No, the old times are not back, so you can put that sword back down. This is the next-gen era, and (almost) everything happens now inside virtual worlds. It's the same story regarding Duels - a recently launched MMORPG where people can... uhm... challenge others to duels. It's easy like that and, like many similar games, a player shouldn't be online when the duel takes place. This is really cool - especially if a message like "Congrats! You've been killed 100 times since your last login" would be implemented.

Now, joke aside, let's get to the important thing: almost one million duels are made on a daily basis on duels.com, which means almost one million deaths per day, which means that "say no to violent games" had absolutely no effect until now. Actually, even though the word "death" sounds impressive enough, it's not the same thing you can say about the way it happens in the game. But, at least, it's a powerful word.

Besides that, the developing company, Oxygen Games, has changed its name to Challenge Games when the recent version of the game was launched. And this new version is one of the reasons so many duels happen in this game, since it introduces a handful of new ways to kill your opponent, a tournaments option and... female avatars! Yeah, this game was released without females (a strong enough reason to start dueling in the first place), but now supports them.

We've yet to see if this is a real profitable business for the game developers, but one thing is certain, at least that's what CEO Andrew Busey claims: more people have already spent more than 1,000 bucks to buy for their characters some really great swords or armor. So things seem to be moving just like the developers want and, to support this idea, it's worth noting that a sports game is scheduled to be released, too.