Remember Fury? The fantasy PvP oriented MMO from Auran that has a massive marketing campaign last fall before completing bombing with both critics and players? Well, the development team may have been drastically reduced and the game itself turned into a free-to-play title but Fury is still being updated with new content. Last week the developers announced a new promotional push for Fury with a new PvP league with real money to be given out to players.

Fury League is basically a way for players to earn real money by playing against others in PvP matches. The league has already begun with a qualifying season with $25,000 to be given out in two different competitive ladders later in May. It's also designed as a precursor to the actual launch of Fury League in June. Every game that is played earns a free game ticket for the Fury League launch. So will this new push get more people to play the game? It certainly can't do any worse.

[Via Blue's News]

Big Download's sister site Massively.com has all the news you'll need about MMOs. Here's the best, brightest, and most interesting stuff from the last week, all in one convenient place for your MMO minute.

Blizzard unleashes a storm of Lich King information After months of silence on their in-development World of Warcraft expansion, Blizzard has unleashed a furious Winter gale made of pure information.

All Points Bulletin to become Grand Theft Auto Online? Eurogamer is reporting on rumors of what could be the holy grail of online gaming: a Grand Theft Auto massively multiplayer game.

CoX Issue 12: Midnight Hour enters Open Beta! As of yesterday, all City of Heroes players can access the twelfth expansion, Midnight Hour, on the Test Server.

A few weeks ago Ubisoft announced that it would release a patch for their PC ports of their highly successful stealth action game Assassin's Creed. However, instead of fixing bugs or adding new features, the patch is to remove the support for DirectX10.1 graphics. According to the initial announcement about the patch the DirectX10.1 support in the game added "a render pass during post-effect which is costly."

While the patch has yet to be released as of this writing, some are accusing Ubisoft of playing hardware politics with this proposed DirectX10.1 removal from the game. Why? Because at the moment the only graphics cards in stores that support DirectX10.1 are cards from AMD's ATI unit (specifically the Radeon HD 3000 hardware). Performance issues with Assassin's Creed were reported on NVIDIA graphics cards. The problem is that Assassin's Creed is part of NVIDIA's "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" marketing program where the company makes deals with game publishers to add their logo and ad support for a number of PC games.

So did NVIDIA ask Ubisoft to remove the DirectX10.1 feature from Assassin's Creed? Officially the answer is, "No." TG Daily contacted both Ubisoft and NVIDIA reps and both denied any sort of external influence, saying that the decision was made by the game's development team. The author feels that the game simply was not finished in terms of proper code and that the programming team put in the DirectX10.1 support without making sure the game would work on normal DirectX10 hardware. It just goes to prove that developing PC games without taking the tons of different hardware combinations can still be tricky.

A couple months back, the Discovery Channel spent an entire hour of its 5 part documentary "Rise of the Video Game" analyzing the relationship between the United States military and the video games industry. It's been a long and profitable tradition, with military simulations making up a big chunk of video game sales, and with recruitment games like America's Army proving to be very effective for the military.

Australian military officials must have been inspired by that example, because their online recruitment initiative DefenceJobs has launched a website full of military-themed Flash games. The games are designed to pitch a 12-month, post-secondary-school stint in the army as a viable choice to teens. So, far, over 300,000 users have signed up at the site.

The games aren't nearly as complex as America's Army, but they're still fun, and there are several of them. Some of them even have multi-player options. The blending of military and gaming culture is a complex subject, and a lot can be said both in criticism and acceptance of the trend, so mull over that if you like. Or, if you're more the shooting type than the thinking type, just play the damn games.

[Via Joystiq]

So little has changed in recent months -- The Sims 2 and World of Warcraft still completely dominate PC game sales. Sure, now and then something usurps them for a short time, but they always come back. The top 10 PC games in the NPD sales report released this past week:

1. The Sims 2 Kitchen & Bath Interior Design Stuff Expansion Pack
2. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe
3. The Sims 2 FreeTime Expansion Pack
4. World Of Warcraft: Battle Chest
5. World Of Warcraft
6. Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
7. Sins Of A Solar Empire
8. World Of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Expansion Pack
9. Assassin's Creed: Director's Cut Edition
10. Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas 2

That makes four years that The Sims 2 and World of Warcraft have been fairly consistently pwning the industry. The only other PC exclusive on the list is Ironclad/Stardock's runaway 4X RTS hit Sins of a Solar Empire. The others -- Call of Duty 4, Assassin's Creed, and Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 -- are multi-platform titles. WoW's position is no surprise, given the NPD's research with regards to online game revenues. The Sims 2's domination of the charts, however, speaks to a vast, silent market of gamers to whom hardcore games like Rainbow Six don't appeal.

Update after update after update, it seems. Team Fortress 2, hot on the heels of the last patch, has received yet another patch. This one fixes some major issues, such as problems with two achievements, problems with the Kritzkrieg not behaving properly, and problems with players being unable to use the new medic items. Hopefully this has fixed most of the issues with the new patch, but after recent history, it's almost guaranteed there will be more issues.

Electronic Arts is the single largest third party game publisher (at least until the merger of Activision and Vivendi Games goes through later in June) so it's safe to say it has a lot of money. However it looks like EA's planned hostile takeover of Take-Two Interactive may cause them to reach out and get even more money from outside sources.

In a new filing today with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, EA stated that while it has enough money to cover the proposed $2.1 billion takeover of Take-Two, it has now secured an additional $1 billion loan from several banks (including Morgan Stanley Bank) that it could use for the offer if the deal is closed by January 2009. That may indicate EA could raise its current offer to make it more attractive to Take-Two's board of directors and/or shareholders. EA's current offer, which Take-Two has already dismissed as too cheap, is set to expire one week from today, May 16.

[Via Gamasutra]

Today the Gamecock Media Group reaffirmed its stance against the new Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) promising to mock the event in 2008, as it did in 2007 with an open funeral for the event.

Under the guise of a fictitious campaign to be elected ESA president, Gamecock CEO Mike Wilson promises to "bring the fun back to the gaming industry." Wilson's candidacy headquarters will be located at the Hotel Figueroa between July 15-18 and invites gamers, "who love fun and just want to play games," to attend.

No word on specific titles being showcased at Gamecock's E3 party-crasher, nor did the press release mention when Wilson would shake hands with voters and kiss babies in his (fake) quest to become ESA president.

Jump in for Mike Wilson's official announcement in all its hilarious and fake glory.

As we all know, THQ had an abysmal Q4, having record losses that forced them to lay off quite a bit of employees. Michael Pachter, however, believes they can rebound from their hard times. The game industry analyst has stated that he believes THQ can come back after their dismal showing to make a tidy profit, thanks to its stable of returning IPs. Let's hope he's right.

Developer Gearbox Software and publisher Ubisoft recently revealed that their long awaited WW II tactical shooter Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway has been pushed back to August. Today the publisher released some new screenshots to keep us occupied for a little while longer.

Reportedly the game was pushed back to put in some more multiplayer features and support. Of course it could be that Gearbox has one of the busiest game line-ups around. In addition to Hell's Highway they are working on Aliens: Colonial Marines and the Wii game Samba de Amigo for Sega and Borderlands for 2K Games. In the meantime these terrific looking (and Unreal Engine 3 powered) screenshots from Hell's Highway make waiting for the game just a little harder to take.

Much like Mass Effect, Spore has come back after the outrage over the SecuROM copy protection and announced that they are utilizing it a little differently than default. No, they aren't requiring you to authenticate every 13 seconds or submit DNA tests to a mysterious database.

Like Mass Effect, Spore will only (re)authenticate when you go online or install the game. It also makes it so you can play without the disc, as well as install it on multiple computers. Best of all, you'll be able to play offline without any issues! As Spore is destined to be one of the biggest PC games of the year, this sudden shift in copy protection is much appreciated.

Criterion Games have never ported one of their Burnout games to the PC before but it looks like they are going all out with their first attempt at the platform. The just announced Burnout Paradise for the PC will support a lot of different resolutions in addition to other features.

Criterion have released the first screenshots from the PC port and they decided to take an unusual stance; they are extremely tall. Very few PC monitors can support such a screen size but again this is Criterion's first PC Burnout game and they clearly wanted to make them stand out from the standard PC screenshot gallery. We also have the first brief gameplay movie that shows the game in motion. Again Criterion decided to go with a an odd ultra-wide screen ratio for the movie so what you are seeing below is intentional (you can download an even bigger version at Criterion's web site) So far there's been no word on pricing or a release date but hopefully we will learn more about their plans for Burnout Paradise for our platform soon.

World of Warcraft players heed our call. Blizzard dropped a ton of new information regarding the highly anticipated WoW expansion, Wrath Of The Lich King.

Probably the most exciting news outlined for fans of the MMO is the reveal of new details for the Death Knight hero class. Players who ding level 55 will be able to create one Death Knight hero per realm per account and signs point to the class still being available for all races; Worldofwar.net was shown Tauren, Dwarf, Gnome, and Orc Death Knights characters. The information for the new hero class doesn't end there as our sister site, WoW Insider, has the skinny on the Death Knight's rune system, role and abilities.

Other additions to the expansion include scalable party dungeons and the new backend system of the 5-man dungeon heroic mode. WoW Insider also has a breakdown of GameSpy's preview of new areas and quests in Wrath Of The Lich King, which include an aerial gondola, a huge sea battle, and apparently an archaeological expedition where you'll be able to fly planes.

Lead designers Jeff "Tigole" Kaplan and Tom "Kalgan" Chilton also dropped new information in an interview with Curse on the upcoming expansion as well as co-lead design J. Allen Brack in an interview with Gamespy. Both interviews covered such hot topics as Wraith's split raid system, flying mount level changes, feedback and much more. Kaplain and Chilton also presented details which outlined some of Wraith's new areas and changes to the original quest.

So WoW fans, that enough news for you in one day?

Imagine the game industry as a schoolyard, with all of the major companies as little kids. Activision, haughty because of its new friends and growing popularity, decides to pick on one of the older kids, EA. What does EA do? Let loose with an ice cold burn, possibly making Activision cry to its friends. They console and comfort, but little can remove the daggers EA has thrust into Activision's heart.

Speaking to Portfolio, Activision's CEO let loose with a jab at EA, stating, "We built a model that celebrates entrepreneurial, opportunistic, independent values. It's almost the opposite of Electronic Arts, which has commoditized development. It did a very good job of taking the soul out of a lot of the studios it acquired."

Firing back (eventually), EA's Jeff Brown fired back with the following statement after being asked about their response to the slam from Activision: "The truth is, everyone laughed. In the past year EA has made radical changes to decentralize the company and put creative control back in the hands of development teams. It's too early to declare victory but if you talk to people like Patrick Soderlund at dice in Stockholm, Mark Jacobs at Mythic in Virginia or Josh Resnick at Pandemic--they'll probably tell you that it's working."

Ball's in your court, Activision.