Greetings Conquest of Heroes Fans,
As 2009 is upon us, a new year brings new beginnings for both Burning Man Studios and Conquest of Heroes. With 08 now behind us, it has been a rocky road this past year, both good and bad, and lessoned learned for BMS. Now, we are ready to look to the future and make 2009 ours and your year with some new developments, and goals for both BMS and COH in the coming year.
First off, COH will be having a name change. In relation to our other COH products coming in 09, the MMO has been titled, Conquest of Heroes: Reign of the Order.

Development for the COH MMO game has had a lot of ups and downs in 2008, but now we have a new plan, better mechanics, better direction and focus to make this game a reality. We’ve had to take a long hard look at the game, and what it was shaping to be. Ultimately, while we had our dream game written down on paper, there were too many obstacles standing in our, and the game’s way. Finally, Steve (company director) realized that our needs and desires may not have been the best direction to tell the story of Conquest of Heroes, and since, we have laid down a new plan that will explore the roots of the COH world, and game, in a whole new way. Thankfully now, the COH MMO is more alive now than ever.

In 2008, our attention span was short as BMS started focusing on a lot of other things that in many ways weren’t in the company’s best interests. With those lessons learned, the company has been undergoing a series of reformations in order to strengthen our resolve, and overcome any obstacle that might rear its ugly head in 09.

With BMS’ new streamlined approach to our development, we know what we want now, and how to get it.
As for Conquest of Heroes, you can expect to see more of it in the coming year, in various media’s. The first novel is now completely finished, its cover finished, and ready to go to the publishers. We expect the book to be out no later than February, early March at the least.

The second COH novel – Trinity – is nearing it’s finish, and now will tie directly into the first segment of Conquest of Heroes: Reign of the Order.

You can also expect a Conquest of Heroes comic book sometime too in 2009. Right now, we are going through the pre-production of this product. For my self, doing a comic is a lifelong dream – maybe more so than even doing a video game – go figure. As for what market it will be finally released under – Diamond is of course our primary focus, but for anyone that knows the comic business, Diamond can be a tough egg to crack. So, we’ll see what happens when the first two issues are finished.

A few other things you can look forward too in 09: Nathan (music composer) is hoping that the first COH soundtrack will be released in the coming year. A number of COH merchandise is set to be made, such as shirt, mugs and whatnot. And as for the podcast, (Conquest of Heroes Radio) expect a new format, co-host and more focused material that will reveal more about BMS and COH than ever before in 09.

So, with you, our loyal fans, old and new, expect 2009 to be the year that Conquest of Heroes stepped out from the imagination of a few choice creators, and into the real world.

Christopher Lee Buckner

Update: As it turns out, this information was false.

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Update: EA community manager eaapoc, the bloke who started this whole affair, has acknowledged that his initial threat was “inaccurate and a mistake on my part.”

“If we suspend or ban you from the forums, that does not affect your in-game account and certainly it does not impact your in-game account for other games,” reads a new post. “I had a misunderstanding with regards to our new upcoming forums and website and never meant to infer that if we ban or suspend you on the forums, you would be banned in-game as well. This is not correct, my mistake, my bad.”

Original Story:

“Your forum account will be directly tied to your Master EA Account, so if we ban you on the forums, you would be banned from the game as well since the login process is the same,” he wrote. “And you’d actually be banned from your other EA games as well since it’s all tied to your account. So if you have Spore and Red Alert 3 and you get yourself banned on our forums or in-game, well, your Spore account would be banned to. It’s all one in the same, so I strongly recommend people play nice and act mature.”

“Those banned will stay banned, but like most other internet services, its not that hard to create a new fake e-mail account,” he added. “However, its a lot harder to get a new serial key.”

As Kotaku points out, neither the Forums Help page nor EA’s Terms of Usage say anything about what constitutes a ban-worth offense, although the Forums front page says, “We ask all members of the community to respect each other and each other’s opinion. These message boards should be considered ‘E’ for Everyone and the moderators will close any posts that break the EA Terms of Service. Further violation of the EA Terms of Service will result in a banning of the offending account.”

Read more: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/87102-EA-Get-Banned-From-Forums-Lose-Your-Games

Midget Gnomes unite! Blue, Yellow, Pink, Green, Red! All the Mighty Morphin’ Midget Gnomes want to do is eat cupcakes and watch a bull-fight, but their boss, the Giant Floating Head, wants to send them on a mission. Will a compromise be made so that both parties get their way? Or will the Giant Head assert his authority? Or will the Gnomes poke out his eyes and read copies if the swimsuit edition of Good Gnomekeeping.

“This movie was absolutely awesome to score, and turned out great. But watching it today I never saw the ending. It made my sides hurt!” – Nathan Allen Pinard

The widley anticipated game among the hardcore MMO community has finally opened beta signups for individual users, as well as released a 17 minute gameplay video showing a large amount of footage of what you can do in Darkfall.

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From www.darkfallonline.com:

“We’ve released an extensive Darkfall Online gameplay trailer which shows a multitude of Darkfall’s unique features in action.

The trailer consists of 100% in-game footage and features real-time massive naval and land combat, battle tactics,  city sieges, mounts, siege weapons, vehicles, adventure areas, clan cities, spell mechanics, highlights of the grand scale of the Darkfall world, and much more. The trailer is made of playtesting footage with no scripting, no simulations, or post- processing. It’s the Darkfall team playing the game as the players would.

You can download the Darkfall Trailer here

A beta registration link is included at the end of the video, and beta registrations are now open.”

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Poster’s Comments: “Some of you may yell your eyes are bleeding from the graphics, but don’t. The graphics in this game are actually very likable especially later in the video. But throwing all that out the window, the things you can do in this game blow my mind. They didn’t forget much. If you watch this video, make sure you watch ALL of it.”

Your probably saying “Who?” at the moment. Trust me, you know who he is.

He’s better known as the “movie trailer announcer guy”, commonly known for his “In a world where (insert blurb here)”. Don has done hundreds, if not thousands of movie trailers in our time. I’m not sure if he will ever be replaced.

It’s a sad day for all of those in the voice over industry.

Read the full article HERE.

The newest machinima has just been released from Firebolt Productions, with music composed by one of our very own TGM affiliates; Nathan Allen Pinard.

This video has been entered into the Wegame Machinima Contest, and just in time too. The contest has ended as of August 1st, and now nearly 120 videos await judging by the Wegame staff.

“Extra effort has been taken effort into this film, and I’m happy to say it’s probably one of the best scores I’ve done for Johan. This score takes you up and down on the emotional scale.” – Nathan Allen Pinard

Nathan: I got this in my inbox, and I though the community should see this, as they also may relate to it. This video has taken the Youtube population by storm getting over 25,000,000 views. It’s not a varation of a Rickroll, somebody injuring themselves horribly, or a cat eating corn. This is something I thought should be shown, as it was very touching to me.

Hello Everyone,

In the past few weeks I’ve seen a huge influx of fake emails and webpages often leading to people having their information stolen. These sites are simply to harvest information and exploit it. And, possibly even sell this information to a 3rd party.

So here’s a quick how-to in detecting harmful emails. Please note this isn’t a fool proof method, but it’s often the way I’ve seen these emails come through.

Read More