The action starts off with the press conferences on Tuesday 16th August, a press and trade only day on Wednesday 17th August and then the show is open to the public between Thursday 18th and Sunday 21st August.

EA Press conference

• Date: 16th Aug 2011
• Time: 15:00 BST onwards (time in your city)
• Live Stream: EA @ Gamescom

EA will obviously be wheeling out the big guns at this event, so expect to see Mass Effect 3, Battlefield 3, Need For Speed: The Run, FIFA 12, SSX and Burnout: Crash and Star Wars: The Old Republic. There is talk of a new version of Bullfrog’s classic Syndicate making an surprise appearance. We shall see…

Sony Press Conference

• Date: 16th Aug 2011
• Time: 18:00 – 19:00 BST (time in your city)
• Live Stream: via Facebook

You can also watch the press conference live via the PlayStation App on iOS/Android phones, on the PlayStation Blog or within PlayStation Home which will feature a dedicated Gamescom 2011 space. If you miss the press conference then you will be able to watch video edits in the Home space later on.

Sony should be showing off more of its new PS Vita handheld console, along with many of its games like wipEout 2048, Uncharted: Golden Abyss, LittleBigPlanet and Resistance.

On the PlayStation 3 expect to see Resistance 3, Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, Starhawk, Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One and maybe even the Ico & Shadow of the Colossus Collection making an appearance.

The PS Vita

Microsoft:

Microsoft isn’t holding a press conference on the Tuesday. Instead assembled journalists and media will be getting to hands-on with their Gamescom line-up at the Xbox Play Day Event. You will be able to see clips and pictures from this event as well as keeping up to date with the rest of Gamescom 2011 via Xbox.com and Facebook page.

DotA 2

• Date: 17th – 21st Aug 2011
• Time: TBC
• Live Stream: DotA website

You will be able to watch the best Defence of the Ancients (DotA) teams in the world battling it out for the $1 million first prize live on Valve Software’s brand new DotA 2 game via the DotA 2 website. This tournament will be the first time DotA 2 has been shown in public.

Guild Wars 2

• Date: 17th – 21st Aug 2011
• Time: TBC
• Live Stream: Electronic Sports League TV (ESL TV)

NCSoft are showing off Guild Wars 2 at Gamescom. You will be able to watch the developer PvP show matches on ESL TV from the 17th Aug 2011.

Guild Wars 2 - Sylvari Race

Borderlands 2

• Date: 19th Aug 2011
• Time: 16:00 BST onwards (time in your city)
• Live Stream: 2K Games Live

2K games will be streaming a live demo of Borderlands 2 from Gamescom via its Usteam channel. This will be the first time the game will shown in public. Gearbox will also be answering questions during the live demo. If your question gets asked then you’ll get a Borderlands 2 swag bag. You can either tweet your question to @2KGames or @GearboxSoftware twitter accounts or post on the 2K Forums and the Gearbox Forums.

Nintendo:

Nintendo isn’t holding a press conference or even showing off the Wii U (as reported by Conceivably Tech). Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and most of the games shown at E3 will be playable on the show floor but Ninty isn’t showing anything that you can watch online, I’m afraid.

We’ll be reporting from Gamescom 2011. See you back here for the latest news from the show floor.

You can now buy tickets for GAMEfest, which the organisers GAME are surprisingly enough calling the UK gaming event of the year. Taking place over 3 days at Birmingham’s NEC in September 2011 and a week before the Eurogamer Expo at Earl’s Court, GAMEfest is only open to GAME reward card owners*. There’s an impressive list of confirmed exhibitors so far, including all the major players in the industry and games like Gears of War 3, Battlefield 3 and Mass Effect 3. Adult tickets cost £10 per day, £5 for kids

*If you don’t have a game reward card, you can pick one up for a one off charge of £3 from the GAME website.

Speaking of games expos, Eurogamer have announced that Guild Wars 2 from NCSoft will be playable at Eurogamer Expo 2011. This is great news as I’m seriously looking forward to this game, being a big fan of Guild Wars. If you can make it to the Expo in September (tickets £7.50 or £10), I’d suggest spending some time with the game.

Harvest Moon – Grand Bizarre will be arriving later on this year. In this game you are in control of a run-down farm on the outskirts of Zephyr Town. You need to rejuvenate the town’s weekly bizarre with produce from your farm, so that it attracts people from far and wide. The game also features the ability to own multiple pets, a horse race festival and a windmill which can mix ingredients to produce goods for the bizarre.

The Bitamp Brothers classic Z The Game is now available for iPhone and iPad. For £2.99 you get a taste of classic (i.e last century) real-time strategy action. You can also get the Bitmap’s excellent futuristic sports game Speedball 2: Evolution on the iPhone/iPad too. I’m hoping we get Xenon 2: Megablast or Cadaver released next.

And finally today we have the conspiracy trailer for the upcoming Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The game is looking a bit tasty it has to be said. Is anyone else looking forward to playing this?

Check out the videos below to see some of the Necromancer’s spells in action. Personally, I love a good minion spell. It’s great seeing them go off to beat the crap out of an enemy whilst you chill out ;-) Are there any other classes people would like to see added to Guild Wars 2?

Doom:

Bone Minions and Putrid Explosion:

Grasping Dead:

Locust Swarm:

Life Siphon:

Guild Wars 2 is out sometime in 2011.

NCSOFT haven’t announced a release date yet for Guild Wars 2 yet. Boo.

(Yes, Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa is a big reason why I haven’t been posting for the past few months)

Here’s the message from yesterday:

“Last November we launched what we hoped would be a ground breaking sci-fi MMO. In many ways, we think we’ve achieved that goal. Tabula Rasa has some unique features that make it fun and very different from every other MMO out there. Unfortunately, the fact is that the game hasn’t performed as expected. The development team has worked hard to improve the game since launch, but the game never achieved the player population we hoped for.

So it is with regret that we must announce that Tabula Rasa will end live service on February 28, 2009.

Before we end the service, we’ll make Tabula Rasa servers free to play starting on January 10, 2009.

NCSoft have been nice enough to give active players a few months of their other games – 3 months of Lineage II, 3 months of City of Heroes, Aion beta access, Aion preorder access (whatever “access” means in the context of preorders) and a month of Aion gameplay. Some players aren’t happy but I think that’s incredibly generous of them.

Still, the closure of the only sci-fi themed MMORPG is very sad :( OTOH, also fully understandable. I’ve been playing for a good few months now. The game itself is great fun. The music is brilliant and does a wonderful job of setting the war-time atmosphere. The in-game events that preceded major updates were just plain awesome; previously-secure fortresses coming under heavy attack front of you and ultimately being taken by the Bane. Compared to WoW or LOTRO, TR has (had) no grind at all – when you get a collection quest to, e.g., get 10 hard drives, there’s no stingy 5% drop rate. In general, you go out, kill 10 reconstructor bots and retrieve their hard drives. Job done, hooray!

Of course, that sort thing has ultimately proven to be their downfall. See Rob Fahey’s Tabula Rasa analysis on Eurogamer back in April:

“…at its launch (and ever since, in fact) there has been essentially nothing to do in Tabula Rasa once you hit level 50. You could, of course, create a clone and play with the other class options available to you…

…All there is to do at the end of the ladder in Tabula Rasa is fairly limited player-versus-player combat, the uninspired nature of which is all the more disappointing given how well the active combat system should scale to PVP play.”

What were the design team expecting? There is little grind, so your players progress quickly. They reach the end, find there’s nothing there and… continue subscribing? Play the same game over and over with slightly different weapons? No. We unsubscribe, of course. All the more unfortunate is that end-game content like Omega Labs just came out in September, 6 weeks before NCSoft pulled the plug. I guess it wasn’t enough to draw players back in.

The other thing that normally keeps players hooked to online games is the social scene. The PvE campaign stretches across multiple worlds, with multiple areas in each and multiple instances for each area, presumably to keep the population controlled across the servers. In other words, a social scene simply does not exist. WoW’s crafting, postal and auction system creates natural gathering places like Undercity or Orgriammar. Tabula Rasa has no incentive to drive you to any particular locations, so meeting other players is a rarity. Strong clans could have helped, but the official website’s clan listing is painfully out of date and in-game clan-finding is limited to asking nicely on the general chat channel in the hopes that a clan at your level is recruiting. Chances? Slim-to-none.

Anyway, enough of that. It’s all going to disappear in February :( I guess I’ll have more time to blog.