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Last week's Hero Con has come and gone but the info revealed at the fan fest for City of Heroes has been pouring out of the MMO's official message boards. A lot of the info reveals developer Paragon Studios' plans for Going Rogue, the upcoming commercial expansion for the long running super hero MMO title.

The expansion, which will allow players to turn their hero characters into villains and vice verse, is currently due for release sometime in the second quarter (i. e. spring) of 2010, with a beta test to begin sometime earlier in 2010. The expansion will also include new power sets, new factions, and a optional graphical upgrade. You can check out the game's message boards for all of the info revealed at Hero Con.

[Via Massively]

Earlier this year, NCsoft announced that they would be launching a Guest Author program for their super hero MMO City of Heroes, allowing major outside talent to create new storylines for the game via the Mission Architect tools. Today NCsoft announced that acclaimed comic book author Bill Willingham will be added as one of the first people or teams involved in the Guest Author program.

Willingham is best known for his work on Fables, the DC Vertigo comic that takes a new spin on familiar fairy tale characters. He will be creating a City of Heroes mission called The Quest for Magic. He joins Red Vs Blue creators Rooster Teeth and PvP comic strip creator Scott Kurtz in making new missions for the MMO. All are scheduled to be made available to players of the game for free beginning on October 13.

In related news, City of Heroes is allowing all inactive accounts in good standing to be reactivated from now until Sunday at 11:59 pm PT. Also all characters will receive double their normal experience points during this weekend.

NCsoft and Paragon Studios are ramping up for the annual Hero Con event where fans of the super hero MMO City of Heroes will get together with the game's dev team, learn more about upcoming plans and in general have more fun than fans of MMO titles are allowed to have under law. This week, NCsoft announced that all attendees of Hero Con will get a chance to receive a special item.

That item is an invite to the closed beta test for City of Heroes: Going Rogue, the upcoming commercial expansion to the game that was announced earlier this year. The expansion itself will be shown in a "sneak peak" panel at Hero Con for the first time in public. Tickets for the event are still being sold; it will be held at October 24-25 (with some pre-con activities on October 23) at the Doubletree Hotel in San Jose, California. By the way you have to physically attend the show to get your closed beta invite. That's because NCsoft wants you to sign an NDA on site before you get the beta invite.

[Via Massively]

Every time a new MMO comes out, it is often heralded as the "WoW killer." The one MMO that will manage to dethrone Blizzard's impossibly popular epic once and for all. This is a ridiculous expectation for any game to have, and thusly, MMOs need to be judge on their personal merits rather than in comparison to how popular they will be beside World of Warcraft. Aion is one of these games, and while it is rather generic, it manages to offer up a good mix of storytelling, graphics, and gameplay that make it a game to at least try out.

NCsoft's launch of their fantasy MMO Aion this week in the US has been successful . . . or perhaps too successful, if you catch our drift. Since the game opened its servers for its pre-orders and then officially launched on Tuesday, there have continued to be long queue lines of players waiting hours to sign onto the game's servers.

NCsoft has been trying to cut down the wait times and now our sister site Massively reports that the developer has put a new time limit on the game's private stores. Players have been idling on the servers while supposedly opening a virtual store to sell their items. Now there's a 30 minute time limit for those stores to remain open. More importantly, NCsoft plans to launch a new North American server sometime this weekend. Both efforts should help a lot to reduce wait times to enter the game.

If you attended the 2009 edition of the Penny Arcade Expo earlier this month you might have gotten lucky enough to get a free copy of The Art of Guild Wars 2, a hardcover book with lots of concept artwork for the upcoming fantasy MMO game. Now NCsoft and the game's developer ArenaNet are selling the book to everybody else.

The 128 page book is now on sale at the official Guild Wars 2 web site (which takes you to the Penny Arcade Store site) for $30. There's also tons of lore info about the game's locations, characters, creatures and more in the book and will likely be the biggest source of info about the long awaited game for some time until ArenaNet reveals more info in 2010.

Aion, the MMO that gives you wings, is already a huge hit in S. Korea, a country where online games are a part of the culture's daily life. In the fourth (and last) video podcast, the developers at NCsoft travel to Seoul to get the fans' comments and reactions to the game. It also answers some burning fan submitted questions. Hopefully, the enthusiasm in Asia will carry over to the West, since the game is set to officially went live in North America today. The gorgeous launch trailer can be seen after the jump.

Download HD Aion Video Podcast #4 (769 MB)
Download HD Aion Launch Trailer (112 MB)
Check out all Aion downloads

With NCsoft's MMO Aion officially launching Tuesday in the US and on Friday in Europe, the development team is already looking ahead to what they will be doing next for their best selling fantasy MMO. VG247.com chatted with the game's brand manager Christian-Peter Heimbach who states, "There will be at least one major update a year" for Aion.

Of course NCsoft has provided free content updates for a number of their other games, particularly City of Heroes, in the past. Heimbach states that for Aion, "there will be free content updates for all players, and we're looking then at how big the major updates will be." If the game continues to be as successful in sales as its pre-orders you can most likely expect lots of content updates in the months and years to come.

While the game doesn't officially launch until tomorrow it looks like there have been a few pre-launch day issues for the US release of Aion. NCsoft's long awaited fantasy MMO opened up its servers for its Head Start program for everyone who pre-ordered the game (all 400,000 of them) on Sunday.

The Aion Tower web site reports that there have been long queue lines to join Aion's servers during the Head Start launch. The queue lines were several hours long at one point. There have also been reports of servers going down as well as long latency issues with the ones that are up. Aion's community manager made a post on another fan site, Aion Source, stating, "I'm going to disagree with anyone who is saying that we've had a 'bad launch'. It's been fantastic. So many players logging in at once, and our servers are going strong." The community manager did admit to long queue lines saying, "While it is ridiculous waiting for 8 hours in a queue, queues are a good thing." She added, "We don't want to see a scenario where we put too many servers online resulting in a barren wastelands of empty worlds once the initial rush settles down. We're dynamic in the way we manage our servers, and we want to be open about this."

As NCsoft prepares to launch the North American version of Aion next week, the fantasy MMO is still getting some last-minute changes before its official release. This week the game's official web site posted up word of those changes for the folks who have pre-ordered the game and will get to play Aion early.

There's been a few interesting changes in that final patch including a level cap raise from 45 to 50 and biggest of all the removal of GameGuard, the anti-cheating software that was a part of the game's beta test. However there were a ton of issues from players who had problems with GameGuard during the test so NCsoft took it out so they could give players "the best possible Aion experience." While it's likely they will try to put the software back in at some point, it's clear that NCsoft wants nothing to come in the way of the game during launch week.

[Via Massively]