Author: Admin

Lord of the Rings Safe Until 2017


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When it comes to licensed MMOs, there is always the risk that the game will shut down not because of a lack of population, but due to issues over renewing the license. For Lord of the Rings Online, players are understandably concerned over Turbine’s license expiring at the end of the year. Luckily for all of us, Turbine has announced that the license has been renewed through 2017.

We have said as far back as July of 2013, we plan to support LOTRO for many years to come. I really want to be as clear as possible on this subject to avoid any further confusion or misunderstanding. The license was renewed. I think it’s rather clear and direct. I can’t think of a more direct way to say the license was renewed than to say the license was renewed. We have an agreement that runs through 2017.

Barring some sudden drop in population, players have little to be concerned over.

(Source: Contains Moderate Peril)

Less Than Massive: Simcity Does The Impossible!


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SimCity turns ten months old soon, and what better way to celebrate the occasion than with more backpedaling? In an announcement detailing the upcoming Update 10, Maxis has revealed that SimCity will receive the heavily demanded offline mode allowing users to play without requiring a constant internet connection. The revelation is even more incredible if you remember that Maxis had previously made every excuse in the book to explain why SimCity did not have offline mode, with claims ranging from how online regions were integral to the game’s vision, to how the servers simulated too much for the game to work offline. Last October, the developer finally caved in and agreed to look into offline mode.

General Manager Patrick Buechner wrote the announcement blog post.

Yes, Offline is coming as a free download with Update 10 to all SimCity players. When we launch it, all of your previously downloaded content will be available to you anytime, anywhere, without the need for an internet connection. We are in the late phases of wrapping up its development and while we want to get it into your hands as soon as possible, our priority is to make sure that it’s as polished as possible before we release it.

Whether or not this announcement will be enough to bring back EA’s disgruntled fans will have to be seen. On the other hand, EA can now focus on more pressing issues, including investigations and multiple lawsuits from customers and investors regarding the botched launch of Battlefield 4.

(Source: Maxis Blog)

MMOrning Shots: The Importance Of Free Time


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Today’s MMOrning Shot comes from Final Fantasy XIV, in particular the game’s rather odd New Year’s event where players take on the role of donning horse masks of varying colors to run around and convince the citizens of Eorzea to embrace the import of horses as an alternative mount to Chocobo. Could horses be added at some point? Possibly, if the conclusion to this quest is anything to go by. Now if you don’t mind, I have to spend some time avoiding that one guy who said he’d rather ride me than either of the two creatures. He says that, play the quest line.

Turbine Reveals DDO Player Council


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It looks like Turbine is taking a note out of Eve Online’s book, with the announcement of a player council being set up for targeted feedback.

The DDO Player Council is a group of players selected to provide targeted feedback and valuable suggestions to the DDO Team. This will involve participating in surveys, focused discussions, as well as highly structured and targeted developer chats. Often the topics covered will be elements of game design at their earliest stages, well before they are committed to development or appear in our preview programs like Lamannia.

Applications are being taken through January 20th, with the council launching on the week of the 27th.

(Source: DDO Forums)

1.5 Million Concurrent On Blade & Soul


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Tencent Games is ready to talk about Blade & Soul’s performance in China, and the results are expectedly enormous. According to Tencent, the peak total concurrent players came up over the 1.5 million mark, with over 450 million creatures killed on the first day. Thousand Soul Demon has been slayed over 7.7 billion times, and the average queue time is apparently around six hours. This is hardly surprising when you factor in that the game launched with two hundred servers, and still had major problems with queues. Blade & Soul has so far exponentially outperformed all of Tencent’s previous games.

As far as Blade & Soul launching in the west, nothing to report.

(Source: MMO Culture)

Guild Wars 2 VIP Membership Discovered


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Dataminers on Reddit unearthed the above information regarding a VIP membership for Guild Wars 2. Although no price is detailed, membership includes a bundle of extras, including bank and inventory space, convenient banking/trading, and more. There are at least 20 tiers, going by the VIP badges found in the Mists beta client. Mark Kerstein, Head of Global Community, commented on the forums to point out that the VIP member is an internal experiment and is not intended for western gamers.

This is a testing branch. We conduct internal experiments for various territories on our testing branches. This particular experiment is not being tested for the West.

Whether or not VIP will make it into Guild Wars 2 in any territory will have to be seen.

(Source: Reddit)

Pathfinder's Backing Of Elder Scrolls Online


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Goblinworks CEO Ryan Dancey found himself in the news this week by penning an editorial defending The Elder Scrolls Online and the game’s planned subscription system. In the op-ed, Dancey states his belief that not only are subscriptions responsible for more than $100 million a year in the west, but that it is hard to imagine that the revenue from microtransactions even approaches 50% of that figure. Now Dancey’s figures are hardly scientific, but the overall point that he seems to be making is that the optimal route for MMOs (particularly Elder Scrolls Online) to take is to launch with a box price and subscription to recuperate development costs and then switch over to a system based in microtransactions with an optional subscription intact once it makes sense.

I remain convinced that the market is going to continue to support subscriptions for these games regardless of budget so long as the subscriptions are intelligently linked to a microtransaction model as well.  The evidence of ongoing success with that model seems incontrovertible and the implication that there are millions of people happily paying for game subscriptions shouldn’t be controversial to anyone who digs into the numbers.

Whether or not you agree with Dancey’s conclusion, the editorial is still a great read. Check it out at the link below.

(Source: MMORPG.com)

Pathfinder’s Backing Of Elder Scrolls Online


2013-12-17_00007

Goblinworks CEO Ryan Dancey found himself in the news this week by penning an editorial defending The Elder Scrolls Online and the game’s planned subscription system. In the op-ed, Dancey states his belief that not only are subscriptions responsible for more than $100 million a year in the west, but that it is hard to imagine that the revenue from microtransactions even approaches 50% of that figure. Now Dancey’s figures are hardly scientific, but the overall point that he seems to be making is that the optimal route for MMOs (particularly Elder Scrolls Online) to take is to launch with a box price and subscription to recuperate development costs and then switch over to a system based in microtransactions with an optional subscription intact once it makes sense.

I remain convinced that the market is going to continue to support subscriptions for these games regardless of budget so long as the subscriptions are intelligently linked to a microtransaction model as well.  The evidence of ongoing success with that model seems incontrovertible and the implication that there are millions of people happily paying for game subscriptions shouldn’t be controversial to anyone who digs into the numbers.

Whether or not you agree with Dancey’s conclusion, the editorial is still a great read. Check it out at the link below.

(Source: MMORPG.com)

Planetside 2 Will Feature Weekly Updates


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Matt Higby from Sony Online Entertainment posted a thread on the Planetside 2 forums detailing that the company plans on expediting updates to better service the MMO shooter. Starting January 15th, Planetside 2 will enjoy weekly updates to address bugs, balancing, and more. There will still be large updates to the game, that will be included with the weekly updates as they become ready for release, but the overall goal is to allow SOE to work on bug fixing and balancing at a faster pace.

One final note, the first couple of these weekly updates are going to be a bit smaller than what you can expect to see later on, as we’re still shaking off the holiday cobwebs and getting used to the new development processes.

You can read the entire notice at the link below.

(Source: Planetside 2)

MMOrning Shots: To Battle!


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For today’s MMOrning Shots, we continue our trek down nostalgia road with some very old screenshots of Final Fantasy XI. These shots are from 2002, I believe the Playstaton 2 version but don’t quote me on that.