NCSoft, all things golden in massive-multiplayers that don’t end in ‘craft’, today announced the official launch of Dungeon Runners, their new MMORPG based on team-raiding fantasy-themed dungeons. Sporting a more playful, cartoony art style than Guild Wars, Dungeon Runners also features a similar price tag to GW, free! That’s right, Dungeon Runners is NCSoft’s first free to download and free to play MMO. There is a premium subscription model at $4.99 however, which gives players access to a bank to store their dungeon treasure, high-level equipment (such as armor) and the ability to stack potions in your inventory. All around, it’s looking good and I’m hoping NCSoft’s approach starts to work. Now, if they’d just quit screwing around and introduce that one-price, play-all subscription model similar to SOE’s which NCSoft’s CEO teased us all with a year or so ago!

Official press release after the jump..

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9dragons, the martial arts MMO from (the new) Acclaim is currently running their open beta phase and have finally added a European server for us on the motherland. 9dragons is a massive-multiplayer martial arts title, re-creating the ancient myths of early Asian, allowing you to explore, learn and battle rival fighters along with your friends, mentors and fellow disciples.

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Having played around with developing on the Torque Engine in the past, I still like to pop in and see what’s going on with the enhancement of the engine and related tools from time to time. That’s how I came upon Dreamlords and whoa was I surprised. The power of Torque is starting to really shine and Dreamlords looks to be an extremely interesting title. Combining an MMORPG with traditional RTS battled and long-term tactical strategy, Dreamlords looks to be a must for any indie games and MMO fan.

Hit the jump to watch an introduction to Dreamlords gameplay..

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Rupture, the social network for World of Warcraft players run by Napter-founder Shawn Fanning has gone live, allowing users to meet with real life people who play the most popular MMO in the universe. Rupture allows you to automatically publish your character and guild profiles to your profile page, as well as share pictures, chat with friends and recruit new people into your fold.

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World of Warcraft developer Blizzard Entertainment today announced that worldwide subscriptions to it’s monster MMORPG have surpassed the 8 million mark. A fitting announcement 1 week before their much anticipated expansion, Burning Crusade, which debuts on January 16th. Prediction: expect a global meltdown of servers as users attempt logging into Blizzard servers all at one time. Have fun!

Read more: World of Warcraft surpasses 8 million subscribers worldwide

Oh how I wait anxiously for a Battlestar Galactica MMORPG, but, until that highly unlikely day dawns, I’ll have to live with user-created machine in order to live those dreams out. Here, we’ve got the opening credits of the amazingly sci-nerd television show, recreated from within World of Warcraft. I especially love the multiple cyclon clones and the “Six” model.

See more: World of Battlestar @ Machinima

Hit indie MMORPG Minions of Mirth has won Game Tunnel’s technical excellence award, a nod to the single-developer project which was created over the course of 11 months. Using the indie games engine of choice, Garage Game’s Torque 3d, Minions of Mirth sports over 30,000 registered players, offers both Windows XP and OS X clients and even allows players to host their own persistent game servers, all run by a highly technical and experienced two man show. Kudos MoM, keep up the great work.

Read more: GameTunnel.com’s 2006 awards | Minions of Mirth

Many, many, many, many many people are losing their shit in anticipation of World of Warcraft’s upcoming expansion, The Burning Crusade. Dropping January 16, 2007 in the US and EU, The Burning Crusade is increasing the level cap to 70, the killer feature will most certainly suck WoW’s certainly reverse WoW’s slowly increasing burnrate, along with many new spells and talents for each class and two new playable races (Blood Elves and Draenai), among many other additions.

Watch Blizzards somewhat recently released intro for The Burning Crusades after the jump..

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Codemasters Online announced last-week that fantasy-based MMORPG Archlord will become free to play on January 4th, 2007 for all players, both old and new. Codemasters will continue support for the fledgling Korean massive multiplayer, which has been struggling with balancing issues and attracting an audience in the massively overrun fantasy MMO world. Archlord’s expansion to Episode II is still underway as planned and all players who buy the boxed copy will be able to access both Episode I and Episode II for free.

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Armada Online brings an indie tear to my eye. A sci-fi themed MMORPG with some of the sickliest-sweet art direction I’ve ever seen, Armada takes the hyper real art style of Eve Online and gives it a coating of playfulness. Don’t be mistaken though, Armada is already a surprisingly solid game, featuring quite an in-depth items, weapons and stats system for the RPG nerds deep down inside all of us and a rapidly growing and enthusiastic community. Currently the world features 1 PvP and 1 PvE instance, though I expect this to grow as more players discover the joy of massive PvP space battles. Hopefully a Mac client is forthcoming, since this would be a nice addition to the paltry options available to us Mac users (who like to keep their PCs permanently shutdown).

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