We've checked in with Wargaming.net for new updates on World of Tanks, as well as on the studio's upcoming projects, World of Warplanes (which is in early alpha phases and will, as we're told, hopefully go into beta later this year) and World of Battleships (which is even earlier in development and probably won't be playable for a while). We have new updates on all three games, including the studio's eventual plans to unite all three games to be playable simultaneously (spoiler warning: it's planned, but don't expect it anytime soon), for you here.

World of Tanks

Bonjour! Soon, French tanks such as the Somua S40 will grace the battlefield in World of Tanks.

According to Wargaming.net representatives, World of Tanks continues to enjoy strong success in the studio's home country of Russia, though the company continues to make strides in expanding out of its motherland, having already established offices in Berlin, Paris, and California. The World of Tanks development team has grown to a whopping 600 people who are hard at work on the game's 7.0 update, which will add plenty of new features, including fully functioning global camouflage (currently, camouflage isn't always fully visible for all players). Future updates will also introduce new battle modes, such as Garage Battle, which will let each player in a standard 15-versus-15 match choose five different tanks based on certain criteria (such as point value) and then go into battle; if shot down, players will then respawn as the next tank in their remaining four until they run out of tanks and the game is over. Other modes include Assault (a team-based mode that puts one team on the attack and one on the defense); Encounter mode, a king-of-the-hill-like mode that requires each team to try to capture and hold a central point on the map; and Escort, a mode that requires one team to safely escort a computer-controlled VIP vehicle while the opposing team does its best to destroy it.

7.0 will also add new tanks and may or may not coincide with a separate, planned tier of French tanks dating back to the 1930s and up through the 1960s. Wargaming.net chief Victor Kislyi explained that several of these new French vehicles will be lightly armored, hit-and-run vehicles that can perform powerful ambushes using cartridge-based turrets, which can launch multiple shells in a single round (but require significant recovery time to reload). And generally speaking, Wargaming.net is also working on future enhancements for its large-scale clan warfare mode (also known as Ultimate Conquest) by adding new territories, such as North Africa, Korea, China, and Japan. The 7.0 update will launch "hopefully within the next month or so," though the developer plans to continue supporting the game with regular monthly updates.

World of Warplanes

In World of Warplanes, your enemies will be rival sky pilots, and your only cover will be the clouds.

World of Warplanes is Wargaming.net's next free-to-play online action game, and like the name implies, it'll be all about fighter planes rather than tanks. The game is in development in Wargaming.net's Kiev studio with a team of about 200 people, and like with World of Tanks, the vehicles you'll use will be from the mid-20th century, primarily from World War II. At launch, the flyable planes will mostly originate from the major world powers that participated in the conflict (the United States, England, and Japan, as well as planes from Germany and Russia). While the game is intended to have the same kind of accessible, action gamelike pace as World of Tanks, Wargaming.net's Kislyi suggested that the team is still doing some fine-tuning with regard to exactly how in depth it will make the control scheme. The current, alpha version of the game uses a simplified control scheme we saw in a brief, hands-off demo; at the moment, you can control your plane completely using nothing but your keyboard to turn, bank, accelerate, and slow down. Because you'll be airborne for the entire time--the game will not require you to sit through takeoff, though Wargaming.net is considering the possibility of letting players attempt a landing for bonus experience after a match ends--your aircraft will always be on the move. You will have only clouds to use as cover while you face threats not only in the sky from enemy ships, but also on the ground from antiair emplacements. And while you won't have to worry about your fuel running out, you'll still have to stay clear of terra firma because flying into a mountain will cause your ship to crash. This is an important concern because your ship's flight model will be affected if you've taken severe damage. The game will even model specific mechanical damage, such as shorn wings.

World of Warplanes' development team is still determining the sensitivity of the control inputs. In any case, the studio plans to support multiple types of controller input (keyboard and mouse, USB controller, and flightsticks) for the game when it eventually launches. And much more interestingly, the studio plans to (eventually) have Warplanes missions connected to Tanks missions in clan wars mode. The tentative plan is apparently to let Warplanes players struggle for air control over sectors of the clan wars map, with the winning team granting some sort of bonus (which has yet to be determined) to the Tanks players on the ground who belong to the same team for as long as that team maintains air control in that sector. Wargaming.net hopes to have the game in a beta state later this year.

World of Battleships

World of Battleships won't be available for a while, but one day, you might call yourself the captain of a ship like this.

World of Battleships is the third game in Wargaming.net's planned trio of games, and by its very nature, it'll be the game with the slowest pace. This is because you'll be controlling a warship of some type, such as a PT boat, destroyer, or some class of battleship. Then again, the term battleship itself is pretty broad and can refer to gunships that are merely huge or to truly colossal aircraft-carrier-style ships. Because battleships don't generally turn on a dime, the game experience in World of Battleships will be less about careful maneuvering and presumably more about timing, smart initial deployment, and repeated shelling of key targets. All of this must also be done while avoiding minefields and coastal batteries and capturing key control points and island bases. We're told that for the time being, Wargaming.net doesn't plan to implement submarines into the game, at least not at launch, because this tactical consideration could throw off entire matches, such as a 15-versus-15 battle in which a few players on one team decide to play as subs while no one on the other team makes the same decision. This kind of thing would make matches lopsided in a hurry, and the studio prefers to let players play the game with the vehicles they most enjoy rather than have them feel that someone has to play a different vehicle because the game mode requires it. The game was not in a playable form when we saw it, and because it's the third game to go into development (a team of about 60 is currently working on the game at Wargaming.net's St. Petersburg studio), it'll most likely be released after Warplanes or as Kislyi put it, "When it's done."

Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes is the PVP-focused spin-off of EA BioWare's (formerly EA Mythic's) massively multiplayer game Warhammer Online, which was itself based on the rich lore of Games Workshop's Warhammer: Fantasy Battles universe. But while Warhammer Online had a comprehensive player-versus-environment (PVE) game in which players joined characters from friendly factions to explore the countryside, complete quests (both private and public), and eventually gain experience levels, Wrath of Heroes strips away the story and quests and offers a pure PVP experience--one that has nothing to do with gaining in-game experience levels or picking up in-game loot but has everything to do with killing the other team as many times as possible.

The beta appears to currently be running on only one mode for the time being, a match type in which three different teams compete openly against each other and can kill each other off with no restrictions. This mode takes place on the beta map Mourkoun Temple, which has an actual stony temple in the middle of the map…and in the middle of a swamp full of fallen trees and uneven terrain. This map has four different node areas you can capture: three nodes on the map's outer extremities and a massive artifact in the middle of the temple (which is, again, in the middle of the map). It's certainly helpful to capture the nodes and the artifact, since they grant score multipliers whenever your team kills an enemy, but the only way to put actual points on the board is to bury enemy players in the ground.

The bright wizard doesn't like it when you offer her a breath mint.

So, although we successfully pulled off a few sneaky node captures all by our lonesome at the beginning of our beta session, we quickly realized that going off alone just meant that the rest of our team was down a man--and more likely to get killed off to inflate an enemy team's scores. The name of the game in this particular mode is sticking together, isolating targets of opportunity (especially lone players, if possible--better known to online game players as "ganking"), and taking as many of them with you as possible.

The mode lets you play as one of seven different character classes, and you can swap freely between them each time you die, similar to class-based shooters such as Battlefield. The professions include the black ork, the largest character in the beta, who is equipped with powerful melee attacks and the ability to knock a single enemy flat; the human bright wizard, whose flame spells can carpet a certain area with continuous damage; the goblin shaman, who primarily acts as a healer; the witch elf, who uses various types of magic to inflict debilitating effects; the elf shadow warrior, a powerful archer with long-ranged attacks; the vampiress, a spellcaster class that can drain her enemies' health; and the axe-wielding dwarf slayer, the beta's other melee profession.

We put in time with all of the game's classes and found each one to be devastatingly powerful only when used correctly, and less than worthless when stupidly trying to go solo. Thanks to its huge size, the hulking black ork looks like the strongest character right off the bat, and with strong backup behind him, he can shorten your enemies' life spans considerably by using his knockdown ability to pin an opponent to the ground while everyone else on the team whales on their immobilized victim. However, the class is also one of the slowest runners and has noticeably short range on his axe--he's a melee fighter, after all--so swifter enemies can run circles around him, particularly outdoors, and if you give chase to fleet-footed enemies without backup of your own, you'll find yourself quickly slowed or stunned and then chopped into mincemeat. Conversely, the goblin shaman seems like the weakest profession at a glance, since its abilities are primarily based on healing and providing bonuses to teammates, rather than dealing any sort of direct damage, but because the shaman has abilities that let him heal himself and any allies (such as placing a stationary talisman on the ground that radiates a healing aura), a properly played shaman seems like one of the hardest classes to kill. On the whole, ranges and spacing seem to be of paramount importance in Wrath of Heroes' battles--one of the best ways to avoid a deathstroke is to jump out of its range at the last second.

The goblin shaman's healing powers make him deviously hard to kill.

Currently, Wrath of Heroes' beta PVP skirmishes seem fast-paced and messy. Once the battle relocates to the inside of a temple--and it always seems to--the already-quick combat becomes even more frantic, and targeting individual enemies (you can cycle through nearby enemies by tapping your keyboard's Tab key) occasionally gets iffy, especially with friends and foes strafing around like mad and magic spell effects going off every second. Still, this is fast-paced PVP without having to grind for dozens of experience levels just to get there. In addition, Wrath of Heroes appears to have a persistent level system for your account that will increase with victories and kills. We imagine the level system will be tied to some sort of metagame with unlockable content and possibly some sort of talent tree, not unlike the rune system of League of Legends, though EA hasn't confirmed exactly what this level system will mean.

Trion Worlds announced today that its upcoming massively multiplayer online real-time strategy game End of Nations will be free to play. Developed by Petroglyph Games (Star Wars: Empire at War), the game puts players in control of a small group of units and encourages them to work with their teammates to achieve victory. "We see End of Nations as a core real-time strategy game," said Dave Luehmann, vice president of third-party development at Trion. The Western market is starting to come around to the idea of free to play, he explained, and we feel by using this model, it will lower the barrier to entry for a lot of players.

"You cannot buy your way to the top," added David Reid, senior vice president of publishing at Trion. Reid went on to say that the types of items you'll be able to buy will include unit skins, accelerators for experience gain or wealth, and other customization options. And most of these items can be purchased using wealth you earn in the game. All of the game's features, both solo and multiplayer, will also be available free of charge. The shop will be largely for convenience items only, and if you know you won't be spending any money on the game, Reid noted that you won't have to enter your credit card information to access it.

Trion also announced that End of Nations will be receiving a collector's edition, both digital and physical. The physical version will be the only version of the game available at retail, and it will include in-game extras, as well as actual collector's items (what these items are specifically is still unconfirmed). Prepaid game cards will also be available at retail. The digital version of the collector's edition will only include the in-game extras.

Yes, you heard that right. Apparently, if you've downloaded the free version but never bought anything, you're not a free-to-play Team Fortress 2 customer.

And if you have every bought anything for Team Fortress 2, you're a "premium" customer, which means a bigger backpack, better items, and all blueprints. It also means a "proof of purchase" hat.

More details are at the official Team Fortress site.

While the Electronic Entertainment Expo is known for giving fans a peek into the year's marquee titles, it's also a great place for stumbling upon interesting games that may otherwise fly under the radar. One of these lesser-known games is End of Nations, a massively multiplayer online real-time strategy game from developer Petroglyph (Universe at War: Earth Assault). The game puts players in control of a small squadron of units, which they must use in concert with their allies' troops in battles that can support more than 50 players. We got the chance to go hands-on with this game and test our tactical prowess against some the E3 attendees.

Our demonstration began on the character creation screen where you create your general and choose either the Liberation Front or the Shadow Revolution to join. To use StarCraft as a comparison, The Liberation Front was like the Terrans. Its units are tough, bulky, and rely mostly on brute force to get the job done. On the other hand, the Liberation Front was more like the Zerg. Its units are lighter and quicker; it is the only faction with access to cloaking technology. Once we were squared away, it was time to review the world map. This screen showed the (numerous) contested areas where we could take part in missions against other players or the AI-controlled Order of Nations faction.

But, before we headed into battle, we needed to visit our armory first. From here, we selected which units to use in combat. We could roll with all of one type of unit or bring a variety. Unit types included infantry, light and heavy armored vehicles, helicopters, and artillery. Ideally, we would have coordinated with our teammates on who should bring what so that we didn't have any holes in our forces. In practice, we just grabbed a handful of troops and jumped right into battle. We could have also coordinated on our unit's paint job or upgrades--which tweak a unit type's health, range, or other stats.

Even though this was our first time playing the game, it immediately felt familiar once we hit the battlefield. Left click and hold to drag a selection box; right click to move. We knew the drill. Our mission was simple: Wipe out the enemy's base on the far side of the map. Everything started out well. We captured a resource point and even drove an enemy armored squadron into retreating. We were feeling pretty good, but then, the helicopters arrived. Our squadron had no air units of its own, and only three light antiair vehicles. Our representative from publisher Trion also saw this and suggested we build an armor depot and a few turrets to bolster our defenses. Even with these additions, the enemy's air units made quick work of our ill-equipped ground units.

Similar to Relic Entertainment's Company of Heroes series, the maps in End of Nations were littered with tactical points for us to capture. Doing so earned us tactical currency used primarily for building defensive structures, such as defense-boosting armor depots and deadly turrets. It could also be used for repairing units or activating our commander's special abilities. When a unit was destroyed in this game, it wasn't lost forever. Instead, its flaming corpse remained on the field until we had enough tactical points to repair it. Once repaired, the unit would respawn at the nearest spawn point that was under our control. Our commander's special abilities also took tactical points and could turn the tide of a battle if timed correctly. These included such destructive forces as tactical nukes, landmines, EMP blasts, and noxious clouds.

From what we played, End of Nations was largely a war of attrition, both on and off the battlefield. On the battlefield, we were fighting to gradually push our skirmish line forward by capturing the tactical points and reinforcing them with defensive structures. Off the battlefield, we were working to tip the scale on a territory in our faction's favor. A territory is not won with a single victory but, rather, with numerous victories that gradually push it over the edge to one side or another.

And if your side gets too far behind, don't worry. In three-month intervals, the world of End of Nations will be reset. Before that happens, you and your faction can earn numerous bonuses for controlling the major territories of the world. However, don't think that just because you joined the winning team in the 11th hour, you'll earn all those rewards. The developers are tweaking the bonuses you will receive based on various factors, such as level of contribution. We'll be sure to keep our eye on this game.

E3 2011 is all about new and upcoming games, and one such game is APB Reloaded, GamersFirst's revamped version of Realtime Worlds' dearly departed online game. Reloaded just recently went into open beta, but the team at GamersFirst is still hard at work on new improvements to add to the game in the coming weeks and months between now and the game's planned official launch later this year.

In the near term, player matchmaking is getting overhauled, and larger-scale clan warfare battles are being added. The current player matchmaking system, which is purely point based, is getting thrown out completely for a system modeled after the Glico scoring system used by certain tournament chess organizations. In a nutshell, this new ranking system will give players a rank between one and 30 (bronze rank one through 10, silver rank one through 10, and gold rank one through 10) based on past and recent engagements, which will more accurately and more currently gauge a player's skill level. It will also use this algorithm to place players in one of the game's 70 districts that is closest to their current rank. This algorithm will be used for clan wars, larger-scale eight-versus-eight or 20-versus-20 battles that will take place in specific districts designated for clan warfare. Winning clans may get to leave their mark on the district with persistent markers that remain in the world for a time, even after they log out.

Further out, the GamersFirst team is working on implementing two additional ways to play: racing and Asylum. The former is a full-on racing experience that will take place in new districts specifically designed for vehicle racing. These new areas will be smaller than normal districts and consist mainly of roads adorned with power-up items (such as speed boosts) to make them conducive to player racing. The latter is a new district that was once a mental institute but is now a close-quarters combat arena with a layout that's significantly different from the open-world city streets of APB. The idea for the arena is to provide more of an immediate head-to-head shooter experience among smaller teams, similar to Half-Life: Counter-Strike, though the entire Asylum district will be one big arena, so it's not clear exactly how the details will work.

While overhauled matchmaking and clan wars are planned for the next two weeks of open beta, racing and Asylum are scheduled to be added to the game in the coming months. APB Reloaded is tentatively scheduled for a full launch this August.

E3 2011 is underway and plenty of upcoming games, like Cryptic Studios' Neverwinter, are being shown. Despite the fact that Cryptic was recently acquired by free-to-play game publisher Perfect World, Neverwinter is still being published by Atari (which still has the rights to publish Dungeons & Dragons-licensed games), though the actual game isn't being shown at the convention. Instead, an updated version of the Foundry toolset, which debuted in Star Trek Online in what producer Andy Velasquez described as a "version 0.1 beta state," was shown. The Cryptic staffer suggested that Neverwinter's version of Foundry will be much more robust and went on to fire up the engine to give us a demonstration.

The toolset in Neverwinter will let users start building their own custom adventure using one of four different building blocks: story, map, dialogue, or costumes. Story is the conceptual backbone of the game's user-generated content and can be built by stringing together dialogue sequences (which you write) arranged any way you like. These include multiple options in a dialogue tree and "fail states" that may end the conversation prematurely. You can write branching dialogue tree options or string them together by dragging them back into the same sequence. For instance, you can create a dialogue situation where no matter what you say to a hostile enemy, it attacks you.

If story is the conceptual backbone of the game's UGC, maps are the structural backbone. The updated Foundry map editor seems quite powerful and easy enough to use. While you can craft your own rooms, the editor will also come with dozens of preset rooms that you can drag and drop into your maps, connecting them by lining up their doorways. Better still, the editor will let you test out the dialogues and maps you've built by hopping into and out of a live mode to see what they look like in action. We watched Velasquez put together a simple dungeon full of undead in about 15 minutes, and what we ended up with was what looked like an actual adventure or, at least, a small portion of one. More interestingly, Neverwinter will let you integrate your custom content with the persistent, out-of-the-box content that Cryptic is building with the game, such as by keying up one of your custom quests from a dialogue with a guard from the city of Nevewinter proper.

Unfortunately, no actual gameplay was shown from the final game, but Velasquez did share some story details. Apparently, Neverwinter will take place in the fictitious year 1479 DR (that's Dale Reckoning, fellow Forgotten Realms aficionados). It's about 100 years after the time period usually explored in previous Forgotten Realms games (such as the previous Neverwinter Nights games) and in licensed novels, such as R.A. Salvatore's Icewind Dale Trilogy. The world has undergone The Cataclysm, which is an event that has caused magic to seep out of the world and triggered natural disasters, such as the volcano eruption that leveled the city of Neverwinter. At the start of the game, a noble lord from Waterdeep has sanctioned the rebuilding of Neverwinter, and your character arrives to help with the reconstruction efforts.

We still don't know much about the in-box game that Cryptic is crafting for Neverwinter, but it's clear that the game will have powerful tools, which will let dedicated users create plenty of new content. Neverwinter is scheduled to ship later this year.

The 2011 Electronic Entertainment Expo in is full swing, and today we were summoned to Riot Games' booth to check out some of the updates coming to League of Legends. Travis George, lead producer on the game, was there to talk us through three upcoming champions, as well as show off Spectator mode. "Our driving belief has been to make a game players would want to pay for," said George, "and we've got a lot of people who are working on more than just champions."

Three champions that are in the works are Yorick, the grave digger; Leona, the radiant dawn; and Skarner, the crystal vanguard. Yorick is Riot's take on the necromancer archetype. Similar in concept to Sona's auras or Udyr's stances, Yorick is all about managing three abilities in harmony. Each of his three main abilities summons a ghoul, which dies fast and prioritizes attacking enemy champions. There is an immediate effect when the ghoul is summoned, and each ghoul type has its own special properties. His first (decay ghoul) causes a small blast of damage and slows enemies around him. This ghoul has its own aura that slows enemies and will automatically seek out enemy champions to attack.

The other two ghouls, ravenous and spectral, are still being worked on but will grant bonuses to life steal and attack speed, respectively. Yorick's passive will increase his stats so long as one ghoul is active, thus making skillful ghoul juggling a must for effective play. Finally, his ultimate is shaping up to be a skill shot that fires in a straight line, sending a wave of grasping skeleton hands that root champions. The skill may be modified so that nearby ghouls will focus on rooted champions, but it's still a work in progress.

Because Leona and Skarner aren't as far along in development, we didn't get as concise a breakdown. In broad terms, Leona is Riot's answer to the community's requests for a true female tank (sorry Kayle). Her character concept is built around the sun, with several crowd control abilities. These culminate in her ultimate: a global area-of-effect nuke that initially slows champions caught by it in a blinding ray of sunlight. After a moment, a beam of solar energy will crash down, stunning and damaging those hit. Skarner is a massive, purple scorpion made of crystal and built to focus on enemy champions one at a time while keeping others at bay. One idea George would share for this champion was the ability to physically pull enemy champions toward Skarner using its tail.

In addition to the new champions, Spectator mode was also shown. When doing research into how information should be presented to the player, George and the team at Riot turned to ESPN and other sports broadcasts to see how they formatted their information. At the top of the screen is a large blue-and-purple score tracker that tallies each side's total team kills, gold, and towers destroyed. The sides of the screen show vertical lists of each team's champions, with icons indicating individual summoner spells and the status of ultimates. Finally, the bottom has a full scoreboard that can be toggled on and off, as well as a chat window and minimap.

To help prevent foul play, Spectator mode has about a minute of built in lag (the exact number is still being tweaked). Riot is also still working on how many players will be able to spectate a match at once and would only commit to supporting one spectator per match at the moment. These additions, and many more that George was eager to reveal, are on the way and should be arriving before the year's end.

Such games as Castle Crasher or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game might not be the first that come to mind when thinking of a free-to-play massively multiplayer online role-playing game. But that's just the comparison developer Stairways Games is going for with Rusty Hearts. This game fits into the new breed of MMORPGs where the fast-paced, combo-centric combat feels more akin to Devil May Cry than World of Warcraft. We got the chance to go hands-on with the game and discover what other tweaks Stairways Games has planned for the action role-playing genre.

Each player is assigned a special room that collects items reflecting his or her achievements.

Of the three premade characters available, we were assigned to play Angela: a sassy, scythe-wielding warrior described as a cross between tank and healer. That's right, instead of having you build a hero from the ground up, the game has you choose from a set of three (through there was a fourth blacked-out silhouette). The justification for breaking one of MMORPG's most sacred features stems from the game's anime inspiration. In addition to its iconic art style, anime has always been known for its high drama and character-centered storylines. Stairways Games wants to channel some of that drama here and believes the story would have more of an impact using pre-established characters.

The game's control layout was also a bit different. You don't use the traditional WASD keys for movement or the number keys for spells. Instead, movement is handled with the arrows keys and your attacks are mapped all across the left side of the keyboard, similar to several real-time strategy games. If the keyboard configuration doesn't do it for you, the game has also been optimized to support gamepads. We actually played the entire demo using an Xbox 360 gamepad, and it worked surprisingly well. Our character's basic attacks and jump were mapped to the controller's face buttons, while her special abilities were handled with the shoulder buttons. Pressing B switched the set of special abilities she had access to, which allowed us to utilize the whole of our magical arsenal.

The layout of Rusty Hearts was similar in concept to the world of Guild Wars. There was a large, communal hub world where characters could interact with each other, visit shops, join a guild, or otherwise make hang out. Once we had our party in order, we headed into one of the game's numerous dungeons. Each dungeon was broken down into several sections, with each section being an instanced encounter with an adjustable difficulty setting. True to its arcade inspirations, the combat itself was fast and chaotic. Juggling between scythe and sorcery was a snap as we slew our way from one room to the next.

Before entering a dungeon, you should visit the bulletin board to pick up secondary objectives, such as killing a certain number of enemies.

Once the dungeon section was cleared, we got the chance to play a card-flipping memory game to earn some extra loot. However, even this simple minigame was madness because all the players who participated in the dungeon got to play at the same time using the same set of cards. We could also find additional items for sale using our own money; however, these were predominately convince items (such as health or experience buffs) and cosmetic items. Overall, we had a fun time with the game, though it remains to be seen what impact not having a character creation will have. Rusty Hearts will start its open beta later this year.