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Noted industry artist Thom Ang has started work at 38 Studios as Director of Art, according to a press release from the company. He has joined company founder and pro baseball player Curt Schilling, comic book artist Todd McFarlane, and fantasy author R.A. Salvatore to work on Copernicus, a secretive MMO project.

Ang has previously been employed by THQ, where he worked on several titles including Disney adaptations, and Electronic Arts, where he worked on the Medal of Honor series. He's just another of many samples of veteran blood the studio has attracted.

Details about Copernicus are hush-hush. We know 38 Studios is using the BigWorld and Unreal engine technologies. There have been hints in interviews about the direction the project is taking. That's about it, though.

There's MMOs to play, plenty of activities and events are happening in World of Warcraft, EverQuest, EverQuest II, and Guild Wars. Even the space cases in EVE Online are tearing each other up in the Empyrean Age expansion. But there isn't always something for everyone, many of us yearn for a new creation not touched before, and the million boxes Age of Conan shipped attests to that. Right now Warhammer: Age of Reckoning is looking like the only real new option on the dinner table, and it may be time to be taking a leap into Warhammer's open beta.

Over on the Warhammer Online blog WAAAGH! Syp has gathered and laid out all the facts and the rumors regarding the open beta. If you didn't know you can pre-order the Warhammer Online Collector's edition to guarantee a spot in the beta to beat the launch pandemonium. As for an estimate on when the open beta will start the latest WAR newsletter revealed that the guild beta will be starting in early July. This phase of testing will at least last for a month and it will be the last closed beta phase. Making it more than likely that WAR's open beta phase at the very least wont start until mid-August, if that, making the rest of summer pretty bleak MMO wise if you aren't planning on playing anything until WAR comes out.

Over at the Waaagh! Warhammer Online blog, Syp has reported back from his recent time spent with a copy of June's PC Gamer at a doctor's waiting room (and we agree with him, coolest doctor ever). The June issue featured a whole mess of Warhammer related content, including WAR coverage, and Syp has been good enough to condense this down into note form or us to peruse.

The result is a quick but worthwhile read, and might give you an idea of whether you'd like to pick up the mag to check out the articles in full. Some of the topics covered are: the original RvR system versus what is in game now, the guild UI, a races "role call", and some information about Warhammer in general.

Total Video Games has a new scoop about BioWare's mysterious MMO project. The site reports that Electronic Arts' CEO told investors that his company is funding an MMO in Austin. Of course, that's a no brainer. Since BioWare is owned by EA now, we assumed that much. But he want on to say that the MMO is slated for a release in "the fiscal 2010/2011." That means it's coming between April 2010 and March 2011. It'll be a long wait; how sad! That's not all, though.

There's also the rumor that will not -- cannot die. An alleged disgruntled ex-LucasArts employee (the "ex" bit because of the recent layoffs) e-mailed gaming blog Kotaku saying that one of the projects "in the pipeline" at LucasArts is Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 3. That alone is no surprise, since LucasArts and BioWare announced a new collaboration months ago, but ... he also said that KotOR 3 is an MMO.

Oh noes! Not that rumor again! Well, anyway, we're sure our very intelligent readers know to take with a kilogram of salt the paraphrased words of an alleged disgruntled former employee. Right?

Are you a glutton for punishment? Do your friends and family often remark about how rewarding it is to berate you with insults and make nonsensical demands that far outstrip your capacities to fulfill? Do you have exceptional attention to detail, with encyclopedic knowledge of the proper bust sizes for a game's various races? If you answered yes to these questions, we might have a position for you!

According to a message sent out via the Warhammer Herald, EA Mythic is looking to hire some trustworthy Warhammer Online CSRs to start working in the Fairfax, VA facility starting this August. The listing makes mention of benefits and opportunity for growth, which is frankly more than we were expecting from a company that was gobbled up by the EA monolith not long ago. (As you might remember, EA has a less than stellar reputation for treating its employees well.) In any case, if any of you Massively readers gets the job, be sure to regale us all with your tales misfortune and lunacy!

We can never get enough Warhammer Online coverage, even if a particular preview is talking covering a lot of older information we're still interested. It just so happens that this Next-Gen.biz article is talking about old information in a pretty fresh way, which is always a bonus.

It's always interesting to see someone else's take on a game you've been slowly forming an opinion about. The main focus of the article is on PvP and PvE, with a hint of the "war is everywhere" concept that EA Mythic have been working on. Essentially, both styles of gameplay feed directly into the endgame concept of faction warfare and all-out bloody battle. We do often find ourselves wondering how living guilds and the recent social network purchase by EA may play into the Warhammer Online endgame. Hm, yes, we certainly wonder.

Gamasutra spoke at length with BioWare head honcho Ray Muzyka about living under the EA banner, and his company's vision for its up-and-coming MMO. He assured Gamasutra that the unique identity of BioWare has been preserved despite EA's acquisition, and pointed out studios like DICE and Criterion as other EA acquisition success stories. He noted also that BioWare now has non-mandatory access to all the tools and technologies of the EA family.

Of the Austin studio's mysterious MMO project, he said: "It's going to feel like a BioWare game. It's going to have the best of breed of MMO features, and some new innovations that when we reveal them, hopefully they'll be impactful for people." As we learned a while back, he has a positive opinion about World of Warcraft and Blizzard. "I think they've done a great job," he said. "But the fact that people want to play that kind of game is an opportunity to really deliver that level of polish and quality, and innovate in a few key areas, while they continue to innovate in a few key areas, too."

Still no word on what those innovations are. Keep on guessing!

In the wake of such resource-intensive MMOs like Tabula Rasa and the upcoming Age of Conan, it's good to know that every once in awhile, we can get back to the fundamentals of games: having fun. That's exactly what we anticipate with the upcoming Battlefield Heroes.

Opening an MMO up to a broader audience is something many newer developers have not yet grasped completely, but could it be as simple as hardware compatibility? EA certainly hopes so, since Battlefield Heroes is said to run "on your grandma's PC". With a download size less than 250MB and rumors of it running on an integrated video system, we're certainly curious to see if this will become a new trend. Less is more, people.

Shawn Fanning's Rupture social network has been purchased by the folks at Electronic Arts, changing the course of the network's planned use as a hub for World of Warcraft players. EA spent some $30 million in the deal, though there are still some details to be nailed down. TechCrunch broke the story yesterday afternoon, and refers to this as Fanning's "big payday", finally rewarding him financially after a series of successful but ultimately not lucrative business ventures.

The article offers the observation that this is purely a technology purchase, as the service never made it into its planned second phase. The Beta service, at it exists now, simply doesn't have that many users. It's an easy guess as to what the software giant hopes to gain from this acquisition. EA Mythic's Warhammer Online and BioWare's as-yet-unannounced MMO title could be easily fitted into this framework, providing a method for players of these new games to connect on the web. We'll be sure to keep you posted as more details on this still in-transit deal comes to fruition.

Some of you may have been patiently (or not so patiently, if you're like us) awaiting the closed beta for Battlefield Heroes. Unfortunately, there seems to have been a bit of miscommunication between developer DICE and the community that has formed around Battlefield Heroes. The closed beta -- that started yesterday, May 6th -- is invite only for the time being.

DICE is quick to point out that this is for the first phase of the beta only and that eventually everyone will be able to apply for it. What's a bit surprising is that so many people apparently hit the official site yesterday it actually went down for a while. Seems like DICE may be onto something with Battlefield Heroes, but only time will tell.

[via Blues News]

This month we get a look into one of the many cool aspects of Warhammer Online: living guilds. This important Warhammer Online feature is explained by the dreamy Josh Drescher (that's right we said dreamy, just look at those honest eyes) who yet again explains the system in such a way that we cannot help but woo over him -- we mean it, the system.

Anyhow, living guilds are EA Mythic's response to the many different problems with running a guild in MMOs. Everything from the complexity of running a website -- which you don't need with the bevy of features WAR's living guild system offers -- to giving players a powerful reason to join guilds and participate with other guild members in the first place. Did we need yet another reason to be extremely excited for Warhammer Online? No, but it really doesn't hurt to have more of them.

N'Gai Croal, of the Newsweek games blog Level Up, recently sent a few questions in the direction of Electronic Arts. He was following up on the war of words that has been developing between the enormous software publisher and up-and-coming heavyweight Activision/Blizzard. Numerous comments have been dropped by ActiBlizz's Bobby Kotick, slamming everything from EA's interest in Take-Two to their habit of 'stripping the soul' from purchases.

Jeff Brown, EA's vice president of corporate communications, responded to N'Gai's questions and touched twice on Blizzard's World of Warcraft. Croal very directly asked about EA's investment in The9, World of Warcraft's Chinese publisher, and how that relationship would be affected by company friction. Said Brown, "We've got a small equity state in The9 and no real influence over their management. Their plans for non-EA titles don't involve us and we don't have any insight on what they plan to do." He was more direct (and snarky) when asked how he feels Activision/Blizzard is handling their studio as a whole: "No strong opinion. They've got three great franchises [presumably referring to World of Warcraft, Guitar Hero and Call of Duty 4--Ed.]--it's great that one of them was actually developed at Activision."

Electronic Arts' new baby, EA-Land, is apparently not going ahead, with news coming down a few hours ago that this replacement for The Sims Online is going to be closing.

The Sims Online closed and merged into the new EA-Land world in February this year, but it appears that whatever targets EA management might have set for the project weren't met, and it is now going to go away, closing around Midnight on the last day of July, this year.

Up until now, you might have had a shaky understanding of all the basics in EA Mythic's upcoming Warhammer Online. If that's the case, then there's a recent article where you can read up on what we like to call the, "WAR Essentials" as it's pretty much covering the basics.

Unfortunately, if you've been following news on WAR then there isn't anything here that you didn't already know. It's nice as a refresher on all of EA Mythic's basic talking points, though. In fact the article itself sort of reads like that: a prolonged "back-of-the-box" set of bullet points. It just seems a little dry for a preview about a videogame like Warhammer Online, where there are some crazy things to talk about like squigs or little (and big) green monsters from space.

It wouldn't have hurt to try and spice things up a little, is all we're saying.