This notice is specifically for our friends in North America. If you pick up a copy of the latest edition of PC Gamer (April), the cover is for Planetside 2. Inside, however, there is an excellent coverage of Planetside 2 including a priority beta key.
Grab a copy, get your key, and add it to your Station account. Sony will contact you further when the beta is about to begin.
Back in August I wrote an article titled “Does Jagex Have Any Enthusiasm For Stellar Dawn?” In it, I referred to the disconnect between the complete lack of information regarding Jagex’s upcoming MMO and the fact that in August of the (at the time) release year, information on the game was virtually nonexistent. No screenshots, very vague trailers, and barely enough information regarding gameplay t fill a synopsis. Considering Jagex’s upcoming release of Transformers Universe, and the fact that Stellar Dawn is already saddled with the major financial disaster that was MechScape, I questioned whether or not Jagex had the will or desire to ever complete Stellar Dawn.
Jagex CEO Mark Gerhard has confirmed today that development on Stellar Dawn has ceased. In a post on the RuneScape forums, Gerhard says that the decision was not made lightly and was driven by the need to concentrate resources on Jagex’s other titles.
Rest assured that we will review the status of the Stellar Dawn project in the future so long as an appetite for the game remains. I hope Jagex can rely on your ongoing support.
So Stellar Dawn’s future is uncertain at best.
(Source: RuneScape forums)
Allowing accounts to trade characters opens the door for a whole host of issues. If you tie offenses to an account, you open the door for someone to simply transfer a character to a new account before the old account is banned, and CCP is specifically addressing just that issue in the latest bot bust.
Following a strike that saw over a thousand bots banned from Eve Online, CCP went on their website to announce a new tool in the fight against ne’er do wells. From now on, accounts hit with a warning for bottling will find their transfer privileges gone.
From now on, and this current wave is included, characters who receive a warning such as this will have the characters locked to the account. This means that once you’ve received a warning for botting your character transfer privileges have been revoked in perpetuity. This is to prevent people trying to circumvent the rules by recycling accounts. </
CCP has promised more to come after Fanfest. Stop botting.
(Source: Eve Online website)
Blizzard is a special case. If any other company were to lay off 600 people, I might put on my tinfoil hat and start predicting the incoming Chapter 11 apocalypse. Meanwhile, while the usual people are screaming of the impending death of Blizzard, it is worth noting that 90% of the layoffs are from the non-development side of the company without impact on the World of Warcraft development.
But there is one factor I wanted to talk about with regard to World of Warcraft, and that is how Blizzard has managed to do a complete reversal of expectations on income versus subscription numbers. In the past year or two since Blizzard’s figures peaked at twelve million, subscription numbers have dropped by nearly two million. Against what you might expect, Blizzard continues to post higher revenue from World of Warcraft thanks to the increasing sale of cash shop vanity pets and mounts.
So while a good few are referring to the layoffs as the death slide of Blizzard, I’m going to need more persuasion before I dust off the old tin foil hat.
Talk about disappointingly bad timing. Just as I started writing about Everquest Online Adventures, Sony has announced the impending shuttering of the title. On March 29th, Sony will be shutting down Everquest Online Adventures, Cosmic Rift, Infantry, and Star Chamber. Everquest Online Adventures launched in 2003 as a Playstation 2 exclusive.
As a reward to the players of EverQuest® Online Adventures, we will be giving you 3 months of Gold Membership in both EverQuest® and EverQuest® II. We greatly appreciate all of you and hope that you choose to join us in another version of the Norrath that we all love. These gold memberships will be available starting on Friday, March 16, 2012.
Everquest Online Adventures has survived a long time despite all odds, being a subscription MMO on an obsolete console. While EQOA is playable on the Playstation 3, doing so requires not only a model that has backwards compatibility, but the physical disk itself. A new copy of EQOA Frontiers has become extremely rare and expensive, while the original version, still playable, can experience issues when Frontiers content is displaying on screen.
(Source: SOE Website)
Black Prophecy exploded on to Gamigo’s library of titles as one of the best looking MMOs on the market, even more surprising when you look at the free to play model. The game has been praised for its high production quality and customization, but rather criticized for lack of variety in quests and poor server stability. Unfortunately, as Games Industry is now reporting, the future of Black Prophecy may rely on an outside provider.
Developer Reakktor Media is insolvent, and is seeking contract work to stay afloat.
“We are in a position to accomplish basically anything what is played right now, even if we were focused in the recent times on multiplayer mobile gaming. However, the MMO area is historically our organically grown core competence.”
If there is any hope for Black Prophecy, Gamigo owns 19% of Reakktor Media and may be a prime candidate to buy it up in case the play for contract work doesn’t generate enough income to keep Reakktor afloat.
(Source: Gamesindustry.biz)
Black Prophecy exploded on to Gamigo’s library of titles as one of the best looking MMOs on the market, even more surprising when you look at the free to play model. The game has been praised for its high production quality and customization, but rather criticized for lack of variety in quests and poor server stability. Unfortunately, as Games Industry is now reporting, the future of Black Prophecy may rely on an outside provider.
Developer Reakktor Media is insolvent, and is seeking contract work to stay afloat.
“We are in a position to accomplish basically anything what is played right now, even if we were focused in the recent times on multiplayer mobile gaming. However, the MMO area is historically our organically grown core competence.”
If there is any hope for Black Prophecy, Gamigo owns 19% of Reakktor Media and may be a prime candidate to buy it up in case the play for contract work doesn’t generate enough income to keep Reakktor afloat.
(Source: Gamesindustry.biz)
In order to balance the circulation of powerful items, many MMOs use what is known as either Bind on Equip or Bind On Pickup. The former allows you to trade the equipment, provided you haven’t used it yet. The latter renders the item unable to be traded once you pick it up, making the item vendor trash if you don’t meet the class restrictions or already have better gear.
For a game like RuneScape, bind on pickup is mostly nonexistent outside of quest-related items, as well as certain sets of items that decay over time. In today’s update, Jagex implemented a daily spinner game that can be played for gold, resources, and even powerful weapons/armor. Squeal of Fortune costs nothing to play and can be played once (twice for members) each day.
So how does a company balance the idea of potentially injecting a mass of free high level gear into the game? Simple, my dear Watson. High level equipment obtained through this mini-game is branded “lucky,” and cannot be traded to other players, or even dropped through the standard death mechanics. If you die with it, however (skulled, losing everything on death) it will be destroyed and irretrievable.
Granted, there is the issue of Jagex’s big traded prize: 10 million gold. I have faith that Jagex is ensuring that the ten million gold isn’t achieved too much.
In their third quarter finances, Funcom predicted a lower revenue for quarter four on account of the initial fervor over Age of Conan’s free to play ending. In the presentation, released today, Funcom reaffirmed this by posting a revenue loss of 11% quarter over quarter.
While Age of Conan remains Funcom’s primary source of income, revenue for the title was down compared to the previous quarter when Funcom launched free to play. Bloodline Champions, Funcom’s MOBA, saw an increase in profits thanks in part to the launch in Russia.
Quarter 1 2012 revenues are expected to be even lower due to a further decreased revenue from Age of Conan. Age of Conan, Anarchy Online, and Bloodline Champions continue to generate a positive cash flow for Funcom, brought down by the costs of developing several titles.
The finances also make reference to “Project A,” an MMO in the conceptual stage.
(Source: Funcom)
This past weekend marked the second closed beta for The Exiled Realm of Arborea, and my second full weekend of ignoring everything in the Area chat channel for the sake of my ignore button. My last preview was mostly done through Twitter, during which I managed to level up to 9 before admittedly logging out.
I know a lot of people say this, and I will happily join the bandwagon in praising how gorgeous TERA looks. TERA is heavily stylized in an eastern setting, and not just because there is a race dedicated to looking like fat, adorable dogs, cats, foxes, raccoon, gerbils, etc.
MMO Fallout 