Massively^™

Hail, fellow onlookers! (IE: Those of us not in Warhammer Online beta). Last month's news about the Advance on Altdorf has kept our breath at bay. You can breathe easy, there will be no peace. In this latest dispatch concerning the Aegis of the Oathbearers and Bloody Sun Boyz it indicates that the Greenskins and Dwarfs took up arms against one another clashing for the first time in over half a year. Further tasty lore bits and new images from the beta can be seen over on the Warhammer Herald.

It's hinted that the next focus test will involve guilds. This is exciting news, and maybe some guilds that won invites last April will finally reap their better later than never reward. For older but still damn good Warhammer news, and I mean a metric ton of exclusive Warhammer information, check out our Massively goes to WAR coverage. A detailed list on what the latest round of beta testing focused on resides after the jump.

The fine folks at Funcom have posted a brief update about the beta for their upcoming head-loppalooza, Age of Conan.

The biggest news: female avatars are now available! Gotta love this line from Funcom: " ... while there are some bugs to work out -- people always seem surprised to find out a beta is actually used for finding and squashing bugs! -- they are playable..." They also gave a count of how many patches have dropped in the last few weeks. January had three, while there's been two so far this month. Wednesday's update dropped over 2.5 gigs of data! Lastly, PVP and the PVP servers will - for the first time - be opening soon.

So if you're one of the lucky ones in beta - rejoice! But whatever you do... don't cry. As Tom Hanks might say: There's no crying in head lopping!

Is it just me, or are we learning more about the Warhammer Online Beta now when it's closed than when it was open? The fifth Beta update (the latest in a long series of informative posts) offers up some concept art from the Inevitable City, a few tidbits on the new Realm vs. Realm changes, and a lengthy set of questions pulled directly from the forums.

Will the keeps be attackable without siege? Yes, players will be able to break open the keep doors, battle the guards, fight their way to the keep lord, and try to capture the keep.
Will Keeps change in appearance based upon which race controls them? In future patches (pre-launch), the appearance of the keep will change to reflect that the enemy realm has captured it. At this time, we are not planning to entirely replace the keep with a new structure with different geometry. So, an Empire keep captured by Destruction will still look like an Empire keep, but it will change to look like it's been under siege and show some signs of its new owners.

Following the latest newsletter from Hyboria, the Age of Conan website now has details of the new beta update. Apparently there was a very large patch that added lots of new content, and because of this, Funcom has decided to send out some more beta invites, so check your inbox and spam filters if you have previously signed up. This update also saw the introduction of the Capture the Flag PvP game for the beta test.

In website related news, there are some new RSS feeds that you can nab in a few different languages to get the latest AoC information as soon as it's out, and a couple of screenshots of the freshly revamped Picts have been posted. Above you'll see one of them, but there are more at the site. Very scary indeed, and they do have that "wear your face as a hat" look that Funcom mention they are going for.

The European site for Warhammer Online has let loose a giant beta update, with tons of juicy information to sate voracious fans. Various teams working on the game each add their own section to the update, and we hear from the Cities Team, the Items Team, the Animation Team, the UI Team, the Combat and Career Team, and finally the RvR (realm-versus-realm) Team.

Probably the biggest news is the introduction of the Mastery system, which will allow you to specialize the capabilities of your character (an example is given of the Sword Master career being able to specialize as more of a tank, or being better at dishing out damage), the addition of Keeps for RvR play, and some overhauling of the user interface. There really is too much discussed in the update to bring it all up here, but we have made a dot-point abbreviated version of the notes after the break.

The folks at EA Mythic recently released the lowdown on Shadow Warriors and Swordmasters, two of the elf classes from their in-development game Warhammer Online. They say catharsis is good for the soul, and the designers seem to have taken that to heart - they've let loose with the third beta update letter, filling all of us plebes in about how they're all having a great time without us (thank you very much).

What's innit? This time around, there's a bit of discussion on populating and fleshing out the Tier 4 elf zones, as well as bunch more tantalizing information about the Tome of Knowledge. There's another look at the Swordmaster, from a design perspective, and a similar treatment for the Witch Elf.

The best bit, though, has to be the discussion of the Trophy system. The Warhammer devs have promised lots of customization, and this is how they're going to manage it: by letting us put doo-dads on our characters. In a nutshell, as you unlock items in your Tome you will gain access to Trophy items that you can place on your character. Up to five trophy items that you can show at once, but you'll have from 11 to 15 slots to showcase them ... Our artists are slaving away so that you will have access to 100's of trophies to choose from. Just think of the combinations that you can achieve when you have 100+ trophies, five to select, and 11 different locations to equip them. Talk about visual specialization!