Today Fallen Earth has announced a new iPhone app in the works that might well make all but the most hardcore earth-loving Vista reconsider their wary stance on technology. This new Fallen Earth app will offer players the ability to access their stored and equipped items, check out their character's stats and maps of the different sectors. What's most interesting to us is the addition of real-time chat, email, auctions and crafting to the mix. The ability to interact with the auction house and crafting queue is going to be huge to many crafters and travelers, thereby making sure that one never gets stuck with dead time when a project could be rolling.

While currently underway for the iPhone, the eventual plans are to branch it out to other smartphone platforms from there as we're given to understand. The Fallen Earth app is slated to release sometime in the first of next year, and no price has currently been mentioned that we're aware of. There's no doubt it will be wildly popular with many in the wastes. Stuck at work? You'll be able to let your clan know you'll be a bit late for that PvP scavenging trip. Or you could in-game mail some Red Rooster Chicken Beer off to one of those crazy Post Apoc Radio DJs. We hear they like drunken parties.

We've got Trooper, Smuggler, Jedi Knight, Bounty Hunter, Sith Warrior, and now Imperial Agent. BioWare revealed the sixth class for Star Wars: The Old Republic today on their forums. This news comes as absolutely no surprise to those who attended the EA Press Tour earlier this week -- they enjoyed advance information from producer Blaine Christine.

Imperial Agents are a rogue class of sorts, doing their work for the Empire with high-tech tools to help them infiltrate the republic and assassinate enemies of the Sith Empire. The announcement from Sean Dahlberg says that Imperial Agents are "heavily inspired by several classic Star Wars characters such as Zam Wessel and Grand Moff Tarkin. [...] Players who choose to be Imperial Agents in The Old Republic (TOR) will see the underbelly of the Empire in a whole new light."

The Holonet will be updated next week with the Imperial Agent, but the class already has its own forum on the official site and discussion is going strong.

You can argue the specifics about whether or not MAG qualifies as an MMO, but the game certainly fits the "massive" portion of the bill -- 128 characters to a side in battle, customized and developed characters, persistent world based on the performance in the skirmishes. The game's release is only a couple months away, and there's still a great deal more to learn about it if you haven't yet opted in to the preorder beta. Luckily for all of us, Giant Bomb has an interview with Seth Luisi which sheds more light on how the game will play and progress.

The interview is quite substantial, covering everything from MAG's skill progression to leadership roles in the game. Among the more interesting tidbits is the system for squad leaders and further command posts. In order to give some incentive to follow a commander's orders, the objectives they set give a bonus to experience when fulfilled, and as the objectives are fulfilled the leader gets points to help improve their character. It's an interesting dual-reward system that should help lead to people being a bit more inclined to give and take orders in a setting notorious for just the opposite.

But that's hardly the entirety of the interview -- it's only a tiny slice of a talk that ranges to the state of the world affecting map play, character specialization, and some of the problems that the team is facing and working on improving. Take a look at the full interview, which clocks in at around eight minutes long, and you might be inspired to place a pre-order and get your hands on the beta early.

September 2009 saw the release of Champions Online, Dungeons & Dragons: Eberron Unlimited (an older MMO going F2P), Fallen Earth, and Aion. This was easily the busiest month for MMOs in recent memory and we're sure many of you at least picked up one of them to try out. We're curious to know if you're still playing a September MMO just over a month later. If so or if not, why?

No MMO in the history of MMOs has experienced a perfectly smooth launch and these September titles were no exception. Did the action-packed combat of CO pull you in or did the lack of content push you away? Were you awed by DDO-EU's polished suite of tools or annoyed by the limitations put on free accounts? Was Fallen Earth's post-apocalyptic setting a breath of fresh air or did you choke on a mouthful of radioactive bugs? Did the beauty and smoothness of Aion make your heart beat faster or did its grind and bot infestation crush your soul? Just how impressed were you with September's crop of new MMOs?

North American Closed Beta Test 1 is beginning on November 10th for Allods Online, and we're happy to throw a few keys out to our loyal readers. We have 500 to give out, thanks to our friends at gPotato, so they may go quickly. Simply head on over to our giveaway page and follow the directions there.

You can download the game from this link, but it won't be available until 2pm EDT today. You can also take a look at their main website to find out some interesting tidbits about the expansiveness of the game and its award-winning development team.

[Update: Make sure to only enter the numbers after the comma in the beta code you receive. Thanks!]

Do you have burning questions for the Star Trek Online development team? We certainly hope so, because over the next several weeks we'll be issuing posts like this looking for your questions on a specific topic concerning the upcoming Trek MMO. This week? Ships! We want all your ship-related inquiries, whether they're about customization or weapon points; Federation of Klingon Empire.

We'll give you until 12pm Pacific time Friday, November 6th to submit your questions in the comments section below. Following that, we'll round up a cross-section of the most popular and most poignant questions and by next week we'll have your answers straight from the folks at Cryptic. We're also open to suggestions on next week's Q&A topic, so feel free to throw your hat into that ring while you're typing 'em up.

Update: We'll be extending the time limit on questions until the end of Friday, November 6th, so keep 'em coming guys!

In an interview with Hi-Rez Studio's executive producer Todd Harris, Ten Ton Hammer discusses Global Agenda's Assault class at considerable length. For those looking for a simple analog, the Assault is like a meaty tank class wielding huge weaponry such as mini-guns. The interview covers such topics as ammo concerns -- as the aforementioned mini-guns chew up ammo like a man on a desert island drinks fresh water -- and several other matters that dig deep into the earth center of the class. Then again, if blowing stuff up is your preference, that's offered as well.

Much of what we've seen of the Assault class tells us that it's going to be a favorite with players who generally enjoy inflicting damage in the most terrible of ways. And really, that's a whole lot of people; those who drool at rocket launchers and chain-fed ballistics weaponry.

In between navigating the sometimes-choppy waters of Age of Conan and working toward the launch of The Secret World, Funcom is having a busy year, but it looks like they are adding one more project to the pile as well.

Funcom has been given a grant worth NOK 1.5 million -- $262,000 US -- in order to create a new extreme sports MMO. Funcom's Director of Communications Erling Ellingsen says "Yes, I can confirm that Funcom is working on a new project called Board with the World. This will be a free-to-play social MMO focusing on the world of extreme sports. [...] First and foremost we will be focusing on snowboarding, with the possibility of adding different sports later. We also want this to be a social world rich with different types of media content and pop-cultural elements such as music, video and even fashion. It is definitely exciting, and we look forward to revealing more on this later."

Work on the project is expected to begin in January 2010, and we can expect more details as it progresses.

After our Alganon Q&A fell flat on its face yesterday, we decided to lick our wounds and proceed with something we've been planning to do for developer interviews anyway: let you ask the questions! We ran the idea by the folks at Quest Online, and they're up to the challenge.

So if you have something you'd like to ask the Alganon developers, send an email to shawn AT massively DOT com by Friday, November 6th at 8am EDT with the subject line "Alganon questions." Questions asked as comments to this post will not be considered. We're going to pull 10 of the best questions from the bunch and toss them at the Quest Online team. We're looking for thought-provoking questions, not just general bashing or praising, so be constructive. Negative or positive, they are ready for what's on your mind.

Once the answers are back, we'll post them on the site as a reader-submitted pre-launch interview. So don't be shy! Get those questions in.

Mixing side-scrolling fighting action with RPG elements seems like it should go together like peanut butter and chocolate, so the biggest surprise about Dungeon Fighter Online is that no one else thought of it first. The game is still in the middle of its open beta, but Nexon's most recent offering gave us a small preview of some of the dungeons to come in the game as well as a number of screenshots of them in play.

Each of the dungeons in question are accessed from a larger hub area, allowing you to whisk yourself promptly off to a specific dungeon, each with its own enemies (and presumably different rewards). The central area Grand Flores, for instance, leads to Mirkwood Frost and Blazing Gaqarak, with the former being a rime-coated expanse of woods and the latter an eternal forest fire. The Sky Tower leads to the Vestibule of Darkness, full of light-dousing goblins and enchanted armor, and the Golem Tower, in which you fight a large number of... well, okay, that one kind of makes it obvious. (It's not kittens.) The Temple of Apostasy leads to the GBL Arad Branch, a library-themed dungeon in which hordes of librarians attempt to surround you with magic and the rage of a thousand cracked book bindings.

Last but not least, Noire Ferra includes among its cavernous reaches the Spider's Lair, sure to be a top vacation spot for arachnophobes everywhere. Take a look at our gallery of shots, and if it gets you interested in Dungeon Fighter Online, let's not forget that the game is currently in open beta.

If you were disappointed to hear of Alganon's recent delay until December 1, this news might cheer you up. We just received word that Alganon open beta is set to launch on Wednesday, November 11, 2009. This is a great opportunity to check out the game for yourself rather than taking other peoples' opinions for it. The client can be downloaded from a number of places including Direct2Drive, Fileplanet, MMORPG.COM, Curse, and the Alganon and MyAlganon websites.

If our previous closed beta key giveaways are any indication of the interest in this new title, open beta should receive a hefty amount of player attention. If you're already in the beta, Quest Online seems to have made a number of improvements across the board that should make for a better gaming experience. We recently caught up with president and co-founder, David Allen, for an interview, so feel free to give it a read while you wait until next Wednesday.

Earthrise creators Masthead Studios have already made clear that their forthcoming title will be a far future sandbox MMO, a post-apocalyptic setting where PvP will be a major aspect of gameplay. What hasn't been as clear is exactly how the extensive crafting process they've discussed in the past will actually work out in normal gameplay. Certainly we've heard a great deal about customization of crafted goods and the potential to become well-known for your own variations on items, but we never had a real overview of those game mechanics. That is, until now.

Masthead aims to dispel any confusion surrounding Earthrise's crafting system in a two-part series of blog posts that kicked off today as part of their Question of the Week offering to the community. "The Crafting Process", part one of two, poses the theoretical example of a player -- let's call him "Tim" -- who clearly hates Burzun mutants. Enough so that Tim wishes to craft an assault rifle specifically tailored for killing this particular type of mutant. Masthead Studios walks the reader through the skills required to create such a weapon, the components that must be gathered, and how Tim will be able to extract needed resources from those materials.

We recently mentioned that Star Trek Online fans would get a chance to play through a demo of the game at Eurogamer Expo last week. One of the first reports we've read about the Star Trek Online demo comes from Oli Welsh at Eurogamer who was uniquely positioned to check out the game (it was their Expo after all.) Welsh begins by writing, "Trekkies can put one fear to rest right now: Star Trek Online feels just like Star Trek." Although this might assuage a bit of the apprehension some gamers have about trying yet another Star Trek game, Welsh is up front about the fact that the demo he played through was a contained single player experience. It's too soon to say what gameplay will feel like when hundreds of other players are thrown into the mix.

He writes about the demo's transitions between locations via warp jumps, keyboard navigation of star ships (standard WASD, with additional throttle control), and the pacing of ship combat. Welsh also walks the reader from the bridge of a Federation vessel down to the surface of a planet where Klingon opponents await. Fans of the game should read Eurogamer's hands on with Star Trek Online and may also be interested in the video footage of STO gameplay from Limited Edition, shot at this year's Eurogamer Expo (starting at 02:40. They've also captured gameplay of Global Agenda as well.) We've got a video embed of that for you after the jump.