An anonymous reader writes "It looks like approval to build a memorial to E. Gary Gygax has been granted in Lake Geneva City, Wisconsin. The Gygax Memorial Fund is still taking donations for the memorial that may begin construction as early as later this year. I (like many on Slashdot) spent many years of my youth using Gygax inspired creations as an excuse to socialize, roll dice, and eat chips at impromptu gatherings before computers intruded on the RPG realms."

An anonymous reader writes "The former Illuminati Online domain, IO.com, has been sold, and all existing customers will lose all services associated with the domain. A 1990 Secret Service raid on Steve Jackson Games, then owner of the Illuminati Online BBS and later the IO.com domain led to the creation of the EFF and was an important milestone in the fight for online rights. While the domain has been sold in the past, the services offered to customers always remained unchanged. However, this most recent sale, to an unnamed party, will result in all services being dropped on July 1, and people will lose email addresses, web pages, and shell accounts that many have had for 15+ years." Bad news for me — io.com was my first real ISP, and I was hoping to see if I could revive the account.

eldavojohn writes "It's no secret that Final Fantasy XIV took a lot of heat early on, which required extensive damage control. And the Japanese tsunami (which appears to have added $7.5 million to their losses) certainly didn't help. But if what early investor reports are saying is true, then Square Enix is expected to report $148 million in losses for the closing fiscal year. Expect title cancellations (which might add to the hurt) and a very painful realization for the owner of Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior (PDF). Perhaps a move to re-releasing classics will prove more fruitful than high development cost MMORPGs?"

NCSoft announced yesterday that they plan to shut down all North American servers for their long-running Lineage MMORPG on June 29th. The game came out in 1998 and gradually became one of the most successful MMOs of all time, reporting over a million subscribers as much as a decade after launch. Account creation on North American servers has been disabled, subscriptions for coming months have been refunded, and existing accounts have been reactivated for free. "We will not be making any additional content updates, but we do have US Ruleset changes and lots of great events planned for the next two months. We want to give you every opportunity to make all of your remaining Lineage dreams come true. We hope that everyone will stick around to have fun with the game you love in the time we have left. We know that we have incredibly loyal fans that have stood by us for the past ten years. As painful as it was, as a business, we had to make a very difficult, but necessary, decision."

During an earnings call this afternoon, Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime revealed the company's goals for testing and releasing the much-anticipated new chapter in the Diablo series. "[Morhaime said], 'On the Diablo 3 front, I'm pleased to report that we began internal, company-wide testing last week. The game is looking great and we are currently targeting a Q3 launch for external beta testing. The development team is working hard to try to launch Diablo 3 this year, but I want to be clear. We do not have an official release date or window yet.' Details on the external beta are currently extremely limited, so we don't know the scope of how many testers will be involved or what the beta will include. It's hard to imagine that anything could match the gargantuan beta for StarCraft 2, but Blizzard has said that Diablo 3 will have plenty of online functionality, and that sort of functionality needs plenty of testers to succeed."

sdasher writes "Finally, there's a chance to combine your love of version control and parties: Gitionary. The brainchild of two MIT alums, it's a party game where you try to illustrate git commands. A set of gitionary cards (PDF) has been posted as well. Personally, I'm still holding out for the Debugging Python RPG."

donniebaseball23 writes "EA's BioWare is developing its first-ever MMORPG in Star Wars: The Old Republic, and the publisher is betting big that the project will be a huge success. Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter says development alone cost an estimated $80 million, with marketing and distribution adding in another $20 million. The good news is it shouldn't take much to break even. 'We estimate that EA will cover its direct operating costs and break even at 500,000 subscribers (this is exceedingly conservative, and the actual figure is probably closer to 350,000), meaning that with 1.5 million paying subscribers, EA will have 1 million profitable subs,' Pachter noted." They're now aiming for a release late this year, but acknowledged the possibility that it could slip to January 2012. If you're curious about the current state of the gameplay, Eurogamer and Rock, Paper, Shotgun (PvE, PvP) both posted write-ups of some recent hands-on time.

You may have no trouble smelling like an orc after 12 straight hours of raiding, but if you do, Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab is here for you. The company has come out with a line of RPG inspired perfumes. Choose from: Dwarf, Elf, Half-elf, Hafling, Orc, Cleric, Fighter, or Mage and people will not only see that you're a geek, they'll smell it too.

Martey writes "Ars Technica reports that a server problem with the DRM authentication servers has caused Dragon Age: Origins players to be locked out of any saved games that include downloadable content. Quoting: 'Thanks to a combination of DRM idiocy and technical and communications failures on the part of EA and Bioware, I (along with thousands of fellow EA/Bioware customers) spent my free time this past weekend needlessly trapped in troubleshooting hell, in a vain attempt to get my single-player game to load. The problem, it turns out, was the Bioware's DRM authorization servers.'" An update to the article indicates the problems have finally been resolved.

Kevin Fishburne writes "According to posts at the Ultima fan site Ultima Aiera, both the browser-based Ultima IV Sega Master System emulation at Master System 8 and the IBM-PC port at Phi Psi Software have received cease and desist letters from Electronic Arts, the current IP holder of the Ultima franchise. The post states that despite the widely held belief that Origin had allowed the Ultima Dragons to distribute Ultima IV freely in 1997, in fact that is no longer the case. It further suggests that the EA takedowns are preceding an upcoming browser-based Ultima IV reboot by Bioware Mythic. Has EA lost an eighth, or are they well within their rights by going DMCA on a 26-year-old game they had no hand in developing?"

As various MMOs have been released over the past several years, their developers have been wary about the inevitable measuring against World of Warcraft, often saying that "second-best" is more than good enough for them. Not so for ArenaNet as they work on Guild Wars 2; they're aiming right for the top. And according to a detailed preview now up at Eurogamer, their effort is paying off : "Two huge and risky decisions have been made in its design: junking the 'holy trinity' of character class roles (protective 'tank', damage-dealer and healer) and doing away with the quest-style architecture for game content. Yet, in moment-to-moment play, Guild Wars 2 looks and feels instantly and reassuringly like a fantasy MMORPG – just a noticeably fresh one. It's a question of flow. Combat is still hotkey-based, but faster and smoother and more streamlined, involving more movement and positioning. The levelling curve is now an almost flat line, replacing the epic ascent with a steady journey where content, not advancement, is king."

RogueyWon writes "Kotaku is reporting that a Dragon Age II gamer banned from BioWare's forums for an allegedly inflammatory post has been locked out of the (singleplayer only) game for the duration of the ban. This is a consequence of EA's backend systems, which link forum accounts to the accounts that players use to access their games. This would appear to be a worrying new development; while trolling forums has led to bans from massively multiplayer games in the past (arguably with some justification), the extension of the principle to singleplayer games, where an abusive player cannot affect the enjoyment of others, must surely be a step too far."

Today marks the US launch of Dragon Age II, the sequel to BioWare's popular 2009 RPG Dragon Age: Origins. Like its predecessor and other BioWare RPGs, Dragon Age II is non-linear and has extensive dialog, though this time the story focuses on a particular character, Hawke, whose race and identity you can't change. A demo of the game is available, and early opinions noted both the impressive art direction and less punishing difficulty settings. BioWare has also released an optional ~1GB texture pack for the PC version that bumps up the level of detail for owners of high end computers. They explained some of the technological changes they made in a couple of blog posts. It's available for Windows, OS X, the PS3, and the Xbox 360.

An anonymous reader tips an article about 'consolitis,' the term given to game design decisions made for the console that spill over and negatively impact the PC versions of video games. "Perhaps the most obvious indicator of consolitis, a poor control scheme can single-handedly ruin the PC version of a game and should become apparent after a short time spent playing. Generally this has to do with auto-aim in a shooter or not being able to navigate menus with the mouse. Also, not enough hotkeys in an RPG — that one’s really annoying. ... Possibly the most disastrous outcome of an industry-wide shift to console-oriented development is that technological innovation will be greatly slowed. Though a $500+ video card is considered top of the line, a $250 one will now play pretty much any game at the highest settings with no problem. (Maybe that’s what everyone wanted?) Pretty soon, however, graphics chip makers won’t be able to sustain their rate of growth because the software is so far behind, which will be bad for gamers on consoles as well as PC."

On Wednesday we discussed news of an impressive-looking mod for StarCraft II that transformed the game into a WoW lookalike, which quickly drew a copyright infringement warning from Activision Blizzard. The company has now released an official statement green-lighting the mod for continued development. "'It was never our intention to stop development on the mod or discourage the community from expressing their creativity through the StarCraft II editor,' Blizzard said in a statement. 'As always, we actively encourage development of custom maps and mods for StarCraft II, as we've done with our strategy games in the past.' Blizzard went on the say that it's looking forward to seeing development of the mod continue, and that it has invited Winzen to the company's campus to meet the game's development team."

eldavojohn writes "If you've been following the team who created World of StarCraft (an amazing mod of StarCraft II to be more like World of Warcraft), their YouTube video of what they've done so far has already resulted in a cease and desist from Activision/Blizzard. Evidently when you are given tools to make custom mods to games you should be careful about making something too good. The author of the mod is hopeful that it's just a trademark problem with the name of his mod, but few reasons for the C&D were given." In other StarCraft news, reader glwtta recommends an article about how a Berkeley team won the world's first StarCraft AI competition with code that can beat even pro-level human players.

An anonymous reader writes "Square-Enix has announced Final Fantasy XIII-2 for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. According to Gamespot, 'The newly christened Final Fantasy XIII-2 continues the adventures of Lightning and her team of RPG vagabonds in a brand new adventure, utilizing the long-in-development engine (and, probably, some of the art assets) that powered the original game. And because Square doesn't have to spend all of that extra time developing the engine, players won’t have to wait nearly as long to get their hands on this newest iteration of the game. According to Square Enix, Final Fantasy XIII-2 (which, in case you haven't guessed, is a game title that is just as terrible to type out as it is to say with your mouth) is on track for release in Japan this year. [The game] should be available in English-speaking territories by "next winter."'"

eldavojohn writes "Thinking about developing a game involving a 'database driven online distributed tournament system?' Well, you had better talk to Walker Digital or risk a lawsuit, because Walker Digital claims to have patented that 'invention' back in 2002. The patent in question has resulted in some legal matters for the makers of 'Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 1 and 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Call of Duty: World at War, Blur, Wolfenstein, DJ Hero 2, Golden Eye 007, World of Warcraft and its expansions, Mafia Wars, and many others.' Walker Digital (parent company of Priceline.com) said it's not sure how much damages are going to be, and requested that through discovery in the court. If you think Walker Digital is not a patent troll, check out their lawsuit from two months ago against Facebook for using privacy controls Walker Digital claims to have patented. It would seem that any online competitive game that uses a database to select and reward contestants in a tournament could potentially fall under this patent — of course, those with the deepest coffers will be cherrypicked first."

Since the announcement of Star Wars: The Old Republic, many gamers have been hopeful that its high budget, respected development team and rich universe will be enough to provide a real challenge to the WoW juggernaut. An opinion piece at 1Up makes the case that BioWare's opportunity to do so may have already passed. Quoting: "While EA and BioWare Austin have the horsepower needed to at least draw even with World of Warcraft though, what we've seen so far has been worryingly conventional — even generic — given the millions being poured into development. Take the opening areas around Tython, which Mike Nelson describes in his most recent preview as being 'rudimentary,' owing to their somewhat generic, grind-driven quest design. Running around killing a set number of 'Flesh Raiders' in a relatively quiet village doesn't seem particularly epic, but that's the route BioWare Austin seems to be taking with the opening areas for the Jedi — what will surely be the most popular classes when The Old Republic is released. ... the real concern, though, is not so much in the quest design as in BioWare Austin's apparent willingness to play follow the leader. Whenever something becomes a big hit — be it a movie, game or book — there's always a mad scramble to replicate the formula; in World of Warcraft's case, that mad scramble has been going for six years now. "

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies have developed software that enables control of PC video games using the Microsoft Kinect sensor. Their toolkit, known as the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit (FAAST), emulates custom-configured keyboard controls triggered by body posture and specific gestures. This video shows a user playing the online game World of Warcraft using the Kinect. Potential applications of this technology include video games for motor rehabilitation after stroke and reducing childhood obesity through healthy gaming."