It's tough to follow-up our booming Star Citizen coverage, but if any game's got the grit to do it, it's Castle Story. Between our friends over at Sauropod and friends at Cloud Imperium Games, our coverage of successfully-crowdsourced games at PAX East feels pretty filled-out. Besides, our Castle Story FAQ was a big hit, so it made good sense to revisit the game and check up on its progression.

For the unfamiliar, Castle Story is the up-and-coming freeform city-builder / RTS hybrid that accumulated nearly one million dollars via Kickstarter. We first covered the game almost exactly one year ago, and while things have certainly changed, the general concept remains the same -- go check that link if you're not yet sold on how the game works. This post will focus more on delivering new information to existing backers / fans of the upcoming RTS.

This article and the video interview aim to detail Sauropod's improvements to Castle Story over the last few months, their UI overhaul, future plans, and the sheer amount of work involved with living up to sudden success.

We'll start with the videos:

In suit of our technological analysis of Star Citizen's high-end hardware utilization, we regrouped with Chris Roberts at PAX East 2013 to briefly discuss overall progression, PvP, the node-based networking framework, and more.

Roberts made an appearance in the final hours of the show and participated in a panel discussing crowd-sourced obstacles and benefits, titled "Going Back To The Future - Calling All Mechwarriors, Tribes and Star Citizens." After meeting up near the somewhat internet-famous Firefall and LoL statues (seen here), we journeyed up to the panel area to talk some Star Citizen; it quickly became evident that Roberts is a marked man in the games industry, with several excited fans greeting and thanking him for his efforts to revitalize the Space Sim genre. He's ambitious and dedicated, but every conversation sort of resonated a "no, thank you for supporting us" humble tone.

You'll find our video interview with Chris Roberts below, a recording of the panel, and discussion on Star Citizen's future.

I’ll be attending PAX East (this weekend!) for the third consecutive year, but this is the first time I won’t be going as an exhibitor. Certainly this PAX will be much different than what I’ve experienced in my previous position—but is that a good thing? Let’s find out in my insider’s take on the highs and hells of convention/trade-show exhibiting.

Click for full image. PAX East 2012 panorama.

Being an exhibitor in the PC hardware industry is like starting college.

MMORPGs: Plunging into a world wrought with thousands of heroic warriors, each challenging god-incarnates, courageously marauding across war-ravaged country-sides, donning immaculate armor, and -- who are we kidding? They're killing a pseudo-arbitrary count of orcs; waiting until level 15 to wear the red gloves; and they're delivering letters from one lifeless NPC to another, whose pointlessness is superseded only by that of the courier of said letters. This is what the industry's definition of an MMORPG has become, and part of that is the burgeoning of the market post-EverQuest and post-WoW; comparable to reality TV shows, everyone wants their own money-making machine of questionable quality.

There are dozens of MMOs that violate core game design principles in favor of monetization—especially prevalent in the emerging Chinese MMO market—and quality gameplay is particularly hard to find when faced with the overwhelming amount of MMOs out there.

Neverwinter hopes to be one of those quality MMOs -- one of the visceral, lively, immersive, and purely fun games that breaks the mold and brings immersing adventure to countless gamers.

The question is whether or not it succeeds.

Today brings the return of our popular Heat Signature video series, which has brought games like Cube World and Castle Story to the forefront of our coverage; this series looks at up-and-coming games that we find particularly worthy of attention and would like to share with all of our readers.

For this episode—officially episode 11—we look at Artizens (Kickstarter here), a creative-driven, four-player co-op action/RPG that allows players to fully customize their characters -- all the way down to uploading drawings of weapons and armor. With no class restrictions or setting restrictions in place, the game hopes to really appeal to the stat-tweaking mentality of gamers with its modular design for weapon and armor upgrades; the devs even mention in their Kickstarter video that they draw inspiration from the likes of tabletop RPGs and Magic: The Gathering, which should tell you more about their goal of limitless customization than this entire post.

The video below offers an overview of the features in Artizens, some of our thoughts/first impressions, and a visual demonstration of the item customization.