A great new blog went up on friday about the beautiful new cinematics and story moments in Guild Wars 2 and how they have evolved fromt he early ones we saw earlier this year

Scenes occur in the game as text spoken by NPCs and are usually more for giving direction and information than they are about story content.The third and final tier we refer to as “scenes.”

 

To read the entire blog, jump over to http://www.arena.net/blog/chuck-jackman-on-updated-cinematic-conversations and leave your comments in the thread below

~Lone

Gabe Newell announced today that Steam's database and forums have been hacked. According to Newell, Steam's forums were defaced earlier this week, and further investigation led to evidence that the hackers had obtained access to the Steam database.

"This database contained information including user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information," Newell wrote. "We do not have evidence that encrypted credit card numbers or personally identifying information were taken by the intruders, or that the protection on credit card numbers or passwords was cracked. We are still investigating."

While the hackers may have had access to the data, it isn't immediately clear how much information they actually took, or if any of it has been used.

"We don't have evidence of credit card misuse at this time," Newell added. "Nonetheless you should watch your credit card activity and statements closely."

Beyond personal information, Newell also issued an advisory about Steam forum accounts. All users will be required to change their passwords the next time they log in, and Newell recommends changing the passwords on any other accounts that used the same password.

"We do not know of any compromised Steam accounts, so we are not planning to force a change of Steam account passwords (which are separate from forum passwords). However, it wouldn't be a bad idea to change that as well, especially if it is the same as your Steam forum account password. We will reopen the forums as soon as we can. I am truly sorry this happened, and I apologize for the inconvenience."

Ok…  This is the most desperate story I have seen for a while…  and what a shock that its one of the biggest hyped games of every year

Sledgehammer Games' Glen Schofield has taken to Twitter to ask Call of Duty fans to support Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 on Metacritic.

"I don't usually do this but, if u like MW3 go 2 Metacritic.com & help our user score," writes Schofield. "It's suspiciously low. Be honest but help if u agree."

Modern Warfare 3 is attracting a torrent of user scores of zero across all three platforms. The current user score (out of 10) is 2.7 on Xbox 360, 2.0 on PS3 and 1.5 on PC.

But there's still plenty of people left on Azeroth.

In the last year the number of World of Warcraft subscribers has fallen in the from 12 million to 10.3 million.

The game's developer, Blizzard, announced yesterday that between July and September 800,000 players left. This is a sharp decline compared to October last year, when the game reached a peak with 12 million users.

The decline began earlier this year, as the number of subscribers slipped to 11.4 million, dropping to 11.1 by July.

The CEO of Blizzard, Mike Morhaime, revealed in a conference call attended by Gamasutra that the decline came mainly from the East, yet he added that WoW remains "one of the most popular online games in China, and by far the most popular subscription-based MMO in the world."

But laurels aren't being rested upon. "That said, we know there are improvements that we can make in the game content," said Morhaime.

In addition to the recently-announced expansion pack, Mists of Pandaria, Blizzard will launch a content update pack in the next few weeks. According to Morhaime, the release is "not intended to go out and drive new user acquisition, that's a whole other strategy. But it does drive engagement with the game, and so that will impact churn if we do it successfully, and will eventually drive winback, as players tell each other about the content they're enjoying."

The PlanetSide 2 site has been updated with a new "brief", or profile, of one of the factions set to debut in the game on release. The New Conglomerate is known to inhabit the shady side of the street and members are known as rebels, traitors and terrorists.

The blog post goes into a bit of detail about the background for The Conglomerate as well as some of the more practical, gameplay facets that players will see if they build characters of this faction:

From a gameplay perspective, the Blue and Gold are built around hitting first, hitting hardest and taking a beating.  Although their weapons might not have the most finesse (often having strong kick, long reload times, and slower firing rates) they do pack a hell of a punch.  The empire specific vehicles, the Reaver attack fighter and Vanguard medium battle tank pack on more armaments and armor as well as abilities that allow them to stay in battle longer than the other empires equivalents.  While the N.C. vehicles excel in durability and sheer firepower, their trade off is in mobility and speed.

Read the full blog post on the PlanetSide 2 site.