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Trion Making It Possible To Buy Artifacts In Rift

There are well over 8,100 artifacts to collect in Rift, a number that likely has hardcore collectors chomping at the bit to get started and others probably crying behind their keyboards. In an update coming next week, players will be able to buy artifacts with credits, the cash shop currency bought with real money. From the news post, it appears that the price of artifacts comes down the more you have collected in each set, rewarding players who go out and find them in the game world.

The goal, naturally, is to give an out to players who have spent a lot of time searching for the artifacts with no luck, as senior development director Simon Ffinch puts it:

“It’s really for people who have tried for months or even years to complete a set and just can’t do it – we don’t want them to be frustrated, we want to enable them to be able to complete it and move on,” says Simon. “It’s actually designed to encourage gathering or trading for artifacts,” he explains, “Because when you open a fresh collection with no items in it, the price per slot is ludicrously high. No one is going to want to buy them at that point.”

(Source: Trion Worlds)

Rumored Division Open Beta Is True, Coming February 18th

Last week’s rumors of an open beta coming for The Division have proven true, as Ubisoft has announced that gamers on Xbox, PC, and PS3 will be able to get in and play in just about a week and a half. Xbox One players will have a one day bonus, gaining access on February 18th with PC and Playstation receiving access the next day. The beta for all three systems runs until February 21st, barring the moderate possibility that technical issues delay the beta past a reasonable point, as seems to happen every now and then.

In addition to the beta news, Ubisoft notes that most of the cheating issues that plagued the PC closed beta have been fixed and will be ready to roll out for launch. Anyone who plays the open beta will also receive a unique item that will carry over to launch on March 8th.

(Source: The Division)

Chronicle Servers Going Offline For Open Beta

Jagex has revealed that Chronicles, the card game based on the RuneScape game series, has shut down as of February 8th. In an announcement posted on the official website, the servers are shutting down for approximately six weeks in order to prepare the game for open beta. During that time, the dev team is adding in more features, balancing, and infrastructure to provide a better experience for customers.

When the beta returns in March, players can expect Venescula, the fifth legend character, arriving alongside more than forty new cards. Alongside Venescula is Dungeoneering, a skill that tasks players with PvP challenges in return for coins, gem shards, and platinum. The legends you have will have the ability to be outfitted with cosmetic customizations and improving skills with experience gained after each fight. Finally, two new locations (one previewed above) and improved client performance will be coming alongside open beta launch.

Players who participated in the closed beta will receive an exclusive card back, title, emblem, and coin chest. The open beta is the last time that Chronicles will wipe player progress.

(Source: Chronicles)

Chad “Pappy” Moore Takes Lead Of Wildstar

Carbine Studios’ own Chad “Pappy” Moore has announced that he is taking the reigns as the new game director, filling in the spot previously held by Mike Donatelli. Moore has been with Carbine Studios for quite a while, previously holding the position of lore expert. In the most recent blog post, Moore gives a summary of the past year of updates to Wildstar, including its transition to free to play, and gives an idea on what’s on the road ahead.

The next update, Destination Arcterra, introduces a new zone, new game mechanics, and a bunch of new quests and rewards. But that’s not all Wildstar has to offer this year:

Later this year players will find themselves in the Halon Ring, an asteroid belt around planet Nexus that is home to outlaws, marauders, and other unsavory individuals. Anything can happen in the Halon Ring, and it probably will. And speaking of marauders, we just announced that the next major raid in WildStar will be the Redmoon Terror. This is an incredible new raid, and although it won’t be going live with Destination Arcterra, we want to get some early testing of it done during the Arcterra PTR so we can get lots of feedback from our dedicated raiding community before its release.

Carbine Studios continues to work with Giant Interactive on the Chinese launch of Wildstar, which may be just the market that the game needs in order to truly thrive. MMO Fallout is expecting that the latest quarterly report, covering both Wildstar’s business transition and Heart of Thorns, to drop within the next few days.

(Source: Wildstar)

[Column] Are Pirates Starting To Admit Defeat?

Video game piracy may be going away, a thought that is sure to terrorize every consumer who feels entitled to a free lunch, but while we’ve been hearing this statement from publishers for years accompanied by their games being cracked and leaked at launch or, in some cases, weeks and months before. We hear it and groan about the prospect of a new piece of half-cocked DRM that doesn’t so much stop piracy as it does harass legitimate buyers and diminish the overall product, but this is the first time we’re hearing about it from the pirates themselves. The message isn’t so much a cry of fear but a sigh of resignation, there’s a sense that publishers are indeed winning this war.

This has been going on for nearly two years now, thanks to a little piece of software called Denuvo Anti-Tamper. While it hasn’t made games completely uncrackable, it has severely lengthened the amount of time and effort required to break the games, in many cases until months after launch when the initial wave of interest is already over. It took a month to crack Dragon Age: Inquisition, six months for Fifa 15, and titles like Just Cause 3 and FIFA 16 still have not been cracked as of mid-January. Chinese group 3DM noted in one of their posts that their cracker nearly called it quits over Just Cause 3’s impenetrability.

According to that same group, piracy may go the way of the dodo within the next two years, at least as far as AAA studios and big releases are concerned. 3DM, meanwhile, has actually pledged to stop cracking single player games for the next year in order to examine how sales are affected by their absence. Whether or not that’s actually their motivation, or if it is a coming sign of defeat, will have to be seen.

And for the record, MMO Fallout does not support piracy of commercial products for any reason. Private servers for abandoned MMOs and abandonware, modifications, and tweaking software to function on your computer are completely different topics.

Shanda Games In Severe Damage Control After Losing Two Years Of Data

Shanda Games is performing serious PR damage control after a “severe technical failure” resulted in two years worth of data being lost in their MMO Dragon Nest. While characters, gold, DNP, and AC are still intact, virtually everything else has been lost. The good news is, according to the news post, Shanda is capable of reconstructing lost data outside of the game, and will be providing players with a reimbursement package and a compensation package.

All titles, missions, quests, achievements, NPC points, guild points, cooking details, fishing details, trading house items, as well as inventory and storage items are gone for now. Cash Items have also been wiped.

When the servers go live, all characters will be jumped up to level 80. In addition, all characters will have their mandatory and relevant missions completed, along with 100 gold, legendary level 70 equipment, and epic level 80 equipment upgraded to +10. Cash shop reimbursement will be based on how much you spent between November and January, with all purchases prior to November being sent out over the course of the next week.

There is a ton of information regarding player compensation, which you can read at the link below. It’s hard to imagine that there are publishers that still operate their games without redundancies in cases of issues like this.

(Source: Dragon Nest)

Rift: More Perks For Patrons, Less For Everyone Else

Trion Worlds is improving Rift, provided you’re a paying member. If not, you might log in to find your game experience is actually worse off than when you left it. Trion Worlds has been making a few controversial decisions regarding how they monetize their games over the past week, each time noting the need to enhance revenues and support their titles with the conclusion that “it’s just business.” Today, the company announced new enhancements to Rift’s patron subscription. Subscribers will enjoy immunity to soul vitality loss, a 50% discount on auction house fees and commissions, stacking charges, rest experience, and queues for specific warfronts and dungeons.

In addition to enhancing Patron status, these changes are designed to enhance the development revenues of the game as a whole, supporting the game we all love. We are fully committed to the long-term health of RIFT, and exploring options such as these that will keep Telara evolving over time

If many of the things listed above sound like features that Rift already has, that’s because they are. In enhancing Patron, Trion Worlds is actively revoking features from free players that have been present since the game went free to play. Trion Worlds waved away criticism over removing access by free players by describing the features as “not necessary in order to play.” The changes to queues, for the unaware, means free players will only be able to queue for random dungeons.

These are of course beneficial and convenient, but not necessary in order to play RIFT. Therefore, they are the sort of thing we believe should be reserved for Patrons. When we reviewed RIFT as a whole this year, we identified this as an area we had overlooked previously. On a side note, any non-patron can group with a Patron friend, who can then select specific queues for the group. In this way, a Patron provides benefits to those around them.

(Source: Rift)

Daybreak Reneges On Free To Play, Splits H1Z1 In Half

Free to play your way is going away as Daybreak Game Company announced today that the zombie game will be split into two separate titles, with both requiring a down payment in order to get into. Since its announcement, Daybreak has billed the title as early access with an eventual launch into free to play, as shown by the following description on the game’s Steam page.

“Initially available as a Steam Early Access title with optional in-game RMT marketplace purchases, H1Z1 will later launch as a Free to Play. Your Way™ title with optional in-game RMT marketplace purchases.”

According to a blog post on the official website, the decision comes down to both games getting to the point where they would require their own dedicated development teams in order to progress efficiently. The two versions effectively split the battle royale and survival modes into their own separate clients with separate teams and separate characters. H1Z1: King of the Hill will launch on PC, Xbox One, and Playstation 4 later this summer with a console version of H1Z1: Just Survive coming down the road.

The more we developed this game with you, our community, the more we realized that in order to fully support both aspects of H1Z1, and their respective players, we needed to make them their own stand-alone games supported by their own dedicated development teams.

Anyone who has already purchased H1Z1, or purchases it before February 17th, will be granted both copies. For everyone else, the game will cost $19.99 each.

(Source: H1Z1)

Lineage Eternal Hits Beta This Year, Probably

NCSoft Korea is planning on launching Lineage Eternal’s closed beta test in April, at least that’s what the current plans are. The news comes to us from Steparu, reporting on another source from Korean website GameFocus. Steparu reminds viewers that this anticipated closed beta date comes after multiple other scheduled, and subsequently missed, beta dates for the upcoming MMO over the past year or so.

Lineage Eternal was originally announced in 2011 with an accompanying quarter hour of gameplay footage. The game has seen numerous delays, with beta schedules going as far back as 2013 for Korean audiences, and it is currently unknown when NCSoft plans on launching the title.

(Source: Steparu)

Mac Gamers Are Seeing More Titles Cancelled

Perfect World Entertainment has joined a list of companies that are pulling out of the Mac gaming scene, with the announcement that Star Trek Online’s Mac client is being discontinued. The client has had numerous issues in the past, and while many of those problems have been fixed, the ongoing support requirements have ultimately lead to the decision to pull support altogether.

Following these issues, we looked at our Mac support overall and determined that we cannot promise to deliver an experience on Mac that meets our expectations of quality. After heavy consideration, we have decided to end support for the Mac version of Star Trek Online on February 5th. No other version of Star Trek Online is impacted.

In order to reimburse players, any purchases made from October 1st onward (including lifetime subscriptions) will be refunded. Perfect World Entertainment isn’t the only company to drop support on Mac. Recently Warner Bros. announced that the Mac and Linux version of Batman: Arkham Knight would be cancelled entirely. Last November, Blizzard announced that it would break trend and not publish Overwatch on Mac. Last June, Square Enix released Final Fantasy XIV’s Mac client and quickly pulled it from sale due to major technical problems.

(Source: Star Trek Online)

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