Author: Admin

Lineage II Free To Play Brings Login Woes


Although Lineage II unofficially went free to play a week ago when NCSoft opened up all existing accounts, today brings the full release of Lineage II: Goddess of Destruction. With it brings the Path to Awakening, a system that gives players an incentive to grind through the levels (Lineage II is not an MMO where you can level solely through questing) by offering rewards, and the Goddess of Destruction expansion. You can head over to the Lineage II website to download the client and find more information on the game. Truly Free places forward all content free of charge to anyone willing to participate, while the cash shop is promised to sell only convenience items.

Of course, with the amount of people logging in today and creating accounts, the servers have become rather sluggish and have been coming down regularly. NCWest promises that they are working on the issue, and will be giving more information as it appears. Until then, you shouldn’t have any problem downloading and patching the game.

Video of the ___: Neverwinter Trailer


Is anyone else excited for Neverwinter primarily for the opportunity to create custom dungeons and stories? I hope Cryptic makes a trailer showing off the custom tools next.

Bobby Kotick Blasts The Old Republic: LucasArts Business Tactics


It isn’t often I get to pull out the young Bobby Kotick picture. There are a whole host of reasons Bobby Kotick would want to pick up The Old Republic and throw it directly into the garbage, so I will step back for a few seconds and allow you to come to your own conclusions. Because World of Warcraft is hemorrhaging subscribers? Because Activision Blizzard recently had its stock downgraded due to World of Warcraft? Because The Old Republic is the largest MMO release of the year? Or because of the bitter rivalry between EA and Activision? Maybe it’s because analysts predict that not only will The Old Republic steal users from World of Warcraft, the number figures somewhere around 3-4 million departing Azeroth for Tatooine. Don’t rush, I’ll wait.

Bobby Kotick threw a few jabs at Electronic Arts, by pointing out the LucasArts will be taking some of the MMO’s income home as royalty payments:

“Lucas is going to be the principal beneficiary of the success of Star Wars,” Kotick said. “We’ve been in business with Lucas for a long time and the economics will always accrue to the benefit of Lucas, so I don’t really understand how the economics work for Electronic Arts.”

Thank you, Bobby Kotick. I think. Considering that Electronic Arts has had dealings with LucasArts in the past, they know what they’re getting into. Also remember that Bioware has dealt with LucasArts in creating the original Knights of the Old Republic (the second handled by Obsidian Entertainment).

Roma Victor Developers Working On Sandbox MMO


Do you remember Roma Victor? I do, and was very disheartened when the company finally shut the servers down back in January 2011. But with all night comes dawn, and the folks at RedBedlam wanted to make it clear that this was not the last we’d heard of them:When I was a little filly and the sun was going down

RedBedlam is currently focussed exclusively on developing projects for third parties. It is worth bearing in mind however that a great deal of work was put into the project codenamed ‘Roma Victor 2’, and we still have every intention of releasing a top quality historically authentic ‘remake’ at a later date. All user data from the original Roma Victor has been backed up and stored safely. It is our intention that this data will be used in a future Roma Victor game to ensure that our original community will have new assets proportional to their previous standing.

Well those of you waiting on a Roma Victor 2 can step to the side, because RedBedlam has announced The Missing Ink, a free to play browser/tablet MMO coming next year that features players taking the role of a Paper Mari0 style game in a 3D sandbox world (your characters are paper thin) where players can explore and build and fight in pvp combat.

You can find the announcement on Eurogamer here. The Missink Ink will be available to play when it is released as an alpha next month.

Ubisoft: 95% of Our Consumers Are Pirates


Here is a quick lesson on public relations: Try not to outright insult an entire group of your userbase. Ghost Recon Online, the free to play title coming out on PC and WiiU, is meant to replace the console version coming next year, which will not be ported to PC. In an interview with PC Gamer, Ubisoft’s Sébastien Arnoult doesn’t just think that a large portion of Ubisoft’s PC consumers are pirates, he knows they are:

“When we started Ghost Recon Online we were thinking about Ghost Recon: Future Solider; having something ported in the classical way without any deep development, because we know that 95% of our consumers will pirate the game. So we said okay, we have to change our mind.”

And perhaps not implying that a certain group is lower class.

“We’re adapting the offer to the PC market. I don’t like to compare PC and Xbox boxed products because they have a model on that platform that is clearly meant to be €60’s worth of super-Hollywood content. On PC, we’re adapting our model to the demand.”

I do not support piracy, but it boggles the mind to see how Ubisoft has treated its PC customers over the past decade or so, with buggy and unfinished ports, draconian DRM that has managed to punish their legitimate buyers (Remember Starforce anyone?), and then turn around and wonder why the same group you’ve ostracized for years on end has come to resent you. I don’t think I have to remind that Ubisoft’s latest game was met with horrid PR because it was released in an unplayable state as a substandard port, with DRM that Ubisoft had promised to those preordering that the game would not contain.

Rock Paper Shotgun summed it up best:

So, there you go. Mettra doesn’t want your money, thinks you’re bitching when you want to play his game, and that at least over half a million quid is of no use to him. We have, as you might imagine, contacted Ubisoft to see how they feel about 50,000 sales.

Star Vault Q3 Financial Reports


Star Vault today released their third quarterly report for 2011, and the results are rather similar to last quarter. For the first time, Star Vault has reported a loss in subscribers, even though sales of the game client itself are up. In the usual manner, I’ve included the fun facts for you all to enjoy. Do bear in mind that there may be some inconsistencies and poor grammar, as my source is the poor translation of Google from a Swedish document.

  • Star Vault’s Q3 net sales amounted to 706,404 SEK, but the company’s net earnings remains in the red (-720,790 SEK)
  • Subscriber numbers declined in the third quarter, which Star Vault attributes to the delay of Territory Control.
  • Sales of the game itself increased in Q3 over Q2.
  • Territory Control hopes to bring in more players who “really take gaming seriously.” (their words, not mine)
  • Star Vault is still working with OnLegends to bring Mortal Online to a wider audience.
  • Star Vault’s gross profit for the first nine months was 4.3 million SEK ($622 thousand USD).
  • Administrative Expenses ran up 1.3 million while research and development gobbled up 2.1 million.

And because you were waiting for this part of the quarterly update:

Program to reduce our costs are developing well and we expect and that the outcome of this will reflected fully in January 2012. With our current cost structure, we consider that further approximately 500 players to achieve break-even, a goal that we are due to the delay of further expansion expected to achieve first quarter of 2012.

And an interesting note on why Star Vault has been in the red:

In June 2011 signed an agreement with Star Vault LeKool (Chinese publisher) when the fast-growing gaming market for English-language games in China is one such market that the company could not reach before. Along with LeKool open this opportunity up and Mortal Online expands thus into this interesting market. The business model means that the cost of operation increases to a much lower rate than revenues, when number of players increases. Star Vault will continually monitor price developments in the industry to offer players market prices. In the longer term, the Star Vault to develop and sell new games.

Just Kidding: Lineage II Becomes Free To Play Today


Omali you cheeky person, you say while you flick through the calendar here on MMO Fallout and see that yes, indeed, the free to play switch was announced for November 30th. You would be half correct: The Goddess of Destruction patch goes live on the 30th. Today, however, NCsoft has taken down the Lineage 2 servers at approximately 8am eastern for an estimated ten hours for maintenance. The patch notes are as follows:

  • The Vesper Dreams event continues.
  • The European server, Naia, will be moved to the United States. Moving forward it will be in the same physical location as Chronos. The Naia server time in-game will remain European: the next Castle Siege and Territory Wars on Naia will occur this weekend (November 26 and 27) as originally planned.
  • All Lineage II game accounts become Truly Free.
  • All characters’ vitality will be refilled. A vitality refill will happen with every regular weekly maintenance.

For now, the NCsoft account management is down for maintenance. You can find the announcement here, in case you still don’t believe me. You’re going to need an eleven gigabyte download for the client, so get to work!

Update: The NCsoft website is back up and accounts should be displayed as “playable” with an NCcoin amount listed.

Steam November MMO Sales: 23-27


Oh glorious Steam overlords, what sales do you bring us on this, the week of Black Friday?

Check out the rest of Steam’s catalog to see what else is on sale. We here at MMO Fallout wish to extend our sincere apologies to everyone’s wallet this coming Black Friday.

Earth Eternal Shuts Down, Again.


Greetings fellow Earth Eternal fans,

It’s been a blast observing the Earth Eternal community participate in the Beta program and your feedback has been invaluable

Unfortunately, Earth Eternal will be saying goodbye on Thursday November 24th 2011 at 9:00 pm EST

We are still determining future plans for Earth Eternal but those have not been finalized and we hope to share them with you as soon as we can

We hope you had an awesome time because we certainly did

The Earth Eternal team

Stay calm, Omali, remember what your therapist told you. I’d be remiss to try and convince any of you that I didn’t know this was coming, especially after my rather scathing remarks about the title a few weeks ago,  but today marks the official announcement that Earth Eternal will be shutting down and similarly to Sparkplay’s announcement, this time around gives even less warning. When the servers come down at 9pm tomorrow night, they will stay off for good (or at least until future plans are determined).

I think I can inject some wisdom into the Earth Eternal team for their next go around: If I have more fingers on one hand than you do developers working on the game, you aren’t investing enough resources and should have seen the performance that Earth Eternal received. But now that the game has shut down a second time, and the community will experience a second character wipe, I should say not to be surprised when, if you do decide to attempt a third launch, your community is not as willing to support you.

How fitting is it that MMO Fallout’s 1,000th article would be about an MMO shutting down for the second time? No I did not plan that out.

Happy 1,000 posts MMO Fallout.

Speaking of Macrotransactions: Bigpoint’s $1,000 Spaceship


I hesitate to talk trash about Bigpoint games, and not just because the company could throw a million bucks my way to shut me up and it’d be like the CEO dropped a few pennies out of his pocket, but because the company has indeed found a way to monetize any aspect of their games as promised. And the players? Could not be more overjoyed, at least according to the $200 million that Bigpoint drew in in 2010.

The spaceship that you see to the left has sold two thousand copies in four days. DarkOrbit, by Bigpoint Games, has put this item up for sale for the insane price of €1,000 or approximately $1,337 USD (I see what they did there).

Bigpoint is, and really always has been, the company to come right up front and admit that they sell power, and that there are plenty of people willing to pay major sums of money for that power. I find interesting how many people are disputing that the numbers presented are fact. I dispute the claim that The Old Republic will not be profitable, but I don’t dispute sales figures put out by a company who stands to lose a lot of good faith and press if they lie.

All I know is, Bigpoint has nothing on Eve Online’s theorized $10,000 golden ship.