Also at Gamona.de today, an exclusive interview with Ryzom Ring Executive Producer Guillaume Puzin. There are two versions, one german and one english. Here's a snippet from the English version:

gamona: Originally announced for release outposts needed more than one year to be implemented into the game. Lots of players are disappointed about them. There is only one single building (a drill) available and only a few outposts have been opened. Do you plan to open more buildings in the near future (maybe at the prime roots)?

Guillaume Puzin: Yes we plan to add new buildings in the future but not quite yet as we are currently focusing on new content to bring to the players who have been with us from the start. After releasing the outposts we switched our focus away from PvP for a while in order to work on PvE content but we do plan to come back to them again. As it happens one of the buildings that we will be adding corresponds to another of the questions that you have been asking as it gives extra storage space for guilds to stock their items.

Ten Ton Hammer interviews Nevrax's Daniel Miller about the launch of The Ryzom Ring.

Ten Ton Hammer: "What has been the feedback from the users of the Ryzom Ring in open beta? Has the community embraced the concept of player created content, or is it still too new to tell?"

Miller: "The response of the community has been excellent. The concept of player created content is very strong. We now see a very significant proportion of our players connected to the Ring editor 24 hours a day, so we expect to see an ever increasing quantity of interesting scenarios emerging over the weeks to come."

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Great news today, we are happy to announce the official release date of Ryzom Ring! We will launch our first free expansion next month, on October the 3rd. Sharpen your mind and prepare your scenarios, soon power will truly be given to you!

At the release, the current content restrictions for paying players will be lifted. Moreover, the rating and reward systems that allow the best scenarios to stand out will be activated. A German and French version of the manual should arrive as well.

With a Free Trial, you will be able to try all the creation tools of the Ring with a basic set of creatures and maps, but you won't be able to play your own adventure with others nor participate in other player's adventures.

Milko started out showing us just what The Ring could do. What can I say but once again we were floored by the power of the tools that Nevrax is placing in the hands of their customers. Milko started off by mentioning that due to server loads bandwidth they would not be allowing players to create their own maps, instead they would have initially have around 200 optimized maps for players to choose from and that they would add more over time. These maps have a huge range in size, shape and environments. He showed us several maps ranging from desert and marine environments to some gorgeous woodland settings. At this I had to ask the size and support that these maps were capable of he mentioned that every map would be able to support up to 100 Objects and 100 NPCs and some were so large that it would take a player nearly 1 hour to navigate across them.

Today is a great day in the history of the Ring! After lots of testing with the first waves of Alpha testers, opening to all the CSRs then to 40 lucky players, we now need even more players for testing on a larger scale.

We already gave access this week to 40 more active players and also to those who added their names to our list at the GC Leipzig. But today, with the opening of the Alpha to our 589 ATS (Advanced Test Server) testers, we're crossing another key point as it's the first time we'll welcome so many people on the Ring.

To those who wonder, an ATS tester is a player who filled out a form and got enrolled in order to gain access to the ATS (Advanced Test Server) a few months ago. This form is no longer available.
If you are not sure you are one of them or not, here's an easy trick: ATS players have access to one more forum dedicated to the ATS.

To the ATS testers: please read carefully the posts of your ATS leader on your ATS forum to patch your ATS client properly. We also highly encourage you to read the Ring manual to get started.

And then, play and most importantly have fun with the Ring! :D

While the New Player Experience offered a new way to draw in players to Saga of Ryzom, Ryzom Ring wants to offer a new way to keep players in a game that doesn't revolve around barraging players with bigger things to kill. Ryzom Ring allows players to create adventures using a client that emphasizes drag-and-drop placement of objects and enemies, much like Neverwinter Nights. Unlike NWN's reliance on scripts, though, Ryzom Ring allows for a player to act as a true "Adventure Master," taking control of characters and mobs as he sees fit. This can let a mob attack with more intelligent tactics than AI would normally allow, or for characters to genuinely roleplay with another NPC as part of an adventure. Adventure Masters can set up automatic triggers for behaviors if they want something more script-like, or can remotely trigger events themselves as they watch the adventure. Player-created adventures are instanced and only available when the creating player has his Saga of Ryzom client open.

The concept of allowing users to generate their own content is nothing new. Back as far as the late eighties, gamers were getting in on the act with packages such as Sensible Software's Shoot-'Em-Up Construction Kit. Since then, some developers have shipped tools within their games to enable players to create custom levels or missions, and such freedom soon proved popular as online communities flourished--Doom, Morrowind, and Neverwinter Nights were just a few to galvanise would-be designers to get creative.

Now, this idea is being taken a step further by Nevrax, the team behind the online role-playing game The Saga of Ryzom. The new content, called Ryzom Ring, is currently in the alpha stage of testing but will be freely available to subscribers to the main online RPG. In a recent visit to GameSpot UK HQ, Nevrax director Milko Berset took us through the basics, before leaving us a copy to get stuck into.

The buzz created by the Ryzom Ring (R2) continues to build with two more features appearing online. Our friends at American site UGO have posted a neat preview of the latest happenings, while French site Playingzone.com have produced a mammoth five page article in French about Ryzom and R2.

With the current press tour still going on around the world we will bring you more articles as soon as they appear.

The first video is an extract from Gamer.TV weekly show available through MSN Video (needs at least IE 6 to view) that shows the Ring in action with a voiceover by Milko from Nevrax that was demoed in England. The second is a series of 14 shorter videos shown on ViTiVi.TV on a recent German press tour showing many different sequences of the Ring, again with an interview/voiceover from Milko. Hopefully this will whet your appetite as the Ring draws ever nearer. The voiceovers for all these videos are in English.

The third R teaser is out today on the web! This time we let you live for an instant in the sweet atmosphere of the lakes to witness the creation of a truly bewitching place. Big thanks to Sylk and Istari for this teaser. :)

You can download it on these sites:

TVG (UK site)

Gamona (German site)

Jeuxvideo.com (French site)

The previous teasers can be found here.