Square Enix announced today that the Open Beta Test will be ending on September 19, 2010, just three short days before the Collector’s Edition of the game officially launches!

From the Beta site:

We would like to thank everyone who has participated in the FINAL FANTASY XIV Open Beta Test.
The open beta test currently being conducted is scheduled to end at 5:00 p.m. on September 19, 2010 (PDT). Following the end of the open beta test, the beta test site will close at 12:00 a.m. on September 20, 2010 (PDT).

• Client downloads will cease simultaneously with the end of the open beta test.
• The bug report form will be closed simultaneously with the beta test site.

There isn’t much time left in the open beta test, but we would like to thank everyone for their cooperation and support.

What We Know So Far

It’s been a good two years since Guild Wars developer ArenaNet initially announced a proper sequel to its free-to-play (well, once you buy it), multi-campaign, sort-of massively multiplayer online role-playing game. In that time we’ve received assurances that Guild Wars 2 would move the series’ storyline forward over 200 years, affording us a peek at the dark fantasy world’s future. Moreover, Guild Wars’ highly instanced nature (where 20-plus copies of every major city exist, wilderness areas are totally private to the player or party exploring them, and towns feel more like lobbies than fleshed-out locations) gives way to true large-scale persistency, with shared world objectives allowing players to influence the flow of events en masse.

What’s New for Penny Arcade Expo

And we still don’t have a lot of hard details. ArenaNet’s PAX presentation revolved around lore-related information, with fantasy-author-turned-ArenaNet-writer Jeff Grubb leading the charge. It’s no surprise given Guild Wars’ longstanding emphasis on story (it’s one of the few MMOs to spin an engaging narrative that amounts to more than quest-NPC flavor text).

The quick version of what’s going down on the continent of Tyria as Guild Wars 2 opens: Elder dragons — massive and ancient beings who exist to corrupt and devour everything they lay eyes (or teeth) on — have awakened, and boy, do they need dealin’ with. Fortunately, heroes from each of Tyria’s trademark racial groups (humans, minotaur-like Charr, hulking battle-thirsty Norn, alien-lookin’ Asura, and tree-hugging Sylvari) are up to the task.

Why You Should (or Shouldn’t) Care

Again, we know zero in terms of detailed gameplay information. Guild Wars 2′s 2007 announcement was posed as something of a reassurance to fans who might have otherwise felt slighted due to the relative radio silence after the last Guild Wars campaign’s retail release. Most developers tend to announce games only once they have a bit of rough gameplay to show off, so in a way, Guild Wars 2′s existence was revealed pretty prematurely. It’s great to see that ArenaNet values its fans above all else… but man, it doesn’t make the wait any less agonizing.

Guild Wars 2 was revealed to the mob attending gamescom earlier this week for the first time. The sequel MMORPG is set some 250 years after the events of the first game took place, and we’ve got screen captures from the trailer for you to enjoy.

The trailer details some of the game’s amazing graphics and new locations, and while we’ll have to wait longer to see more of the actual gameplay, NCsoft released the following words:
Guild Wars 2 is a visually stunning MMO that will offer players the epic grandeur of a massive role playing environment combined with the challenge of world-class player vs. player competition. Building on the success and lessons of Guild Wars, ArenaNet is creating an MMO that lets gamers play the way they want, while at the same time retaining the no-subscription-fee business model that has made the original Guild Wars so popular.

Blizzard has announced that it will stop support for PowerPC based Apple Mac systems for its heavily popular MMORPG game – World of Warcraft. The announcement was made a few hours ago in the Mac Technical Support Section of World of Warcraft forums. A patch would be released to nix the same before the third expansion pack – Cataclysm arrives. This might dishearten PowerPC based Mac owners.

Blizzard is apparently dropping support for older Macs stating that Apple itself has been focusing on Intel Macs since 2005. As per Blizzard Forum Staff S4d1k, “So since 5 years, PPC systems has received very few bug fixes. It is now too hard to deal with all the bugs and the lack of features to support the few PPC users that we have left.”

Of course here, the staff is pointing out important updates related to graphics, key system extensions and framework of the PowerPC Mac systems. At this moment, Apple releases only security updates for old PowerPC based Mac Systems and even the new Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard won’t run on PowerPC based Macs.

World of Warcraft is one of the heavily played MMORPG games that gets a major expansion packs every year. To cope with new technologies, game developers have to drop support for old and extinct hardware. We’re sure that number of users who’re addicted and true followers of the game would upgrade their machines. The patch, in the near future would be automatically applied for any user on PowerPC Mac running Burning Crusade or Wrath or Lich King.

In a post on their forum recently, Blizzard have announced that the upcoming new patch for their hugely popular title World of Warcraft will remove support for PowerPC-based Mac machines, removing a portion of the game’s fanbase which according to Blizzard “represents a very small minority of users”.

Blizzard stated that they have been progressively downgrading the game’s hardware compatibility in relation to Macs ever since “the death of Leopard a year ago”, and this is just another move in this regard. The game started off as a pretty flexible and portable title, but ended up more and more demanding with each expansion pack which added new content to the game.

And in case you’re wondering – yes, the same goes for StarCraft 2 and the upcoming Diablo 3 – PowerPCs are a no-go for those titles as well. Oh well, we guess if it helps improve the game for the majority of players, we can’t really blame them.