Ubisoft sent out a press release this morning confirming that Far Cry 2 will hit European retail shelves on October 24th. The company also announced a collector's edition, which comes in a wooden box. The fine wooden case, sure to be made from only the finest trees (not really), will deliver the game, t-shirt, art book, collector's map and "making-of" DVD.

We're still waiting to hear back officially from Ubisoft if North America should plan on getting the game on October 21st, which is what many retailers are currently showing as the release date. Update: GameSpot confirms the date is the 21st.

If you love classic games but feel the need to own things in order to bring some sense of stability to your life, GOG.com (that's Good Old Games) could be a good alternative to GameTap for you. The company recently announced that you'll be able to find out for yourself if you sign up for the beta before Sept. 8, at which point the gates will be opened to the masses, or at least the masses that signed up.

We love GOG.com's approach, with $5.99 and $9.99 DRM-free releases that you can download as many times as you want and don't need an internet connection to play, but we wish the selection was a bit better. But who knows? With a beefier roster GOG could be a real Steam contender.

Jeff Green is the kind of game journalist we want to be when we grow up: Seasoned, funny and imbued with the perfect blend of skepticism and passion, even after 17 years on the job. Now, the former CGW and GFW editor and (just as importantly) GFW Radio/Brodeo cornerstone is leaving Ziff-Davis to join The Sims development team.

We have too much respect for Green to use this as an opportunity to note all the high-profile names that have jumped the Ziff-Davis ship recently. We'll only say that we'll miss you Jeff, and we wish you all the best.

[Thanks, Jonah]

Stardock has revealed that its sleeper PC hit Sins of a Solar Empire has sold over half a million copies. The company's CEO Brad Wardell tells Gamasutra that 400,000 units were sold at retail, while 100,000 in sales came from digital downloads. Not bad for a full-bodied PC strategy game that cost less than a million dollars to make.

Wardell is certainly becoming an interesting character in the narrative of this industry, with relatively small publisher Stardock really stepping up. He explains part of Sins' success is that it was designed to run on a "four-year-old video card" and still look good. He says there might be a "piddly super-mega effect" that gets missed, but the result is more sales for the game, a strategy which sounds similar to Blizzard's take on being a PC developer. Sins' first mini-expansion, Entrenchment, will be available for $10 later this year.

[Via Big Download]

Worth it or not, to me personally, pay-to-play MMOs always felt like a ridiculous proposition. Paying to play a game I already paid for is like paying $5 to bite into a delicious burger I just got at the drive-through. Still, the genre continues to spawn new titles as proven at the 2008 Penny Arcade Expo.

While many MMO titles were on display, two were the most talked-about massively multiplayer role-playing games of the show: Warhammer Online and Aion: The Tower of Eternity. Realizing my limited experience with MMOs in the past, the team at Joystiq tasked me with learning as much as I could about each title and see if they could appeal to a genre newbie willing to jump into the online fray.

We recently had the chance to check out Combat Arms, the free-to-play online FPS brought to US shores by Nexon of America. Nexon is best known in the states for its unique side-scrolling MMORPG Maple Story. Despite the company's grounding in the MMO genre, Nexon chooses to see itself as a purveyor of online games in general. From online racing in Kart Rider to virtual karaoke in Audition, the company publishes or develops a multitude of multiplayer experiences. Its extension to first-person shooters, in that light, makes a great deal of sense.

What's surprising is not that Nexon has chosen to jump into the FPS genre, but that the offering is as good as it is. The company has combined elements of mindless combat shooters like XIII with the multiplayer tactical orientation of a game like Counter-Strike. In doing so, it's delivered a title that can be as explosion- or strategy-focused as players want. And, of course, it wouldn't be Nexon without some unique twists -- namely, the incorporation of its successful microtransaction-based business model.

Combat Arms employs a clearly visible player ranking system in order to tie together rank rewards, the in-game currency, and the socialization aspects.

Kim and Yang noted that this balance between purchased items and off-the-rack choices didn't exist in the original Korean version of the game. As previously mentioned, the Korean gamers were looking for a more "arcade-y" experience. Grenades had flares to make them easier to track, mines had blinking lights, and every purchased item was a pure win for the player -- why not buy in that environment. As Kim put it, "American players have a definite concept of what is fair and what isn't," and they were determined to cater to that.

Yang noted that the despite changes from the Korean version, Combat Arms retains the "jump-in-and-out" gameplay that made this take on the genre so popular there. Nexon believes Americans will respond (and are responding) to this vision of what an FPS could be, based primarily on the "feel" of the game. As an example, Min Kim noted the simple feature that you can run in the game:

"If you press the shift button you actually run. That is not an option in a lot of other FPSs so it feels a lot faster and a lot of people like that. It's one of those things that is not easy to market; you can't say: 'hey you press the shift button you go really fast' on the back of a box. They don't know what that means until they start playing it."


After talking through the game as a concept, we sat down to play a few rounds -- dying numerous times to both Kim and Yang as they schooled us on the game's public servers. (Protip: Anyone interested in jumping into the game can already do so. Nexon has had an amazingly positive reaction, and had to increase their server capacity unexpectedly fast to deal with demand.)

During our back-and-forth matches, Yang stated that Nexon's planning to update the game on a regular basis. The company has been regularly releasing a patch to the game every two weeks since the game's beta began. Every update will add new weaponry, while a new map or game type will be added every month or two.

That endless state of updates driven by player demand will likely never stop for the game, and neither will the game's "test" state. After the interview, we spoke with Nexon representative Robert Holtzman to clarify when the game would be going with a hard launch. He laughed, and noted that the game might never get one -- given the title's popularity already, Nexon plans to continue to expand through word of mouth advertising and constant improvements.

Overall, we walked away from Combat Arms very impressed. Given the game's region of origin and the stigma of a free-to-play titles, Nexon's offering is a surprisingly fun and impressively attractive offering. It's a fast-action title that will please the twitch-happy mindless shooter fan just as easily as one looking for a more tactical approach. On top of it all, it deftly ties online clan gaming and Web 2.0 sensibilities together with ranks, formal groups, and eventually social networking plugins.

Given the unique blend of MMO and FPS in Combat Arms' DNA, it was intriguing and enlightening to see what the game has become. And it's always hard to turn down the offer of free.

BioWare's return to PC as a primary platform has been met with rapture and glee from the PC gaming crowd. The development chops of the Canadian company are almost impossible to question, with hit after hit being released from its Edmonton headquarters. Now the reunion with keyboard and mouse is accompanied by the most ambitious fantasy RPG BioWare has attempted since the original Baldur's Gate. Dragon Age: Origins is a true return to roots for the company, a homecoming with its dearest fans.

It makes sense then to find David Gaider, one of the original writers of the Baldur's Gate plot, at the keyboard behind Dragon Age. We had the chance to talk briefly with the author about what this highly-anticipated title will offer. Though he couldn't reveal much in the way of story components, he did offer a tantalizing view into the world's history. Join us as we talk with Gaider about stepping back from Mass Effect's advances, the joys of returning to PC gaming, and what he considers required reading for any Dragon Age fan.

How would you compare what you've done with the story in Dragon Age to what you did with Baldur's Gate?

Dragon Age is a huge game, much like Baldur's Gate. I don't know that we'd ever make a game as big as Baldur's Gate again, though. That game was just ridiculously huge. That said, there is something to making a game that is substantial like that. The word "epic" is thrown around like there's no tomorrow, but in some ways epic does fit with the scope of the game's story. It's a long story that takes your character through this large arc. It's appropriate for what we're doing.

It is also similar to Baldur's Gate insofar as how much we focus on character. You have all your party members, and I would say almost a third of the writing that's been done is just for the members themselves. The amount of talking they do may in fact be sort of endless. I think for a lot of players that's really important. To this day in any given forum, people will still bring up characters from Baldur's Gate. Some of them are quite beloved. I would like to think as a writer that Dragon Age is the next step from there. Not to knock the Baldur's Gate characters, but these are the characters you'll be interacting with at length for a long period of time ... they're important to the story.

Go for the eyes Boo! Go for the eyes!

Exactly.

It seems as though Dragon Age is very much BioWare returning to its roots. Was that a conscious decision or just a reaction to the way the company and gaming as a hobby has been going?

The company has gotten big enough now that we can have several projects on the go at any given time. Console has its place, of course, and we can't ignore them.

"We chose the subtitle 'Origins' specifically. This is where it begins, and we're not abandoning the PC gamer."

I'm sure a lot of PC gamers would love it if we did, but we can't. What PC players hate, though, is when you have a game that tries to work on a PC and a console at the same time. It has to go for the "lowest common denominator." I think that's a legitimate concern. I think there are games that have successfully worked on both platforms, I don't think it needs to be that way. But here we're focusing on, we're starting on the PC.

We're doing a couple of things differently with this game, though. I mean, we announced Dragon Age really really early. In the normal scheme of things, we would have probably only been announcing it around now for release next year. Instead we announced it really early so that PC gamers wouldn't feel left out. They could look at Mass Effect and know we had huge plans for Dragon Age as a world. We chose the subtitle "Origins" specifically. This is where it begins, this is where the new story starts, and we're not abandoning the PC gamer.

That's something I wanted to mention; origins would seem to suggest a number of things especially for PC gamers. A lot of them still see the Baldur's Gate series as this great franchise that they'll really appreciate forever. Do you see Dragon Age as an attempt to go for that kind of success?

In the end the proof is going to be in the pudding. Rather, the proof is in the eating of the pudding. A lot will depend on how well the game does, right? Before we go crazy with it we want to see how the game is received. I think we're very confident, though, that there's a big group out there that has been anxiously waiting for something like this. I think they'll really respond if we've done well.

I have a good feeling about it, it's not just because I created the world. I watched this game grow before my eyes, I got to start see the cutscenes back, see the world I created take on a life of its own. The coolest thing is when the artists started getting on board. They're one step ahead of me now, instead of me being the one to say "well this is what this should look like". I have that same feeling as I did when we were at this point in developing Baldur's Gate. There's always that point where you're like 'this game is utter crap!' Then it starts to change, and finally we're at the point where we're like 'wow, this game is awesome!'

We really hope this is the launching point for something bigger.

One last question: I'm sure that as a fantasy writer, you read a lot of fantasy as well. Who are some authors you would suggest to gamers that are looking forward to Dragon Age, as a sort of primer to get them in the mood for the world?

There is one series of books that is required reading for any Dragon Age fan. It's not to say we copied him, but it's required reading for what it represented when I was thinking about the game. I sort of got tired of the same old fantasy-style stories. I read The Belgariad and Wheel of Time back to back, right? And they both started the same way, with a "chosen one" with a boy in a remote village who is carried away just as his village is destroyed ... they both started the same way. They're both decent series, but they're very high fantasy titles.

Then I picked up a series of books by George R.R. Martin called A Song of Ice and Fire. It's a low magic world there, and ours is a bit higher. Dragon Age is lower than the normal fantasy world, though, because magic is sort of rare and mages are very distrusted. As I described how Darkspawn came to be, people kind of have a bad opinion about them as a group.

For me, it was the tonal shift that really changed for me personally. It was such a dark story, and sometimes I think he may get too dark ... but it was focused on politics and civil war, dark and gritty, and there was the possibility that characters you loved might die. I went from being kind of "meh" on fantasy in general to really excited because of these books. We didn't go out to copy his works, but that sort of shift, that darkness, that seriousness are all elements we've embraced for our game. That's the tone of Dragon Age.

Thanks so much for your time, sir.

A couple of weeks back during X08, we learned that the "fall" release time frame Activision had been giving for the latest Call of Duty installment actually meant "November." Today, the publisher narrowed it down even further to November 11. That's the date all console versions of Call of Duty: World at War will rumble into retail – except, of course, for the never-to-be PS2 version. Those hankering for an earlier taste of multiplayer flame thrower action should hit our post from earlier today on the upcoming October beta.

Take-Two Interactive's third-quarter fiscal results have proven that crime really does pay, with law-breaking blockbuster Grand Theft Auto IV leading sales, alongside Top Spin 3 and Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution. The three-month financial period, ended July 31, 2008, saw the publisher rake in net revenues of $433.8 million, nearly double the $206.4 million it earned during the same, GTA-less quarter of 2007.

If you're reading this paragraph, we can only assume that you're keen on seeing even more numbers. Like $51.8 million, Take-Two's net income for the quarter and a considerable improvement on last year's net loss of $58.5 million. In terms of notable expenses, Take-Two burned through $12.6 million in "stock-based compensation," $1.8 million for "business reorganization" and $5.4 million for "professional fees and legal expenses," primarily aimed at warding off the advances of EA. Finally, net revenues for Take-Two's first three quarters in total were just over $1.2 billion, versus $689.2 million for the same period a year ago.

In summary: Grand Theft Auto IV = money.

In what has to be the most totally original pre-order bonus ever, Activision is going to let anyone who "reserves" Call of Duty: World at War into a multiplayer beta planned for sometime in October. Oh, that's everyone except PS3 owners. The beta will be available only on Xbox 360 and PC, giving lucky paying entrants a chance to try out the game's new perks and squad system.

In "no purchase necessary" style, those not feeling the pre-order itch can try their luck by registering for a beta token lottery on the official Call of Duty site – that is if they can navigate through the Web 2.0 minefield of way too much stuff on the page.

Last week during PAX 2008, we sat down with Hothead COO and Penny Arcade Adventures Producer Joel DeYoung as he guided us through Episode 2 and improvements to the engine. The gist of it is: if you liked Episode 1, you'll like Episode 2 that much more. Here's the rundown from our talks:

• Highlighting points of interest has been made easier! "If you have your proximity putting you close enough to 2 or 3 things, you can slide through that with bumpers," said DeYoung.
  
• There are now difficulty levels, including an Insane Mode (unlockable only after beating the game). Special collectibles and pickups are only available if you play Insane Mode. Comparatively, Episode 1's difficulty is "a little easier" than medium.
• All the weapons have been replaced. Tycho gets a shotgun, Gabe has new fist upgrades and your player now possesses -- wait for it -- a hoe! Also changed are the special attack minigames.
  
• You now have, among other new items, a revive potion. Healing won't be enough to bring your troops back to life. "Just adds a little bit of depth to it," said DeYoung.
• The real-time reaction for defense has been made more obvious (e.g. "Block!" now appears when you need to push block), but nothing analogous for attacking has been added.

More after the break.

We were given one hour with Fallout 3 at this year's PAX, and we don't mean some pared down, nerfed, demo-ized level; this was the full version. Not only that, but the Bethesda folks showed it to us in the tricked out Fallout 3 Airstream Trailer, complete with a nuclear family peering in.

Lead designer Emil Pagliarulo started us out roughly an hour into the game, when you exit the vault for the very first time. We missed the whole "growing up" phase in order to rush right into the action. We didn't mind. but what of our first 18 or so years? Maybe you start out on the cellular level, and fight your way out in a glorious Spore/Fallout hybrid. Your guess is as good as ours.