazier, associated producer a few questions and received a few screenshots of their own. It was a pretty generic interview, but we did get one update on the localization process.

GI: How has the localization process been going? What kinds of things do you look out for when bringing a Korean-style MMORPG to Western audiences?

Blazier: The localization process has been going extremely well. For our beta event last weekend, we released new Asmodian content for levels 1 through 10. The feedback was very positive! We focused a lot of time and energy on localizing the game. It was important to us that this wasn’t a quick direct translation job. We wanted the quests and story to be meaningful to the western market and culturally relevant. All of the culturally tied lore, in-game fables, and inside jokes in the Korean release were reviewed and rewritten for the Western market. We have a team of highly creative published fantasy writers who have been working on localization, and we couldn’t be happier with the results.

The bottom line is, in terms of gameplay and art, Aion is an extremely polished game. We wanted no less for localization.

GI: Are there a lot of gameplay tweaks that need to be made, or are they primarily related to language and cultural references?

Blazier: We focused the majority of efforts localizing and culturalizing the game. The core gameplay itself was not tweaked for the Western audience because there was no need to. From the drawing board, Aion was designed to appeal to a global audience.

[View with PicLens]

If you would like to see some of Draegan’s own screenshots from his time in Beta last weekend; you can find them here.

In a recent news item put out through the War Herald, EA announces restructuring for the MMO and RPG groups.

EA is restructuring its RPG and MMO games development into a new group that includes both Mythic and BioWare. This newly formed team will be led by Ray Muzyka, co-founder and General Manager of BioWare. With this change, Ray becomes Group General Manager of the new RPG/MMO studio group. BioWare’s other co-founder, Greg Zeschuk will become Group Creative Officer for the new RPG/MMO studio group. Rob Denton will step up as General Manager of Mythic and report to Ray. BioWare’s studios remain unchanged and continue to report to Ray.

For you Bioware fans out there, make sure you read the bolded above; so this shouldn’t affect the continued development of SW:TOR.

Regarding Mark Jacobs co-founder and current General Manager of Mythic: “[He] will leave EA on June 23, 2009. We thank Mark for his contributions at Mythic and wish him the very best going forward. Mark played a major part in the success of Mythic with his contribution as General Manager and Lead Designer of WAR.”

What does this mean for the diminishing MMORPG WAR? There is no question that this MMOG has suffered after such a stellar debut. What changes can go into this game to re-attract gamers?

Just in case you didn’t know, Warhammer’s expansion, “Land of the Dead” goes live today.

Status: All servers are now online, welcome back!

Greetings!

This morning (Tuesday, 6/23/09) all North American servers will be brought offline at 8:00AM EDT with Oceanic following at 9:00AM EDT to open the Land of the Dead for the winning realms of this past week’s Live Event: Rise of the Tomb Kings! In addition multiple other small improvements will also be made during this downtime.

We anticipate servers to be online by 1:00PM EDT. As always stay tuned to the Herald for information during this and other future downtimes, thank you!

Enjoy.