In CCP's DUST 514 for the PlayStation 3, battles are initiated by corporations in the PC-based space MMO EVE Online. In a post on the PlayStation Blog, CCP server architect Lin Luo talks about how much fun making that work is.

First we need to understand the basic flow of a DUST 514 battle. First, a corporation in EVE for the PC decides they want a territory owned by another corporation, and issues a battle contract. The order is communicated to DUST on the PlayStation 3. Two groups of DUST mercenaries are assembled to do battle. When the numbers on each side are satisfactory, EVE tells DUST to start up a battle. Everybody fights, and when the dust clears (pun semi-intended) the victors get the spoils and EVE terminates the battle process.

It's up to Lin Luo and friends to figure out how to facilitate this level of interaction between the two platforms while keeping the first-person shooter action of DUST fast, furious, and lag-free. I do not envy him this task.

So the EVE universe needs to manage the lifetime of DUST battle servers as well as communicating with them when needed, while we also need to make sure that the latency sensitive FPS multiplayer gameplay goes fairly for the participating DUST players. I won't go into a deep technical discussion about how we solve the challenges involved here, as we are still exploring all the possibilities to find out the best balance point to map physical DUST battles nicely into the EVE universe!

Unlike traditional FPS multiplayer servers, we will host DUST battle servers around the globe. Since the centralized server hardware resources are pretty limited in number, we have to find ways to utilize existing server resources as much as possible. Instead of having a dedicated server machine to host one battle, we aim to have a dedicated multi-core server machine to host as many DUST battle servers as possible!

Sou8nds like an awful lot of work to make PlayStation 3 owners the willing pawns of a bunch of EVE players. Sometimes the battles we fight are not our own. Hopefully they'll be a way in DUST to align yourself with a corporation, getting choice placement in their battles so it really feels like you're contributing to a cause.

Scaling the Universe of DUST 514 [PlayStation Blog]

According to the latest polls, businessman Herman Cain's currently the Republican most likely to get the GOP presidential nomination. (And, yes, it's early.) One of the reasons that Cain's appeared attractive to the electorate has been his easy-to-understand 9-9-9 proposal to overhaul taxes. Game-savvy political commentators noted that a similar scheme shows up in the classic SimCity games.

As far as we knew, no one had actually put the connection question to Cain. But, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow finds a clip of Cain angrily denying that he could've gotten his signature idea from a video game. In the process, Maddow pulls out her gamer CV and regales viewers with her old-school gaming obsessions. You'll need to wait for Cain to show up and answer the assertion (around 3:50) but it's worth it.

[Thanks, tipster naniwear]

No matter how fast Bethesda staffers can speedrun through the latest Elder Scrolls game, it's still freaking huge. It can be tough to appreciate how much work goes into a project like this when you're caught up in the experience. That's what so great about the latest blog post on the official Elder Scrolls site and its accompanying video. It brings the people and the process behind turning so much paint into polygons that take on a life of their own. Watch, read, learn and appreciate. Unlike Kotaku's own extremely lucky Mike Fahey, that's all those of us who don't have the game yet can do.

Completely Blue Sky: The Concept of Skyrim [The Elder Scrolls]

The launch trailer offered teasers of how the up-rezzed environments from previous Battlefield games would look in the upcoming Back to Karkand expansion pack, but these screens show them in all their Frostbite 2 glory. Back to Karkand will also include new dog tags, new Xbox Live achievements/PSN trophies, three new vehicles and 10 iconic Battlefield weapons. It'll also introduce a new persistence system where you'll complete assignments to earn rewards. Back to Karkand rolls out in December.

First they deliver an intricately carved pumpkin to Kotaku HQ, then this painful-looking trailer that showcases the flair with which you can dispatch enemies in the upcoming Darkness II. You can really see how the game uses its comic-book art style to maximum effect and those demon appendages give you even more options to off your antagonists. The Digital Extremes-developed sequel hits systems next February.

It's going to be a little while yet before we get to Daniel Craig as Ian Fleming's iconic secret agent on the big screen. The fact that he'll be reprising the role in Activision's new Goldeneye game is as good a reason as any to pick up the modern take on a FPS classic. The trailer above gives a glimpse of Craig's craggy features, as well as a run-through of various environments from the game. You'll also get a gander at what classic henchmen Jaws and Chop Chop look like in all their visually upgraded glory. Get ready to lay your goldeneye and goldfingers on the spy shooter next week.

Women in Grand Theft Auto games have had many roles. Mom. Girlfriend. Nightclub manager. Criminal.

Lots of roles. Just never the main one.

On the eve of the release of the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto V, and with no inside knowledge about who will be the star of this new game, I find myself thinking back to an article I wrote in April 2008, in which I wondered what it would be like to play a GTA that starred a woman.

Some people hated the idea and others loved it.

I wrote the piece after I'd played as a woman in the multiplayer of the then-unreleased Grand Theft Auto. It was a first. I'd played Grand Theft Auto games on the PlayStation 2, the PSP and the Game Boy Advance, and I'd always played as a man, because the characters Rockstar Games created to lead their games were men. In GTA IV multiplayer, however, you could play as a woman. So I did and, of course, it didn't make much of a difference. What would be different, I thought, was if she was the game's star. That idea does come up, from time to time.

GTA games are known, by and large, for their chaos. Say what you will about their satire, their storytelling, the quality of their cutscenes, their soundtracks and many of the other commendable aspects of the series, they're associated with interactive mayhem. You jack a car, you go on a spree. The cops give chase. That's always been GTA at its most fun, a sort of Pac-Man with guns and cars played both within and beyond walls that you can vault a sportscar over. And that kind of virtual chaos has always been orchestrated by men in these games. Their cast of man has been diverse. GTA leads have not been the bland white guys that are the norm in gaming. We've had black, Latino, and Eastern European men in the lead roles and never in a way that seemed like a big deal. They just fit.

I'd wondered in 2008 if it would be a big deal if a woman was the lead character of GTA. Or if it'd be no big deal at all. The story I wrote back then was for MTV.com, which has scrubbed the comments from the post. The web-archiving Wayback Machine, however, kept a snapshot of the article, so I can show you some of the reactions I got (I've kept the original text intact, so forgive the spelling...)

A reader named Rob:

"i think it would be googd to have a woman in the game. I think that when you start the game you should be able to choose wheter your a female or male instead of woman always being prostitutes in the gta games"

Another reader named Rob:

Absolutely not. As a side character maybe, but as the protagonist, no thank you. It's not that I've got anything again women, it's just the masculinity of ‘bazukaring' a helicopter would be somewhat diminished if I was playing as woman. IMO.

WTFMan! said:

Atleast they took the liberty of even INCLUDING female advatars! It doesn't matter, male or female, just shut the hell up and enjoy the game as humans!

A reader named Incedious:

What a irrelevant debate this is. Why are you even arguing this. When the main character of a movie is a male (ex: Frodo in [Lord of the Rings]). Do we have to debate how good the movies would be if he would be a female … no. We should just accept these games as a creation of a group of artists and leave it at that. They have a story in mind from conception to creation that they want to follow. Who wants to hear a bunch of crap like … "Scarface should've been a woman" or whatever. Historically, how many mobsters can you recall that have been women ??? That's what I thought. Maybe you should go try and Google it or something.

And KJB815 said:

Whats the difference, its just a character, personally i dont think a woman would look good on a game such as GTA, not through chauvinism but simply because it would look vulgar and im sorry women swearing and killing people with AK47 Kalashnikovs isnt very realistic. I do feel sorry for all women enjoying GTA, while waiting for a female protagonist, but i think it wouldnt suit the game in the same way as Vercetti or Bellic has and will do respectively.

I apologise to the women but i think Men look better (personally)

I'd call that a mixed reaction.

I wondered what it would be like if a series that might be branded a male fantasy starred a woman. I wondered how that would affect the games' presentation of sexuality, if not violence, and what players would make of it. I wondered what it'd be like to play a GTA with a woman as the leading hell-raiser.

I've found all of Rockstar's GTA characters interesting and most of them like-able. I've heard that, for the new game, there may be multiple playable lead characters. While I won't know if that's for sure at least until the GTA V trailer hits on Wednesday, hearing about that possibility got me thinking the odds of playing as a woman in some wild GTA adventure felt like they increased just a little.

We'll find out next week. But, for the record, playing as a female lead character in Grand Theft auto? I'd be up for it. You?

I thought I was the most hideous Queen of Blades in StarCraft history during my session with Blizzard DOTA at BlizCon 2011 last weekend. Last night Dwight from The Office proved me wrong.

I feel Dwight makes a valid argument in the second half of this clip from last night's Halloween episode of NBC's The Office. It's not really dressing up as a lady unless certain lady parts are firmly in place. Well, perhaps firmly is a bad choice of words.

One of the big selling points for Microsoft's latest Windows Phone 7 OS has been the interconnectivity between smartphones running the platform and their Xbox 360 game console. Word of the dedicated Xbox Companion app—which essentially turns your handset into a remote for the 360—came down the pike recently but Microsoft recently shot video of it in action at Nokia World 2011.

The app will launch services and control the Xbox Live Marketplace like video streaming straight from the phone but it'll also let you transport game elements from the WP7 device to the Xbox 360 and back again via a fancy QV code. If Microsoft can push this Kinectivity feature across first-party and third-party games the way they have with Kinect's features, it might just give people reason to go out and get WinPhone devices.

Live from Nokia World 2011: Demo of the Xbox Companion App [Windows Team Blog]

In today's very special episode of Speak Up on Kotaku, commenter Aikage warns of a very dangerous message lurking in the otherwise pure and innocent Bayonetta.

What are we teaching our children?

Oh my goodness I can hardly believe it! As I'm a monogamous gamer, I will only play or make comments on one game, and so you may know that I've been playing Bayonetta. I was playing this morning and fighting a big boss (and losing horribly because my reflexes are like a 98 year old man with Parkinson's). Eventually I managed to rip off both dragon heads and turn my hair into a raven which poked a hole through the remaining upside down head bit. Some witty dialogue ensued (oh that Bayonetta is so cheeky!) and then. and THEN.

She threw her lollipop stick on the ground.

Imagine if my children were watching! They would learn that it is OK to litter. There's a $500 fine if you're caught littering in NY. I suggest that we all email Platinum Games and demand that an ECOGREEN version of the game be made where Bayonetta picks up the stick and apologizes. Then turns it into a shuriken that can cut off some angel wings.

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