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En Masse Entertainment Bringing Streaming To TERA

Hey, remember when En Masse Entertainment was offering a demo version of TERA on Gaikai? And then remember when Sony purchased Gaikai and shut everything down? We didn’t either, but luckily that doesn’t mean you have to miss out on The Exiled Realm of A Massive Installation just because TERA is about fifty gigabytes. In a press release sent out today, En Masse Entertainment has revealed a partnership with Happy Cloud Incorporated, to bring TERA to players devoid of time and bandwidth. Rather than having to download the 22gb file required to install TERA, players simply boot up the application and let the game download the files it needs as they are needed.

“Improving our user onboarding process for TERA: Rising is a priority for us, and using Happy Cloud’s system is an easy way for us to get more players into TERA’s immersive, 3D world,” said Soo Min Park, COO at En Masse Entertainment. “Taking a graphically rich, fast-paced game such as TERA: Rising, which contains hundreds of hours of gameplay, and delivering the bytes in the order they’re needed is no small task, but we’re confident this will provide an even better experience for our fast growing legion of fans.”

Happy Cloud’s download system is available now through the TERA website once a user registers for an account. As far as MMO Fallout knows, this service only applies to the North American version and there has not (to our knowledge) been any announcement by Gameforge in Europe.

(Source: En Masse Entertainment Press Release)

Disney Shuts Down LucasArts

In a truly disappointing move, Disney has confirmed to Game Informer that the game publishing subsidiary LucasArts has been shut down, accompanied by an expected number of layoffs associated with such a change. Instead, LucasArts will move toward licensing rather than developing games based on the Star Wars franchise.

“After evaluating our position in the games market, we’ve decided to shift LucasArts from an internal development to a licensing model, minimizing the company’s risk while achieving a broader portfolio of quality Star Wars games. As a result of this change, we’ve had layoffs across the organization. We are incredibly appreciative and proud of the talented teams who have been developing our new titles.”

Unfortunately this likely means the cancellation of the upcoming, and extremely beautiful looking, Star Wars 1313. As Game Informer points out, the shuttering wasn’t exactly unexpected, with the absence of both the Force Unleashed and Battlefront series, not to mention the total lack of any serious Indiana Jones games in the past few years outside of LEGO Indiana Jones.

MMO Fallout hopes for fast employment by those affected by the layoffs.

Dungeon Fighter Online Shutting Down In North America

Dungeon Fighter Online launched in 2009 in North America and despite some complaints about issues with gold spam, it was actually a fun game to play. Despite the shortcomings of gold farmers and hackers, DFO was a solid side scrolling hack and slash game, one that probably deserved a much warmer reception than it apparently received. Sadly fortune does not always find us, and Dungeon Fighter Online never caught on with the kind of audience Nexon expected, and the developer has posted a notice on the official website that services will be coming to an end on June 13th. The ramping down will begin on April 11th with the closure of the game’s cash shop.

For more than three years, our teams worked hard in hopes of building a strong community through new content updates, service fixes, and events. We tirelessly battled hackers and farmers. We even had the honor of presenting the game to you at E3 and PAX. However, Dungeon Fighter Online was not able to grow beyond its very special and proud core following. Sadly, Dungeon Fighter Online has not attracted enough player interest to properly service the game. Internally, we struggled deeply with the popularity of DFO in North America as the title is immensely popular overseas. For more than three years, we went through many milestones and several pushes before we came to this very difficult decision.

Information regarding compensation will be coming on April 11th.

We will compensate the purchase of Permanent, Durational and Consumable items purchased within the past six months. The dollar value is correlated with the time of purchase. Please note that this compensation is non-transferable.

(Source: Dungeon Fighter Online)

Greed Monger Threatens MMORPG.com With Lawsuit, Game Unlisted

Greed Monger has been completely unlisted from MMORPG.com following a request from Electric Crow Games. According to Managing Editor Bill Murphy, the MMO news website was contacted with a request to remove negative posts, with legal action against the website threatened if the requests were not made. MMORPG.com’s policy is to completely remove a game’s listing when such a request is made.

Bill Murphy commented:

In case this hasn’t been answered yet, yes. He emailed me directly and asked us to remove the negative posts about the game. He also hinted at taking legal action if we didn’t remove the posts of our users, and we decided we didn’t need a baseless lawsuit.

If you want to blame someone for the removal of the game listing and forums, blame Jason Appleton. But when someone threatens us with legal action, we can either a.) ignore it or b.) react with what we think is appropriate. In Greed Monger’s case, it’s probably just better to igore its existence as a website.

I wish the Greed Monger devs well, but I’m not too thrilled with how they handled the negativity our forum users tossed their way. If they can’t take the criticism and claims of trolls, they’re in for a rude awakening in this industry.

Maybe one day we’ll re-add the game to our list, but that depends on whether or not our users are allowed to post about it without the site being under threat of legal recourse.

This is not the first time a game has been unlisted from MMORPG.com. World War II Online was removed at the request of Cornered Rat Software just recently, and Mourning was famously removed in response to Loud Ant Software abusing MMORPG.com staff.

(Source: MMORPG.com)

Total Sum Of My EGO Rewards

Defiance has launched, and if you are considering buying the game you might be interested in the game’s My EGO rewards. By entering in 120 easily obtained codes, you have access to all of the following perks, including boosts to your weapon skills and an increase in inventory slots. These perks work on all versions of Defiance, console players simply need to link their accounts to the Trion accounts that they unlock the codes on.

+6 total inventory slots
Pistol skill +1
Light machine gun +1
Sniper rifle skill +1
Assault rifle skill +1
Shotgun skill +1
Firestorm unlocked
Thundershock unlocked
TMW Hannibal 650R unlocked
Scavenger perk
Basic lockbox
Bonus ark salvage
Title: VBI Recruit
Title: VBI Operative

Players who pre-purchased on Steam will also enjoy several additional bonuses:

7-day exp boost
Outlander Outfit
Steam exclusive sniper rifle
Exclusive titles
+10 inventory slots
ATV Mount
Exclusive vehicle
Free copy of Rift
Discount on DLC season pass

The War Z Shutdown Following Security Breach

OP Productions has issued a warning to its customers via email that the game and forums have been shut down temporarily following a security breach being discovered. Hackers allegedly got ahold of email addresses, encyrpted passwords, however payment information was not exposed as all payments are processed through a third party.

We have engaged outside experts and investigators to assist in our investigation of this incident and committed substantial resources to that effort. We have identified number of ways access was obtained and have enhanced our security to improve game and forum safety. We are undertaking a full review and update of our servers and the services we use and adding additional security mechanisms. In addition to this post, we are emailing all of our players just to make certain that everyone is informed and has been advised to change their passwords.

You can find the full security alert at the link below.

(Source: The War Z)

EA Sends Origin Coupons In Response To Playstation Store Downtime

Update: EA has retracted its free game offer, noting that the original notice was created in mistake. EA CFO Blake Jorgensen reached out to MMO Fallout to explain what was simply a case of mistaken identity:

Electronic Arts stands at the head of a large number of subsidiaries, and it’s become so hard to keep track of how many we’ve had to apologize for that we decided to set up an automated system we call the Apology Bot 3000. Unfortunately the system still has some kinks to work out and sent out the coupons under the false pretense that EA owns Sony. We apologize for the mistaken apology and to compensate our users, we will be sending each of our members an unlock code for a free copy of Peggle on the Playstation Vita.

Original Story: In an unexpected and unexplainable move, Electronic Arts has reached out in apology to Playstation 3 owners affected by today’s Playstation Store downtime, and has offered the console users a free Origin game as compensation for their frustration and time. Gamers are admittedly confused by the sudden move, since EA is neither responsible for the Playstation Store, or are they at fault for the store’s extended downtime. Still, it’s rude to look a gift horse in the mouth, and EA is offering players a free copy of Battleforge, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Need For Speed World, and Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes.

We will hopefully have a comment from Sony on the matter once they stop screening our calls.

TERA Unveils Small Ass Monsters

The folks at En Masse Entertainment have unveiled an upcoming update to TERA, introducing the Small Ass Monster. Players will be able to use the brand new “jump and squash” technique to destroy these new creatures, and take a break from the daily grind of fighting Big Ass Monsters.

[Community] The Move That Saved The Old Republic

Massively has a great article covering James Ohlen’s comments at GDC about how free to play saved The Old Republic.

When free-to-play launched in November, it “blew all expectations out of the water,” said Ohlen. Subscriptions started going up again. Concurrent players on the servers went way up. Both of those statistics continue to rise. As Ohlen put it, TOR is the second biggest subscription MMORPG in the western world, it has had two million new accounts since the F2P launch, thousands of new players try out the game everyday, and TOR is one of the largest microtransaction money-makers for publisher EA.

I’m interested in finding out what EA’s largest microtransaction money-maker is, assuming The Old Republic being “just one of the largest” doesn’t put it at #1.

(Source: Massively)

MMOrning Shots: 8-Bit Avengers

If you haven’t had a chance to play through Guild Wars 2’s April Fool’s update, you have the entirety of the month to do so.

MMOrning Shots is a (somewhat) daily line of screenshots from various MMOs. Most are taken in-house , but if you would like your screenshot featured, send it over to contact[at]mmofallout[dot]com with the subject “MMorning Shots.”

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