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Once again, NCsoft and ArenaNet will be making an appearance at Seattle's Penny Arcade Expo this year. The NCsoft booth (#642) will be packed full goodies during the weekend of August 29th through the 31st, and they will be showing off some of their new and old favorites, including Exteel, Dungeon Runners, Guild Wars, City of Heroes, Tabula Rasa and the brand new Aion.

As they did last year, ArenaNet will be holding contests where participants can win valuable prizes. Developers will also be on hand to meet and greet with the players. Possibly the most exciting news is the fact that ArenaNet will hold another after-party at the Game Works across the street from the Washington State Convention & Trade Center, as they did last year. This is your chance to meet the folks at ArenaNet in a more casual setting and even challenge a few to an arcade game or two!

Lets go back about ten years or so to the original EverQuest. Now it isn't my intention to pick on any one game, I just happen to be more familiar with it than Ultima Online or Meridian 59. For the sake of immersion let me assume the role of a 1999 copy of EverQuest that you happen to be playing on your gaming machine back in the last year of the last century.

You just died in EverQuest. How dare you die! Since you had the nerve to be defeated in combat, you'll now be required to run from your binding point -- which could potentially be very far away -- to your dead body, which contains all of your equipment and bags that just happen to hold all of your inventory. If you fail to do this, then you lose all of these items. Oh but you've already lost some experience and possibly de-leveled if you happened to have recently leveled up.

Hey! Why are you logging out? So what if you think you'd rather play Half-Life right now, this is the game you're paying for monthly. Don't you think you'd better get the most out of it? Hah! See? I knew you were only bluffing. All right, now get to running, noob.

City of Heroes community relations manager Alex 'Lighthouse' Von Minden doubles up as the editor for a new CoX Fanzine. The current issue is technically Issue 1, the former 'Issue 0' having been released as a preview issue, reproducing material from the Fan Submissions section of the Top Cow comic.

Issue 1 features a spectacular cover by Douglas Shuler, with Back Alley Brawler and Ghost Widow apparently on the same side for once. The background of Cimeroran soldiers can only mean they're among the many Heroes and Villains who've chosen to set aside their differences for long enough to help Imperious make the future safe. Ghost Widow's not looking too shabby for someone who's been dead at least three years, as Back Alley Brawler (the developer) would have liked to affirm.

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.

The ups and downs of the Assassin skill Shadow Form has been quite the topic of debate lately in Guild Wars. Back in May, the skill had its duration increased which made it the perfect skill for ecto farming builds in the Underworld. The inevitable progression from there evolved into ecto and shard prices dropping dramatically from the over-farming of all the big farm spots. However, in the June 2nd skill update, Shadow Form had quite a change. Now, the caster does 50% less damage while Shadow Form is active on them. Not only that, but the Mindblade Spectres in the Underworld have received Hex Breaker to help combat the hex-based farming builds that have always been so popular in this area.

Now the question is, do you think this is a good thing or a bad thing? Of course, if you're one of the people who farmed ecto with your A/E Chaos Planes farmer, you might not be very excited by this update. We've found that generally, most players do welcome this change though. Not only for the projected rise in ecto prices (making them worth obtaining the old way, and selling on the market again), but also to give a bit of credibility back to the Assassins who enjoyed their class for what it was before they became easy money-makers.

It's a month and a half since City of Heroes Issue 12: Midnight Hour went live, and by now the developers will have been hard at work on Issue 13 for some time. While there has been little in the way of concrete information, over time the Developers have given out a multitude of hints and comments that have enabled us to put together a speculative look at some of the coming content. As we'll see, there's been a lot more hinted at concerning powers and game systems than new mission content or zones.

The safest bet for Issue 13 is the introduction of the Shields powerset, which Back Alley Brawler has described at length: 'Shields will be a defensive powerset, not an AT. They'll also be useable with any unarmed or right handed weapon powerset... because Shields require their own combat mode animations, they have to work with every attack power, every buff, debuff, hit reaction, pool power, ancillary power, and patron power that might be used while holding a shield out in front of you. So the bulk of work on Shields is just all the animations.' The bulk of those animations were completed with Issue 12, as many of the Cimeroran NPCs use shields. Since the NPC hero Blue Steel is famous for his shield, we'd be surprised not to see him play an active part in the game at last.

Back Alley Brawler of City of Heroes has made a brief but encouraging comment on the official forums, hinting strongly at a new piece of Powerset Proliferation in Issue 13. Villains who had complained of not having access to the funky new Nictus Sword have been reminded that they don't have the necessary sets 'yet'. Unless this is a cruel tease, this means Villains will be getting broadsword soon - and despite Back Alley Brawler's habit of turning into a shark when he visits the Test Server, we don't think he's that mean.

We already know that more Powerset Proliferation is coming in Issue 13, because Positron and Castle have told us it'll bring the villain equivalent of Empathy (which won't, of course, be called Empathy). Issue 13 is also an ideal time to give Villains the Broadsword set, as it should be bringing Shields, too. We've already learned that Shields will be a defensive powerset, usable with one-handed and unarmed sets; this opens up the possibility of Broadsword and Shield wielding Brutes, surely an obvious combination to go for. The Shield animations are now largely done, courtesy of the Roman NPCs in the Cimerora zone released with Issue 12, so we can't see any reason why they'd miss Issue 13.

As many of us enjoy very warm weather for the upcoming holiday weekend, we thought we'd flash back to a cold holiday of yesteryear. Today's Guild Wars One Shots screen comes to us from Eugaet, who created this during the 2005 Guild Wars holiday event. Eugaet writes: I had planned on creating panoramas for every location in the game, including 'holiday' versions...but I ended up not having much time to devote to the project. Even so, they're still lovely panoramas to look at -- especially the full-size version!

If you're heading out in your favorite virtual lands to enjoy the celebrations, snap some screenshots of what you and your friends are doing. We'd love to show off some of the things going on this weekend, but we need your help! So snag those screenshots and send them to us at oneshots AT massively.com along with a quick blurb as to what we're seeing.

As we announced a few weeks ago, the folks at TabulaCast landed an exclusive interview with Tabula Rasa's lead designer, Tom Potter. They reached out to the community during these last few weeks, asking players to submit their own questions for Tom to answer on the show. Now, that episode has been recorded and is ready to download.

In this audio interview, we hear more than just the usual about how new features are coming "soon", Tom actually gives us some specific deployments where certain changes may be made. For instance, when asked about concept art for the much-anticipated Personal Armor Units that Destination Games has been promising for around 8 months now, Tom says that we can expect a finalized design within the next one or two deployments, and then after that, concept art will soon follow. He also discusses some exciting features coming down the pipe such as completely new enemies, more PvP maps with the possibility of class vs. class battles and a working prototype for the new crafting system they're developing, which will work on a more streamlined infrastructure.

Take a listen to this episode to hear more about what Potter reveals on the future of Tabula Rasa.

Feelings must be mixed over at NCsoft Austin today, as the Tabula Rasa team is experiencing a bit of a staffing shake-up. April "CuppaJo" Burba, who only a few months ago was promoted from Community Manager to Associate Producer, will be leaving the team to take on the same Associate Producer role with the Dungeon Runners team, who just recently released their first retail box. Dane Caruthers, long-time Tabula Rasa team member, is being promoted from QA Lead to fill CuppaJo's combat boots at Associate Producer. and Neal Johnson will be getting the nod to take Dane's former position.

Just two months ago, Tabula Rasa designer Paul Sage left the team to work on another unspecified project within NCsoft. The flight of their lead designer and associate producer within such a short timespan is worrying, to say the least. We don't think the game is going anywhere or anything dramatic like that, but as gamers it makes us a little uncomfortable to have people we don't know shepherding the team forward. We will, however, be looking forward to Dane's first communiques as Associate Producer.

The pay-to-download business is booming, more and more MMOG companies are taking advantage of alternative non-credit card payment options. It sure beats driving down to the local big-box store.

After a tense week of mounting expectation, in which we waited for the promised big news to hit the City of Heroes multimedia forums, the Toyota Matrix Machinima Contest has just been announced. Contestants are asked to put together a video using City of Heroes and/or City of Villains, in which the theme is to be getting in touch with your dark side. After all, even heroes have a dark side of some sort, right? Videos have to be 2-4 minutes long and no more than 200 mb in size.

The Grand Prize is spectacular: 'A 2009 Model Year Toyota Matrix S model filled with a year subscription to "City of Heroes" and "City of Villains," an XBox 360, a Playstation 3, a Nintendo DS gaming console, and tons of super hero video games!' We know there's an ocean of talent out there, so we're anticipating some stellar entries from the CoX machinima crowd.

Details of the contest, along with full rules and regulations, are available at the official website.

In a game that is mostly arena PvP between giant bipedal robots, we'd imagine that would be about all we'd need to know, right? We have all we need in the game with giant weapons, mechanaught add-ons and a hundred different ways to blast holes in our enemies. Or do we? Well, as it turns out, Exteel actually has a back story, and you can find it over at GameZone.

In this story, we learn about the struggle between four colonies on the recently-inhabited planet of Natha. Each of these colonies has their own ideals and their own reasons for warring against the others. Some are refugees from Mars, some from Saturn and some from Jupiter, but they're all at war with each other. The reason they were once unified has crumbled away, and now they must continue their skirmishes in their metal behemoths until a resolution is found.

This month's desktop wallpaper for City of Heroes recalls Issue 3, A Council of War. This was one of the most content-packed issues, bringing (among other features) the Striga Isle zone, the Hess Task Force (still a firm favorite) and the Kheldian epic archetypes. New Epic Power Pools were opened up for the regular ATs, and 'zone events' such as the Ghost Ship, the Clockwork Paladin and Lusca, the giant octopus of Independence Port, were added.

There was also a key change made to the game world itself, which excited controversy across the official forums and beyond. The Fifth Column villain group was replaced with the Council, an organisation very similar in powers but conspicuously lacking the Nazi background. As A Council of War coincided with the official European release of City of Heroes, some irate players reached a seemingly obvious conclusion: the Fifth Column had been removed due to 'political correctness'

A new patch has gone to the City of Heroes test server today. Courtesy of the European CoX forums, we've been able to take a look at the patch notes a little in advance. It's another round of fixes and tweaks, and we're particularly pleased to see the dual pistol wielding Lady Jane has been given a stern talking-to and instructed not to rush into combat like a maniac any more. The 48 month Veteran Reward pets are similarly non-suicidal - for real this time.

The controversial change, though, must surely be the adjustment of Total Focus: 'All player versions of Total Focus Disorient Magnitude reduced to 3.' For those who don't know, Total Focus is a double-handed overhead smash that previously dealt a Magnitude 4 disorient. That's one of the most powerful stun effects in the game, enough to send a boss staggering and temporarily helpless.