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Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and in Runes of Magic (AKA Radiant Arcana), Runewaker Entertainment has taken all they loved about Ultima Online and World of Warcraft, combined that with elements from EverQuest, EverQuest II and Final Fantasy XI Online to make a free-to-play MMORPG combining all the elements of both Western and Eastern games. It's like a highly-concentrated booster shot of high fantasy goodness -- and it's free!

Runes of Magic will include a dual class system, where you will choose a primary and a secondary class, armor dying, player housing, crafting, an auction house, unique mounts, a fully customizable user interface and either click-to-move or WASD controls.

The starter zone of Taborea has a deep and rich lore, a colony struggling to stave off the darkness, with your help. You'll need a PDF reader to read that, but we have some of the highlights in our gallery. Can a free-to-play homage to some of the Western world's greatest MMOs succeed on in North America? Distributor Frogster is looking for a US publisher to take that chance.

The game play video from the Chinese open beta (you can find that after the break) shows clearly the developers at Runewaker loved World of Warcraft perhaps more than is really healthy. Still, a free-to-play WoW clone may be exactly what players want, and Runes of Magic may just be different enough to make it interesting.

Cryptic Studios was the developer to bring us a superhero MMO with City of Heroes. Since that time thousands of people have spent a lot of time both creating and playing their fantasized superheroes over the past years, including us here at Massively. Essentially, we've always felt like Cryptic games were pretty damn good. Recently, Jack Emmert made a post sharing with the community how the Champions Online team stopped development of new content for two weeks in order to thoroughly play and polish a single zone.

Is this a sign of things to come from Cryptic? We certainly hope so, because with three titles in development -- Star Trek Online being a strongly-rumored guess for one of them -- there's already quite a lot that's different about the guys that brought us City of Heroes back in 2004 these days.

Lockpick Entertainment announced today that they have signed an exclusive agreement to distribute their MMORTS game Dreamlords -- the Reawakening in North America. Aeria Games, publishers of Stone Age 2, Dream of Mirror Online and many, many more free-to-play MMOs, will have Dreamlords in beta in July, looking forward to an August release.

Spencer Chi, producer at Aeria Games, called Dreamlords an answer to gamers' demand for a fun MMORTS (massively-multiplayer online real-time strategy) game. Dreamlords players will be able to buy in-game items and equipment with the Aeria Points currency common to all Aeria's games. Interested and want to know more? Then turn back to our extensive coverage of Dreamlord's path to publication.

Wanna bash stuff up good? Wanna capture little dinosaurs, train them up right and then send them into battle? When you see a broken tree branch with leaves on it, do you think "oooooh, a new club and a snack!"? If any (or all) of these sound like you, then you owe it to yourself to try out Aeria Games' latest prehistoric-themed MMO, Stone Age 2. Thump stuff good, collect baby dinosaurs from all over the world that will forever think of you as "Mum", and make the world safe for yourself and your tribe.

Our sister site, Big Download, has the client ready to download. The Stone Age 2 team has brought the servers up and open beta has begun. If you signed up in advance with Aeria, you may be finding a surprise in your in-box. For a complete list of the exclusive open beta goodies -- and a warning from the devs -- you can just go ahead and click on the break.

G4's X-play gained access to the FireSky Studios where the developers are hard at work on Stargate Worlds. G4 was allowed to open the Stargate and returned back with gameplay footage, while undergoing their mission they infiltrated Studio Head Dan Elggren, Creative Director Chris Klug and Art Director Howard Lyon. As for game footage Elggren took a character through several environments of a pre-alpha build and played through an assault on a drug lord stronghold on the alien planet Lucia. The game is looking great, albeit some video lag in some parts. No earth-shattering revelations were disclosed, but if you'd like learn about the game be sure to check out all our SGW coverage.

As massive as we like our MMOs to be, the realities of modern networking have made sharding, the creation of identical game worlds hosted on separate servers, a practical necessity. Last week, Awen, Jumpgate Evolution community manager, elaborated on why the NetDevil team was looking at sharded server architecture. Understandably, players maintain that the ideal MMO minimizes sharding to allow players to interact with the greatest possible population of other users.

As Awen explains, this isn't exactly possible with Jumpgate Evolution. While their spaceserver architecture--which is similar to EVE Online in that different regions of space can be hosted on different hardware and scaled to the server load--is technically capable of handling most of the challenges of going unsharded, the central-state server on which all the non-combat activity is managed, does have a physical limit. In a game that is focused on real-time space simulation, their focus is on minimizing latency, and that's why they're going to use sharding.

As we reported last April, popular teen hang-out site Gaia Online is making the leap from virtual world to full-blown MMO, further blurring the lines between the two genres. It will still have movies, malls and minigames ... just with a few more monsters. Gaia Online was a separated series of rooms, but now its filling in the lands between those rooms with impromptu games around fountains and battles with psychotic garden gnomes.

VentureBeat talks with CEO Craig Sherman and senior producer Dabid Georgeson about the new MMO world and the challenges of turning a fabulously successful social space with millions of users, into a succesful MMO. Is the world ready for another Runescape? Look for Gaia Online -- the MMO -- when it launches this summer to find out.

Yesterday's announcement of an online Trading Card Game based on the SOE title Star Wars Galaxies came as quite a surprise. Fans were full of questions in the official forum thread announcing the game, and Galaxies' newly-minted Senior Producer Dotanuki was on-hand part of the evening to clarify information for players.

Just to reiterate a bit, Champions of the Force will offer some 20 loot cards redeemable in-game, with the possibility of new cards being found via in-game adventuring. Players will be able to choose a light- or dark-side slant to their decks, and the game will feature events similar to sister title Legends of Norrath's raids called heroic encounters. Adds the producer:

• Loot cards are only going to be available in booster packs, not through direct sales.
• Pricing on the cards has still not been determined.
• The game is being developed by the SOE-Denver studio; the Austin team has not been sidetracked or taken off of SWG proper products to work on the game.
• There will be an in-game client and a standalone client for the game, just as Legends of Norrath currently offers.
• Booster packs for the game will be only lootable from NPCs in-game during special promotional periods, a departure from the LoN paradigm.
• All SWG subscribers will be granted cards for free, and there is no subscription fee required to play the game. Subscribers will received five free booster packs a month.

Interested in KingsIsle Entertainment's forthcoming Wizard101? Do you have a deep desire to learn to cast spells and summon monsters in order to save your universe -- all universes -- from the evil machinations of one rogue wizard? Do you pore through Harry Potter books taking notes on the correct way to flick the wand when casting Oculus Repairus?

Yeah, we do, too. If you're lucky enough to be in the Wizard101 beta, you probably are busy dressing up your homonculous and decorating your cauldron, but for those of us still waiting to crack the ol' spell book, KingsIsle has released the documentary "The Making of Wizard 101", in four parts. We have magically gathered them together for you -- after the break. Enjoy!

You'd be right to think that Brian Gilmore -- a content designer for Champions Online -- is an interesting fellow. In fact, you'd probably be right in wanting to play some Champions tabletop with him, too. All in all, we have to wonder what sort of contacts, missions and spawns Brian has been concocting for our most anticipated superhero MMO. Will there be Victorian era zombies wearing Frock coats and Top Hats. What? We can dream!

While there isn't any new game information in the article you can find a very cool story about one of Brian's GM (Game Master) experiences with the tabletop Champions game. We're kind of jealous that we'll never get to do battle with "The Demon's Hand" supervillain group. Anyhow, the fact of the matter is that with each of these Meet the Team articles we find out that the group of people working on Champions Online are a pretty unique lot.

It's been a month since we last took a look at how Warhammer Online's Destruction classes have made the transition from the old-school tabletop game to a full-fledged MMO experience, and a lot has happened. We've shown you a huge amount of new coverage with our Massively Goes to WAR series, and even got some more hands-on details of each of the game's many classes. We know that the guild beta is practically within our reach, and the open beta never leaves our minds, though it still lies just over the horizon.

Since our last look at the WAR's tabletop roots was so well-received, we went back to the drawing board to bring you part two - focusing this time on the races on the side of Order. If you plan on joining the ranks of the Dwarfs, Empire, or High Elves and lack the proper appreciation for how the game's classes came to be, read on!

Started in 1999, Neopets was one of the first kid-friendly online virtual worlds on the web, and is still fantastically popular today. Hoping to bring their success with Neopets into the MMO world, founders Adam Powell and Donna Williams started Meteor Games in 2007 to make a game targeted at a slightly higher age bracket than Neopets. Their still-unnamed MMO, due to be shown at this year's Penny Arcade Expo (PAX), will be a seamless, 3D world with elements drawn from today's top MMOs -- World of Warcraft is specifically mentioned.

Their new game will be a drastic departure from Neopets. Not only will it be a 3D world instead of a collection of minigames, but it won't be free to play. The founders believe they need a subscription in order to produce the highest quality game, but the price will be less than WoW, and there will be an item shop of some sort where new outfits, furniture and other non-unbalancing items may be bought. Meteor Games is also looking into ways to integrate cellphones into their game. Due out in some fashion in 2009, their MMO will enter a market already dominated by Runescape and will be competing directly with SOE's Free Realms, which promises to be free to play and run also on the Playstation 3.

Neopets is famous for its huge amount of content, involvement with players and accessibility. Can Meteor Games grab that same sort of success with a more traditional MMO? CEO Adam Powell explains their strategy in this interview with Gamasutra.

From Korean developer Eyedentity Games comes a brand new MMO called Dragon Nest that bills itself as a "dynamic action fantasy online game", and uses Eyedentity's own proprietary Eternity Engine technology. The announcement was made earlier this week, including a collection of screenshots and a gameplay video released as well.

The game itself is centered around the action of combat, with a healthy dose of visuals that seems to remind us of the Final Fantasy series. Following a trend that promises to benefit all players on a global scale, the game is said to be accessible to those with lower-end computers, thanks to the low polygon count and streamlined graphics engine. Beta testing will begin in late 2008, with a projected global release date of 2009.