The news that Kevin Conroy would not be voicing Batman in the upcoming Arkham Origins seemed to come out of nowhere, and — though it couldn’t be verified — was still enough to upset many fans. But never fear! Kevin Conroy will be returning in Arkham Origins — although whether or not he’ll be actually voicing Batman remains unconfirmed.

At the recent Dallas Comic-Con, Conroy revealed that “I can talk about it now. We’ve been working for about 9 or 10 months on the next Arkham.”

“We were all signing these contracts that we weren’t allowed to talk about it – you know the studio likes to completely control the roll out of any product, so they don’t like any of us to talk about anything.”

Although this being widely reported as confirmation, Conroy actually stops short of saying “I will be voicing Batman”. It’s hard to imagine what else he’d be doing, but considering this is a prequel, there’s every possibility he may be perhaps providing a voiceover from the perspective of an older Batman, along with a newer actor. Stay tuned!

Source: GameArena

Late last week, we sat down with Blizzard’s lead encounter designer, Ion Hazzikostas. Aside from having an awesome superhero-style name, Ion also manages the raids, scenarios, and other encounters that make up Mists of Pandaria’s patch 5.3. Read on for all the details of the new scenarios, why Blizzard are cutting the XP required for the final five levels, and how he feels about WoW’s recent drop in subscriber numbers.

The BBC is reporting that one of the hackers self-identifying as Lulzsec has been slapped with a 32-month jail sentence for their involvement in the hacking attacks against EA, Sony, Nintendo, and others. 32 months is reportedly the longest sentence ever handed out for hacking in the UK.

One additional member received 30 months, while another who acted as the main publicist received 24 months in a young offender institution. An 18-year old member who was sitting his exams at the time received a 20-month suspended sentence and 300 hours of community service.

Unfortunately for these four offenders, that’s not the worst of it — they now face possible extradition to the US for additional charges under the US legal system.

A 24-year old Australian man has also been arrested.

Source: VG247

Epic Games’ co-founded and president Mark Rein has used Twitter to lambast processor-manufacturing giant Intel for holding back PC innovation.

“For years we tried to convince Intel to fix their graphics but their data said they were good enough,” claimed Rein. “PC innovation suffered for it.”

“Intel still owned the lions’ share of the graphics market with integrated,” he continued. “That’s why their data said it was good enough.”

Rein doesn’t provide an idea of when they attempted to convince Intel to fix their graphics, but it’s an interesting perspective nonetheless — although many modern games sadly no longer push the boundaries of PC gaming, with multiplatform releases meaning a lower-end hardware requirement. Who knows what might have been?

Source: Kotaku

The game formerly known as Alien Fear is now Alien Rage, and to celebrate their emotional turnaround they’ve released a teaser trailer showing some of the game below. It’s not clear how much is in-engine and how much is cutscene, but their tried-and-true premise of “you are a badass space marine who must kill thousands of aliens” means you’re probably in for a good time anyway.

Take a look below and let us know what you think.

When I played Anomaly: Warzone Earth a couple of years ago, it was a refreshingly different take on the tower defense genre, but one that seemed almost more like a proof-of-concept. Now, with Anomaly 2, this reverse-tower-defense concept has been polished up and expanded into a well-developed new iteration that offers a number of neat new twists on the idea. This includes a multiplayer mode that is the real selling-point of the sequel, but which might struggle to find a stable player-base.

At the Maker Faire event currently running in the San Francisco Bay Area, a pair of former Valve engineeers have been demonstrating their CastAR augmented reality glasses, to great acclaim.

The current prototypes, which are extremely rough with bare circuitboards, solder and wires, contain a pair of miniature projectors mounted on the glasses and attached by wi-fi to a PC. A special reflective screen is set up, while infra-red LEDs around the edge of the screen track the position of your head, allowing the glasses to shutter left-and-right at 120 frames per second to create the 3D effect.

According to a hands-on report from The Verge, it’s an incredibly promising piece of technology, with players even being hooked together in multiplayer to share the same 3D space but receive their own virtual images.

The makers are calling themselves Technical Illusions, and they revealed that there was an internal struggle at Valve between supporters of augmented reality and supporters of virtual reality — and the virtual reality supporters won. However, Valve were apparently keen to make sure that the pair kept all their hard work and were allowed to develop it on their own when they left.

“Gabe was completely behind it,” said Jeri Ellsworth. “I talked to Gabe, and he talked to the lawyers, and he’s like, ‘It’s theirs, make it happen,’ because he could see we were passionate about it.”

Source: The Verge (thanks Stefan)

If you’re trying to play Neverwinter at the moment, you’re out of luck — the game is completely offline at the moment due to a massive bug in the auction house that saw players receiving free money simply by bidding negative amounts.

Last night, some clever chap found that if you bid negative amounts on your auctions the game freaked out and handed you not only the item you were bidding for, but all of the money you bid as well. So if you slammed down negative two million Astral Diamonds on an item, you’d not only end up with the item, but with a further two million Astral Diamonds on top. Nice!

Then players discovered that you could take those Astral Diamonds to the Zen market, where players were offering real life currency in exchange for Astral Diamonds, and… well, needless to say, Cryptic immediately shut the game down.

They’re now working overtime to investigate who exploited the economy, and are currently promising a “high likelihood of character-specific rollbacks” and are “investigating the possibility of a shard-wide rollback” — something which would make the hundreds of thousands of completely innocent players pretty unhappy, as this 100-page thread on the official forums shows.

Neverwinter‘s official Twitter account claims the game should be back online within the next hour.

Source: Neverwinter Forums (thanks, Nemesis_22!)

Speaking to GamesIndustry, Former THQ president Danny Bilson, who was ousted before the publisher’s collapse, has said the company had financial issues the whole time he was there. The one-time executive said this was due in part to an ongoing tendency to rely on licenses, which had served THQ so well from 1991 to 2007, and weren’t shucked fast enough.

“We were shutting studios the whole time, and I was the guy going out there and giving the bad news,” he said. “It’s like the worst thing that… it’s the worst. I’ll stop right there. Awful.

“When I left a year ago, we didn’t see what eventually happened on the horizon. I’m not kidding, okay: we knew we were in trouble, but we knew we had a good line-up, and I thought we had enough money put away to support that stuff, finish it, and market it properly. We had a plan to live another day.

“And this is honest, honest, honest: I do not know what happened after I left. No idea. I’m not privy to what went on in there and I didn’t try to find out. I needed to move forward. I really wasn’t engaged at all, and then the news came in December.

“This was happening to my friends. I felt terrible. I just felt terrible.”

Bilson has never made any comment on his exit from THQ ahead of the appointment of former Naughty Dog lead Jason Rubin as president, and said he has to count on influential figures in the industry and press knowing the truth.

“Do I take responsibility for being involved in the decline of a company? Absolutely. Will I tell you candidly that it was the hardest job I’ve every had in my life? Well, it was. But I gave it my best, and I didn’t see the end result coming at all,” he said.

“On my watch, we, meaning my team, took [THQ] from one place and got it to another. We made a lot of improvements, but obviously it wasn’t enough; it wasn’t fast enough and it wasn’t good enough. I take responsibility for that. I’m proud of the portfolio my team built under duress. My team helped to raise the quality bar at a company that was built on something else entirely.”

Source: GamesIndustry

I am sorry, friends, but it is time to let go. After eight years and a successful sequel, ArenaNet has announced it will cease development of new content for Guild Wars. Take heart, through; the game will not be shuttered any time soon, and the team hopes to continue supporting loyal players via an automated system.

“Our focus has shifted to updates that not only help maintain Guild Wars but help the game maintain itself. With this focus in mind, we’ll no longer be releasing any new content for the live game except in support of automation,” ArenaNet said.

“Our goal is to get the game to a place where it can continue to run and be available to all of our fans. We have a lot of love for Guild Wars—it’s the game that made us what we are today—and we want to continue sharing it with everyone!”

The Live Team will remain on hand to address critical crashes and the like, but the tournament system will be fully automated; events will run over the course of a week rather than a weekend; and festival tokens and birthday presents will allow you to pick up older unique items missing from your collection.

For more information, check out the May 16 developer post on the subject.

Source: Guild Wars – News Updates

Team Fortress 2: Robotic Booglaoo is the first major Team Fortress 2 update crafted entirely by community members – and ladies and gentlemen, it is a doozy. Admire the trailer below; check out this amazing gallery of artwork; read both pages of back story; and marvel in the fact that it even comes with a comic. A full list of all the contributors is available if you’d like to send some mad props.

Following on from cuts to the Rift team in December, Defiance developer Trion Worlds has made another round of lay-offs.

“To best position Trion in a rapidly changing industry, we have reorganized our teams and are expanding our free to play offering,” the company said in a statement.

“With Defiance, we delivered a great game that more than one million gamers registered to play and continue to enjoy. As we progress from launch to ongoing development of the game, we are adjusting our staffing levels to deliver new content and improved features. RIFT, and our other titles in development, were unaffected by these changes.

“We are very much looking forward to the free to play release of RIFT and are excited by the other new titles currently in development.”

There were some pretty furious rumours flying around about the lay-offs, including that up to 80% of staff had been affected; that staff were escorted from the building; and that senior employees would not receive due severance packages. Trion Worlds has said that the 80% figure is exaggerated – without providing a new one – and that the other claims are completely false.

However, the developer has not yet denied IGN‘s claim that all studios were affected, but the Defiance team and generic support groups were the hardest hit.

Defiance is expected to spawn five major expansions in the next year, so it’s hard to believe the MMO’s development team has been gutted.

Source: IGN