Author: Admin

Beta Perspective: Fantasy Tales Online


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It’s very obvious, or at least it should be, when you’re dealing with an independent MMO made with passion. Fantasy Tales Online, as I’ve been told, is being developed by a team of three people at Cold Tea Studio. Right now the game is gearing up for Steam early access, and I was contacted and offered a key to get in a little early.

As far as graphics go, Fantasy Tales Online is virtually future proof. It is retro-inspired but not basic, the kind of style that will still look good in ten years time compared to making a polygonal game that looks like it was born out of the early Everquest era. FTO advertises customization, dynamic raids, player housing, a massive world, and more. But can it live up to the hype? Sure, why not.

The sure sign of an addictive game is one that steals time, and somewhere along the line after booting up Fantasy Tales Online I lost five hours. I hate to make comparisons to other games, but it feels like a higher functioning RPG MO, which is in turn an homage to RuneScape Classic, which is probably why FTO set my clock forward the length of a short work shift. It also bears a strong resemblance to another game that is taking up a lot of my time, Stardew Valley.

FTO is played from a top down perspective using the mouse, keyboard, or combination of the two. You can move by clicking or using the WASD keys, and you can mostly disregard the mouse by enabling targeting which places a key binding over interactive objects on screen. A very handy tool that you don’t normally see in games, and as you’ll hear me say quite a bit in this game’s coverage, it’s the little things that go a long way.

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There are a lot of little things that make the world less stagnant and boring, while also giving players little hints on where they can go next. Walking through the mines early on, I noticed a rat immediately get smashed by falling debris, warning the player of impending danger. NPCs run around the towns, giving random bits of dialogue and pointing toward places of interest while actually giving the area a living feel. I accidentally said hello to one of the NPCs, I won’t lie.

Dungeons are where Fantasy Tales Online becomes something of a Diablo-esque romp. Each dungeon you enter is randomly generated at the start, a series of interlocking rooms with plenty of mobs to mow down and loot to obtain. There are traps, a few simple puzzles inserted so far, and bosses at the end that will probably knock you around the first few times you make your way through. The first boss you encounter has a trick that took me a minute to figure out, you have to knock out the support beams to destroy his armor. For some reason that makes sense.

I like how quests are written, if only because it’s a nice change from the usual first person view of quest text. Quest lines are a bit more like Dungeons & Dragons, written from the perspective of an outside narrator giving exposition. “Mayor Donnoville say this time he would like you to eradicate one hundred squirrels.” Now I read the quest dialogue in pretty much every MMO that I play, and I can get behind any game that strong-arm’s the player into reading the text to know what is going on. Quests are somewhere between standard and RuneScape, a bit heavier on the story and slightly more in-depth than you standard go here and kill the things until you get the stuff.

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Crafting is pretty basic at the moment with the most fleshed out area being the ability to create a wide variety of potions that boost health, strength, armor, etc. There isn’t much to say here other than that reagents can take up a large amount of space in your backpack along with potions and loot, and since you can only have one buff active at any time it’s best to travel light. Inventories at the moment can’t be expanded and you’ll quickly find them filled with loot.

Of course, the game is not without its flaws. This is early access, after all, and the only glaring issue that I can find at the moment is that your character’s attacks are rather unreliable, which the guys at Cold Tea Studio have attributed to a few unfixed bugs. While generally not a problem, your character will occasionally not engage in combat without multiple button clicks. It is semi-frequent and, if inattentive as myself, will probably get you killed a couple of times.

Another gripe I have is with the game’s crafting system, if only because it is different and I am inattentive. Right now, you need to manually remove your ingredients and final product from the crafting screen, not unlike Minecraft. If you don’t remove your items, they are wiped after about an hour (according to one of the crew in chat).

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With about eight hours of game time so far, Fantasy Tale Online is shaping up to be quite an entertaining game. I look forward to seeing what the small team can accomplish. For now, I will continue leveling and providing coverage.

Square Enix Saves A Ton On Its Taxes


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Square Enix has announced that it expects to save 5.2 billion yen in total income taxes on its consolidated and non-consolidated statements of income for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2016. In layman’s terms, the company is going to save a lot on its taxes. The actual figures will be announced when Square Enix publishes its income reports, but for those of you outside of Japan 5.2 billion yen amounts to roughly $47 million dollars USD.

Normally this kind of news wouldn’t make it onto MMO Fallout, but normally tax savings aren’t worthy of a press release and Square Enix thinks otherwise. For those of you just remembering your taxes, the deadline to file was yesterday.

(Source: Square Enix Press Release)

Snapshots: RuneScape NXT


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RuneScape is celebrating the launch of its new game client, NXT, and Jagex has sent over a few screenshots of the new engine to grab your eye. Check them out in the gallery below and, if you like what you see, head on over to runescape.com to download the new client.

World of Warcraft Drops Legion Expansion August 30th


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Blizzard Entertainment has announced the full release of World of Warcraft’s latest expansion, Legion, will arrive on August 30th. The expansion will run you $49.99 with the digital deluxe at $69.99 and the collector’s edition at $89.99. The special editions come with exclusive pets and other goodies, along with an instant level 100 boost for pre-orders, with a dvd, soundtrack, mousepad, and art book for the collector’s edition.

Legion grants access to the Demon Hunter class, artifact weapons, a new continent, class halls, and a new pvp honor system.

“Legion opens a dark and thrilling new chapter in one of the Warcraft series’ greatest conflicts, and things will never be the same for some of Azeroth’s most iconic heroes and villains,” said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. “This expansion is loaded with features and content that give players whole new ways to explore the world and customize their heroes. We’re looking forward to sending everyone into battle against the Burning Legion this August.”

Check out the trailer below.

(Source: Blizzard press release)

Neverwinter Coming To The Windows Store


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Perfect World Entertainment has announced that Dungeons & Dragons MMO Neverwinter will be heading to the Windows Store for Windows 10 users. When the game does launch, you’ll be able to boot it as an app from the store, introducing the game to a new audience of gamers. For everyone else, nothing will change. Neverwinter will still be available via Arc.

For more information on Neverwinter, check out MMO Fallout’s coverage and on the official website.

(Source: Perfect World press release)

Funcom Confirms The Park For May 3rd


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The Park is the first experimental title released under Funcom’s new development strategy and console players will be able to get in on the terror in the next couple of weeks. On their website, Funcom confirmed that the romp through the park of nightmares will be hitting Playstation 4 and Xbox One on May 3rd. The Park is the first console game released by Funcom in ten years, the last being Dreamfall on the original Xbox in 2006.

“We are thrilled to develop games for consoles again,” says Funcom CEO Rui Casais. “Not only because ‘The Park’ is a great fit for console gaming, but the process has also given us a lot of experience which we can use for some of our upcoming games, like ‘CONAN EXILES’.”

Originally released on PC last Halloween, The Park sold enough to meet all non-revenue related goals and kept in line with internal expectations, according to Funcom’s revenue reports which projected the title to not generate a significant source of revenue. Conan Exiles, an open world survival game set in Hyboria, is expected to launch on PC and consoles sometime later this year.

(Source: Funcom)

Jagex Details Less Punishing Deadman Mode


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A new blog post up on Old School RuneScape’s forums offers new details into new changes coming to Deadman Mode in this season and next. The ideas change how players will lose experience, items, changes to the end-game tournament, and more.

Foremost, this season will bring changes to how much players lose upon death. The number of items lost on death will be reduced from 28 bank items down to 10, rewarding player killers while also not completely wiping out a player’s stash if they die a couple of times. Death to a much higher leveled player will incur less of an experience loss than someone closer to your own level, while new players will receive a six hour immunity and increased experience gain during that period. The teleport delay will be removed for unskulled players, while un-noting items at a bank will be made a bit more time consuming.

Next season will see the Grand Exchange being added to Deadman seasonal to reduce the time spent buying and selling items that could be better spent murdering your fellow players. The experience multiplier will also change to give a better boost at lower levels. Deadman Invitation #2 will make changes to the killer fog that ushers players into tighter spaces, while the winner will be declared based off of kills rather than total level in case of a tie.

As always, Jagex is soliciting feedback on the forums. You can read the entire developer blog at the link below.

(Source: Deadman)

Jagex Product Manager Weighs In On Classic Servers


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The recent shuttering of Nostalrius, one of World of Warcraft’s biggest private servers, has been rippling throughout the gaming news and leaking into the regular press. Part of the discussion has turned to both the feasibility and potential that legacy servers can offer MMO developers.

Here at MMO Fallout, we’ve pretty heavily covered the ongoing successes of Old School RuneScape, a service that began as a snapshot of the game as it was in 2007 and has gradually expanded thanks to community feedback. The game has even incorporated Deadman Mode, a hardcore spinoff that itself spun off into a seasonal eSport event. We even had a chance to talk to Jagex about Deadman mode in its earlier stages.

You can read the entire piece at Kemp’s Linkedin here or below.

Building on the past: How RuneScape’s official legacy server avoided cannibalism and became an eSport

It’s more than three years since we had our first discussion about releasing legacy servers for RuneScape. However, we can now say that releasing Old School RuneScape was one of the best decisions we ever made. Since Old School RuneScape’s launch in February 2013 we have seen just short of seven million players log in with over two and a half million becoming members.

During that time Old School has of course faced a number of challenges, but here’s how we overcame them and how we took a version of RuneScape from 10 years ago and made it relevant for todays’ gamers.

The legacy risk

During the early discussions there were of course many concerns such as: Was it even possible? How long it would take? And, whether there was the potential for cannibalisation of the existing RuneScape player base? We knew our players wanted legacy servers, as with most MMORPG communities they were not shy in telling us what they wanted. Even though we were quite certain about the initial surge of interest these servers would get, we wanted to test this so we asked our players via a poll if they would play. When half a million of our customers said they want to play it… we kind of had to do it.

Another big question mark was whether the legacy servers would have any longevity. To manage this risk a small team of three people was put together to manage the servers and community until the initial interest had died down, at which time resources could be reallocated.

The risk seemed low, allocated resources could all be temporary, and with half a million players saying they would like to try it, the risk of cannibalisation was outweighed by the potential for new customers. At the very least, Old School RuneScape would be a quick nostalgia hit for disenfranchised players.
With legacy servers comes legacy technical debt

Once Old School RuneScape had launched it quickly became apparent that the community wanted game updates. However, initially we were very limited in what we could deliver. Since RuneScape as a game had progressed during the intervening years, so had all the tools we used to develop it. We were in the unenviable position of having to recreate all the tools we used to develop the game back in 2007 so we could update it. At no point had anyone thought, “We ought to keep all these old versions of the development tools just in case.” I mean why would they?

The lack of development tools was not our only technical debt, we had to rework anti-cheating software, optimise areas of the code, and fix some pretty major bugs for a second time.

Community tribalism

Something which should not really surprise anyone is that there was a rivalry between the communities of the Old School RuneScape and RuneScape. Over time this rivalry increased with the Old School community taking the stance of being purist, and the RuneScape community positioning themselves as progressive.

Although the Old School community saw themselves as purists they still wanted change, so to ensure the rate of change was acceptable to those players we allowed them to vote on every update that happens to the game. If 75% of those voting did not agree, the update didn’t happen. This gave a very strong sense of ownership of the game to the community; they were in control.

What was a surprise was that the tribalism shown by the community started to manifest itself among the development teams. As the small team was left to get on with things they developed their own ways of making things happen without relying on other teams. Although this self-sufficiency might be much sought over by many people, it has a hampering effect when it has to fit into companywide objectives and strategic planning across products.

It came to a point where the Old School RuneScape team needed more integration into the wider RuneScape studio. This was achieved by creating stronger relationships between staff and line managers that traversed different teams, as well as including the Old School team in more of the studio level decisions.

Game positioning

After about six months we started to see player numbers settle and we could see that very few players migrated between Old School RuneScape and RuneScape. What we were not seeing was one game cannibalising the other, so we wanted to understand why a player would play one game and not the other.

Through a series of surveys and data gathering from the game servers we saw there were some distinct reasons why people played Old School RuneScape. The three key reasons were the old combat system (which was changed in the main game in 2012) the grinding of levels, and the straightforward membership monetisation model. This made it very easy to position Old School RuneScape as complementarily to RuneScape and give us a very clear direction of where the game could go. More importantly, it identified areas we could branch into much more effectively than we could have done with
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For example, the old combat system leant itself well to PvP combat, which in turn allowed us to take our first steps into the eSports market last month with considerable success.

When legacy becomes THE legacy

Although the initial impact of legacy servers on RuneScape was expected to be short and sweet, it has grown into a major part of Jagex’s business. The Old School team is now five times the size it was when it started and has more members than the launch period, showing it can reach out to a wider market than the initial audience.

The modernisation of RuneScape meant tensions increased between the traditionalist and progressive RuneScape player base. However, Old School RuneScape gave the traditionalists a safe home and allowed for the continued modernisation of RuneScape without alienating a key part of our player base.
There have been challenges in overcoming the technical debt that suddenly appeared, as well as, ensuring that the product sits well within a wider business. However, it offered something our existing games did not offer and has allowed us to start expanding the RuneScape franchise into new areas such as eSports and streaming.

By keeping the risk of legacy servers low and being focused on how they can grow the franchise, this adventure has just started.

Mathew Kemp is product manager for Old School RuneScape at Jagex Games Studio.

Gloria Victis Balances Combat


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Gloria Victis is tweaking combat once again, this week shortening the distance between new and experienced players. Players will find upon logging in that weapon damage has been adjusted as well as health scaling and passive abilities to ensure that higher level players won’t just roll over fresh accounts.

Other aspects of the game have been simplified, including the woodworking process, allowing for a more user-friendly interface to teach players how to craft their first weapons. Cost of resources has also been reduced for basic swords.

You can find the entirety of the patch notes at the link below.

(Source: Gloria Victis)

[Column] Is The Division The Good Guy?


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I don’t think the Division are the good guys.

If you’ve been hiding under a rock, The Division takes place following a biological terrorist attack on Black Friday in New York City, where terrorists use money infected with a virus to kill a lot of people. The Division is a government organization that only shows up when all other options have failed.

Immediately I started asking questions like “how does the Division work exactly? Are all agents assigned jobs where they can just up and disappear whenever there is an incident? Or are the jobs fake? Wouldn’t someone eventually figure out that their co-worker goes missing whenever a big tragedy occurs? Like how Clark Kent disappears whenever Superman is needed? Wouldn’t it be kinda obvious when a large group suddenly book plane tickets toward ground zero?”

But first, let’s talk about Tom Clancy.

The universes created by Tom Clancy are filled with amazing characters like Jack Ryan, Ding Chavez, John Clark, and scenarios that if not exactly realistic were at least reasonable for the alternate timeline that they took place in, and were generally based off of some person or event in the real world. It was Die Hard plausible: Bruce Willis could take on a whole group of terrorists solo, but still destroy his feet on some broken glass.

Tom Clancy, despite his lack of military experience, was a mastermind of warfare, on a level that baffled actual military leaders. If his universe had a war, he simulated war games to see how it would go. His writing predicted strategies years before they actually happened, like the use of airliners in suicide bombings or Russia’s invasion of Georgia, and described creations before the public even knew about them.

The Division doesn’t have a shred of Tom Clancy’s DNA on it, but frankly none of the games do. The most involvement he had with the video games was founding Red Storm Entertainment and writing the books that some of them are based on.

Tom Clancy also had little regard for the government, stating the following:

“What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It’s not good at much else.”

This’ll be important later on, but back to the game.

My problem with the factions in the game is that they take popular Clancy tropes and fit them within the walls of New York City. If you’re looking at The Rikers make sense, they are all inmates that broke free and stuck together. Rioters aren’t really a faction as much as they are a collective name, but the cleaners are simultaneously the only enemy faction with a motivation other than survive/destroy, and also feel the least inspired.

After all, they are a faction call the Cleaners, whose goal is to “cleanse” the city, oh and their rank and file is made up of former cleaners (janitors, garbage men, custodians). It’s a Scooby Doo level of storytelling where the characters names are a pun of their jobs. I wonder what Mr. Shipping & Receiving does for a living.

The Division reminds me of the Jedi from Star Wars. They’re a secretive group that, when deployed, become judge, jury, and executioner. Their ranks have a habit of getting wiped out or going rogue and turning evil, and the few people that know about their existence don’t seem to hold them in much high regard or trust for those exact purposes. For all of their claims of being the “good guys,” they’re really more the anti-heroes. The Ghost Riders of their world.

If you play The Division with this mindset, everything makes a lot more sense. You casually stroll down the street and have full authority to murder anyone marked red on your map. Random civilians are absolutely terrified of you, and who can blame them? As the game tells you, regular people have no idea what the Division is, and you don’t wear any sort of marked uniform. To them, you’re just a bunch of heavily armed thugs gunning people down at your own discretion.

And naturally once your character goes off the grid (the dark zone), they are free to go rogue and murder other Division agents and loot their goods. Since no one can see what you’re doing, you can return in the good graces and assumption that you were a total angel during your time away.

Quick: Tell me who is responsible for the terrorist attack in The Division? You don’t know, do you? Considering that the Division is in place as a counter-terrorism force, you don’t do any counter-terrorism. Cleaning up New York City should, arguably, be a job for the National Guard or military, and considering the Division is a last resort group, it doesn’t seem like all options were really exhausted before you were called in.

I’d like to think that, were he alive, Tom Clancy would have put the kibosh on this story or at least put more emphasis on the whole government overreach aspect. You’d probably have a scene where President Jack Ryan fires the head of the Strategic Homeland Division (yes the same President Jack Ryan who assassinates the dictator of the United Islamic Republic on live television) before turning the operation over to Rainbow.

There seems to be at least some self aware understanding that the whole operation has gone tits up, the Division is only welcome because as much as some agents are making things worse, there are others that are actually helping, and the story does eventually come to a decent conclusion. I’d like to see some followup, even better if it is in a companion novel, on how the public reacts to the Division.

With all the civilians still in New York City, I find it hard to believe that their actions are remaining quiet this whole time, even if the word on the street is questioning why the hell this group of people wearing no uniforms and carrying military weaponry descended on New York and started massacring everyone.