Month: December 2011

Games To Watch Out For: NCSoft Edition


If there was ever a game to give Diablo 3 a run for its money, it is Lineage Eternal. Fully revealed late this year, Lineage Eternal brings players back to the days of Lineage with even more chaos and destruction. We were treated to a fourteen minute video of pure gameplay, with cutscenes, massive battles, and showcasing the game’s physics and destruction engine. With the success of Lineage and Lineage II, especially in the Korean markets, Lineage Eternal looks to bring back the days of dealing destruction on a massive scale.

We eagerly await more Lineage Eternal information in the coming year.

Do I need to elaborate? Guild Wars promises to give something everyone can enjoy, from the hardcore player vs player to the MMO fan who simply wants an open world to explore. Arenanet promises to build a dynamic world without subscriptions or heavy grind, world PvP, and the ripple effect. In the case of dynamic events, considerably similar to the public quests of Warhammer Online but on a much larger scale, the actions of players will determine in what direction each phase of the dynamic events move.

Guild Wars has a very strong following of gamers, like it or not, and will prove to be among the biggest releases of 2012.

 

Games To Watch Out For In 2012


2011 was more a year of free to play conversions than new games releasing, but 2012 is looking to be quite an interesting year. Jagex is set to release their second MMO, TERA may finally come to the west, and Star Trek Online heads free to play in January.

Planetside 2 is the first big budget MMO to take the reigns of Planetside since, well, Planetside. While Hi-Rez studios works on the well anticipated Tribes Universe, Sony Online Entertainment this year will (hopefully) roll out the renovated, upgraded, and more efficient massive action shooter. Sony is promising even bigger battles, and has been showing off concept art and trailers left and right. In addition to satisfying Planetside fans, Planetside 2 also has something to offer us more traditional MMO gamers, the Forge Light engine. Sony is using the Forge Light engine to build Everquest Next, so Everquest fans will have a little piece of what they can expect when that MMO hits store shelves at some point in the distant future.

I thought I would be celebrating this with Stellar Dawn, but ever since Geoff Iddison announced back in 2009 that MechScape would be ready that year, I’ve been sitting patiently with my flags and goofy hat with the soda cans and straws hanging out for Jagex to finally come out and have two MMOs running at the same time. If anything else, I’m just interested if they can pull off supporting two MMOs at the same time. After all, their second major project, FunOrb, was more or less abandoned after two years when Jagex got tired with their new toy.

So Transformers is really getting my attention, especially since Jagex also has Stellar Dawn in development (which was supposed to release in 2011), making for three MMOs they will have running concurrently. As for Stellar Dawn, like I’ve said before, maybe they just lost interest after the high-cost cancellation of MechScape.

Star Vault Summons League of Extraordinary Investors For Meeting


The Board proposes that the AGM resolve in order to enable the Board to provide the company with working capital to authorize the Board, during the period until the next AGM, to decide on the issue of a maximum a number of shares and / or convertible bonds and / or warrants entitling to convert to each new subscription, or involves the issuance of a maximum a number of shares to an amount not to exceed 2 million…

Looking to buy stock in Star Vault? They are looking to sell. Announced in an investor’s email, Star Vault will be holding a meeting on January 13th to discuss and vote on the sale of up to 2 million more stocks in order to acquire more “working capital.” The board notes the obvious downside of issuing these stocks, namely that it will dilute the value for existing stockholders.

The measure requires two thirds of the board to vote yes before the new stocks can be sold.

(Source: Translated Release)

Eve Online: 350,000 Subscribers


Convincing an MMO developer to release their subscriber numbers is difficult, if not downright impossible. After all, since World of Warcraft came in and scooped up twelve million people, somehow players have decided to use the most popular MMO in existence as a benchmark for success. Still, Eve Online is one of the big players remaining on the pure subscription section, boasting three hundred thousand players a few years ago. Earlier this year, CCP pointed out after the hubbub over their in-game cash shop that Eve Online was still growing year over year.

In an email to past subscribers, CCP is offering a reactivation for the new years. In the email, they mention “Join CCP Games and the 350,000 subscribers of the Eve Community…” So much for the “Eve Online is dying” crowd.

Oh Joy, The Sony Hackers Are Back!


Apparently someone is nostalgic for seven months ago when Sony’s services on Playstation 3 and PC were offline for weeks on end after a hacker broke into the database and walked out with a cartload of personal data. Thankfully, in their usual fashion, the Denial of Service group Anonymous has released a video in advance, warning Sony of an impending assault on their servers over the company’s support of SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) which is being heavily criticized for claims that it infringes on first amendment rights and will cause even more stability and less security on the internet.

Does Sony support SOPA? This is the fun part, they don’t. All three console manufacturers (Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft) pulled their support of SOPA after heavy public backlash, although Sony is technically part of the Entertainment Software Association, who do still support SOPA. I suppose being right “in a manner of speaking” is still better than rushing out of the starting line with your shoes tied.

With luck, Sony still has the phone numbers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from the last time. Looking forward to the arrest articles.

Eleven Things I Hated About 2011: 2011 Edition


Going into this article, I assumed I’d have trouble lowering my list to eleven items. Truth be told, I actually had more trouble filling this list than I did culling an even larger list. It must be my power of 20/20 hindsight to look at events of the past and think “well that actually didn’t affect me as much as I thought it did.” I also didn’t want the list to be too focused on this website, too specific towards any games but not too broad. In the end, something happened, and this is what popped out.
  1. Rebuilding My Backups: I have no backups of any images from MMO Fallout prior to March of 2011 (I’m spitballing a date), because my hard drive crashed. Since then, I’ve taken the intelligent route of storing my images on a flash drive, of which I have backed up on another flash drive. At some point this year, I will have to transfer my folder for MMO Fallout to a larger flash drive because it currently takes up 600 megabytes of my one gigabyte disk. That is just images, and isn’t even my backup of the actual database itself.
  2. Spam Writers Became More Intelligent: The spam writers are becoming rather intelligent, and for a few months back in September actually started reading my articles and writing appropriate responses. Take for example, I wrote an article in October about the Playstation Vita being viable for MMOs. Now, I always read through the comments Akismet marks as spam but doesn’t immediately delete, and I found one that said simply “Playing an MMO on the Vita, especially with 3G turned on, would kill the device’s battery life.” I actually un-flagged the comment and was in the process of approving it when I noticed in the website box was a URL for an offshore pharmacy website. So touche, spammers.
  3. Targeted By Jaded Gamers: I don’t mean physically. This year I noticed a new trend. Whenever I appeared on Massively.com, or MMORPG.com, or Tobold’s Blog or any other website far more popular than I am, there was a notable increase in attempts to steal any account associated with my email address. Email, gaming accounts, Steam, NCSoft, even an attempt to break into my student loan account. What is it about gaming that spurs people into thinking to themselves “this guy has an opinion I don’t agree with. I should…steal his RuneScape gold and armor!” Just a point of interest to anyone who tries this again in the future: Requesting a password reset email sends the email to my email address, not yours.
  4. Darkfall 2010: Or Darkfall 2.0, or Darkfall 2011, or Darkfall 2012, whatever you want to call it. Players of Darkfall have been reasonably annoyed this past year by the lack of information from Aventurine as to whether or not a wipe in some form will occur when the game goes live. Now, Aventurine has not commented on whether or not a wipe will take place because they claim that they don’t know themselves if they will need to wipe in some fashion. Darkfall 2.0 is still a long ways away, and granted some of the community is taking Aventurine’s lack of response as a confirmation and unsubscribing now to avoid having about a year of grinding be pulled out from underneath them.
  5. Project V13 Has No Hope: Project V13 falls on my list of games that pain me to talk about. On one hand, if Interplay wins I have high doubts that we will ever see the title released. On the other hand, if Bethesda wins it means that they will be developing the MMO and the varying quantity of bugs in Bethesda’s single player games leaves me with nothing but quantified concern.
  6. Babying Cheaters: I couldn’t help but notice a number of MMOs babying their cheaters this year, not that it occurred in any larger quantity than years past. Developers like Jagex who stopped permanently banning botted accounts, instead simply rolling back stats and items gained. Sony, who had warned cheaters that they were on their last warning, before following up with a few temporary suspensions.
  7. I Wanted More Indie: Bigpoint Games, despite my repeated shots to the kidneys, was kind enough to add me on to their press release mailing list (thank you, Lucianne). I love independent MMOs, and I’ve supported almost all of them by buying copies even if I didn’t have much intention on actually playing the game, but I can never get their developers to talk to me. I guess when your company is smaller than my extended family, everyone is too busy to talk to the bloggers. Still, I manage to keep on good terms with the developers I do know.
  8. I Have No Intention on Culling The List: I know I promised this earlier this year. MMO Fallout is getting huge, and at some point in 2012. We have 52 currently running games listed and 27 games still in development listed, and many of them are not receiving the love they deserve. That being said, I have no plans on combating this by de-listing games, rather in 2012 one of my resolutions is to pay more attention to them.
  9. Another Year, No MMO Calender: Back in 2010, I posted an article that the 2011 MMO Calender was cancelled. It hasn’t come back this year either.
  10. Altering New Player Promotions: I’m a bit of a completionist, which is slang for I want one of everything. So every now and then I have to add things to my list titled “not to be considered for 100% completion.” When I played World of Warcraft, this meant items given exclusively at BlizzCon, and more recently retailer-specific promotional items. More recently, however, I’ve noticed a small trend to offer new items to new accounts, that cannot be obtained by current accounts. Do I need to pull out the Ally Bank ice cream commercial?
  11. Massive Action Game Needs A Category: Seriously, who is running this dump?

Eleven Things I Hated About 2011: 2011 Edition


Going into this article, I assumed I’d have trouble lowering my list to eleven items. Truth be told, I actually had more trouble filling this list than I did culling an even larger list. It must be my power of 20/20 hindsight to look at events of the past and think “well that actually didn’t affect me as much as I thought it did.” I also didn’t want the list to be too focused on this website, too specific towards any games but not too broad. In the end, something happened, and this is what popped out.
  1. Rebuilding My Backups: I have no backups of any images from MMO Fallout prior to March of 2011 (I’m spitballing a date), because my hard drive crashed. Since then, I’ve taken the intelligent route of storing my images on a flash drive, of which I have backed up on another flash drive. At some point this year, I will have to transfer my folder for MMO Fallout to a larger flash drive because it currently takes up 600 megabytes of my one gigabyte disk. That is just images, and isn’t even my backup of the actual database itself.
  2. Spam Writers Became More Intelligent: The spam writers are becoming rather intelligent, and for a few months back in September actually started reading my articles and writing appropriate responses. Take for example, I wrote an article in October about the Playstation Vita being viable for MMOs. Now, I always read through the comments Akismet marks as spam but doesn’t immediately delete, and I found one that said simply “Playing an MMO on the Vita, especially with 3G turned on, would kill the device’s battery life.” I actually un-flagged the comment and was in the process of approving it when I noticed in the website box was a URL for an offshore pharmacy website. So touche, spammers.
  3. Targeted By Jaded Gamers: I don’t mean physically. This year I noticed a new trend. Whenever I appeared on Massively.com, or MMORPG.com, or Tobold’s Blog or any other website far more popular than I am, there was a notable increase in attempts to steal any account associated with my email address. Email, gaming accounts, Steam, NCSoft, even an attempt to break into my student loan account. What is it about gaming that spurs people into thinking to themselves “this guy has an opinion I don’t agree with. I should…steal his RuneScape gold and armor!” Just a point of interest to anyone who tries this again in the future: Requesting a password reset email sends the email to my email address, not yours.
  4. Darkfall 2010: Or Darkfall 2.0, or Darkfall 2011, or Darkfall 2012, whatever you want to call it. Players of Darkfall have been reasonably annoyed this past year by the lack of information from Aventurine as to whether or not a wipe in some form will occur when the game goes live. Now, Aventurine has not commented on whether or not a wipe will take place because they claim that they don’t know themselves if they will need to wipe in some fashion. Darkfall 2.0 is still a long ways away, and granted some of the community is taking Aventurine’s lack of response as a confirmation and unsubscribing now to avoid having about a year of grinding be pulled out from underneath them.
  5. Project V13 Has No Hope: Project V13 falls on my list of games that pain me to talk about. On one hand, if Interplay wins I have high doubts that we will ever see the title released. On the other hand, if Bethesda wins it means that they will be developing the MMO and the varying quantity of bugs in Bethesda’s single player games leaves me with nothing but quantified concern.
  6. Babying Cheaters: I couldn’t help but notice a number of MMOs babying their cheaters this year, not that it occurred in any larger quantity than years past. Developers like Jagex who stopped permanently banning botted accounts, instead simply rolling back stats and items gained. Sony, who had warned cheaters that they were on their last warning, before following up with a few temporary suspensions.
  7. I Wanted More Indie: Bigpoint Games, despite my repeated shots to the kidneys, was kind enough to add me on to their press release mailing list (thank you, Lucianne). I love independent MMOs, and I’ve supported almost all of them by buying copies even if I didn’t have much intention on actually playing the game, but I can never get their developers to talk to me. I guess when your company is smaller than my extended family, everyone is too busy to talk to the bloggers. Still, I manage to keep on good terms with the developers I do know.
  8. I Have No Intention on Culling The List: I know I promised this earlier this year. MMO Fallout is getting huge, and at some point in 2012. We have 52 currently running games listed and 27 games still in development listed, and many of them are not receiving the love they deserve. That being said, I have no plans on combating this by de-listing games, rather in 2012 one of my resolutions is to pay more attention to them.
  9. Another Year, No MMO Calender: Back in 2010, I posted an article that the 2011 MMO Calender was cancelled. It hasn’t come back this year either.
  10. Altering New Player Promotions: I’m a bit of a completionist, which is slang for I want one of everything. So every now and then I have to add things to my list titled “not to be considered for 100% completion.” When I played World of Warcraft, this meant items given exclusively at BlizzCon, and more recently retailer-specific promotional items. More recently, however, I’ve noticed a small trend to offer new items to new accounts, that cannot be obtained by current accounts. Do I need to pull out the Ally Bank ice cream commercial?
  11. Massive Action Game Needs A Category: Seriously, who is running this dump?

The MMO That Wasn't: The Agency


Looking at the success of games like CrimeCraft and the sales Tribes: Ascend during its continued beta period, I can’t help but feel that The Agency got the very short end of the stick when Sony cancelled it earlier this year. Perhaps if Sony had licensed an IP, say James Bond, the game would have gathered the internal enthusiasm to be thrown in the chopping block over, say, existing costs that show little promise. While Sony never made an official statement at the time, given their desire to release DC Universe as free to play in early 2011, it might be safe to say that The Agency would also have been released under a similar model. Instanced shooters are great, but historically have not proven to be viable subscription titles.

In the grand scheme of things, The Agency was likely a side project that Sony was working on alongside their other more serious projects, and when the company hit hard financial times and had to lay off a massive amount of people, it was the first project to get the boot. Perhaps at some point in the future, The Agency will be revived and Sony will continue where they left off.

But I’m an optimistic person.

The MMO That Wasn’t: The Agency


Looking at the success of games like CrimeCraft and the sales Tribes: Ascend during its continued beta period, I can’t help but feel that The Agency got the very short end of the stick when Sony cancelled it earlier this year. Perhaps if Sony had licensed an IP, say James Bond, the game would have gathered the internal enthusiasm to be thrown in the chopping block over, say, existing costs that show little promise. While Sony never made an official statement at the time, given their desire to release DC Universe as free to play in early 2011, it might be safe to say that The Agency would also have been released under a similar model. Instanced shooters are great, but historically have not proven to be viable subscription titles.

In the grand scheme of things, The Agency was likely a side project that Sony was working on alongside their other more serious projects, and when the company hit hard financial times and had to lay off a massive amount of people, it was the first project to get the boot. Perhaps at some point in the future, The Agency will be revived and Sony will continue where they left off.

But I’m an optimistic person.

Predictions for 2012: 2011 Edition


Make that one burger, big and juicy.

  1. Free To Play: do I need to say? We already know of Star Trek Online and more titles will no doubt follow in its footsteps. Sony Online Entertainment has shifted its development direction to free to play, CCP has DUST 514 coming on to the Playstation 3 and Vita as a free to play (with mandatory deposit?) and more we haven’t heard from yet. Aion is going free to play in Europe and possibly North America. Chalk this one up as guaranteed.
  2. WAR Will Die Like Galaxies: When Star Wars Galaxies shut down, John Smedley noted that the closure was a deal between Sony and Lucas Arts to not renew the license after it expired, coinciding with the release of The Old Republic (coincidentally). I have a feeling that the same will happen between Mythic and Games Workshop whenever the WAR license expires. I’m not saying that it will happen in 2012, but I have a feeling that Warhammer Online shutting down will coincide with Warhammer 40k releasing.
  3. Mists of Pandaria Sells Millions, Trashed: World of Warcraft’s expansion will hit the top seller list for months after launch, but given the recent trend of gamers trolling metacritic, the expansion’s ratings will take a plunge as players rate the game zero because Blizzard are worse than Stalin and their game is easier than Cooking Mama.
  4. Neverwinter Will Sell A Lot of Lifetime Subscriptions: And most of those will be sold to jaded Champions Online and Star Trek Online account holders who will shamelessly trash the game and Cryptic for forcing them at gunpoint to preorder the most expensive package despite them not enjoying Cryptic’s two past titles. One of them will send me his account details so I can enjoy Neverwinter for free.
  5. I’m Going to Get Sued: Call this one a hunch, and something I really hope I’m wrong about.
  6. The Number of MMOs Shutting Down Will Spike: 2010 was a major year of MMOs shutting down, and I have the feeling 2012 will be similar in quantity.
  7. TERA Will Have A Similar Launch in the West: Overseas, TERA is being heavily criticized for a myriad of issues, including lacking end-game content. My optimistic side says that many of the issues will be fixed by the time the game hits state-side/Europe-side. The part of me that has played every MMO released in Asia years before the West says otherwise. I’m expecting heavy server mergers in TERA’s forecast.
  8. Guild Wars 2 Will Not Be The Messiah: Sorry Guild Wars fans! The game is going to do great, don’t get me wrong, and will be no doubt be operating for years to come with plenty of expansion packs. That being said, it isn’t going to change the industry any more than Guild Wars did, and it certainly won’t be NCSoft’s top performer, nor will it kill The Old Republic, drop a deuce on Bill Roper’s lawn, or punch Richard Garriot right in the Ultimas.
  9. Planetside 2 Will Not Spur Competition: Planetside 2 doesn’t have much competition when it releases hopefully in 2012. Tribes Universe is still in no man’s land of development, and World War 2 Online isn’t competing with anyone. I don’t count MAG as competition because the titles operate on two separate consoles. We all thought when Planetside got old that other companies would pick up the slack. They didn’t, and probably still won’t. And finally…
  10. Action MMOs Will Be Slammed As Clickfests: I’m specifically referring to games like TERA, because the people who complain about MMOs relying on hotbars seem to be the same people trashing companies that take a more action-based approach for being dumbed down and button mashers as well.