We learned an abundance of new information during the CCP Presents keynote on Saturday. After the presentation we sat down with EVE Online's Lead Game Designer, Noah Ward to get clarification on some of the newly announced features including Planetary Interactions, Mining Enhancements and the rise of the Jovians.

Noah Ward: Hi, my name is Noah Ward, I also go by Hammerhead, and I am the lead game designer.

ZAM: First of all, can you just go into a little bit more detail about the sovereignty capture system that's going in?

Noah: It's really simple, and that was the whole goal of it. You just plunk down your clay marker and that's really all it takes. There's a bit of a timer. In order to take it back, you have to have 51% of the gates in the system controlled with these, we'll call them "disruption beacons," I don't know if that will be the final name. Basically you have to have, what we consider air superiority of the space in order to make the clay marker vulnerable.

ZAM: OK, so there will be new planets and stars. Does that have anything to with DUST? Are those in preparation somewhat?

Even though DUST 514 was officially announced at GDC Europe / GamesCom in August, CCP was reluctant to share anymore information until they could do so before the fans at the 2009 EVE Fanfest in Iceland. After the special presentation, we sat down with CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson and Creative Director at CCP Asia, Atli Már Sveinsson to talk about DUST 514, EVE Online and how they'll compliment each other. Check it out!

ZAM: Dust 514 is a persistent universe where the characters and the world will be persistent and every battle will be significant and all of the outcomes will affect both worlds. Can you go into some detail as to how persistent some of those features are going to be, and how they will affect both EVE Online and Dust 514?

Atli Már Sveinsson: Obviously the character progression is quite persistent. Your wealth is persistent, or not. But in terms of conquests or control of planets, this is, I think, the main thing that is certainly persistent.

Hilmar Veigar Pétursson: The fundamental communication between the games is that players can contract Dust mining rings to fight over territories on the planet. Where we go beyond that initial standpoint is something where we sort of go with the flow, as we've always done with our game design ideas, where we see where people take the ideas, and we follow the track. So we're very much thinking about the link and Dust alone as a model and DUST together with EVE. So it's really starting there and leading from there.

Earlier this month at PAX, we had the chance to speak with a few of the developers from ArenaNet about the upcoming MMO, Guild Wars 2. A sequel to the successful Guild Wars (published by NCSoft), Guild Wars 2 is currently in full production, with a predicted release date sometime in 2010 to 2011. We learned quite a bit about the project, including its new and revamped engine, what to expect from PvP, and the story and lore behind it all. Before the interview, we had a brief chat with the team about the history of the franchise, and why they decided to make a sequel, rather than continue supporting the original Guild Wars.

ZAM: The trailer looks amazing. The architecture and the buildings look really cool.

Mike O'Brien: You don't even get a sense of how enormous that is, as you're flying through in the video. This is the kind of thing we could never pull off in Guild Wars I. This process of building our engine—we can imagine something like that, and then actually put it in-game.

ZAM: That was a very seamless transition between concept art and in-game. It looks like you can do a lot more with this engine; even with the mountains—they're obviously stylized—but they look a lot more real than mountains I see in other games.

Earlier this month at PAX, ZAM had the chance to speak with a few of the developers from ArenaNet about its upcoming MMO, Guild Wars 2. A sequel to the successful Guild Wars (published by NCSoft), Guild Wars 2 is currently in full production, with a predicted release date sometime in 2010 to 2011. We learned quite a bit about the project, including its new and revamped engine, what to expect from PvP, and the story and lore behind it all.

ZAM sat down for a Q&A about the upcoming sequel with Jeff Grubb (Game Designer), Daniel Dociu (Art Director) and Mike O'Brien (Founder and President, ArenaNet) to find out what players can expect to see in Guild Wars 2, which will be featured on ZAM in a few days, after the weekend. Before the Q&A, though, we had a brief chat with the team about the history of the franchise, and why they decided to make a sequel, rather than continue supporting the original Guild Wars.

We tried out the Global Agenda demo at the Penny Arcade Expo and got the chance to sit down with Executive Producer Todd Harris to discuss various aspects of the game, including PvE and PvP combat. Harris even gave us some details on the 'Agency vs. Agency' system that's going to be part of the next beta phase this fall. It looks like high-level teams will get to fight over territories owned by a particular agency, which adds an extra layer of strategy to the game. Global Agenda is a nominee for "Best in Show" in our first PAX Awards.

ZAM: Hey Todd! We just finished our demo and that was pretty cool; it was like a battle instance within a larger game world…

Todd Harris: Yeah, there are really three types of combat instances, in addition to social spaces. One, we do just have social city spaces; they’re pretty small hub areas, but they’ve got vendors, an auction house and a virtual reality where you can go in and shoot your friends for practice—that sort of thing. For combat, there are really the three types, all of them are instance spaces but they’re linked together in different ways. One is PvE, so we have a lot of folks that come to us from Planetside…but we do have a rich PvE, experience unlike Planetside. It’s built around four-person teams, so you go co-op. It’s a little different experience than the objective-based PvP map, [where] you go through a progressive dungeon-crawl sort of experience. But for us, it’s a mission; fighting a mini-boss in each stage and a big boss at the end.

Before our big Riot Games vs. Team ZAM match at PAX this year (which we regrettably lost), we ambushed Marc Merrill, President of Riot to get some insight about what the team has planned up until launch and beyond. If you haven't been able to try League of Legends yet, stay tuned -- we're going to be giving away over 20,000 beta keys sometime this week.

ZAM: League of Legends is doing great here; you have a lot of people playing the game and all of them are having fun. What kind of feedback have you guys had so far?

Marc Merrill: We've had some great feedback. Not only from guys who have been in the beta, that have been playing for a long time, coming by, wanting to meet the developers. Other players that have played DotA, but not necessarily have heard of League of Legends have had a great reaction as well. And then a lot of people that have never experienced the MOBA genre have shown up and had a great time as well. There are a couple guys playing right now, in fact, who are having a really great time. It's really exciting for us; it's been in positivity all around.

ZAM: I've been in the beta for a while, so a lot of the stuff that you guys have in right now, we already know about. We want to know about the new stuff, I want to know about the stuff that's going to go in that hasn't necessarily happened. Most notably, new maps, new champions or other juicy nuggets of information you can tell us about.

During our meeting at PAX with Flying Labs, we spoke with Associate Producer, Janice Vonitter and Game Designer, Greg Hanefeld about their rum drinking ... and Pirates of the Burning Sea. The first expansion is tentatively called "Power and Prestige" and although it currently has no set release date, we've been told that it will definitely be released in 2010. Check out all the details in to Power and Prestige which was been nominated for one of our PAX awards.

ZAM: We understand that there's a new expansion that you guys are talking about at PAX. Can you tell us the name and some basic information?

Janice Vonitter: Yep, it's called "Power and Prestige." It's centered on influence and control over the Caribbean, and parts in it. The main feature in it is the player governed ports. So you can run to be a governor of the port, and if you get a bunch of people to support you, and they put you up for Governor, you can be elected. Once you are governor, you can do a lot of things that actually affect how the port performs, economically and defensively against other players when they try to take it over.

ZAM: What are some of the lesser features of this expansion?

Last week at PAX we had our first look at the latest project being developed by Funcom, "The Secret World". Words cannot express how we already feel about this game. Funcom has created one of the coolest premises for an MMO that we've seen to date and combined it with years of experience and an enhanced Age of Conan game engine. Enjoy our interview and stay tuned for an upcoming article with even more information!

Ragnar Tormquisc: My name is Ragnar Tormquisc and I'm the Producer Director on The Secret World.

Martin Bruusgaard: I'm Martin Bruusgaard, and I'm the Lead Designer.

ZAM: First one I'm going to ask; can you tell us a little bit about the individual persistent elements that will exist in the game?

Martin: The important thing to mention is that we don't have classes and we don't have levels. We have a very... linear progression, very result-based. It's all about gathering items and equipment, and also different powers. It's all about playing how you want to play and gathering the powers that matter to you, that let you play how you want to play. If you want to be a healer, then you gather the healer powers, and if you want to be a tank, you can gather the tank powers. You can also create hybrids. It's also important to say that you can design different powers to work with different powers, so you and your buddy can create specs that work well with each other, that feed each other. So, in that way, you can become very good at something very quickly, but to be able to master all of the powers and have a 'spec' for every situation - that will take a long time. So it's quick to get into the game and excel at something, but to be able to have all the tools, that will take a long time. So it's a very open progression in that way.

Last week CCP announced the 11th expansion for Eve Online, Dominion will be making its way into players hands this winter. Of course, inquiring minds wanted to know more so we caught up with Lead Content Designer, Scott Holden at PAX to do just that.

ZAM: What is Dominion all about and where is it taking EVE Online?

Scott Holden: Well, we have changes to sovereignty coming in; the first stage of a series of introduced steps on sovereignty should probably happen over the course of the next year and half—it's a long-term project. We [also] have some new balancing for capital ships, more epic mission content coming and the cosmos, which is essentially a new communications platform inside the game. It's basically taking the email system the way it is now—chat channels will still exist, as far as I know at this point—but basically making it much easier for people inside the game to communicate with other people. You can kind of think of it like Facebook inside EVE.

ZAM: What about some of the pirate epic mission arcs, can you tell us about those?

Back in May we broke the news that Jumpgate Evolution had been officially delayed and since then, further developments have been few and far between. During our time at PAX we had the chance to talk with NetDevil President, Scott Brown about what the team has been doing, where they're at and when players can expect to play the retail version of the game. Unfortunately Scott mentioned that it's probably impossible to ship in 2009, but rather early 2010.

In addition to the fore mentioned topics in our interview, Scott mentioned their commitment to work with the UI modding community to make sure that JGE players will have plenty of choices when it comes to their user interface. Someone remind me to inform Dolby of our sister site, MMOUI.

ZAM: What is the biggest reason you decided to delay the game and go back to the drawing board?

Scott Brown: It's all based on player feedback. We started our focus testing with a few hundred friends and family testers. They came back with a lot of stuff they really liked, like the game ran well and it looked really good, but there were just some certain things about it that weren't immersive; the game didn't feel epic. Of course, epic was really our goal, so we went back to the drawing board on mission systems, special effects, A.I. especially - did a lot of work there - to really bring the level of immersion up.

ZAM: What are some of the things that you improved? I saw that the A.I. had been redone. What specifically did you redo?