‘A Game of Thrones: Genesis’ plunges you into the heart of the battles and intrigues between the Families that shaped the Kingdom of Westeros.

However, victory does not necessarily result from brute force. The innovative game mechanics provide players with numerous paths to success: will you opt for a military, economic or diplomatic approach? Trickery, treachery and deceit are widespread and you will constantly have to watch your back if you want to avoid a bitter defeat!

Peacefully or forcefully annex surrounding territories, besiege enemy castles, send spies to infiltrate behind enemy lines, assassinate trouble-making officers or capture them to ask for a ransom… When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground!

About a year ago, and out of the blue, I got an e-mail from one John Miles, an enforcer (okay, not really) for the British arm of EA Games. He had a proposition for me, was I interested? Interested, of course, was putting it mildly. Video gaming is the only thing in my life that I would fully qualify as an addiction. I like a fairly limited number of games (there’s an awful lot of dross out there), but those I like, I really like, and will play them until the game paths, enemy spawning points and scripted incidentals are graven into my synapses. Some game spaces I probably know better than the streets of the city I live in. And, as I’ve said once or twice on this site, I think the gaming medium has a potential for storytelling every bit as charged and exciting as literature or film. So was I interested? Yeah – just a little bit.

Well, John flew up to Glasgow to buy me lunch, and brought with him fellow enforcer Jeff Gamon and development capo Colin Robinson, who framed their proposition thus: was I interested in coming aboard with EA to write and script for a particular game project they had going, with a view to other game projects thereafter, and if so could I be in Berlin in a week’s time?

Talk about your offers you can’t refuse.

That was a year ago. Now, without breaking any Non-Disclosure Agreements, I can cautiously reveal that I’ve been pulled in to consult on three separate games, have spent more time on airplanes and in overseas hotels during the last year than in my entire previous life, and have hit one of the steeper learning curves of my creative existence. Gaming turns out not only to be exactly as fascinating a medium as you’d expect, it’s also a very young industry and its norms have yet to be fully formed. So while it shares some characteristics with the movie world, gaming has yet to produce its version of Story guru Robert McKee or the cut-and-dried writing formula requirements that have strangled so much creativity in places like Hollywood. What you can put into a big budget game is still very much up for grabs, and what’s more, with the breakneck pace of technological development backing the field, it’s constantly changing as well. One producer I’m working with at the moment likens what we’re doing to working in Hollywood circa 1920, when everyone was still working out what you could do with this wild, new medium called film; the only difference is that the rate of evolution in technique for video games is running at about a dozen times the speed it ever did for film. The field is open, the potential huge and, in story terms, only just beginning to be properly tapped

For a writer, that’s a pretty close definition of paradise.

And it hasn’t hurt that the projects I’m working on are all science fiction, so while I chisel patiently away in fantasy at The Dark Commands, my SF muscles are being kept in trim by the concepts at the heart of each game.

Word of Ember blazed across the land, and the town of Torchlight flared to life.

Ember is the essence of magic and the keystone of alchemy; it lures the restless with promises of power and riches. Miners burrowed deep beneath the dirt streets of Torchlight, discovering veins of the ore richer than any found in living memory- but they were not the first to covet these mines. The miners broke through into the buried past, a dangerous labyrinth of caverns and ruined civilizations, twisted creatures and the bones of those who came before. Evil bubbles up from the depths and threatens to overrun this town as it has so many others. The heart of a villain has infused the Ember, and his darkness seeps through the veins. To survive, the townspeople must break the cycle of destruction; they need a champion who can destroy the evil at its root. Removing the source of the rot may purify the Ember, but it is a long and perilous journey. The champion must battle through rock and fire, through lost cities and ancient tombs, into the palace of the villain himself.

The adventure is set in the mining settlement of Torchlight, a boomtown founded on the discovery of rich veins of Ember – a rare and mysterious ore with the power to enchant or corrupt all that it contacts. This corruptive power may have dire consequences however, and players set out into the nearby mountains and depths below to discover the full extent of Ember’s influence on the civilizations that have come before.

DDO Unlimited introduces an innovative new way to play – you can download and play DDO for free! For even more action and fun, you can purchase additional adventures, convenience items, and account services at your leisure from the new DDO Store. Can’t get enough of DDO? You can even subscribe, becoming a “VIP”, to get unlimited access to all of the game’s content.

The US-only, free-to-play makeover for the MMO turns regular subscribers into VIP members and gives access to all game content as well as a monthly Turbine Point allowance. But, said Mersky, the company has still profited from Turbine Point sales.

“They all got a ton of points for being loyal subscribers, for being in the beta. We weren’t really expecting a ton of sales – they had no incentive to. They already had access to all of the content as VIP subscribers, and we just gave them a butt-load of Points,” Mersky told Kotaku, as reported by Eurogamer.

“They’ve gone through their points, and we’ve already sold millions more Turbine points, and we’ve not even opened up the world to the public yet.”

“The hottest selling items are the new Favored Soul class, which is unlockable in-game, but all of our subs just went ahead and spent points on it, unlocked it, and they’re playing it right now,” he added.

[…] Alongside the switch to a free-to-play model comes Module 9, which raises the level cap, adds two new storylines, overhauls the combat system and introduces the Favored Soul. Module 9 will also be released as a regular free update to European subscribers.