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Anyone playing the City of... franchise must know that the game's latest free content update, Issue 12 is on the horizon, including epic archetypes for villains. And though here at Massively we can't make issue 12 arrive any faster, we do have the scoop, straight from NCsoft, on the the new Blood Widow and Wolf Spider archetypes.

For the level 50 villains in the audience who can't wait to get started playing the new archetypes (or the heroes wanting to know what they'll be up against), keep reading for a preview of the new archetype abilities. All we can say is it makes us want to start leveling a villain. In fact, while you watch this video, we'll be in-game grinding our way towards infamy.

Only in our case it is not "havoc" but "Havok" and most people don't wander Second Life's islands in in squirrel avatars. Apparently this weekend's RC3 update went well and Havok will be hitting the grid today -- albeit a bit late in the day. From the official blog we have the report that the server previously known as the Havok 4 Beta Server (now Second Life Simulator v1.20.0.83683), after some bug fixes this morning, has started rolling out to the live grid. Tonight it will only be implemented for early adopters, welcome areas, orientation islands, and 1200 randomly selected Second Life regions -- but by tomorrow Havok will hit the rest of the grid.

Though no one around the Massively office actually remembers how long it has been since Second Life's residents were promised an upgrade from the Havok 1 engine the simulator has been using since pre-beta, but we're fairly certain it was at least 2003. To celebrate this momentous occasion, we're breaking out the champaign and party hats: Havok 4 has arrived!

While many of you may have spent yesterday coloring eggs or biting the ears off chocolate bunnies, many people celebrated the holiday virtually in Second Life. For those of you too busy in real life to enjoy virtual life, we've captured some of Second Life's Easter celebration in pictures. Visit giant bunnies, hunt for eggs, join in an Easter parade, and color eggs of our very own all without leaving the safe confines of your browser! So what are you waiting for? Let's get started!

With the stigma associated with the term RMT -- or "real money trading" -- companies such as Live Gamer and Ping0 have an uphill battle when selling their legitimized RMT services to many gamers. At GDC recently, Live Gamer's Andrew Schneider and ping0's Steve Goldstein tried to explain to a skeptical crowd why their forms of RMT trading are the future of gaming.

Though you hear a lot about WoW gold, all online games have a large secondary market for currency. These services are all operated outside of the publisher's terms of service or EULA and are very inefficient, both for the player and the company. The RMT industry is littered with account and credit card theft -- and when a customer's account has been compromised, they don't call the RMT traders: they call the game's customer support line. It's an immense waste of resources for the game company and a huge hassle for the player involved. (Has your World of Warcraft account ever been stolen? If so, you know it can take weeks to get everything restored.) If game companies don't address RMT issues themselves, they're just going to have problems with black market RMT. Live Gamer seems to offer a, "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach with their attempts to run a legitimate RMT business.

Though anyone who has played the existing LEGO games would understand their charm, from an outside perspective you might be wondering why LEGO needed to go to the massively multiplayer scale. At GDC this past week, Mark Hansen, Director of Business Development for LEGO, explained the ideas behind their MMO to be, LEGO Universe. It's all about playing with LEGOS, of course! Playing and building with LEGOs is a creative experience, an imaginative experience -- and LEGO wanted a version of their product that would relevant for children of the 21st century who had grown up (and are growing up) around computers and technology.

GDC is nearly over and despite chatting up a couple of Cryptic employees and PR (maybe we should have plied them with booze), we're no closer to knowing what exactly Cryptic Studios has up its sleeves. Conversations with multiple Cryptic-folk suggested we check out the March issue of Game Informer for news -- so, of course, we ran right out and scoured the stores until we found a copy of our very own. It gave us oodles of information about their upcoming game Champions Online and a brief teaser of two projects (suggested to be two of many), only referred to as X1 and X2. From Game Informer's images, both appear to be in a fantasy setting. During a panel yesterday, Emmert mentioned a "secret sci-fi project" (our hope is that it's Star Trek Online, but we don't know anything for sure). And on Cryptic's home page there's a selection of concept art that ranges from lush fantasy environments to run-down modern cityscapes to military combat. (But definitely nothing that looks like Trek.) So just what is Cryptic working on? We'll have to keep calling their PR department once an hour asking, "Can you tell us now?" "What about now?"

Yesterday morning, Cryptic Studios' chief creative officer, Jack Emmert, talked to attendees at GDC about Cryptic's successes (and failures) with City of Heroes (and other games). He was surprisingly frank, starting things off with a list of CoH's strengths and weaknesses. For strengths, he cited character customization, fun moment to moment game play, Flight/Superspeed/Superjump, plenty of character slots, no loot. For weaknesses, he told the crowd about how the game had few goals outside of leveling, its lack of PvP, the repetitiveness of the instances, the lack of an end-game, the lack of guild mechanics, no loot. Whether you love Cryptic's City of... games or hate them, read on for a discussion of where they went wrong and where they went right.

Jack Emmert, Chief Creative Officer at Cryptic Studios, gave an interesting talk about using episodic content (read: patches) in the morning's (yes, it's still morning in California!) first round of GDC sessions. While we'll be posting a detailed write-up of the session later today, Emmert dropped a tidbit that, like any good piece of gossip, we simply must share. Talking about what Cryptic was working on, Emmert mentioned the recently announced Champions Online as well as what he called "a secret sci-fi project."

We could hardly resist squeaking with glee as this bit of information might lend some credence to rumors that Cryptic might be acquiring the Star Trek Online license. Of course, this is all speculation -- it's entirely possible Cryptic is working on an original IP or other sci-fi license. Right now we know:

1. STO developer Perpetual closed up shop and announces the Trek license had been given to an unnamed developer in the Bay area.
2. Cryptic was in talks with Perpetual for... something. We presume they were after some of Perpetual's development team, but no one would confirm or deny whether the STO license was involved.
   
3. Cryptic is now working on a sci-fi project.

This may not be proof, but if you put these pieces of news together it seems highly likely that they've become involved in STO's development in some way.

We've seen a lot of interesting things at the Worlds in Motion Summit which took place at GDC earlier this week, we found this post-mortum of Scion's virtual campaign in There.com fascinating. While we tune out commercials and skim over print advertisements as much as anyone, but well thought-out interactive advertisements in virtual worlds still feel novel and interesting. (Well, okay, some of them aren't.) So what made Scion's campaign stand out? Read on for an analysis.

Tuesday afternoon, Michael Acton Smith, CEO of Mind Candy, presented attendees at the GDC's Worlds in Motion summit with an interesting look at the confluence between real goods and virtual worlds. For some background on where Smith is coming from, Mind Candy "creates games and puzzles that span multiple media.... [they] use all forms of technology to tell stories and interact with... [their] audiences." They run Perplex City, an alternate reality game that uses clues puzzles in the real world combined with web-based resources to create a unique type of gameplay. Their upcoming game Moshi Monsters is an adoptable pet game geared towards kids. Smith says it's a "new type of virtual pet experience." The pets will be very alive with their own emotions (driven by a behavior engine which will cause your pet to act different ways depending on how you treat it) that will be reflected in the pet's animations. The game will also incorporate a number of social tools, so both you and your pet monster can hang out with friends. And, of course, there will be toys, oh glorious toys. (Some already available, though the game itself is still in beta and closed to the public.)

In this morning's first panel, CCP's Senior Technical Producer Torfi Frans Olafsson had a lot to say about EVE Online's upcoming space station environments. At present, EVE's player characters are little more than still portraits -- in the playable portion of the game you are primarily represented as your ship, which you can use to navegate and explore the game world. Initially announced in a 2006 dev blog, EVE will one day have the ability to exit your ship and interact with other characters as a human avatar rather -- we still don't have an exact release date (though at GDC07 they gave a 2008 date, so there's a chance it may be included in the upcoming Kali 4 expansion, about which little is known), but we have some details on the gameplay and the development process after the break.

At GDC this afternoon Gaia Online's Craig Sherman announced that Gaia is developing a free, flash-based to play casual MMO. Though you may presume this is just another web-based casual game, Sherman says it will be a "real MMO." It will be launching this summer and Gaia expects it to become one of the top MMOs in the world within the first few months -- after all, they already have a user-base of 5 million players who want this kind of game play, so they aren't starting from scratch. Sherman wouldn't give us a name for the game (saying that they'd solicited names from current Gaia users and received around 20,000 responses), but ensured us that it would be a full-scale MMO (with combat, etc) with a heavy social aspect. Though we're hungry for more details, summer is only a few months away!

This afternoon Team Massively is reporting to you live from the Game Developers Conference, where we're fidgeting in our seats waiting for Turbine's Jeffrey Steefel to take the stage. Turbine has quietly been integrating "best-of-breed virtual world and social networking elements" into their flagship game, Lord of the Rings Online. What exactly these features are we aren't quite certain, but we do know that the main reason we're still playing World of Warcraft is because all of our friends play, so we're all about social networking. And, anyway, we're sure Mr. Steefel is eager to tell us alllll about it, just as soon as we get started!

We can hear what you're thinking. Facebook, a gaming platform? It's what we thought, too, when we attended the Facebook and the new web of Social Gaming panel at the Worlds in Motion summit yesterday afternoon. "Facebook" and "gaming" didn't seem to belong together in the same sentence. But as it turns out, Facebook and similar social networks aren't just for making friends anymore -- they're also a lucrative platform for viral web-based games. The numbers these games are hitting are similar to Second Life's and they're targeting a demographic the rest of the industry doesn't touch: not women, not teens, not ages 18 to 25, but people.

Social networks such as Facebook already have an immense audience -- the question is, once you have all of these people connected together through Facebook, what are they supposed to do? I'm sure you've already guessed the answer: game.