Weekly MMO news round-up, September 12: Star Wars has zombies, The Secret World’s not so secret anymore

By Stephany Nunneley

• Massively had a chat with Stew Chisam, VP of game operations at Hi-Rez Studios, during DragonCon last week. It’s a video interview, and in it, Chisam chats about how well things are going with Global Agenda since the two closed Betas. If this game has been on your radar, you should check out what Chisam had to say here.

• Ultima Online’s new expansion, Stygian Abyss, has been released and is now available for download on the game’s website. It will run you $29.99.

• The Secret World was all over PAX. Massively was lucky enough to get a preview of the game, Gamespot provided impressions, and Eurogamer talked to Funcom’s Ragnar Tornquist who told the site all about it. Wanna know all about the three different factions, the lore, and see some screens? Then hit all three links for information overload.

• The clown Malatina offers a new solo challenge for plucky adventurers in Runes of Magic. Once per day, she will give players the opportunity to enter a obstacle-packed dungeon, which will be included in the update for the full launch of ‘Chapter II – The Elven Prophecy’, on September 15. Hate clowns, man. US servers will be brought down for 24 hours starting Monday, Sept. 14, at about 3 a.m. PST until Tuesday, Sept. 15, at about 3 a.m. PST. During that time, the forums and Runes of Magic Web site also will be down. All systems will return Tuesday, Sept. 15, at about 3 a.m. PST. The forums and Web site will have a new design to match Chapter II: The Elven Prophecy. More details are through here.

• Before you get surprised and start screaming “Oh Noz! You’ve got zombies in my Star Wars Galaxies!”, read up on it via the official Random House website. Apparently, SOE and LucasArts are adding zombies as part of an October event called Death Troopers, which ties into the horror-themed novel of the same name by Joe Schreiber.

• ROHAN: Blood Feud (Renaissance of Human and Nature) now has one million accounts. Cool. To celebrate, the team are holding Million Member Mania events from now until September 21, where players who win the various games included will be awarded with one million in game currency. Very cool. More through Massively.

• The Aion team is aware of issues with lag, the authentication server, gameguard anti-cheating program, forum authentication script, and beta key release schedule, and are devoting resources to finding out the cause. Rest assured, a patch will be released ASAP. Good to know. More on that here. Thanks, Massively.

• Dungeons & Dragons Online went free-to-play in North America this week, and to get you excited for it, Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a couple videos posted, along with some information on it. If that just isn’t quite enough to placate you, Massively has a launch day news round-up for the title. Hooray!

• Karos Online is currently in closed Beta, and other than some interesting bits to PvP, the game takes a different approach to crafting and hobbies than what you may be used to in an MMO, by incorporating both into an alternate character progression tree. Also, instead of running around looking for mats, you may end up fighting over them instead, such as through the mining area which will be rife with PvP. More through the link.