It's time for Tinkerfest, the Norrathian celebration of all things Gnomish! Your EQII ZAM staff has the scoop on the awesome new additions to this player favorite. 2013 brings back all the old favorites and adds more quests, rewards, house items, and recipes!  There are new holiday Achievements, a functioning door to make, and Clockwork Mercenaries!

Tinkerfest 2013 will start July 26th and run through August 13th. Keep track of all your alts and every quest with our convenient Tinkerfest Quest Tracker!

OPINION: Next month I’ll be packing up my bags and heading off to Gamescom. The yearly festival is organized to ‘celebrate the games’, but there’s also an unwritten subtext. With the rekindled friendships, fan gatherings and community meet-ups, it’s as much about celebrating the gamer.

It doesn’t matter who you are or what you play; for a week, the Koelnmesse in the heart of Cologne, Germany is our Woodstock. We come together not just to recognize gaming greatness, but to watch our heroes play in eSports tournaments, to cheer on the cosplayers. To bathe ourselves in everything that is great about gaming culture, in all its forms.

All servers will come down at 6am PDT on Tuesday, July 23, 2013 for the Darkness Dawns patch. Estimated downtime is currently four hours. The full patch notes are now available below.

Your dedicated ZAM staff brings you our coverage of the GU67: Darkness Dawns material to help guide you with the new content and features!

• Daily Objectives
• Personal Depots (crafted by Tinkerers)
• Darkness Ascending (signature series)
• Waters of Norrath (heritage quest)
• All ZAM Coverage

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. In EVE Online, that truism still holds, even among the politics, plots and machinations that gyre within CCP’s sandbox. But while trust can be earned in New Eden, it is also malleable, flashing from strong iron to intangible vapors in an instant.

Last week, I talked about declarations of war. With the corporation in lockdown for most of the week, I decided to spin up a reckless alt in search of trigger-happy adventure. But while mission running was making me braver and bolder than ever before, my PvP escapades had a little less luck. After burning through five destroyers and a handful of clones, I needed a change of tack.

It’s time to pull out those thick coats and strong boots, as winter is heading to Auratia.  Earlier this week, Dragon’s Prophet was hit with Game Update 0.2, bringing the new zone of Wintertide, raising the level cap to 70, and more besides.

To show off everything arriving in the latest patch, SoE senior producer Todd Carson took me on a whistle-stop tour of Wintertide and the new features it brings – quite literally, as we arrived there by train. Carson also revealed that he’ll be announcing a release date at SOE Live next month, although there’s more to come as open beta continues.

As an adventurer, one of the highlights of any Elder Scrolls game is delving into dungeons. Whether it’s a spider-infested cave system or a forgotten tomb ridden with skeletons, we’re there to bring the fight.

Recently, ZeniMax shared a peek inside the dungeons of Elder Scrolls Online. Veteran MMO players will be pleased to know that the trinity of Tank, Healer and DPS are still being used, with the team sharing even more details about what each role will need to do.

As the final Ages End update nears, SOE has given another informative and poetic look into the goings on in Norrath. The New Combine need to make sure its strategy is honed to perfection before the six cities can even hope to challenge the machinations of Kerafyrm, the prismatic dragon. The entirety of the lore piece is displayed below.

He patted the envelope in his left breast pocket. It was still there, as it always was, but old habits die hard.

The letter within was penned what felt like ages ago. It was looking likely that he would take as long to send it as he did to write it. There was always something—the wrong time, the wrong place, the wrong mood, the wrong company.

When you look at it in bite-size chunks, it’s difficult to realize just how big a project like WildStar really is. Over the course of a two hour lunch, executive producer Jeremy Gaffney answered a series of questions from the UK community that really showed how much Carbine Studios has sunk into its upcoming MMO.

Earlier in the day we discussed the changing industry, upcoming reveals and the raiding scene. Once lunch arrived, conversation shifted to PvP and class design. Both sections are well worth a read if you haven’t managed to already.

As the sunny Brighton afternoon drew on, we turned to WildStar’s add-ons and social tools. But before we got to that, Jeremy reminisced about earlier times as one of the founders at Turbine. 

Speak to Jeremy Gaffney for any length of time, and two things become apparent. First, after working on MMOs for most of his adult life, he has a wealth of experience to draw on. And second, in an industry dominated by marketing spiel, he provides refreshingly blunt and honest opinions.

As executive producer at Carbine Studios, Gaffney is responsible for guiding WildStar to a release that we hope is later this year. Taking time out of his schedule, he joined members of the community for lunch on the Brighton seafront. While we perused the menu, we discussed the changing MMO industry, upcoming reveals and the raiding scene.

As our fish and chips or plates of pasta arrived, the conversation shifted to role-play, charging models and class design. And read on for Part 3, which includes an update on beta, add-on issues and more. But first, there was the matter of PvP.

If proof was ever needed about WildStar’s community outreach program, last Wednesday was it. Taking time out of his schedule at the Develop conference in Brighton, Carbine executive producer Jeremy Gaffney met with a small group of gamers representing the fledgling UK WildStar community.

Joining me at the table were Youtuber KaeyiDream, Renaise Galwind from WildStar Roleplay, Kal Holmes from WildStar Core and Edward Orr from Afterlife Gaming. Over the course of a long lunch, Gaffney gave detailed answers to a whole range of questions, from the feel of Carbine as a development studio, to subzone design and content variety.

It was so detailed, in fact, that this is only the first of three parts. UPDATE: Part two is up, covering PvP, class design, charging models and more! Part three is also up, covering an update on beta, social tools, add-ons and more.