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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.

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.

EverQuest players love the Legends of Norrath: Oathbreaker cards that change the look of their weapons into weird and unique styles -- like the ornament at the right that takes any one-handed slashing weapon, and turns it into the fiery blade carried by creatures in Riftseeker's Sanctum. But the players have not loved so much the fact that the ornament takes up a valuable augmentation slot, which often means the weapon must be drastically reduced in power, just to look cool.

Since that's a trade-off few people really want to make, they've added ornamentations into the game. Ornamentations are single-use containers that take the weapon and permanently change the look of the weapon, but do not grant the weapon any of the stats or procs of the ornament. However, all the augmentation slots remain usable. Magus Alaria in the Guild Lobby will, starting Wednesday, July 9th, sell players a mutation device, for a small fee, that will turn an ornament into an ornamentation. We have a feeling she is going to be pretty busy that week.

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.

There's news and views aplenty in the latest dispatch of helpful information and answered questions in this week's Camelot Herald! Each week, the enigmatic oracles in EA Mythic's stone fortress come down from their golden throne rooms to answer questions. This week's cover druid maces -- that look like hammers. That can't be right (and isn't!). Also mentioned -- how to invite people into invitation-only battering rams, how to open your house to all guild members of a certain rank, and how to find a certain very shy pig.

The Camelot Road Trip hits San Diego on July 26th, so if you would like your Dark Age of Camelot questions answered in person -- and you can get to San Diego -- RSVP so they know you're coming.

It's a dark time in EverQuest. Meldrath, the evil gnome necromancer harrying Faydwer with the mecha-monstrosities, has seen the summer celebrations bring joy to the land, and he is not happy. To prevent Meldrath from breaking out of his mecha-castle and taking over all of Norrath with his numberless mechanical minions, the engineers of Ak'Anon have constructed the Infinitely Regenerative Automaton -- the I.R.A. -- to stop him in his tracks. This marvelous machine pops back to life and full health two minutes after he is defeated, and so can never be stopped for long.

To make sure that the I.R.A. can handle whatever is thrown at it, they need you -- and lots of your friends -- to test it. As part of the Living Legacy promotion, your skill as a raider will be tracked and rewarded. Every time a raid that you're in takes the I.R.A. to 5% health, he will deactivate and reset, and you will get a point (which you can track on the clockwork abacus you will receive). At the end of the promotion, every player that participated in the fight against the I.R.A. will receive an augmentation -- the Silver Threaded Worm Gear -- with power that scales to the number of times they raged against the machine.

Check out the teaser video after the break.

"There's a misconception among MMOs," says Realtime Worlds' Colin Macdonald, "that they don't need to look as good as other games." Macdonald, studio manager for the developers of upcoming street-crime MMO APB (All Points Bulletin), was speaking about the general state of MMOs at the GameHorizon conference in Newcastle, England. "We think that when people look at a screenshot of APB, they won't think 'it's not so good, it must be an online game' -- they won't know."

While we definitely agree that APB is turning out to be an excellent looking game, we thought that World of Warcraft and EverQuest II had settled the 'no compromise, great looking game' issue ages ago. Modern releases like the oft-maligned Vanguard and more recent titles such as Lord of the Rings Online, Pirates of the Burning Sea and Age of Conan have spared no effort in making sure their games are as graphically luscious as possible.

Mr. Macdonald, it's great that you're proud of APB's graphics, be real. Modern MMOs are every bit as graphically gorgeous as single player games.

We're not entirely sure we really needed huge, ginormous character crests to show our EverQuest II characters to the world, but need 'em or not, we have 'em now, so be prepared to see these pasted over your favorite EQ2 forums. We have to admit, they DO look kind of cool. You know what would be even cooler? A whole wall of these, and not just from EQ2, from World of Warcraft and all other MMOs as well. MMO social web developers, take note: we'd love to see a whole wall of these crests in our virtual MMO-themed rooms.

Any current EQ2 subscriber can get a crest for any of their characters. First, log in to your Station account on the EQ2Players page. Then, upload a paper doll image if you haven't already done so. Select the character who needs to be crested, select their media tab, click on the character crest tab, et voila, your custom crest, twice life-sized and bling-enhanced. Either use it as-is, or copy the given code to embed elsewhere.

If you're looking forward to Upper Deck's next expansion to the World of Warcraft collectible trading card game, The Hunt for Illidan, as we are, you'll be doubly excited by the new loot cards they've come out with. One card, The Path of Illidan, gives you glowing green footprints wherever you walk. Have party members that just can't seem to keep up with everyone else? Show them where to go (pro tip: leave footprints leading into lava pits, just for them!). Also included, a D.I.S.C.O. ball for when it's time to par-tay, and the nicest of the bunch, an Ethereal Soul-trader who keeps track of what you kill when he's out and rewards you with money you can trade in for a bunch of cool items, including the very clothes off the old guy's back (complete with complementary dry-cleaning, natch).

[Via WoWInsider]

Back in 1970, futurist Alvin Toffler coined the term "Future Shock", which is the personal perception of too much change in too short a time. While reading a press release for a virtual avatar staffing company, future shock hit this blogger upside the head like a ton of bricks. Thirty eight years after Toffler described the trouble people were having keeping pace with the ever-increasing rate of technological progress, a company has acquired $200,000 to populate virtual worlds with virtual people, living virtual lives.

The Metaverse Mod Squad, creators of avatars for projects like a series of machina "Gossip Girl" episodes, celebrated the closing of their $200K "angel" investment deal in their virtual offices, of course. Remember, every avatar with a job is one less avatar on the streets. By putting avatars to work as greeters, actors, friends for the friendless and so on, they are doing well, by doing good.

$100,000,000 dollars buys you 5,000 online games and virtual worlds -- if you're Nickelodeon. The famous kids' cable channel has spent two years bringing these games onlines, and has plans for 1,600 more online games set in such properties as Spongebob Squarepants, iCarly, and Carrie the Caregiver. Current virtual words for Spongebob, NeoPets and a new property called, enigmatically, Monkey World, are being developed by the newly renamed Nickelodeon Kids and Family Group Virtual World Studios, previously known as NeoStudios. The new division is being helmed by current NeoPets senior VP and general manager, Kyra Reppen.

$20,000 per online game. Not yet known is how many of those 6,600 games are re-skinned clones of Minesweeper and Tetris.

The creators of EVE Online are going all-out with their storyline-driven factional warfare in The Empyrean Age expansion, which is less than a day away from launch. They're injecting the coming struggle with as much gritty realism as they can muster. Massively has already covered the formation of EVE Online's in-game news organization, called Interstellar Correspondents, but it looks like the staff at CCP Games is setting their sites a bit higher.

In a recent dev blog, CCP Ginger discussed the concept of embedded reporting in New Eden. Specifically, there will be war correspondents who report on the events that transpire during the clashes between factions. These members of Interstellar Correspondents will be in the thick of the action and report on world shaping events to the populace of New Eden.

Age of Conan is not the only recent MMO to completely underestimate demand. Asian import Rohan Online: Blood Feud had to open two additional servers as they were flooded with players eager to to join their open beta. Developer YNK Interactive was able to bring on a third server almost immediately, with two more on the way. They'll keep on adding them until they have enough to handle the load.

Rohan Online is a free-to-play, PvP-oriented game with a manga-inspired character design and art style. It has a number of innovative elements. If, for example, someone kills you, revenge is easy and quick: Once you are revived, you can teleport instantly to your killer for a rematch. This adds a little something extra to PvP ganking. Kill someone, and when you finally let your guard down ... when you're at your weakest ... that's when you feel the sword bite into your neck. Player guilds can also rule any of the cities in the game. Battles for their control occur every Saturday, with the winners getting the power of taxation over any transactions performed in the town. And, as is usual for games of this nature, there is an item shop.

[Via Classy Gamer]