Author: Admin

Final Fantasy XIV Billing Starts January 6th


We all knew this time would come eventually, when Square Enix would shake off the training wheels and Final Fantasy XIV would transition back to its intended subscription system. Last month, Square announced that billing would start around the time the much anticipated 2.0 update released, around November or December of this year. Today, in an article on Gamasutra, Square is ready to announce a final date: January 6th. According to Gamasutra, the 2.0 update, billed as a remade version of the game, is set to launch sometime in late 2012.

Until version 2.0 is released, players who opt to continue playing will enjoy reduced subscription rates, starting at $6.99 per month with the cost decreasing for 90 and 180 day subscriptions. The Playstation 3 version is expected in early 2013.

Everquest Channels Jagex: Sends Cheaters Final Warning


Players who partake in cheating are hereby put on notice: stop now. This isn’t an idle warning. We have quietly invested significant behind the scenes effort into detecting cheaters quickly and accurately. The vast majority of players enjoy the game on a fair and even playing field. Those who gain unfair advantage over others will not be tolerated.

Everquest is among the elders in our list of MMOs and while the game has seen updates over the years to allow for more a more casual friendly experience, the game still stands as one of the hardest on the market. Unfortunately, the engine and the systems in place have aged far in their years, and the Everquest team has a lot on their plates to deal with hackers (real hackers exploiting the engine, not your run of the mill bug abusers). Well, on the official forums, SOE Piestro has unsheathed his sword (pictured above) and issued a final warning to cheaters: Stop now, or face the +5 banhammer of troll smite.

Ten Ton Hammer published an incredibly in-depth article earlier this year discussing the epidemic that is hacking in Everquest, which you can read here. Scripts and bots that allow players to warp themselves and NPCs, despawn bosses, and more. At the end of the interview, we’re left with a tease that investigations into cheating would ramp up once Veil of Alaris was completed.

Best of luck to the Everquest team in fighting this never ending threat.

Darkfall 2.0 News: Aventurine Stalls On Wipe Announcement


Whenever the topic turns to Darkfall 2.0, I can’t help but think back to how Jagex moved Runescape to Runescape 2 (now just referred to as Runescape) and the huge amount of changes the game went under just during that initial transition. So seeing this quote from Aventurine, I can’t help but hold high hopes for this ambitious update:

After 3 expansions, 2 siege system revamps and 60 major content updates, we decided that we need to do things from scratch to satisfy the thousands of great ideas, suggestions, criticisms coming from the community, and to properly implement the lessons learned by us since Darkfall’s launch.

The Darkfall Epic Blog was updated to showcase a substantial list of functions Aventurine will be overhauling with this update, a reminder that Darkfall 2.0 is far closer to a brand new game than a simple expansion pack. As for the dreaded (or anticipated, depending on who you ask) wipe, Aventurine still has not come to a conclusion, once again noting:

We explained that whether we wipe or don’t wipe, the game is so different that it’s of little significance. You should not think in terms of the current version of Darkfall when it comes to Darkfall 2.0.

The current state of Darkfall 2.0 is nearing a playable version. More to come.

(Source: Darkfall Epic Blog)

Dr. NCSoft Prescribes Extra Lineage II Server


Lineage II’s free to play launched almost as expected: the servers were steamrolled by the Persian Army sized group of newcomers, and naturally players experienced problems reliably logging in and staying logged in last night. In preparation for the transition, NCSoft opened a brand new server (Shilen) and today revealed yet another new server, Magmeld.

Announced on Twitter and on the main website, NCSoft is advertising the server to new players and new players only. In fact, much like Shilen before it, character transfers have been disabled to Magmeld. Similar to Shilen, NCSoft is adding rewards for server firsts.

NCSoft’s next quarterly report should be rather interesting.

Age of Conan 3.1 Brings Headaches, Patches, Server Downtime


Earlier this week Funcom updated Age of Conan to version 3.1, adding some arguably much needed back end maintenance and optimizations to the game as well as the Dreamworld engine that Age of Conan runs on. You can read the patch notes here, as the list of changes are truly massive, but despite how many times the word “performance” appears (six times), the update found players foaming at the mouth toward Funcom.

Players were experiencing the rather generic list of issues: Crashing to desktop, crippling lag, bugs with instances, custom preferences not saving, but boy does it get worse. Developers dread when this bug appears, but players began reporting item attachments in mail being lost in transit. As a result of all of these issues, Funcom took down the Age of Conan servers at 7pm EST last night to implement bug fixes, once again at 2pm this afternoon which also disabled the in-game traders and mailing system, and yet again at 10pm tonight to implement even more fixes. The servers should be down until 4:30am tomorrow morning. The patching of the European servers has also apparently been delayed due to the number of issues present.

Since Age of Conan will be offline all night, we won’t be able to see until tomorrow morning if the fix does any good. Best of luck to the Funcom team, and hopefully the programmers pulling an all-night’er have plenty of coffee in the office.

Lineage II Free To Play Brings Login Woes


Although Lineage II unofficially went free to play a week ago when NCSoft opened up all existing accounts, today brings the full release of Lineage II: Goddess of Destruction. With it brings the Path to Awakening, a system that gives players an incentive to grind through the levels (Lineage II is not an MMO where you can level solely through questing) by offering rewards, and the Goddess of Destruction expansion. You can head over to the Lineage II website to download the client and find more information on the game. Truly Free places forward all content free of charge to anyone willing to participate, while the cash shop is promised to sell only convenience items.

Of course, with the amount of people logging in today and creating accounts, the servers have become rather sluggish and have been coming down regularly. NCWest promises that they are working on the issue, and will be giving more information as it appears. Until then, you shouldn’t have any problem downloading and patching the game.

Video of the ___: Neverwinter Trailer


Is anyone else excited for Neverwinter primarily for the opportunity to create custom dungeons and stories? I hope Cryptic makes a trailer showing off the custom tools next.

Bobby Kotick Blasts The Old Republic: LucasArts Business Tactics


It isn’t often I get to pull out the young Bobby Kotick picture. There are a whole host of reasons Bobby Kotick would want to pick up The Old Republic and throw it directly into the garbage, so I will step back for a few seconds and allow you to come to your own conclusions. Because World of Warcraft is hemorrhaging subscribers? Because Activision Blizzard recently had its stock downgraded due to World of Warcraft? Because The Old Republic is the largest MMO release of the year? Or because of the bitter rivalry between EA and Activision? Maybe it’s because analysts predict that not only will The Old Republic steal users from World of Warcraft, the number figures somewhere around 3-4 million departing Azeroth for Tatooine. Don’t rush, I’ll wait.

Bobby Kotick threw a few jabs at Electronic Arts, by pointing out the LucasArts will be taking some of the MMO’s income home as royalty payments:

“Lucas is going to be the principal beneficiary of the success of Star Wars,” Kotick said. “We’ve been in business with Lucas for a long time and the economics will always accrue to the benefit of Lucas, so I don’t really understand how the economics work for Electronic Arts.”

Thank you, Bobby Kotick. I think. Considering that Electronic Arts has had dealings with LucasArts in the past, they know what they’re getting into. Also remember that Bioware has dealt with LucasArts in creating the original Knights of the Old Republic (the second handled by Obsidian Entertainment).

Roma Victor Developers Working On Sandbox MMO


Do you remember Roma Victor? I do, and was very disheartened when the company finally shut the servers down back in January 2011. But with all night comes dawn, and the folks at RedBedlam wanted to make it clear that this was not the last we’d heard of them:When I was a little filly and the sun was going down

RedBedlam is currently focussed exclusively on developing projects for third parties. It is worth bearing in mind however that a great deal of work was put into the project codenamed ‘Roma Victor 2’, and we still have every intention of releasing a top quality historically authentic ‘remake’ at a later date. All user data from the original Roma Victor has been backed up and stored safely. It is our intention that this data will be used in a future Roma Victor game to ensure that our original community will have new assets proportional to their previous standing.

Well those of you waiting on a Roma Victor 2 can step to the side, because RedBedlam has announced The Missing Ink, a free to play browser/tablet MMO coming next year that features players taking the role of a Paper Mari0 style game in a 3D sandbox world (your characters are paper thin) where players can explore and build and fight in pvp combat.

You can find the announcement on Eurogamer here. The Missink Ink will be available to play when it is released as an alpha next month.

Ubisoft: 95% of Our Consumers Are Pirates


Here is a quick lesson on public relations: Try not to outright insult an entire group of your userbase. Ghost Recon Online, the free to play title coming out on PC and WiiU, is meant to replace the console version coming next year, which will not be ported to PC. In an interview with PC Gamer, Ubisoft’s Sébastien Arnoult doesn’t just think that a large portion of Ubisoft’s PC consumers are pirates, he knows they are:

“When we started Ghost Recon Online we were thinking about Ghost Recon: Future Solider; having something ported in the classical way without any deep development, because we know that 95% of our consumers will pirate the game. So we said okay, we have to change our mind.”

And perhaps not implying that a certain group is lower class.

“We’re adapting the offer to the PC market. I don’t like to compare PC and Xbox boxed products because they have a model on that platform that is clearly meant to be €60’s worth of super-Hollywood content. On PC, we’re adapting our model to the demand.”

I do not support piracy, but it boggles the mind to see how Ubisoft has treated its PC customers over the past decade or so, with buggy and unfinished ports, draconian DRM that has managed to punish their legitimate buyers (Remember Starforce anyone?), and then turn around and wonder why the same group you’ve ostracized for years on end has come to resent you. I don’t think I have to remind that Ubisoft’s latest game was met with horrid PR because it was released in an unplayable state as a substandard port, with DRM that Ubisoft had promised to those preordering that the game would not contain.

Rock Paper Shotgun summed it up best:

So, there you go. Mettra doesn’t want your money, thinks you’re bitching when you want to play his game, and that at least over half a million quid is of no use to him. We have, as you might imagine, contacted Ubisoft to see how they feel about 50,000 sales.