The offer is open to any “fully-funded, complete and ready-to-publish games designed for digital download to PC platforms.” Brian Fargo, CEO of inXile, and Jane Jensen of Pinkerton Road Studio voiced support for EA’s offer in the press release.

“Crowd-funded projects are like the ‘people’s choice awards’ — a way for gaming fans to express what they want to buy and play,” said Jensen. “It’s great to see a big publisher like EA acknowledging that and opening up distribution opportunities for these games.”

As with those previous free weekend events, you won’t need to feed your credit card details to Bioware’s hungry Treasury Rancor (Bankor?) to get in, and you’ll be able to get to level 15 and participate in PvP and flashpoints. Full details on the Star Wars: The Old Republic site.

In this week's show, we probe very deeply indeed for answers…..

Beyond this, we also go in-depth, and discuss the implementation of a tool that 1) will consistently allow players to find others to group with, 2) may negate the need for server merges, 3) will draw players back into the game, and 4) will make the game seem more alive and vibrant. We talk about the critical importance of this one tool, and the impact it will have on SWTOR.  Want to know what this critical tool is, and if BioWare is going to implement it in the near future?  Listen and find out, friends!

Of course, no podcast is complete until we’ve heard from you.  Leave us a comment, share with us your thoughts, and lend us your insights – we want to hear from you!

It runs as a mod for Arma 2: Combined Operations, in a haunted version of Arma’s 225 km² imitation of the Czech Republic, Chernarus. It isn’t perfect. The servers are usually full. But it is an incredible adaptation of the things Arma does well: emergent gameplay, making you feel vulnerable and powerful, decision making, managing supplies, and tense teamwork.

How does Day Z work?

Actually, it’s miraculous that it functions at all. Having pulled out my own hair dealing with Arma’s sometimes flaky netcode, it’s unbelievable that the game can sustain 500-some AI-controlled zombies and fifty players simultaneously.

Players spawn at one of many pre-set locations with a basic kit: a pistol, flares, some painkillers, some beans, a canteen. Other than that, you’re naked: mapless and compassless in one of gaming’s biggest environments. Food, equipment, and weapons (including custom weapons like a quiet-firing crossbow) can be found around the game world or from killing other players.

If you die, that character is permanently dead. If you exit a server and rejoin another, you’ll resume your most recent character–in the spot and with the gear that you left them. That’s Day Z’s persistency in a nutshell.

Survival mechanics like food and water intake are layered atop the threat of zombies. There’s hunting. You need to take morphine to ignore pain. There’s a lot more to tell, but part of the experience is figuring this stuff out for yourself in a brutal setting.

Why should I play it?

In short: it’s scary as hell, full of stealth and surprise, you can’t trust anyone, roleplaying is effortless, and you might save the life of someone that sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

On my second life in Day Z, I had an unforgettable experience of anonymous cooperation, not unlike what the PS3 game Journey was lauded for. Minutes into a new character, I spotted someone being chased by a zombie. We were both in the open, along a highway that connects a series of hamlets at the southern part of Chernarus. I rushed in to help him; I didn’t think I had much to lose if he betrayed me or the zombie killed us both, and that risk seemed offset by the prospect of gaining a partner. We killed the zombie attacking him, but our gunshots attracted a few more. We settled into a back-to-back formation next to a gate, and used the entrance to bottleneck the zombies.

All through this, I was yelling instructions and directions of zombies. He wasn’t talking back. I asked if he wanted to work together; no response. We looted a little, picking up anything the zombies were carrying. I tried not to point my gun at him. I turned my back to him; I wanted to convey that I could be trusted not to spontaneously murder this stranger and take his stuff.

It seemed like he wanted to work together. Calmly, in the middle of the night, we crouch-walked with the sea on our right side. I kept talking to him. “Hey. Don’t go that way. Don’t go that way, dude! Over here. This house.” He didn’t always comply, but he stuck with me, leapfrogging from house to house and tree to tree. I figured he didn’t have a microphone, or that his push-to-talk key wasn’t bound. Whatever, this was good enough. We were alive. We started throwing flares to signal danger—red bread crumbs for illuminating where we wanted to head.

In a moment of safety, I typed. Seconds later, he finally spoke. He called out over Arma 2′s proximity-based voice chat.

In Italian.

Without speaking the same language, we’d worked as a two man team, killed two dozen undead, traveled a few miles east, and silently agreed to help each other survive.

CHKilroy’s videos are great representations of the best experiences you can have in Arma and Day Z.

How to download Day Z

Something Awful’s guide to installation is the best setup guide I can direct you to. Be patient if you’re hopping in for the first time–connecting to a server (even when it’s hanging at a “Loading” or “Waiting for host” prompt) can take several minutes, and the servers are pretty stuffed at the moment.

Our hot new podcast logo, courtesy of Disco Priest (You can follow her Twitter @discopriest!)

Yes, friends and fellow TORWarriors, it’s that time of week again – time for another TORWars podcast! In this week’s cast, we range far and wide, covering all of the biggest stories and latest news for Star Wars: The Old Republic. What news, you ask? Here’s a couple of quick hits as to what we talk about this week:

~ BioWare’s hardline stance against illicit game accounts – so beware of where you buy SWTOR, friends!

~ James Ohlen is asking for your feedback – what planet do you want to see next in SWTOR?

~ Did you like the Rakghoul plague event? It looks like those kinds of events may happen a few times each year.

~ BioWare is looking for UI feedback – what features do you want to see added to SWTOR’s UI?

In addition, we go in-depth, with Brian giving us some ideas about what there is to do at level 50 – it turns out there’s really quite a lot, and it’s not all just to ‘gear up your toon’. Beyond this, Deirdre explores the latest Q&A, dissecting the most interesting questions, and giving us the skinny as to what’s coming down the pike for SWTOR players.

Of course, the show isn’t complete until we hear from you! So leave us a comment, TORWarriors, and let us know what you think – we want to hear from you!

As far as things with both ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Episode I’ in the title go, the first official SW:TOR podcast is the least likely to make fans cry.

Hosts Eric Musco and Brooks Guthrie talk to Daniel Erickson and Damion Schubert and the process of getting the Legacy update live and discuss what’s coming next in update 1.3, informally called ‘the group finder patch’. There’s some interesting talk about cut features from 1.2 – particularly ranked Warzones – as well as how BioWare handle testing and feedback in the run-up to a major update.

There’s also new information about changes to end-game itemisation, including long-awaited class-appropriate armour types for social gear. If you felt that 1.2′s changes didn’t give you enough freedom to customise your character’s look, there’s hope on the horizon.

I’ll be talking to BioWare about their future plans tomorrow, as it happens. If you’re one of Star Wars: The Old Republic’s 1.3 million subscribers, what are you hoping to see next?

MMOs often make it too darn hard to play with your friends–a ridiculous state of affairs for the most social genre in all of gamingdom. But ArenaNet is looking to change that with Guild Wars 2, and revealed the first details in a development blog last month. We followed up with Lead Game Designer Eric Flannum to find out more.

Let this magical server-traveling Guardian save you from those raging bears.

PCG: So you’ll be able to transfer your character between servers for free in Guild Wars 2. Can you give us details on how this’ll work?

Eric Flannum: Servers and server transfers work a bit differently in Guild Wars 2 than they do in a typical MMO. First, we ask you to choose a Home Server. This Home Server determines which side you play for in our World vs. World combat as well as which bonuses from World vs. World are available to you. Another difference is that our guilds exist across servers. Think of each guild as having a distinct “chapter” that exists on any world where guild members make their homes. So this concept of a home world is very important for Guild Wars 2 players.

A player may transfer from their home world to a new home world for a fee. This fee exists because we want players to make transferring to a new home world a very serious thing and not something that players do on a whim. Once a player pays to transfer, there’s a seven-day period during which they cannot transfer again.
A player may also choose to play on any server where they have a friend as a guest. We want “guesting” to be an easy way for players to play with their friends from different worlds, so we won’t charge any sort of real world money fee for guesting. Beyond that, we’re still working on what other restrictions we might need to impose and will announce more details when we have them implemented.

PCG: Obviously your home server is an important part of World vs. World battles. How will you keep easy access to server transfers from being abused by people wanting to join the “winning” team?

EF: The fee should serve as a pretty large deterrent to people looking to jump on the winning side. Beyond this, a player’s not eligible to receive any of the World vs. World bonuses during the match that is ongoing when they transfer. Because of our matchmaking system, you can never be certain that your side is going to win the next matchup, so you’d be risking your money without any guarantee of being able to reap the rewards that come with victory.

Switching teams right before the match ends is dishonorable and, in GW2, fruitless.

PCG: It’s really kind of surprising that most MMOs make it so difficult to play with your friends. Do you think every MMO can, and should, implement these sorts of features?

EF: Our guesting system is something that’s unique to the way we set up our servers, so I’m not certain how other MMOs would be able to do the same things that we do. That being said, I would personally love to see more MMOs play around with different ways of structuring servers.

PCG: So I can get to my friend’s server. That’s great. But what if we’re different levels? How will rewards work when high-level players are grouping with low-level characters in low-level areas?

EF: High level characters who are playing in low level areas still receive rewards appropriate to their “real” level. The rate at which they gain these rewards is lower in the lower level area than if they’d been playing in an area that was equal to their own level. This reward system works on a sliding scale so that extreme level differences are much less efficient than slight level differences. For example, a level 80 player going to a level 10 area would earn rewards less efficiently than a level 40 player going to that same area. We are always tweaking this number but we generally want to find a sweet spot where players feel rewarded without it being open to exploit.

People with exploding houses don't care what level you are, they just want help!

PCG: Is there still a way to powerlevel a friend’s character, and if not, was that an intentional design choice?

EF: The most efficient way to play the game definitely involves playing with other people although powerleveling in the classic sense is not possible due to the way we dynamically adjust character levels. This was an intentional choice since we want our game to be a social experience.

PCG: Are there any other features in Guild Wars 2 that help facilitate friends playing together, no matter what level or server their characters are?

EF: There are quite a few things that we implemented intentionally to help facilitate players playing with each other. For example, our waypoint system is designed to allow players to quickly and easily travel to wherever their friends are. Friends lists and guild membership are account-based to help people play with each other and not force them to remember a long list of alts. Whenever we design a new feature we always ask ourselves how it impacts our players’ ability to play with their friends.

PCG: Thanks for your time.

It’s not unusual for MMOs to see significant drops in subscription numbers post-launch–many gamers just want to try the game out or find that it’s not what they were looking for. The fact that, relatively, three out of every four players that tried the game are still paying a monthly subscription is more of a testament to the game’s appeal than a sign of its imminent failure, as some forumites are claiming.

What do you think? Is this just the usual dip, or a sign of things to come?

Electronic Arts reported a drop in Star Wars: The Old Republic’s subscriber base, down to 1.3 million from the 1.7 million figure given in February 2012…

EA announced today that it’s made over 1.2 billion dollars in “digital revenue” during its fourth fiscal quarter. That is a massive 47 percent year-over-year growth.

Full game downloads were also up 76 percent year-over-year, pushed by Star Wars: The Old Republic and Mass Effect 3. This comes ri…