Star Trek Online caused some consternation when they announced:

Klingon Captains have the same number of skills available as their Federation counterparts, including the same professions. Your Klingon Captain can be a Science, Engineering or Tactical officer. However, they must advance through PvP, as they will not have access to the same amount of player-vs.-environment content as Federation players at launch.

That's not to say Klingons won't be a robust faction. While they are PvP-focused, PvP in Star Trek Online is something we designed from the ground up to be a viable advancement path, meaning both Klingon and Federation players can reach a rank of Admiral solely through PvP. Players can engage in team vs. team, Federation vs. Klingon, Klingon vs. Klingon and Federation vs. Federation combat. What's more, certain PvP maps will have PvE objectives over which opposing players can struggle.

Cryptic exec Jack Emmert has this to say to IGN about the unfortunate situation:

The fact is, people make their buying decisions early and he felt it was important to have Klingons in the game, even if they were not as deep as everyone would like, from day one. "If I sit back and wait for it to be perfect, frankly people aren't going to wait around for it," he added.

Bottom line, too bad. The Klingon are going to be boring, or no Star Trek Online. Still the Klingons in the game will have their own ships, bridge officers and territory, if that helps at all.

[via IGN]

This trailer was released at the Spike TV Video Game Awards, revealing that there will be a Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2, canon be damned...

How the hell is he still alive? There were two options at the end of the game: death, or life as a half-robot half-creature thing, Sith Stalker, pictured here....

Not that we are complaining, Sam Witwer's Secret Apprentice rage and scowl are the things dreams are made of 00 but no thanks to the robot head and claw hands. This just doesn't work, or make sense. We liked the dark endings that tied up this character's fate with existing canon. Please do explain, LucasArts. More Force Unleashed concept art here.

But other spacey gaming news, we've got a new trailer from Star Trek Online, which also announced today that Zachary Quinto would be lending the game his voice! Here's the new Klingon-heavy trailer:

This game has a long, long wait but thankfully these images seem to promise an MMO world unlike any other. The detail is astounding, even on different planets. In this MMO players will be able to customize characters and their ships. Exploration isn't limited to already-existing Trek planets. And the game will include Trek alien races such as the Andorians and Klingons, which you can see in this gallery.

[More pictures via Massively]

Describing smugglers as "slick, sneaky and street-smart," it's almost as if they're daring you not to want to play this particular class, even before you get to the outfits inspired by Lando Calrissian. Who would want to be a Jedi when you can be one of these guys, instead?

Smuggler [Star Wars: The Old Republic]

The story picks up a bit afterStar Wars: Knights Of The Republic ended (but about 3,000 years before the movies' timelines). The story unfolds during the war between the Galactic Republic (Jedis and friends) and the Sith Empire. And from the looks of things, the Siths are winning. While there isn't much out there yet, but this footage is lovely, especially for an MMO. But it sounds like it will be a long while until the game is released.

Craig Zinkievich from Cryptic Studios took some time to show a few new bits of the Star Trek MMO and talk about how deep and layered this game is going to be, and how much it shows of the post-Nemesis future. We're especially excited that you can become a one-eyed Klingon. They also talk a little bit more about one of the possible objectives of the games, besides shooting everyone.

Despite an interview at Gateworld where Brad Wright hinted that the game didn't have much of a future by saying "They had an opportunity and they got our support, and they obviously had significant funding, and it didn't happen," Balentine (the Manager of the GateWorld project) says that progress is still moving forward with the MMO.

On the World site, he address Wright's interview, saying:

Our official response is that the lights here are still on and the development team is working hard every day to get this game built.

I've been asked from many corners lately to provide an official response to a story circulated by Gateworld.net. I spoke with Darren Sumner, the author of the story, soon after it was posted and gave him a detailed response to the article which he decided not to publish.

Our official response is that the lights here are still on and the development team is working hard every day to get this game built. Team members are in the office seven days a week to deliver Stargate Worlds. Brad Wright is the Stargate expert and a creative consultant on Stargate Worlds who advises us on the story; unfortunately we had not recently updated him on our progress or the impact from the current global economic crisis, and he was not fully aware of the continuing progress on our game.

It's true that the production of Stargate Worlds has been significantly impacted by the greatest worldwide economic downturn in decades, but we are still raising enough money from angel investors to keep the dev team working.

We are currently negotiating several deals that will cover our financial responsibilities and fund the remainder of development. When we sign those deals, you'll hear about it. Until then, we'll keep building Stargate Worlds, because right now, that's the only thing that matters to us.

So that's good news because from the concept art we've seen, it looks pretty gorgeous for an MMO. I hope this project sees the light of day, for the sexy alien ladies alone.

I love this image, above, of a totally industrial landscape. And below, you've got organic, firey goo. The premise of Tabula Rasa, a scifi shoot-em-up game, is that humans have allied with other "sentients" to fight evil aliens called the Bane. All the action takes place on alien worlds, which gives you breathtaking landscapes like the ones Anderson conceived here.

You can see more of Anderson's art in the forums at Concept Art. Or check out his new website.

The Star Trek MMO continues to post segments of the future history of the universe, after the last underwhelming movie, Nemesis. They provide lots of wish-fullfillment for TNG/DS9 nerds, like the news that Keiko O'Brien had become a big wheel in the Cardassian relief effort last time around. But the news that Ro Laren, finally out of Federation custody, has joined the Bajoran militia and become head of security for DS9 is an extra thrill for us Ro fans.

In other news, the Emergency Medical Hologram from Voyager sued to keep custody of his portable holo-emitter, which Starfleet wanted to take to a facility on Galor IV for study. The EMH argued that the holo-emitter was necessary for his quality of life and performance of his duties. The Starfleet judge advocate, that notorious softy, granted a temporary injunction against the transfer of the emitter. (Seems to me a more potent argument is that the emitter is future technology that Starfleet shouldn't even have yet, and attempting to duplicate it violates the temporal prime directive.)

Also, the Romulan empire is still in chaos after the events of Nemesis, and Praetor Tal'aura attempts to tighten her grip by convening a new Senate that's in her pocket. Meanwhile, the Bajorans are demanding that hundreds of Cardassians stand trial for war crimes, but those alleged war criminals keep disappearing from Cardassia. Cardassian conspiracy? Or something else?

I still have no idea if the MMO will be fun or worth playing. But I'm enjoying the random updates on the future of Trek probably more than is healthy, especially now that the franchise is sailing backwards. And here are some new screenshots:

[Star Trek Online]

Though it launched just last week, Superstruct is already getting raves from mainstream outlets like CBS news, as well as obsessive gamer sites like ARGNet. As much an experiment with futurism as it is an engrossing game, Superstruct is designed to teach people to prepare for a worse future — and to come up with realistic ways to fix it.

Each player must do a series of tasks, beginning with a detailed description of what you think you'll be doing in 11 years and ending by working with other players to create new social/political/economic superstructures that could save the world before the 2040s collapse. In the process, you'll read news headlines about the future world, immerse yourself in the life stories of your future neighbors, and participate in detailed world-building with thousands of other players. Your tools will be familiar: blogs, wikis, websites. And you'll gain points by completing tasks, as well as earning "raves" from your fellow players.

Superstruct will only last six weeks, but you still have plenty of time to sign up and join the serious fun. Essentially, the game is an act of collective world-building with a specific, ethical purpose in mind. We recently had a chance to talk about this purpose with one of the game's creators, Jamais Cascio, a futurist and writer. Here's what he told us.

It seems as if Superstruct came along at the right time, when the globe is in the middle of a massive crisis and governments are reevaluating what to do in the future.

After 9/11, interest in the market for foresight thinking collapsed. Companies went out of business, and I didn't get any work doing this stuff for over a year. Nobody wanted to think about the future. But this time, with a bigger crisis, the financial crisis, thinking about future is what a lot of people want to do. Superstruct hit at the right time. A population is out there who want to think about future but don't have a lot of practice at it.

A lot of people think the future is too big to think about and it doesn't matter if they think about it anyway. We're trying to say that your choices do matter, even the small choices you make in daily life – everything we do casts a shadow into the future.

So in the future you've created for 2019, we're dealing with what you call superthreats. This isn't a happy world.

It's important to remember that the five superthreats aren't five separate futures. They're five overlapping crises. Like today's financial crisis overlaps with the war in Iraq, and with AIDS, and the election. All these things you can look at in narrow silos and look at as overlapping.

Why didn't you offer the possibility of a happy future where we've made the right choices?

Right now I'm working on a section of the game called 21st Century Ideas, which is a page where we talk about the toolkit of solutions [to the superthreats]. We chose to start by focusing on the negative aspects of the foresight experience because [the game] is following a dramatic arc. When you go to the movies and see an adventure it usually stars with the bad stuff before you see the heroic team put together a solution. If you start with all the great stuff, then go to the crisis, you don't really see the crisis at all. It seems like it's already been solved.

There was an early consensus among the design team that we needed to give players a sense of terror and fear, and a sense of hope that it can be changed. We're not saying, "Here's the rock slamming into planet — it's too late." We're saying collapse is not inevitable. This is not the singularity or the rapture.

Did any science fiction stories influence the world you created for Superstruct?

I can tell you that one movie that influenced my thinking about how this world looks and feels is Children of Men. There's a short subject on DVD that talks about how they developed their [near future] scenario, and that's what we did too. We were world building. Setting aside narrow plot, think about how that world in Children of Men looks – that was what came to mind immediately. The US in Superstruct's 2019 has that look of being advanced but exhausted.

It's important to remember that we are not doing prediction, here. The Superstruct world that we built is not our or IFTF's vision of what 2019 will look like. It's not about us telling you what will happen, but you running through a scenario and figuring out if this world is where you want to go. It's also about clarifying and demystifying capacities for changing the world.

Everybody in the game has to choose a superthreat to focus on. What's the most popular superthreat so far?

Outlaw Planet [the world of information scams, surveillance, and data overload] seems to be most popular. Even if this game is nothing like World of Warcraft, I think we have a wave of people who were conversant in that world who picked it. Of the 5 it's also the one that seems to be the least depressing. The others would clearly make people's lives miserable: starvation, lack of health care and housing. Outlaw Planet, at least superficially, is about making people's lives annoying. The threat is more about how easy it is to endanger the sinews and communication networks of society.

What are some of your favorite creations you've seen in the game from participants?

People are making interesting videos and flickr streams of photoshopped 2019 images [many of which we've used to illustrate this post]. One person is gathering air samples from around the world — sending a jar around, having people open it and send it back. It's metaphorical rather than scientific, but it's about creativity in the creation of artifacts. There is a lot of artifact creation going on here. Many people have set up websites for organizations that will exist in 2019.

There's definitely a strong scifi narrative aspect to this, but it's more like a game than a novel because we're creating the board where people play. There's no lead story running through. The parallel here would be scenario books, a module in an RPG. that's a better analogy than you might think because IFTF is planning to spin out the process to other areas.

Businesses and organizations will use this same platform as a collaborative idea testing process.

When people are asked to describe their future selves, which is the first task in the game, did you find people were inventing fantasy futures for themselves or were trying to be honest and realistic?

I was expecting scifi exaggeration and wish-fulfillment. But most people seem to be thinking seriously about what they would be like in this world. Some of the most powerful have been focused on little stories, family stories. One person wrote about how they would tell their kids they only have 23 years left. That's a big question.

For me, the notion of telling someone, “Here are the constraints and challenges you'll face,” is the first step to thinking about what you can do about it. You're not just saying, "The world is ending — good luck.” That would be unethical. I think a lot about being an ethical futurist and I think it has to do with making clear the responsibilities people have. And that's what we hope to do with Superstruct. We want to say, "This is in your hands." Ignoring that is also making a choice.

Post-industrial building via Mita.

Thames rising via Elaine Alhadeff.

Condo boom via reBang2019.

ReDS poster via lhall.

Writes Shachtman:

The fictional plot [where terrorists use an MMO to plan attacks] was originally developed by Dan Arey, for the Director of National Intelligence's Summer Hard Problems workshop, or SHARP. And its details are a little fuzzy. The terminology doesn't match World of Warcraft lingo, all that precisely. There is no "White Keep" in World of Warcraft; "Dragon Fire" is a spell in EverQuest, the old-school role-playing game, not WoW.

True enough. But what about the simple point that terrorists of the sort the US government is concerned about could probably just meet in person to plan this stuff. Or use cell phones. Or hotmail, which is what the attackers used on 9/11.

Researcher Conjures World of Warcraft Terror Plot [via Danger Room]

Johns' involvement doesn't just bring his history with the characters to the project - it also apparently brings his sense of scale and ability to make fanboys across the world wet themselves with anticipation, if this is anything to go by:

It's almost like you have a Secret Origin. That's what I look at is as... If you're a new hero; what's your Secret Origin? Your Secret Origin is going to take you throughout the DC Universe, from one end to the next, from The Daily Planet to the inner dungeons of the Doom Patrol's castle in Prague. That's my goal, is to really have you be able to visit and interact with any corner of the DC Universe, whether it's the world of the Flash or the Suicide Squad... I'm kind of a freak when it comes to the far-reaching corners of the DC Universe, so to do that and be able to say, 'Can you build this?' or to say, like, 'can we use the Rogues?' And to have them come back and say, 'Sure! Which ones? Any Rogues you want!' It was really pretty freeing, and it was a kind of experience I'd never had in the DC Universe. It's a totally different way to write.

One of those differences is that there's no such thing as "a" story, as Johns explained:

There are lots of different stories or offshoots you can do. The story that I've created, is really just the first story but within that story, there are dozens and dozens of others... There are some things in it from [Green Lantern] that for people who know my stuff will be familiar.

But if you're worried that gaming - or his TV writing career, like writing an upcoming episode of Smallville - will steal his attention away from comics, you shouldn't be:

[M]y first love and interest is always going to be comic books. Comic books are my main focus and specifically, the DC Universe. It's where I have the most fun. It's where I find a lot of challenges in my writing. It's never boring.

Geoff Johns Joins with Jim Lee for DC Universe Online Game [Newsarama], Geoff Johns Teams With Jim Lee On DCU Online [Comic Book Resources]

We previewed Beyond Protocol last month, and since then the designers have been hard at work hammering the final version into shape. They'll have the game ready in a week or so, but want to spend a few months ironing out bugs and tweaking things so they have a smooth launch. You can pre-order the game right now for $49.95. The planned subscription fee will be roughly $12 per month, with discounts if you buy several months at a time.

Now, about those unit design screens:

Sorry the words are a bit small in the images - they're easier to read in-game. Obviously, this is going to appeal to some hard core strategy gamers. There's a lot going on there, with a pretty steep learning curve. Hey, if you want easy, go play Bejeweled. Images by: Dark Sky Entertainment.

Pre-order the game here.

This footage was taken with someone's video camera, so it's obviously not perfect, but it is the only gameplay footage available of Champions Online. Cryptic has indicated that this demo represents a game still in development - the UI in particular is a work in progress. The robot cowboys are pretty cool, though. They totally ripped off Wonder Woman's golden lasso. Maybe they're riding invisible horses?

Image by: Cryptic.

Four Champions Online gameplay videos surface. [Massively]

In this MMO players will be able to customize characters and their ships. Exploration isn't limited to already-existing Trek planets and races although Andorians and Klingons will be making appearnces (according to hints from the game site). Cryptic Studios also announced that they will be revealing gameplay footage of the new Star Trek Online video game at the Star Trek convention in Las Vegas August 10.

[Star Trek Online via Information Week]

You don't think of virtual worlds like Second LIfe as sensual — after all, there's no sense of touch at all — but watching the lush footage in Second Skin and hearing people talk about their hunger for Worlds of Warcraft may change your mind. Immersive virtual reality might never live up to the hype, but already more and more people are pouring so much of their hearts and minds into virtual worlds that they seem to "feel" their experiences in them.
Director Juan Carlos calls it "An Inconvenient Truth meets Errol Morris," which sounds like he's swinging for the fences. If Carlos was on death row, he'd pick Weird Science as his last movie to watch:

I've always really loved that comedy. I mean John Hughes is great, and he's made a bunch of good movies, but Weird Science to me gets the fan favorite award. The idea behind that movie was so inventive and hilarious. Plus there is just something awesome when aliens come to crash a party in the middle of a teen comedy. So I'd laugh to start, and then get a little Zen.

Artist David Levy has been working as a concept artist and visual director in the gaming industry for several years, and he's currently working with Spacetime Studios, most notably on their upcoming Blackstar science/fantasy MMO. He's also worked on Turok, Red Star, and others, where he brings his love of outer space and Japanese animation together. Although he wanted to become a naval architect, his love of science and fantasy took in a different direction, mostly inspired by his grandfather.

"My grandfather used to draw a lot, and I saw him as a hero," David recalls. "He built roads in the desert, ski-jumped and was a flower geneticist, while staying very humble. He was a real inspiration for me, and drawing was part of it."

Levy was also inspired by Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon and Ray Bradbury, and movies like 2001 and Blade Runner. When he's not working with his brushes and Wacom tablet, he also teaches classes on art. Check out more of his work on his website.

Here's how he puts it:

Look at the lore of most fantasy titles: blah blah elves blah blah elder gods blah blah chosen race blah blah great conflict. Most of these games have little more than the serial numbers filed off to distinguish between their backstories. Is Norrath really all that more compelling than Dereth or Vana'diel? Sci-fi storylines tend to be based (more or less) in the real world, meaning players have a lot of built-in context on which to base their understanding of the game world. This not only means players might find the lore more approachable, for those who care about such things it should lead to better roleplaying. What's an easier point of view to adopt: a crazy lizard-guy who can throw fireballs or a human soldier? . . . I fundamentally think sci-fi settings are more hopeful than your average fantasy world. In fantasy, so much of the time, the efforts of the players are just chessboard moves. Ageless NPCs, demi-gods, demons, these are the 'real' players in the lore. We just show up as incidental actors on a much bigger stage. In science fiction, people are people. The protagonists of the story are set against much more understandable foes; even ravenous space aliens are fundamentally mortal.

Science Fiction Pwns Fantasy [MMO Nation]

Choosing a main image was especially difficult because here's this amazing crashed FedEx plane with a bridge for a wing, these enormous turrets that look like they've grown out of the landscape, or this massive coastal battle.

Korean developer Reloaded Studios has only been open for a month, and this ambitious massively multiplayer action game is scheduled for release in 2010 and will be their first.

Set in the near future, The Day finds mankind discovering a way to travel between two connected parallel worlds. Players will face a changing world never before seen in an online game as they travel back and forth between the past and present, accomplishing critical missions that extremely influence and affect their present-day world. With the fate of mankind at stake, players are thrown into brutal warfare and a fight to keep humanity from slipping into self-destruction across time.

The Day screenshots [Gamers Hell]