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We've said before that the main source of information on Star Trek Online at this point is hints and implications peppered through interviews with Cryptic Studios' Jack Emmert. The latest of those interviews is lighter on details than were previous conversations, but it's still worth a read.

Speaking to Ten Ton Hammer at Gen Con, Emmert started out vaguely answering questions about character customization. Nothing new there. But it got a bit more interesting when he used time travel as an example of something pivotal to the franchise, but that's made difficult to implement by technological and budgetary limitations. He spoke as if he'd already given a great deal of thought to it; perhaps that's a clue that despite the problems, time travel is something Cryptic intends to put in the game.

Other topics included the uniqueness of Star Trek ship design, instancing, procedurally-generated areas for exploration, and travel time.

In this week's Lord of the Rings Online forum roundup over at Ten Ton Hammer, some interesting points are made on the state of game, Tolkien's view of magic and the player impressions of the Summer Festival. Don't let the high-brow lore excerpts fool you though, the expected forum negativity still shines through this week.

The Summer Festival horse's appearance has been a topic of debate since the photos from Roheryn first surfaced last month. The bright green and yellow saddle has been called everything from psychedelic to nauseating. So it should be no surprise that players are petitioning for a change. Plus, the most-heated debate in this week's roundup revolves around Tolkien's view on magic, its usage by Man and the new Rune-keeper. Does this mean the new magic-user class won't be accessible to the race of Man, or does it mean the lore will need to be stretched a bit? Either way, expect a few complaints here and there.

In the latest forum round-up over at Ten Ton Hammer's Lord of the Rings Online division, it's no surprise that the focus is on Book 14's new content. There are gleeful praises and there are angry rants, but perhaps the most interesting is the speculation on what's to come with the expanded Critter Play feature.

As one player predicts, the word is out that we may be able to play as Gandalf in Mines of Moria. Now, keep in mind that this is one player's speculation and the evidence he presents for this theory is a bit of a stretch, but wouldn't it be interesting if they were right? Imagine being Gandalf in that infamous Balrog battle scene, protecting the Fellowship from certain doom all by your lonesome. Now that's immersive game play.

Anarchy Online content designer Nina "Aythem" Sund has been writing developer journal entries over at Ten Ton Hammer for several months, sharing game design wisdom and insider anecdotes with players. Her latest entry had a different tone, though. She used the medium to bid farewell to AO players as she moves on to work on Funcom's next MMO, The Secret World.

As a parting gift, she spent the rest of her entry telling fans how they too can become game designers. Hers is good advice if that's an aspiration for you. Unfortunately, she didn't slip out any news or information on The Secret World, which as so far been very, well ... secret. Ten Ton Hammer attached two bits of concept art, though, so savor that!

We hope Funcom will continue to support AO even though it now has Age of Conan and The Secret World to worry about, too. Sund was a popular quest designer at AO; we're glad she'll be adding her touch to TSW, but poor AO!

In line with the recent interview at MMORPG.com, Lord of the Rings Online's Jeffrey Steefel speaks in another interview with Ten Ton Hammer regarding the plans to bring LotRO to Korean audiences. This is something that has been discussed for quite a long time now, but with the Korean release imminent, we now get into the details of this launch and what LotRO hopes to offer to this specific audience.

One of the most important points made in this article is the projected number of players who could potentially be involved with this game at launch. While Steefel is reluctant to give figures, he says that with half the population of Korea playing online games (which would be a potential market of almost 37 million people), "the numbers could be astounding," he says.

You don't have to be crazy to read EverQuest II's Game Update 46's patch notes, but it helps. It also helps if you're Ten Ton Hammer's Coyote and RadarX, but I guess that's redundant? Read on for tales of brave shadow knights and their pink pool noodles, armor that loves you so much it hurts, and surprise colonoscopies via your faithful rhino mount.

[Ten Ton Hammer]

Hermann Peterscheck is the producer of NetDevil's Jumpgate Evolution. He has a lot of experience working on MMOs -- including the original Jumpgate. For those reasons, Ten Ton Hammer decided he would be a great subject for an interview about the process of developing an MMO. You can read the result now.

Apart from the revelation that the game will feature four kilometer-long battleships (cool), the interview was a little bit light on JGE details. But if you're interested in learning how and why games are made, that's okay, because there's a lot of content on that subject.

We thought it was particularly interesting when Peterscheck explained the philosophy behind NetDevil's decision to make JGE. "It is very difficult to steal people away from other MMOs so you are much better off going after an underserved market," he said. He also suggested that every single big MMO succeeded because it (to some extent) created a new market instead of converting users in an existing one.

Recently we've reported on a partnership between Trion World Network and SCI FI channel to create a new MMO that will be tied into a SCI FI show. But, for all we knew about the new project, we didn't know what genre it would fall under or what the setting would be.

That all changed in an interview from Ten Ton Hammer with Adam Stotsky, the executive vice-president of SCI FI channel, about the new SCI FI project. While most of the interview focuses on the partnership between Trion and SCI FI, Cody "Micajah" Bye was able to pull out the setting for the new project from Stotsky.

Stotsky confirms that the project will be science fiction in nature, centering around Earth in an alternate universe.

"It will be a very different Earth than the one we currently know today," Stotsky told Bye during the interview.

For the rest of the interview, drop by Ten Ton Hammer and check it out.

The guys n' gals over at Ten Ton Hammer were able to speak with Mark Jacobs about the newest Warhammer Online class, the White Lion. Pets that gain levels are pretty standard in the MMORPG world, in fact it's almost a given anymore. However, in an interesting twist, players will keep and level just one pet throughout their time with the White Lion class. EA Mythic is promising a dynamic experience that makes each player's lion meaningful, but hasn't yet gone into the mechanic bits of everything just yet.

While this may not be groundbreaking news, it's very interesting to note Jacobs enthusiasm for giving players a pet with which they'll develop an attachment. Just knowing that there won't be any re-teaching of skills and abilities is definitely a big relief to us, too. Now we just have to wonder how many players are going to roll this class -- a worry that many Destruction players are likely sharing.

Then again, Squig Herders still have that whole thing where they jump into their pets and use them like a suit of squishy, toothy, crazed armor. Not to mention the fact that some of the higher level Squigs looks exceedingly awesome. Seems to us like Warhammer Online's supposed imbalance fears may be over before they've even begun, thanks in part to EA Mythic's keen sense of what we're now referring to as "Class Coolness".

With such an emphasis placed on PvP and combat, until recently not much has been known about Warhammer's crafting. Mark Jacobs has sort of become the official spokesperson for WAR's crafting system and is still making the rounds hitting up TenTonHammer in this one and two part interview. Nothing new is really discerned if you've been following the news closely. In the TTH interview Jacobs discusses scalability, the impact Apothecary will have on other areas of the game like combat, and more. A definite must read while you wait for your beta invite and are frothing at the mouth for anything WAR related.

If you missed out on all the news be sure to check out first-hand coverage for all the latest goods on Warhammer.

In a recent interview over at Ten Ton Hammer, Pierre-Yves Deslandes, the Public Relations Manager for The Chronicles of Spellborn answered some interesting questions about the upcoming fantasy MMO. One of the first questions on the minds of those at TTH and the minds of most players is why the game's launch has been post-poned another six months until autumn of 2008.

Of course, as with most game-launch delays, the development team is still working out some bugs. Plus, to complicate matters, the game is still without a North American publisher. But in addition to this news, we get treated to some wonderful information regarding the unique features of the game, including the "Dress to Impress" gear system.

Head on over to TTH to read the complete interview.

Ten Ton Hammer spoke with Funcom product manager Erling Eddison about his experiences at the company, the Age of Conan launch, and ... his vacation plans!

Apart from a few vague hints about future patches, there's not much information about the game itself in this interview. However, it does contain an inside look at what the Funcom team went through in the days leading up to AoC's launch. For example, on May 17th (the early access launch day), there was a large screen in the Funcom offices that showed how many players were logged on to the servers. When the servers opened to the early access players, and the numbers skyrocketed, the team broke out the champagne.

Eddison plans to take a nice, long vacation -- possibly to Egypt -- before continuing to promote AoC and The Secret World.

In a recent interview at Ten Ton Hammer, Nexon America's Min Kim spoke out about some of the company's plans for upcoming games, including their online FPS entitled Combat Arms which will be entering closed beta next week. He also talks a bit about another upcoming MMO title being produced by their Vancouver studio, but details are still not available.

In addition, Min Kim speaks at great length about some of the existing titles they have have available in Korea, that they're hoping to port to the North American audience, including the wildly-popular Korean title KartRider. To garner interest with North American players, Min Kim realizes that the audiences are different, and social competition is where it's at. No other information was said about KartRider's introduction to North America, but he says more details will be available soon.

Update: Though we initially listed both Audition and KartRider as games Nexon was looking to bring to North America, Audition has been available to North American audiences for some time now, complete with a catalog of familiar songs!