Dungeons & Dragons v4.0?

I wasn't sure of the credibility of this or if it was a rumor or not. It would appear that Wizards of the Coast is poised to announce the upcoming release of another updated version to the most popular table-top role-playing game ever, Dungeons and Dragons.

'D&D 4th Edition' Announced at Gen Con

Wizards of the Coast is announcing at GenCon today that it will release the 4th Edition of its category-leading Dungeons and Dragon roleplaying game in 2008, the first full new edition in eight years. The three core books will be released next summer on a monthly schedule: Player's Handbook in May, Monster Manual in June, and Dungeon Master's Guide in July. Pricing and page counts of the new products will be consistent with current packaging. Graphics have been updated, art will be used on the covers, and interior design has been opened up to make the books less intimidating to new players.

I'm guessing after review that this is for real. Read the full article at ICv2.

There are other sites that seem to be corroborating this story. For instance, EN World has a thread called 4E: What we know, however, it's not loading for me at the moment so it must be disabled or crashing at the server level from all the traffic.

Perhaps the best possible proof for me was that the Wizards.com server appears to be down right now --also most likely from the traffic.

We're Experiencing Technical Difficulties

Unfortunately, due to an extremely high load on our web servers, we have been unable to bring you our normal web content. We apologize for the inconvenience and ask that you please try again in a few hours! Our technical team is aware of the problem and working on it.

Thank you for your patience!

It seemed to me that they had just released version 3.0 and then they followed it up very quickly with version 3.5. The 2nd Edition came out in the early 80s or something and I didn't buy my copy of the Player's Handbook until 1996 or so. However, they are coming so fast right now that I haven't even had time to get 100% familiar with the new rules.

Thanks to Chris Flipse via del.icio.us for the above links.