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Syfy has finally found a lead for their joint television and massive multiplayer online series, Defiance. It's Cooter from True Blood, better known as Grant Bowler. And with the announcement of their lead, a few new details for this space Western have been revealed.

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The Federation is trying desperately to maintain peace in a chaotic galaxy shattered by war. Violent Klingons and bizarre alien invaders threaten. Sounds like the earliest days of Star Trek, but this is the galaxy's future in Star Trek Online. More »
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Zoom through space and go planetside in this new trailer for the Star Trek MMO, due out next month. This bit of footage, called "Exploration," gives a feel for how space battles and other action might unfold. [via Massively] More »
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Today may be a bad day to play Star Trek Online. Turns out 99% of the Star Trek MMO's Klingon content will be PvP — which mean plenty of people may just pass on the game entirely. More »
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The Secret Apprentice, Starkiller, is back, but we have no idea how. If it's because of love, we may have to unleash the Force on LucasArts. Also, check out the latest trailer and news from Star Trek Online. Spoilers below. More »
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We're all still anxiously awaiting the release of the Star Trek MMO. Until then, check out Cryptic Studios' beautiful new space images from inside the MMO that will give you renewed hope that the game will actually come out. More »
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Worried that Star Wars: The Old Republic wouldn't let you live out your childhood dreams of becoming Han Solo? Fret no more - The MMO's website has just released details of the next playable class: The smugglers. More »
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BioWare's beautiful Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO trailer shows us exactly why the dark side is so attractive. Watch a team of highly skilled assassins mow down a flock of Jedi. Let the battle begin! More »
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New clips from the Star Trek MMO show a giant collection of avatars and ships blasting each other. But it still looks mighty pretty. More »
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Despite Stargate executive producer Brad Wright's fears, the Stargate MMO is still up and running, according to GateWorld's Manager Kevin Balentine. More »
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It's a poddish alien landscape from MMO Tabula Rasa, by designer Chris J. Anderson. He's left NCsoft, and the gamemaker's loss is our gain, because he's posting never-before-seen images from his time there. More »
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The last couple of seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation seemed to be leading up to showing Ensign Ro Laren joining the crew of Deep Space Nine, orbiting her homeworld of Bajor. So I was sad when Michelle Forbes turned down the DS9 role. But now at last, Ro has found her rightful place on the former Terok Nor — at least in the Star Trek Online universe. (Which also released some new screenshots recently.) More »
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The year is 2019, and a report has just come out proving that the Earth's population is likely to suffer catastrophic collapse by the 2040s. Energy costs are rising, a new pandemic called ReDS is devastating the globe, homelessness has reached epic proportions, and the internet has become a miasma of spam that prevents everyone from communicating. Now it's up to you and a few thousand other futurists to save the planet by quickly inventing new social structures that can stop all our civilizational "superthreats" before it's too late. This is just a broad outline of the rewardingly complex plot of a new MMO called Superstruct that the Institute for the Future launched last week. On the game design team are futurist Jamais Cascio (we've got an interview with him below) and celebrated game innovator Jane McGonigal, among many others. They helped shape Superstruct into an experimental game that asks you to do the opposite of what most MMOs do. Instead of inventing a character to play, you have to play yourself — 11 years into the future. More »
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A researcher at the National Defense University in the U.S. is convinced that the terrorists could be hatching their next plot in World of Warcraft or Second Life. Danger Room's Noah Shachtman reports that Dwight Toavs gave a paper last week that argued, among other things, that terrorists could discuss plans to sack Washington right out in the open in an MMO, by simply pretending that they were planning to sack a fictional town on a server. Apparently Toavs and his colleagues were a little unclear on MMOs, however. More »
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While we may have been hearing about the upcoming DC Universe Online MMORG for some time, the announcement yesterday that fan-favorite writer Geoff Johns was writing parts of the game - including sequences familiar to fans of his books -made the year-plus wait for the game that little bit harder. After all, who doesn't want to be part of the Sinestro Corps War? More »
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The makers of Beyond Protocol, a real-time strategy MMO of interplanetary warfare, just announced that they're pushing their release date to November of this year. Bad news, right? Well, there's a big, thick silver lining. If you pre-order the game, you can immediately jump into the closed beta and play for free from now until the official launch, at which point you'll get a free month. Sweet deal. We've got the details, plus some new screenshots of the ridiculously deep unit design interface. More »
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Fans got their first hands-on experience of superhero MMO Champions Online at Gen-Con Indy last week, and some in-game footage has made its way online (see video below). Running around in tights and blasting bad guys with a variety of nifty superpowers looks fun, but why are all the heroes stuck in a Yul Brynner-less Westworld? More »
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Click to viewFederation space stations guarded by expansive sensors snake across the Alpha Quadrant. Cryptic Studios have released screen shots that give future gamers a look into the brand new Star Trek Online universe. From the looks of things the Federation is a force to be reckoned with. Click through to see a gallery of the final frontier including a shadowy glimpse of a CG Andorian. More »
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I can't stop thinking about a story that broke earlier this week about a bug that reduced the breast sizes of tons of large-boobed avatars in the MMO "Age of Conan" (you can see before and after pictures here). No word on whether the boobs have been re-inflated, nor any real explanation of how it happened beyond some hand-waving about patches and "morph values" for body parts. My theory is that it was actually a gang of feminist modders who infected the MMO with properly-sized boobies. [Kotaku] More »
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Virtual worlds are driving people to suicide — and making them fall in love. A new documentary, opening this weekend, follows seven people who are devoted to virtual worlds, and finds them struggling with addiction and discovering romance. Second Skin, which debuts at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, showcases players' devotion to worlds like Second Life, and soon the science fiction wonderment addiction that is Starcraft 2). Click through to view the trailer. More »
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If you're worried about getting packages from grandma and Amazon when you live in a hovering spacepod floating somewhere off the Pacific Rim, fret no more. You'll have friendly mail carriers with anti-Postal Tendencies (tm) automatic injector systems buzzing by to drop things off. They won't complain about the weather, steal your lingerie catalog-capsules, or mace your dog. More »
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Some of the most popular online video games and virtual worlds have fantasy themes — think World of Warcraft or old-school MMO Everquest. But if games are ever to make it out of the dork ghetto, they're going to have to shed their elves and orcs and start giving us more spaceships and high tech. So says Michael Zenke, who blogs about games at MMOG Nation. He says science fiction games (like Tabula Rasa, pictured here) will always beat fantasy in terms of storytelling potential. Zenke bolsters his argument with two interesting points: that science fiction is usually based in reality, and therefore is more appealing to a mass audience; and that science fiction has a much more hopeful outlook than fantasy. Realism and hope just make for better gameplay. More »
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We hope that upcoming MMOThe Day manages to look like its sumptuous concept art, pictured above. That image of the Arc de Triomphe being repaired, upgraded, or duplicated is just simply amazing. The premise of The Day is that two parallel worlds smash together, and we've got a whole gallery of strange history-mashup imagery from The Day for you to gawk at. More »
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A new version of massive multiplayer game World of Warcraft will allow people to change their characters' hair and dance moves, but not their genders. Just goes to show that you can move to a new cyber-world packed with an international population of millions, and still be SOL if you want to find a decent tranny bar. This isn't the first time that WOW has instituted weird, arbitrary rules about sex-related crap, either. More »
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