You may know Multiverse from…well you probably don’t know about Multiverse. You may know about the game engine because of two specific IPs set to have MMOs on the platform: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Firefly. Those looking forward to questing alongside Buffy or traveling the stars in the distant future will have to turn elsewhere. Multiverse has shut down production due to lack of funding, and has ceased operations as of December.
Although thousands of developers showed interest in the Multiverse Platform, Multiverse wasn’t able to achieve a profitable business model. As a result, Multiverse ceased operations in December 2011 due to lack of funding.
This isn’t the end of the Multiverse platform, however. According to the website, a group of people are working to start a nonprofit foundation to take over the platform and to support developers who still wish to use the engine.
Color me intrigued. There’s a bit of a hubbub going on around The Old Republic over an issue I can’t quite wrap my head around. If you haven’t been following the blogosphere, a few players pointed out to the press that they were temporarily banned from The Old Republic for looting chests on high level planets with a low level character. Patiently, I opted to wait for more information to come out before writing a story. For starters, the emails were shady looking, there was no true confirmation to their authenticity, and even then there was likely more to the story than we had been told.
There is, but not in the manner you would have assumed (glitches). Stephen Reid (of the Bioware Reids) went on the forums to discuss the bans:
To be completely clear, while players may choose to travel to Ilum earlier than the recommended level (40+) and may loot containers if they can get to them, in the cases of those customers that were warned or temporarily suspended, they were systematically and repeatedly looting containers in very high numbers resulting in the game economy becoming unbalanced.
From extensively reading Reddit and the thread linked above, I’ve sussed out that two categories of accounts were targeted: Gold farmers and exploiters. The former, permanently banned, were using throwaway characters to exploit the somewhat sparse grounds of Ilum and gather vast quantities of credits (and crafting materials?) to sell. The latter, who had received temporary bans, were “systematically and repeatedly” looting containers.
The issue here is that there is no mention by Stephen Reid of an existing bug, but the offenders are described as exploiting the system, and this is what is confusing people because it paints the picture as Bioware banning players for spending too much time camping, and in Reid’s case, being rude by taking all the loot for themselves. The discussion by Reid goes on to reference this as outside what Bioware considers “normal gameplay,” and is thus punishable.
The actions taken by these accounts – and again, this is a relatively low number – were not ‘normal gameplay’. Everything you have listed above is what we’d consider ‘normal gameplay’.
After twenty four odd pages on the linked thread above, someone finally pointed out the exact nature of the exploit: In Ilum, when control moves from Republic to Empire and vice versa, the loot boxes respawn immediately. Seeing the potential for profit, players have set up a system on servers where they simply trade control back and forth with guild members out on the field to collect the boxes. This is what Bioware is referring to by banning players for exploiting the treasure chests, and in that case I would support the temporary suspensions as long as Bioware is warning the players beforehand, which they appear to be doing, or if the activity is truly as impossible for a legitimate player to stumble upon as is being claimed.
The issue here isn’t that Bioware is slapping offenders on the wrist, but that their explanation for the offense itself is painting an inaccurate picture in player’s minds, one that is not endearing to Bioware’s case. In any case, this exploit needs to be patched out.
Even if you hate CCP, even if you have no interest in Eve Online or DUST 514, you have to admit that the very concept of an space ship MMO on the PC interacting in real time with a first person shooter on the Playstation 3 is astounding and exciting. DUST is expected to release in Spring 2012, at least according to Wikipedia, and registration for the beta test has begun for Eve Online subscribers. Hopefully CCP will follow the proud Sony tradition of opening the beta to Playstation Plus subscribers.
On the positive side, it appears you will not be forced to join a corporation to play the game. In addition to corporation vs corporation and contract fights, players should be able to join random matches. The corporation vs corporation matches, however, will be for territory control and the aforementioned contracts with Eve Online players.
I know what you’re thinking, “Omali I don’t like to play graphical spreadsheets. I want Eve Online’s unforgiving world but in a more relatable game.” World of Darkness, based on the tabletop RPG, is supposed to be just as hardcore as Eve Online and the upcoming DUST 514. Players live in a world run by immortal vampires, and if the combination of CCP and the existing lore is to be reckoned with, World of Darkness is set to bring forward a deadly world of politics, player interaction, open world combat, and perma-death.
There is still no word on a general release date for World of Darkness, and 2012 seems out of the question for now.
Too many colons in the title! During the time Bioware wasn’t busy absorbing every sub-developer of Electronic Arts, the company was busy working away at their first and arguably one of the most risky entrances into the MMO genre. The Old Republic is the labor of love of a company that has never put out an MMO, let alone having not developed a multi-player game since 2002. But with the announcement of The Old Republic, at least we knew that Bioware would be consistent, and that we could expect heavy voice acting, a whole load of plot and subplots, and an incredible soundtrack.
I’ve found that The Old Republic is best played as Bioware once referred to it: Knights of the Old Republic 3, but online in a persistent world. The Old Republic is heavily instanced, and while that is for good reasoning, it’s a bit obnoxious when you walk into each city and see a number of buildings that cannot be entered because they are locked by class or by level. However, as it stands, all personal story-related buildings are instanced to ensure that the player is able to immerse themselves, and that means no entry if you have no business there. Still, the game does its best to present a compelling and immersive world, with your companion making comments in various areas of the map.
The first thing you’ll notice is the game’s voice acting, more so its very impressive quantity. Everyone has voice acting, and every quest you take, big or small, has a full dialog tree to accompany it. As with the KOTOR series, you are given the choice from time to time to go down the light or darkside path, which can mean continuing diplomacy or simply halting the conversation and murdering some NPCs. Where Bioware continues their trend of deep plot twists is in the sense that while your choices are split between dark and light side, your goals often are not. For example, the light side path may tell you to report your quest giver to the Republic for smuggling goods, but that means having a good friend arrested. On the Imperial side, while your Sith Trooper may want to just kill everyone in his path, often times the Empire would rather you left a few alive to bring back for interrogation. The points go into your light side/dark side pool, and unlock equipment as you gain ranks.
As far as game play goes, expect nothing particularly groundbreaking. Your story carries you through clearly defined hubs, from planet to planet as you level up. If you’ve played an MMO before, you know the procedure of entering a new hub, gathering all of the quests that send you conveniently in the same general areas, and turn them in until there are no more quests and your main story arc leads you somewhere else. The pain of this grind is lessened a lot by the inclusion of a story that will actually interest you. No more reading a long piece of text (and by that I of course mean slamming the “accept” button), and if you really don’t care about the story, the cutscenes can be sped through by holding down the spacebar.
In combat, The Old Republic follows the prime directive of hotkeys, with the notable exception of no auto-attack function, and this is where The Old Republic is falling short. While combat is functional and hardly a deal breaker, it is sluggish and slow to react. Again, not to a game breaking extent and one that Bioware should be able to patch, but enough that it is easily noticed and in high-intensity situations where you are attacking groups of five, six, or seven mobs, can be quite aggravating. Couple the inherent system and throw in if you are experiencing latency problems, and you have a recipe for button mashing. The fact that you always have a companion available allows for every class to be competent without issue. For instance, my smuggler is a damage dealer and healer while my companion is a tank. While he takes the punishment, I deal out damage and occasionally heal him.
Crafting is a hands-off component of the game, which some will enjoy and others will not. Players will wind up with three skills from an enormous list from three categories: Crafting, Mission, and Gathering. Gathering skills are what you find in other MMOs, nodes in the world that offer raw materials. Crafting is self-explanatory. Mission skills are where you send your companions on mini-quests to find resources. Each skill has respective suggested skills in other categories, so it’s best to choose three skills that fit together. All of the skills however, are leveled on a set it and forget it system, where you set up your crafting queue and then go about your business as your companion on board does his work. You can issue commands from anywhere, and the items are delivered directly into your inventory. Talk about convenient! In my case, the crafting is so hands off that I often find myself forgetting that it exists until the area I’ve entered has resource nodes that have outleveled my skill.
Why You Aren’t Playing Star Wars: The Old Republic
1.) Origin: You don’t need it, even if you order through Origin.com. As some of you know from my head start experiment, I ordered off of Origin.com, even with my intense loathing of EA’s Origin service. I never had to touch Origin once, as when I purchased the digital edition it sent me a link to download the client. Not once during the beta, head start, or live game did I ever have to touch Origin, and I placed this first on the list because I know how people feel about that platform.
2.) Space, where no one can hear you complain about how boring space is. I didn’t expect much out of The Old Republic’s starfighting for the same reason I never expected much out of Bioware’s previous game’s starfighting. Fighting in space is on rails, and was special for me for the first or second time I played through a mission. Sure, it looks pretty, but at the end of the day it’s just a mini-game. A fun mini-game for some, and even if you have absolutely no interest in space combat, you can easily pass these missions up.
3.) Again, Star Wars: The Old Republic breaks ground in storytelling, not combat. For players seeking a sandbox title, this is not the game you are looking for. If you don’t mind the traditional MMO approach of quest hubs, social areas, occasionally grouping up for heroic missions, flashpoints, and an endgame that revolves around player vs player combat and grinding for gear, you will find a lot to enjoy in The Old Republic. Even if you don’t enjoy the endgame grind, you can always start a new character and go through their individual story, skipping the repeated side-missions.
Bioware handled the launch of The Old Republic stunningly, between the staggered head start invitations and the servers specifically capped to even out the populations. There are some crippling bugs still in the game, including a few planets having problems with memory leaks. I can say for what it is worth that Bioware has been taking a very aggressive stance with releasing patches, at a rate of once every other day or so with varying degrees of extensive work, and regular maintenance on the servers themselves. There have been instances of one or two servers coming down for unscheduled maintenance, but these are usually fixed within an hour or two.
I know I say in every Why Aren’t You Playing that the title is worth looking into, but this is one of the few times I will extend that to paying the full $60 box price and a subscription. Take it from someone as cheap as I am, this is worth the cost. If you don’t like MMOs, do as I said earlier: Play it as if it is Knights of the Old Republic 3, ignore the social functions and heroic/flashpoint quests, and play for the story arcs. If Bioware plays their cards right, future expansions of The Old Republic could fulfill their desire of TOR being KOTOR 3,4,5,6,7, and beyond.
At the time of this writing, it is 4:00pm on Sunday, January 1st 2011. Of the servers online, there are 37 North American and 27 European servers listed as full, 31 NA and 23 EU servers listed as very heavy, 13 NA and 15 EU servers listed as heavy, 30 NA and 26 EU servers listed as Standard, and 13 NA servers listed as light.
Too many colons in the title! During the time Bioware wasn’t busy absorbing every sub-developer of Electronic Arts, the company was busy working away at their first and arguably one of the most risky entrances into the MMO genre. The Old Republic is the labor of love of a company that has never put out an MMO, let alone having not developed a multi-player game since 2002. But with the announcement of The Old Republic, at least we knew that Bioware would be consistent, and that we could expect heavy voice acting, a whole load of plot and subplots, and an incredible soundtrack.
I’ve found that The Old Republic is best played as Bioware once referred to it: Knights of the Old Republic 3, but online in a persistent world. The Old Republic is heavily instanced, and while that is for good reasoning, it’s a bit obnoxious when you walk into each city and see a number of buildings that cannot be entered because they are locked by class or by level. However, as it stands, all personal story-related buildings are instanced to ensure that the player is able to immerse themselves, and that means no entry if you have no business there. Still, the game does its best to present a compelling and immersive world, with your companion making comments in various areas of the map.
The first thing you’ll notice is the game’s voice acting, more so its very impressive quantity. Everyone has voice acting, and every quest you take, big or small, has a full dialog tree to accompany it. As with the KOTOR series, you are given the choice from time to time to go down the light or darkside path, which can mean continuing diplomacy or simply halting the conversation and murdering some NPCs. Where Bioware continues their trend of deep plot twists is in the sense that while your choices are split between dark and light side, your goals often are not. For example, the light side path may tell you to report your quest giver to the Republic for smuggling goods, but that means having a good friend arrested. On the Imperial side, while your Sith Trooper may want to just kill everyone in his path, often times the Empire would rather you left a few alive to bring back for interrogation. The points go into your light side/dark side pool, and unlock equipment as you gain ranks.
As far as game play goes, expect nothing particularly groundbreaking. Your story carries you through clearly defined hubs, from planet to planet as you level up. If you’ve played an MMO before, you know the procedure of entering a new hub, gathering all of the quests that send you conveniently in the same general areas, and turn them in until there are no more quests and your main story arc leads you somewhere else. The pain of this grind is lessened a lot by the inclusion of a story that will actually interest you. No more reading a long piece of text (and by that I of course mean slamming the “accept” button), and if you really don’t care about the story, the cutscenes can be sped through by holding down the spacebar.
In combat, The Old Republic follows the prime directive of hotkeys, with the notable exception of no auto-attack function, and this is where The Old Republic is falling short. While combat is functional and hardly a deal breaker, it is sluggish and slow to react. Again, not to a game breaking extent and one that Bioware should be able to patch, but enough that it is easily noticed and in high-intensity situations where you are attacking groups of five, six, or seven mobs, can be quite aggravating. Couple the inherent system and throw in if you are experiencing latency problems, and you have a recipe for button mashing. The fact that you always have a companion available allows for every class to be competent without issue. For instance, my smuggler is a damage dealer and healer while my companion is a tank. While he takes the punishment, I deal out damage and occasionally heal him.
Crafting is a hands-off component of the game, which some will enjoy and others will not. Players will wind up with three skills from an enormous list from three categories: Crafting, Mission, and Gathering. Gathering skills are what you find in other MMOs, nodes in the world that offer raw materials. Crafting is self-explanatory. Mission skills are where you send your companions on mini-quests to find resources. Each skill has respective suggested skills in other categories, so it’s best to choose three skills that fit together. All of the skills however, are leveled on a set it and forget it system, where you set up your crafting queue and then go about your business as your companion on board does his work. You can issue commands from anywhere, and the items are delivered directly into your inventory. Talk about convenient! In my case, the crafting is so hands off that I often find myself forgetting that it exists until the area I’ve entered has resource nodes that have outleveled my skill.
Why You Aren’t Playing Star Wars: The Old Republic
1.) Origin: You don’t need it, even if you order through Origin.com. As some of you know from my head start experiment, I ordered off of Origin.com, even with my intense loathing of EA’s Origin service. I never had to touch Origin once, as when I purchased the digital edition it sent me a link to download the client. Not once during the beta, head start, or live game did I ever have to touch Origin, and I placed this first on the list because I know how people feel about that platform.
2.) Space, where no one can hear you complain about how boring space is. I didn’t expect much out of The Old Republic’s starfighting for the same reason I never expected much out of Bioware’s previous game’s starfighting. Fighting in space is on rails, and was special for me for the first or second time I played through a mission. Sure, it looks pretty, but at the end of the day it’s just a mini-game. A fun mini-game for some, and even if you have absolutely no interest in space combat, you can easily pass these missions up.
3.) Again, Star Wars: The Old Republic breaks ground in storytelling, not combat. For players seeking a sandbox title, this is not the game you are looking for. If you don’t mind the traditional MMO approach of quest hubs, social areas, occasionally grouping up for heroic missions, flashpoints, and an endgame that revolves around player vs player combat and grinding for gear, you will find a lot to enjoy in The Old Republic. Even if you don’t enjoy the endgame grind, you can always start a new character and go through their individual story, skipping the repeated side-missions.
Bioware handled the launch of The Old Republic stunningly, between the staggered head start invitations and the servers specifically capped to even out the populations. There are some crippling bugs still in the game, including a few planets having problems with memory leaks. I can say for what it is worth that Bioware has been taking a very aggressive stance with releasing patches, at a rate of once every other day or so with varying degrees of extensive work, and regular maintenance on the servers themselves. There have been instances of one or two servers coming down for unscheduled maintenance, but these are usually fixed within an hour or two.
I know I say in every Why Aren’t You Playing that the title is worth looking into, but this is one of the few times I will extend that to paying the full $60 box price and a subscription. Take it from someone as cheap as I am, this is worth the cost. If you don’t like MMOs, do as I said earlier: Play it as if it is Knights of the Old Republic 3, ignore the social functions and heroic/flashpoint quests, and play for the story arcs. If Bioware plays their cards right, future expansions of The Old Republic could fulfill their desire of TOR being KOTOR 3,4,5,6,7, and beyond.
At the time of this writing, it is 4:00pm on Sunday, January 1st 2011. Of the servers online, there are 37 North American and 27 European servers listed as full, 31 NA and 23 EU servers listed as very heavy, 13 NA and 15 EU servers listed as heavy, 30 NA and 26 EU servers listed as Standard, and 13 NA servers listed as light.
Given the recent malicious activity that has been taking place in-game, it is with much disappointment that we announce that we will take the Mabinogi game service offline temporarily while we work to remedy these issues.
This isn’t the first time Nexon has shut down Mabinogi to combat real world trading and bots, they did it back in October for somewhere around a week. Not that hearing one of Nexon’s games having problems with real money trading and rampant botting is surprising, to say the least, but hearing that the publisher is making some tough decisions to eradicate the trouble makers is worth an ear.
Mabinogi went down yesterday before 7pm pacific with no estimated time to return. We will update with a new post when more information is available.
Please do know that we do not make this decision lightly. In light of all the tickets and forum posts (which we do read) of this malicious activity, we feel that we have no choice but to take the game down in order to prevent any further malicious action.
If there was ever a game to give Diablo 3 a run for its money, it is Lineage Eternal. Fully revealed late this year, Lineage Eternal brings players back to the days of Lineage with even more chaos and destruction. We were treated to a fourteen minute video of pure gameplay, with cutscenes, massive battles, and showcasing the game’s physics and destruction engine. With the success of Lineage and Lineage II, especially in the Korean markets, Lineage Eternal looks to bring back the days of dealing destruction on a massive scale.
We eagerly await more Lineage Eternal information in the coming year.
Do I need to elaborate? Guild Wars promises to give something everyone can enjoy, from the hardcore player vs player to the MMO fan who simply wants an open world to explore. Arenanet promises to build a dynamic world without subscriptions or heavy grind, world PvP, and the ripple effect. In the case of dynamic events, considerably similar to the public quests of Warhammer Online but on a much larger scale, the actions of players will determine in what direction each phase of the dynamic events move.
Guild Wars has a very strong following of gamers, like it or not, and will prove to be among the biggest releases of 2012.
2011 was more a year of free to play conversions than new games releasing, but 2012 is looking to be quite an interesting year. Jagex is set to release their second MMO, TERA may finally come to the west, and Star Trek Online heads free to play in January.
Planetside 2 is the first big budget MMO to take the reigns of Planetside since, well, Planetside. While Hi-Rez studios works on the well anticipated Tribes Universe, Sony Online Entertainment this year will (hopefully) roll out the renovated, upgraded, and more efficient massive action shooter. Sony is promising even bigger battles, and has been showing off concept art and trailers left and right. In addition to satisfying Planetside fans, Planetside 2 also has something to offer us more traditional MMO gamers, the Forge Light engine. Sony is using the Forge Light engine to build Everquest Next, so Everquest fans will have a little piece of what they can expect when that MMO hits store shelves at some point in the distant future.
I thought I would be celebrating this with Stellar Dawn, but ever since Geoff Iddison announced back in 2009 that MechScape would be ready that year, I’ve been sitting patiently with my flags and goofy hat with the soda cans and straws hanging out for Jagex to finally come out and have two MMOs running at the same time. If anything else, I’m just interested if they can pull off supporting two MMOs at the same time. After all, their second major project, FunOrb, was more or less abandoned after two years when Jagex got tired with their new toy.
So Transformers is really getting my attention, especially since Jagex also has Stellar Dawn in development (which was supposed to release in 2011), making for three MMOs they will have running concurrently. As for Stellar Dawn, like I’ve said before, maybe they just lost interest after the high-cost cancellation of MechScape.
The Board proposes that the AGM resolve in order to enable the Board to provide the company with working capital to authorize the Board, during the period until the next AGM, to decide on the issue of a maximum a number of shares and / or convertible bonds and / or warrants entitling to convert to each new subscription, or involves the issuance of a maximum a number of shares to an amount not to exceed 2 million…
Looking to buy stock in Star Vault? They are looking to sell. Announced in an investor’s email, Star Vault will be holding a meeting on January 13th to discuss and vote on the sale of up to 2 million more stocks in order to acquire more “working capital.” The board notes the obvious downside of issuing these stocks, namely that it will dilute the value for existing stockholders.
The measure requires two thirds of the board to vote yes before the new stocks can be sold.
Convincing an MMO developer to release their subscriber numbers is difficult, if not downright impossible. After all, since World of Warcraft came in and scooped up twelve million people, somehow players have decided to use the most popular MMO in existence as a benchmark for success. Still, Eve Online is one of the big players remaining on the pure subscription section, boasting three hundred thousand players a few years ago. Earlier this year, CCP pointed out after the hubbub over their in-game cash shop that Eve Online was still growing year over year.
In an email to past subscribers, CCP is offering a reactivation for the new years. In the email, they mention “Join CCP Games and the 350,000 subscribers of the Eve Community…” So much for the “Eve Online is dying” crowd.
MMO Fallout 