Great news for Risen fans with Deep Silver announcing an October 2nd international release date for both X360 and PC - the same day as announced earlier for Germany.  The game has apparently been in beta for a few weeks with three QA teams - here's the full PR:

Risen to be launched on October 2nd

The RPG from the makers of Gothic has entered the Beta phase

Risen will make its international debut on October 02, 2009. The new RPG from the inventors of Gothic, Piranha Bytes, has already entered the Beta phase and is now being honed to perfection. Risen will be available for PC and Xbox 360®, the video game and entertainment system from Microsoft®.

"The release date for Risen enables us to introduce the game to the market in the best possible condition," says Daniel Oberlerchner, Brand Manager at Deep Silver. "We have been in the Beta phase here for several weeks, and now our focus lies on eliminating the remaining bugs."

The contents of Risen are already complete, and all dialogs have been recorded. A total of three quality assurance teams are working on the game – one directly at Piranha Bytes, one at Deep Silver, plus an additional external studio.

About Risen:
This epic role playing game is set in a medieval world on a volcanic Mediterranean island, The “Risen” story unfolds over four chapters and will offer multiple ways to develop the story by his own actions and decisions. An innovative and intuitive user control interface will support both casual and hardcore gamers. With full world streaming support, the player will have a seamless experience while playing in a fully simulated game world with authentic characters.

Risen will be released for the Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system from Microsoft and Windows® operating system. More information about Risen on http://risen.deepsilver.com

Sega has released the Alpha Protocol boxshot and the fourth video dev diary.  The boxshot should be showing up on the left of this newsbit if you refresh but you can also check out a hi-res version on the official forums.

The dev diary is below but, first, Worthplaying adds the release date has been announced as October 6th, although we haven't seen that PR ourselves. 

Another day in Alec Meer's Morrowind wanderings.  This entry has been twittered in, and since I hate Twitter, no quote today.

World of Gothic has news the IronKeep team has released an updated v1.0a community patch for Gothic II.  If I understand correctly, they've added an Alternative Balancing System option, which seems a major feature for a 1.0a release:

Hello WoG Community,

We're delighted to announce the official release of our latest patch, v1.0a. Okay, it's been out for a little while now , but we decided to wait until it was up here on WoG, the community where we came into being, before we made an official announcement.

We've fixed some final bugs in the scripts and added a new, optional Alternative Balancing System, for those who want to try Gothic II again but with some more flavor to the gameplay. You don't have to install it if you want to play "classic" NotR, but if you're itching for a new game experience with the same game, you might want to give it a shot.

Full details are found in the Readme, available during the setup and in the /ICP directory generated by the Setup. Enjoy our newest release!

Best Wishes,

The Ironkeep Studios Team

Head over for a list of mirrors.

This weekend's Steam sale includes Fallout 3, which you can grab for 50% off at USD$24.99.  Fallout 3 is one of those titles with localised prices, so different territories may differ/

As we wait for the combat demo, Vince has posted some sample work from an artist who may provide NPC portraits for The Age of Decadence - keep your fingers crossed because the work is awesome.

The latest Divinity II updates bring information on the "relentless" warrior Rhodes and the "once famed" Dragon Knight Talana, as well as a podcast from Lead Designer Farhang Namdar introducing Damien.

Finally, Friday will see Act 1 of a suite of new trailers released on the official site - we'll let you know when they go up.

Time to find out about Risen's Ghoules:

Two Dragon Age updates over the last day or do, starting with a Human Noble Origin Video and details.  don't you hate it when your parents leave you in charge of the house and gatecrashers ruin the party?

Next, the Environments page has a description and screens of the Tower of the Circle of Magi.

Bashiok has posted an update about the Diablo II v1.13 patch on the Blizzard forums.  It's a long-ish post but the essence is they had to get a Warcraft III exploit out of the way first:

The Warcraft III patch is now on the Public Test Realm (PTR) and testing is progressing. Once that patch is released work can shift back to Diablo II and the 1.13 patch, and we'll be working to getting that patch up on its own PTR as soon as possible. This could be a matter of weeks. Once it's up and in a testing state for all of you, it's then going to be a matter of ensuring the features are good and it's a solid patch. The more people we have testing the patch and providing valid feedback, the better the patch will be, and hopefully the quicker it will be released. So that's my challenge to you. You've been waiting a long time, you want an awesome patch, you want a reset. To get all that, we need good solid testing and feedback, reproduction steps for bugs, detailed descriptions of issues or errors, etc. So once this goes live on the PTR, I expect some crazed-youruinedtheeconomy-testing.

Lucky Day sends word that Obsidian Assistant Producer and community wrangler Rob McGinnis is leaving the company.  Here's his post:

Well, it's been a fun ride. This Thursday, July 2nd, will be my last day at Obsidian Entertainment.

I have truly enjoyed my last three years working with the NWN2 community. Thanks to everyone that have made this such an enjoyable experience.

I will continue to lurk here, as a NWN2 player, so I won't be far away.

Matt Rorie, and others will be popping in here to keep an eye on things after I am gone.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Eurogamer posts a two page interview with Blizzard's executive vice president of game design, Rob Pardo, mostly talking about the development of Starcraft II, but also covering some of the basics of Blizzard's approach to game design.

Here's an excerpt:

One of the first things we discuss is the balance between hardcore and casual players - especially relevant to StarCraft, I propose, given the obvious difference between the average gamer mucking about with friends and the Korean pro-gamer scene.

"It's not really any different for StarCraft than it is for World of Warcraft, Warcraft III or Diablo, to be honest," Pardo says. "We really try to serve both audiences.

"One of the ways we do that is that we build for the depth first - for the hardcore first. When we're first prototyping and working on the game, we're very meticulous. The game speed has to be fast, the units have to be perfect, we have to be thinking about balance. We don't balance it early on, but we have to be thinking about whether each unit is balanceable, whether we have all the right hooks in the game to be able to do it.

"Then, what we do gradually once we have that basic game ... then we really start trying to make the game more and more accessible....

"The reason we build the game in that order is because you can easily come up with game design concepts or ideas or mechanics that are shallow and designed for a more casual, broad-market gamer - they're not going to put fifty-five hundred hours into a game, right? But we really want to make sure that we build in those features that have a lot of depth and a lot of replayability first, because we can always make that stuff much more accessible for someone that's not going to put in the same amount of hours."

Nearly missed this because the name didn't sound RPG-related at first glance.  Headup Games has announced a scifi hack'n'slash called Greed, developed by ClockStone, who received some modest response from their recent fantasy action/RPG Avencast.  Here's the PR:

Prepare yourselves for a diabolic item hunt and in-tense close combats far from earth

Headup Games announces Hack'n'Slash in a unique science fiction setting

Dueren, June 30th 2009 – Headup Games, a recently founded and independently financed publishing company for core PC titles located near Cologne in Germany is proud to announce its main project for this year to be GREED, a merciless hack'n'slash action-RPG. GREED is scheduled for release in November 2009.

GREED features all ingredients to create an enthralling hack'n'slash classic. In the tradition of other critically acclaimed and proven genre colleagues you as the player will need to fight your way through masses of critters, robots, aliens and many other exotic adversaries while collecting unique items and skills thus leveling up your character. In contrast to the genre ancestors, the story of GREED takes place in an adult and mature science fiction scenario. In the futuristic universe of GREED the discovery of novel interstellar travel possibilities has lead to a new age of colonialization. The five largest colonial powers are entangled in a full-scale war over a new element called Ikarium, the recently discovered rare source of nearly unlimited energy. You as a former member of an elite military unit will fight a battle for your survival not know-ing that your actions will lead fate of all mankind into dramatic consequences…

GREED takes your character, chosen out of three completely different classes, through manifold levels and environments, all playable in three increasing difficulty levels putting even the toughest endgame player to a test – but as always, more pain con-tains more gain! Embedded in various scenarios, GREED throws waves of deadly foes in your way as well as screen filling end bosses. But don’t despair! Helpful innovation can be found in numerous innovative features such as the unique dodge move, self-charging shields or destructible environments. The combination of the different character-specific skills and abilities in three categories gives you the diversity needed to conquer even the toughest foes. And if you need a little more support, GREED also features a cooperative multiplayer mode where you and your friends can show the universe what you are made of!

Features
• Hack’n’Slash in a dark science fiction setting
• A huge variety of different levels in three settings, each playable on three dif-ficulties, inhabited by fierce and deadly creatures and screen-filling end bosses
• Three entirely different character classes to choose from
• Upgradable skills in three categories per character class – the simultaneous use of these categories causes thrilling skill combinations
• Upgradable character attributes with direct game play effect
• Hundreds of partially socketed items to collect
• Online cooperative multiplayer mode for up to three players

Worthplaying has three screens on offer.

World of Risen has an interview with Piranha Bytes' well-liked composer, Kai Rosenkranz.  The (German) conversation focuses closely on the music and a little on Kai's background.  English readers can try a rough Babelfish translation here.

Following up on Soldak's call for comments on their next dungeon crawler game, Twenty Sided's Shamus Young has kicked up some thoughts on the subject.  Here's a taste:

I don’t have any earth-shattering suggestions on the genre myself, so I’m just going to list the gameplay elements which draw me to these games. I’m also going to point back to old-school turn-based dungeon crawlers like Eye of the Beholder and Nethack, which are part of the lineage of modern day Diablo clones and thus have some wisdom to impart.

This isn’t so much a list of suggestions as a list of observations from these games over the years.

Story

These games are not generally about story, and they suffer when you try to shoehorn in too much exposition and intrigue. (Plus, that sort of business can get expensive if you try to do it with cutscenes.) On the other hand, the boilerplate, “Bad guy is thirty levels down and wants to kill us all. Go get him.” is hopelessly dull, cliche, and lazy. It front-loads the story with exposition and then doesn’t have anything interesting to say until the end.

I think the “mystery” foe is a nice compromise here. Send the player into the dungeon in search of the source of the evil / corruption / plague / rash of high golf scores, but don’t tell them what they’re dealing with. At regular intervals you can give them another spoonful of story which answers one question and introduces the next, leading up to the big reveal of the bad guy and his plans near the end. It entices players with a question or a mystery, it spaces the story out, and it keeps the story doses small so that they don’t break up the flow.

Kotaku has 20 concept images from Obsidian's Alien RPG, apparently gathered from various developer personal sites and the like.  As some of you will already know, the first image surfaced the Codex a few days back and Obsidian's Anthony Davis responded with some comments and context in that thread.

The Scars of War blog has a lore update on the Ryth:

Of all the cultures in the West, probably the hardest to engage with are the people of Rhythikos. Even disregarding their exotic appearance, outsiders generally find the Rhyth aloof, dismissive and incomprehensibly morbid, a perception the Rhyth themselves seem unconcerned with challenging. And indeed, unless one takes the time to understand the Rhythi world view, this opinion of them seems a rather fitting one.

It's not at all surprising that Fable III would be in development but following the earlier hints from a voice actor's twitter, Kotaku notes that the New York Times' "Weddings/Celebrations" section applauds the wedding of Joshua Atkins and his partner -and Joshua's occupation is listed as the lead designer on Fable III.

Responding to queries on the forums, Lead Designer Preston Watamaniuk and others explain some changes to the Mass Effect 2 replay and difficulty systems.  First, Preston on relaying with your existing character:

Ahhh, ok my bad. The question then is:

"After finishing ME2 can I take my character and restart a new playthrough preserving that characters gear and abilities."

The short answer is no.

The reason is progression. We have been working very hard to make sure we design the abilities system to offer smooth progression into ME3 from ME2. Allowing double progression on characters makes that almost impossible. We have to have reasonable knowledge about where a character could end up finishing all content on a playthrough. We also want to offer choice of character build within specific classes.

We replaced that feature with playing after you were done because it preserves progression and allows for smoother downloading of PRC.

In another thread, Lead System Designer Christina Norman talks about difficulty levels:

As you play through ME1 you unlock bonuses via achievements that actually make your character more powerful. Consequently, the hardest difficulty becomes "easier".

If we give access to insanity on the first playthrough, we need to show that it is possible to beat the game with all classes without any bonuses from achievements. We can't release a difficulty level where it's impossible to complete.

Effectively this means insanity would need to be easier. If we can assume you've already done a playthrough, we can assume you've acquired some bonuses, in addition to getting the experience of beating it on a lower difficulty level which will help you beat it on insanity.

So for ME1 at least, we were able to make Insanity harder because we limited it to people who'd already completed a playthrough.

On to ME2, we're aware that some players really want to use insanity at the get go. I'm developing our difficulty system, and I understand what players who play insanity get out of that experience. I'm very much a "hardest difficulty" person.

So with that said there are a few things we're trying to do with difficulty in ME2.

First we're trying to add additional dimensions to our difficulty system. I can't go into the details right now, but there is more integration with our AI system for example. We want enemies on harder difficulties to feel smarter, deadlier, not just "tougher". We want insanity to feel like a smart experience, where you don't die because a rocket hits you and you're one-shot killed. You die because you face an overwhelming, deadly, force. You play extremely well, but not well enough, and on a subsequent try you're able to be victorious because you play better.

Once we have the difficulty levels nailed down, we'll evaluate and see whether or not it's reasonable to let insanity difficulty be unlocked at the start. I'm totally open to doing that unless it means we have to make it "easier". Ultimately if I have to choose between those options, I will choose a harder insanity difficulty, because I believe that's what's important to our players.

Overall insanity in ME2 will be harder than ME1. That's a heads up for everyone! Beating insanity on ME2 is going to be a real "achievement", a badge of honor, get ready.

Worthplaying kicks up a batch of screenies for Katauri's and 1C's King's Bounty sequel, Armored Princess. You can check them out here.

Gamershell adds a page of screenshots to their gallery for Deep Shadows post-apoc sci-fi title, Precursors. they appear to be different than the last batch we posted, and you can view them here.

Kieron Gillen has an interview with Ossian's Alan Miranda.

We’ve written a little about the Neverwinter Nights 2 adventure pack the Mysteries of Westgate before. But not enough. We grasped the chance to talk to Ossian’s Ex-Bioware head man Alan Miranda about all things to do with the Mysteries of Westgate. Candid and expansive, he expounds about the long route from Darkness over Daggerford, the DRM situation which delayed Mysteries of Westgate’s release for getting on for well over a year, the problems of creating RPGs as a small team, their love for the genre and how audiences differ from country to country. And it all starts below…

PC Games Hardware has a short op-ed on some of the most patched games around  (it's the slideshow at the bottom of the page) including Fallout 3 with a modest 6 patches, The Witcher(7), Gothic 3(14) and Vampire the Masquerade:Bloodlines(31). Obviously some of these are content patches or the like, and don't always mean the game is bad as they point out:

Patches are both a blessing and a curse for games. What has been daily routine for PC gamers for years, is now even affecting the consoles. But a game that is often patched isn't necessarily bad. Quite the contrary is the case: Many developers offer new content or features with the patches. An example is Company of Heroes that received a DirectX 10 mode via patch. In C&C Red Alert 3 the multiplayer balancing has been tuned with more than ten patches and the game was upgraded with new maps. So patches don't necessarily are bad news.[sic] But of course there are also negative examples, like the unfortunate Gothic 3, which actually had been a good game but the flood of bugs in the release version made it almost unplayable. Furthermore there are games that are patched even before they hit the markets - such updates are called Day Zero Patches. 

Sorcerer's Place let us know they have a review of the NWN2 mod, Hearts of Endia.  The score is 8/10 and here's an early snip:

There's little empty room in this adventure. It feels every inch and every minute has been worked on. The locales are lovely and the quests are well set, as I amply showed above. I might say that some city or indoor areas may be just a tiny bit empty, but that's a feeling that probably never entirely leaves anything made in the NWN1 or NWN2 toolset that I've seen so far. As you stray from the beaten path, you discover beautiful locations, you gain side-quests that you otherwise would not and you meet strange people that give you items (well, just one, but still). The author has even provided custom music that fits the module's Alpine atmosphere. It made me laugh like a child throughout the candy-like peaceful sections and it provided an additional flavour to the more adrenaline-loaded moments as well.

The Deep Silver Risen forums has a complete dialogue scene video, showing the NPC interacting with a bandit guard, who is waiting for a replacement.  It's in German, of course.

Thanks, World of Risen.

Akella's official website posts a link to a preview at GamingTrend of their entry in the turn-based strategy/rpgish  Disciples series originated by Strategy First,                    Disciples III: Renaissance. They also have some screens up here.

Here's a brief snip from the preview:

The core of the gameplay remains largely unchanged; At the beginning of the campaign you choose your class which still consists of the warrior, mage, and guildmaster. From this point, you begin building up your Capital City through the exploits of your hero-led squad of warriors who will acquire resources and battle enemies. For Disciples III, Akella is leaning more towards RPG-style gameplay with the implementation of an upgrade system for your hero which will allow the player to apply different attributes as well as customize the hero's equipment. Battles will now also play out in a multifarious fashion as, with the move to 3D, the battlefields are placed on a 3D map which requires more strategy in unit placement, positioning, and movement. What it all boils down to, as promised by Akella, is a more fluid and streamlined gameplay experience compared to the past games.

Overlord II has barely hit the shelves, and Strategy Informer reports in an interview with Creative Director Lennert Sas, that DLC has already been planned and should be announced soon. They also discuss some other aspects of the game:

Strategy Informer: The entire game revolves around being evil. Is that why there’s so much slapstick humour? Is it to counteract all the evildoing?

Lennart Sas: Well first off, we enjoy games and one of the key things we think is missing from games is humour. If you look at television shows or movies, there’s always a big slice of the pie taken up by comedies, but with games (the slice is) tiny. We thought humour would work well with this type of game because being an overlord is cool, but at the same time it’s really grim. We don’t really want people to aspire to be someone who burns villages, clubs baby seals and things like that, so the only way we could make this premise work was by making it tongue-in-cheek. The premise and the dark humour go hand in hand.

On the proposed DLC:

Strategy Informer: Can you tell us about your plans for DLC?

Lennart Sas: We’re actually working on that now and it’ll be announced soon.

Strategy Informer: We can’t convince you to give us any details on that yet then?

Lennart Sas: Erm…no!

Alec Meer continues his trip through Morrowind that happens to have something to do with Mek-Quake?

The Diamond Job

The armed guard wasn’t the problem. The child was. I’d successfully lockpicked my way through the upstairs door, sneaking into this alchemist’s store from their unwatched balcony. The guard, I knew, was downstairs, watching the front door. If I stuck to the shadows, I should be able to get past him to the storeroom, where the jewel awaited. Easy. Straight in, straight out, cash reward, and if I was lucky a spare diamond for myself.

But the child almost ruined it.

There had been reports that Vvardenfell was once a sad, strange place with with nary a youth in sight, but these days children were all over the towns. One, a teenage boy, was inhabiting the upstairs bedroom of this shop. He spotted me the second I entered the room. Rather than shouting or running, he simply stood stock-still at the top of the stairs. I had no way down.

Battle for Wesnoth is not an rpg, but a free indie turn-based fantasy strategy game. The title has some players among our readers, so it may be of interest to hear that a maintenance patch, 1.6.3, has been released that fixes a few bugs in the 1.6 version of the game. It's available here and at GamersHell. As always, this includes and upgrades the full game.

Also, a 1.7.0 version is in development and released for bug-testing purposes only. This version adds a new campaign, additional music and some new graphics, and is not compatible with earlier versions of the game.

You can find out more about what's going on with 1.7.0 here at the official forums.