Earlier this year, IGG announced they had begun work on an MMO based in the Moonlight universe. Moonlight Online takes place in a dark world where werewolves and vampires war for supremacy. Since the announcement, IGG has been regularly pumping out concept art to give people a feel for the style the game is aiming for. We've been shown some werewolf and vampire characters, a dark armoured horse and a few buildings inspired by medieval and gothic architecture. New art has now been released showing the game's three starting cities: Castle Williams, Fort Traster and Wolfsburg Bastion.

Castle Williams is a dark, gothic castle where all vampires first begin their journey. Home to the humans, Fort Traster is a municipality with a strong focus on teaching magic. As expected, werewolves start their adventures in Wolfsburg Bastion, a wild and untamed stronghold. IGG continue to release concept art on the upcoming title regularly, and updates can be found on the official Moonlight Online forum.

Have you ever wondered where to invest your savings for the future? Have you thought about the MMO market? Apparently, multimedia companies like Time Warner, NBC Universal, and Bertelsmann believe it is worth their money. These three media giants have secured over $100 million into Trion Worlds, the top-tier gaming company featuring upcoming MMOs like Rift: Planes of Telara and End of Nations.

Yesterday, Trion's CEO Lars Buttler was featured on Bloomberg's CEO Sitdown. In the interview, Buttler mentioned the role games, specifically MMO games, will play in the future economy. "This is actually one of the fastest growing segments of the games industry. And there are markets like Korea or China where you can see what a massive potential these online premium games already have," Buttler explains in the video. As MMOs become more mainstream, the media industry is beginning to see them as a viable form of entertainment. They are not just pretend fun for teenage boys anymore. Buttler expounds later, "It's really once-a-gamer-always-a-gamer, so as people get older they stay with their favorite game types." The industry is constantly growing because the audience sticks to their favorite form of entertainment.

For more on this story check out the full video on Bloomberg's website.

It's Friday night, do you know where your alter-ego is? If you're lucky, he or she is logging into the DC Universe Online closed beta. If not, we'll point and laugh, but we'll also hook you up with some new location reveals via the latest screenshots courtesy of SOE.

Feast your eyes on Green Lantern and friends flitting about Metropolis City Hall, Robin and Poison Ivy deep in the swampy bowels of the femme fatale's lair, and a few shots from around Gotham City (including the Botanical Gardens, East End Hotel, and Gotham University). You'll also catch a glimpse of a player character fighting his way free of the maniacal Brainiac tutorial missions.

DC Universe Online is currently scheduled to release for PC and Playstation 3 platforms in early 2011.

Welcome to Betawatch, Massively's weekly report on the state of MMO betas. In each installment, we'll report everything from the latest open betas, closed betas and even alphas in one convenient place. Plus, we'll make sure to include as much info on each game's current status, including projected release dates (if known) and links to the sign-up forms to get yourself into that beta you've been seeking.

Battlestar Galactica Online joins our closed beta list this week, and Perpetuum announced that the clock is ticking down to the November 25th launch. Remember the Kung Foo! MMO from Perfect World Entertainment? It's back in our closed beta list after last spring's reboot, and the game is now known as Legend of Martial Arts. The first closed beta test starts on the 24th.

Finally, Dreamland Online announced alpha testing with a key giveaway, so be sure to grab a key if you haven't yet.

Follow along after the break for the current Betawatch list.

A few months back -- just after PAX -- community manager Sean Dahlberg stepped down from his position at BioWare to join UTV True Game's Faxion design team. In the intermediate time, his Star Wars: The Old Republic duties have been filled by community representatives like Joanne Laroche and Alyson Bridge. But now Sean's empty seat has been filled by none other than Stephen "Rockjaw" Reid.

You may know Reid as the Community Director at Gazillion Entertainment or maybe the Senior Community Manager at Trion World. Either way, Reid's experience is well-known in the MMO world. And prior to his work in the States, British-born Reid specialized in public relations and community-related projects for NCsoft UK. His voice has been heard on the Yellow Spandex podcast as well as the official NCsoft Europe podcast before that. It's safe to say the Force is strong with this one.

Reid has been a regular reader of Massively and has been known to comment on our stories via his twitter account Rockjaw. We'd like to congratulate Stephen on his new position, and we look forward to hearing the latest SWTOR news from him. Be sure to send him a warm welcome on the SWTOR forums, and don't miss our interview with this new addition to the SWTOR team coming in the next few days.

In the words of Han Solo in A New Hope, "Don't get cocky" -- I mean, "Here's where the fun begins!"

Curious about crafting in BioWare's upcoming Star Wars MMORPG? We are too. We're so curious in fact, that we're bringing you not one but two crafting-centric stories today. In addition to our exclusive dev interview, BioWare has also updated its official The Old Republic website with a hefty dose of info on crew skills.

In a nutshell, your hero character will have the ability to assign crafting, gathering, and even mission skills to various NPC crew members. While you're out saving the galaxy, chasing attractive Twi'leks, or whatever it is that heroes do these days, your faithful companions will be doing all the grunt work involved in keeping you competitive when it comes to crafting.

Gathering skills include bioanalysis, scavenging, and slicing, while crafting skills break down into armormech, artifice, and biochem categories. Last but not least, mission skills feature diplomacy and treasure hunting. That's not all either, as the web page features a few tantalizing question marks indicating further skill reveals in the future. We'll tell our astromechs and slicers to keep a sharp lookout, and in the meantime, you can view the crew skills video after the cut.

The next few years promise to be exciting ones for fans of Middle-earth. Ever since The Return of the King debuted in theaters in 2003, audiences have clamored for more of Tolkien on the big screen -- specifically, The Hobbit. After nearly a decade of back-and-forth negotiating and legal entanglements, it appears that this The Hobbit movies are finally going to happen, with Sir Peter Jackson once again in the director's chair and Martin Freeman taking on the lead role as Bilbo.

That's smashing news for movie buffs, but what does this have to do with Lord of the Rings Online -- y'know, that MMO we sometimes talk about in this column? It could be "very little," with Turbine proceeding on its merry way and perhaps enjoying the free boost to playership as movie buffs hunt around for a game to extend the experience. However, if the company were smart, it would be laying out the groundwork right now to synergize the heck out of the movie with a similar in-game experience.

For a while now, I've been chewing on the notion that Turbine could incorporate the events, locations and characters of The Hobbit into LotRO -- in fact, several of the key pieces are already in place. Could our journey in LotRO eventually take us back to the era of Bilbo's grand adventure? How would such a thing even work?

Hit the jump and I will smack your brain so hard with ideas that you'll forget all of your piano lessons. It's OK -- you didn't really need them.

We regularly spend money on our favourite MMOs, be it in the form of a monthly subscription fee or a microtransaction purchase. We often spend more time and money on our favourite online retreats than we spend on other hobbies, and yet few MMOs have their own dedicated magazine the way other hobbies do. EVE Online players are fortunate enough to have the quarterly EVE magazine E-ON to spread out across their coffee tables. Produced by MMM Publishing, E-ON is guaranteed to be 100% EVE from cover to cover. Even the advertisements in it are for EVE corporations and services rather than paid ads for other games.

I've been slowly reading my way through Issue 21 since it popped through my letterbox and have definitely enjoyed it. This issue focuses on live events and the upcoming Incursion expansion, with a special feature on EVE's annual fanfest event in Iceland. The issue also contains guides to faction warfare militia fleets, EVE's various communication tools and the first of a series on Drones. Interviews this time around include CCP's video producer Stevie Ward and Technical Director in the fight against lag, Derek Wise. As usual, the magazine contains the latest war reports from nullsec, an awesome new piece of EVE fiction and the impressive layouts and graphics that readers have come to expect.

Skip past the cut for a breakdown of what you can expect from E-ON issue 21 and my impressions of the issue.

This past Wednesday, I had the opportunity to head down to LucasArts in San Francisco to check out the current build of Star Wars: The Old Republic and chat with some of the BioWare developers. While my hands-on with the game won't be out until next month, we can deliver a couple of smaller interviews on two of the recently revealed systems in the game. And I think you'll want to hear what the interviewees have to say!

Join me past the cut as I ask lead writer Daniel Erickson and lead PvP designer Gabe Amatangelo all about the Alderaan Warzone, the PvP reward system, avoiding battleground design pitfalls, companion tradeskilling, player-made gear, and hardcore crafting in SWTOR.

Welcome to this week's installment of Storyboard, in which I'm starting off what I am tentatively hoping to keep as a semi-regular series. For all the previous discussion of characters that don't work, we haven't touched upon any that do work. And considering we've all sat there trying to think of any sort of hook for our characters, it's useful to have some stock types to draw from. I'm going to take a look at some of the more common stock types, how and why they work in a variety of settings, and what sort of touches you can add to make a character stand out.

Of course, the first archetype we're looking at doesn't stand out. In fact, he excels at being a part of something larger, a cog in a machine whose only purpose is death. He's fighting for Stormwind, he's fighting for Bastok, he's fighting for the UFP -- he's the universal soldier, and he really is to blame. So why not cue up some appropriate background music, and take a look at the soldier as an archetype.