Join Stratics Central for their first Stargate Worlds House of Commons chat, featuring the Stargate Worlds development team to answer all your questions.

Stratics Central is very excited to announce our first Stargate Worlds House of Commons developer chat Thursday, May 8th at 4 pm PDT/7 pm EDT/23.00 GMT.

After a whirlwind of recent announcements - from FireSky being named publisher to the closed beta registration being opened - we invite you to join us as the Stargate Worlds development team answers your questions about one of this year's most talked about titles.

Among our scheduled guests are Creative Director Chris Klug, Art Director Howard Lyon, Technical Director Demetrius Comes, and Senior Marketing Manager for FireSky Kevin Balentine. We've been told a few surprise guests may drop in too!

And it keeps getting better! Three lucky attendees will be given an official Stargate Worlds t-shirt, so be there for your chance to win!

You can connect to one of our IRC servers through the use of your favorite IRC client or you can visit our downloads section to choose a client. Connect to irc.stratics.com port 6668 or choose a server listed below that is closest to you:

• stratics.frws.com USA - Colorado 6667 6668 7000
• irc.glowfish.de EU - Germany 6667 6668
• stratics.afraidyet.net USA - Texas 6667 6668
• irc.gamers-irc.org USA - Colorado 6667 6668 7000

You may also connect through the Stratics Java link. You must have Java installed to use this which can be downloaded from the Java homepage.

Only a day since the official announcement, the beta list for Stargate Worlds is already pushing 65,000 sign-ups! "We are extremely excited and overwhelmed by the positive response by fans to get a chance to beta test," said Senior Community Manager Katie Postma. " It gives the dev team a feeling of support and encouragement to know that so many people want to share this game with us, and work with us to make it better and better!"

Remember that the beta process has just begun, so please be patient if you have not been accepted yet. Testers will be added slowly over time, ramping up with much larger numbers in the coming months.

If you have yet to register for beta, do so now!

Stargate Worlds, the massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) from new publisher FireSky, is now taking registrations for closed beta at www.StargateWorlds.com

The closed beta is an invitation-only test of the upcoming science fiction MMORPG Stargate Worlds. Invitations will be sent out this spring and summer as the Stargate Worlds team ramps up the numbers for testing.

The select group of beta testers will provide feedback to the development team about their game experience while also providing vital insight into the performance of the servers. The closed beta will begin with a small core of gamers and gradually expand as more functionality is added. Beta testers will experience Stargate Worlds alongside the developers who also will be playing the game.

"A game is nothing without players. We’re fired up to finally get our game in the hands of the community," said Dan Elggren, Stargate Worlds studio head. "We’re at the point where we need external testers to take Stargate Worlds to the finish line. Our devoted fans have helped guide us for more than two years through our forums. Together, we’re going to craft a balanced, polished, and most of all, fun game."

Dennis Allen of Northern California spent the entire day rubbing elbows with the men and women developing the upcoming MMORPG. He received SGW gear, an exclusive look at the latest artwork, saw worlds being built, had lunch with the department heads, and even got to play in a starting zone of the game!

SCI FI Channel ran the Unlock the Gate contest during the second half of Stargate Atlantis Season Four, from January 4 to March 7, 2008. Dennis beat over 130,000 entrants to win the visit the studio!

Stay tuned to StargateWorlds.com for more information about the visit, including Dennis' very own video podcast!

Maybe the fact that so many people find it disposable is because it’s been designed wrong from the start, and maybe if we really take the time to sit down and ponder why this part is here, maybe then it can be redesigned to be useful, elegant, and appreciated. It might even be totally unrecognizable when it’s all finished and done, but it will be a step in a new direction that we haven’t gone before, and since we know the old way isn’t working, we can feel pretty confident in labeling this as “progress”.

Do you think that you're going to have to partner with a publisher at all, in the case of either of these? I don't know if anything has been announced, but it seems like, with your scale, and digital distribution, it might not be necessary.

JY: Well, it's our intent to basically be the operator of the product, in that we run the service, we do the customer support, and all of the infrastructure that's necessary to do that. So a publishing partner, for us, is somebody that will help us with retail distribution, since Stargate will be a boxed product to go along with the service.

And then the other aspect, that goes back to what you're alluding to with a publisher partnership, is the global scale. You know, we can service a certain portion of the world, but we just can't be everywhere at the same time, because we just don't have the expertise or the scale yet. So, that being said, we're hoping to find partners that will help us in other territories, other than North America. And we'll just see how that works. That's another task that I've been working on now, for some time.

In case you've not been paying attention, Stargate Worlds is being developed by these folks, and the six page interview includes some screen shots you might enjoy as well!

Interest in the official Stargate Worlds Forum has taken a quantum leap since plans were announced for the upcoming beta!

"The Stargate Worlds Community Team is thrilled at the response we have on the forums right now," said Senior Community Manager Katie Postma. "We have grown in size by close to 30% since we announced that beta users would be chosen from the forum membership. This shows us that there is a huge population of Stargate fans and gamers alike who can't wait to see this game!"

The videos include footage from original Stargate worlds, including Agnos and Anima Vitrus, and goes into the first-ever-released details about the planets!

Here's a sneak peek at some of what each developer said in their respective interviews:

Dan Elggren: If you've watched Atlantis, you know that the Ancients came to the Milky Way Galaxy and were to able to embed themselves throughout the galaxy. But one of the things their path always led them to was ascension. They actually created this planet on Agnos which was a supercomputer that could help them ascend to a higher plane.

Demetrius Comes: Currently the plan is to start every player out in their own instance to bring them into the universe, introduce them to the Stargate lore, and immerse them in the story as soon as possible. We're using these instances to tell the story.