Today’s MMOrning Shot comes to us from Shroud of the Avatar, which recently opened its doors to backers to wander around the starter town of Owl’s Head. I had a chance to check out the early access and I found that the chat system is very similar to Everquest in that you actually have to ask questions and bring up subjects rather than clicking on dialogue menus. Sure, you can say “bandits” instead of “tell me about the bandits,” but where’s the fun in that? Nowhere, that’s where.
Developers generally get around to announcing an MMO once it is several years in development. After all, MMOs take a very long time to develop, and are often times at risk of sudden cancellation for one reason or another. In the case of World of Darkness, CCP first announced the MMO way back in 2006 with White Wolf Publishing at Eve Online Fanfest for release in about five or six years. Following a series of layoffs at the team over the past few years, CCP confirmed earlier this year that World of Darkness is still in pre-production and won’t be coming out until 2015 at the earliest.
Just yesterday, CCP once again confirmed layoffs at the World of Darkness development team. The moral of the story? Don’t count your chickens before you have any eggs, or a chicken.
Today’s MMOrning Shot comes neither in the morning, nor is it funny second thing.
In an announcement on the official website, Zenimax Studios has confirmed that Elder Scrolls Online will launch April 4th, 2014 on the PC and Mac platforms. Console gamers will have to wait an additional couple of months, however, as the PS4 and Xbox One releases are not scheduled until June of the same year. The announcement was accompanied by a letter to the community by Game Director Matt Firor.
Worldwide demand for The Elder Scrolls Online is extraordinarily high. This means we need to do a staggered rollout of the different versions of the game to spread out the initial service load and ensure an enjoyable, smooth gameplay experience.
Check out the link below for the full announcement and a brand new trailer.
(Source: Elder Scrolls Online)
Dynasty Warriors Online is the MMO adaptation of the long running hack and slash, and if you didn’t know it existed, well you understand why it is shutting down. Aeria Games posted a notice that the servers will close on January 10th, at around 8pm eastern. Any AP spent from today onward will be rebated back to the player’s account.
We know and understand this is both sad and frustrating. The closure of a game is always hardest for us at Aeria as we recognize the community’s dedication towards the game but regrettably games can’t last forever. We know it’s the community that matters most and we genuinely hope everyone gets to spend some quality time playing the game together with friends before it’s time to say goodbye.
Is it too late to ask for a Gundam Dynasty Warriors MMO?
(Source: Dynasty Warriors Online)
World of Warcraft’s in-game store has arrived in the form of the Battle.net shop. Right now the cash shop is rather limited, offering access to the standard fluff players have come to know and either love or hate from Blizzard’s web client. Vanity pets run about $10, with mounts at $25, although most items from both sets are 50% off for the time being to celebrate the launch. Grab them before they go back to regular price on January 1st.
(Source: Joystiq)
I love my audience, each and every one of you, but let’s be honest: We have a habit of taking jokes out of context when they come from people or organizations that we don’t like. I’m not trying to shame anyone, I fall into that same trap myself from time to time. It’s easy to call someone a liar when they are clearly exaggerating or being facetious.
Still, that didn’t stop people from taking Perfect World Entertainment seriously when they revealed a joke infographic detailing how Neverwinter is actually an annual savings of $25 million USD if you look at it the right way. Or they were just looking for something to complain about. Or they can’t take a joke. Or they have a strange grudge against people they never met who make a game they likely don’t play.
Blade & Soul may not be coming westward for a while, but gamers in North America and Europe should be relieved to see that the game is performing exceptionally well in China. According to MMO Culture, not only is Blade & Soul on its way to surpassing two hundred servers, fifteen of which were added last week, the game has eighteen million active users. To top things off, the number of concurrent online users surpassed 1.8 million. To put that into perspective, if you took 1.8 million people, all of them would be playing Blade & Soul.
Look forward to Blade & Soul’s spike in revenue on NCSoft’s next quarterly report.
(Source: MMO Culture)
Storybricks has become my new grammar peeve for this year. When people refer to the cancelled story-building MMO, they are thinking of the Kingdom of Default project. Storybricks, unless I have read the whole ordeal wrong, refers to the platform through which the AI is given its behaviors. Who could have thought that after Storybricks had its rather disastrous Kickstarter campaign, that the next announcement would be partnering with a major game studio? Yes, Storybricks as a product on its own may not have drawn cash from Kickstarter, but it was certainly promising enough for Sony Online Entertainment to take notice.
Hopefully this will be a success story worth talking about when Everquest Next hits next year.
Eldevin only just launched a few days ago, but the folks at Hunted Cow are already looking toward the future. In a post on the forums, lead programmer Glenn Murphy discussed a few pieces of content that the team is working on. Foremost, Hunted Cow hopes to address the very restrictive camera, a byproduct of the game’s rendering. Eventually players will have better control of the camera, offering a wider range of movement and better visibility of their surroundings. Additionally, since Eldevin is running on an engine built in Java around ten years ago, the game is rendered on a software level. By performing some upgrades, the team hopes to bring the tech forward and allow for hardware rendering.
Also on the bucket list are guilds, an auction house, mail system, housing, pets, and WASD movement.
(Source: Eldevin Forums)
MMO Fallout 