Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello has confirmed that celebrated developer BioWare is at work on a MMO based on the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic franchise.

“We’ve got two of the most compelling MMOs in the industry in development,” Riccitiello told Portfolio.com. “The one that people are dying for us to talk to them about — in partnership with Lucas, coming out of BioWare, which is, I think, quite possibly the most anticipated game, full stop, for the industry at the point when we get closer to telling you about it.”

When asked pointedly if the game he was referring to was the oft-rumored Knights of the Old Republic MMO, the CEO simply responded “Yes.”

BioWare has made several mentions of its in-development MMO project, but has remained characteristically silent on which, if any, property it would license for the title.

Earlier this year, however, BioWare and LucasArts announced that they had partnered for an unspecified project, leading many to speculate that the Star Wars MMO was indeed in development.

No release date or platforms have yet been revealed for the long-in-development MMO. A PC version is likely, though BioWare has made several comments indicating that it may be considering a console release as well.

If you want to play more Crysis levels without having to deal with all the cost of innovative content, you’re in luck.

Where to start? After thirty minutes of playing Crysis Warhead, I saw a couple new guns, some new particle effects, and a new mission. A mission that, outside of a dull scripted vehicle sequence, could have passed as content from the original Crysis.

Don’t get me wrong: I very much enjoyed the original Crysis, and the stand-alone Warhead’s $29.99 price point keeps the lack of new features from being insulting. Apparently Warhead will feature a larger variety of enemies than Crysis, though I saw none while playing it. And it will supposedly be better optimized, so a few more of you might be able to run it. There will also be some new multiplayer maps, and a couple new modes.

Did I mention those explosion effects already?

I can at least confirm that there will be no new suit powers… Read more

An update is now available for the Steam client, offering various improvements to Valve’s content delivery program. Here is the full change list

• Improved cache defragmenter to both defragment at the OS level and internal files
• Improved defrag progress dialog
• Improved download status reporting in games list
• Increased background update frequency
• Improved voice quality
• Added audio recording device selection for voice chat
• Added push-to-talk support for voice chat
• Fixed apps getting stuck at Updating 0% when downloading
• Fixed possible crash when resuming from Standby mode
• Fixed Steam preventing some PC’s from entering Standby mode
• Fixed overlay sometimes getting stuck up and not responding to hot-keys after server join
• Fixed uninstalled apps becoming installed when viewing their Properties page after Steam restarts