http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqqT-redSJ0
Hello ladies. Look at your video, now look back. This is what your video could look like if you parodied Old Spice. This advertisement for Rift may not be the most unique, but at least worth a chuckle or two.
здравствуйте! I’ve been spending the past few days not on homework or work-work, on figuring out exactly how I want to inject videos into MMO Fallout, as I’ve promised many times in the past. My first video, that I’ll hopefully release in the next week or so, is a quick look at the Sony Authenticator. Since my skills with improvisation in front of a microphone are essentially zilch, I’m taking the old fashioned model of writing out a script.
Needless to say, what did I miss?
Any game with player vs player of any kind faces this issue: How liberally do we allow ganking? A majority of games take the approach of rule-bound servers, where players can choose from PvE (only in certain areas) or PvP (virtually everywhere). A select few, including Darkfall and Mortal Online, have mandatory PvP all over, with the exception of small safe zones. Bioware’s statement on the matter:
To put it bluntly: If that is your fantasy, you will have to find another game, because The Old Republic will not cater to that. For every player who enjoys that particular fantasy, there are a lot of players that don’t enjoy being on the receiving end of it. That’s a fact, a business lesson learned from existing, still running MMOs.
Good.
The Shard Axe: An Eberron Novel is hardly out of the ordinary if you’ve read a Dungeons and Dragons book before. The story follows Sentinel Marshal Sabira d’Deneith, and surprisingly requires little knowledge of the world inside. The story does a great job of explaining places and people, in great detail, to newcomers of the series, and doesn’t tie-in with the game at all aside from a few locations. The action is quick, brutal, and author Marsheila Rockwell does a wonderful job painting believable characters in mythical situations that are just magical enough to still be grounded in some sort of realism.
The Shard Axe is a decently sized book at 352 pages, and is a must for any fan of Dungeons and Dragons novels, fantasy novels, or the MMO. You can buy it in paperback for around $7.99, or through your favorite ebook app for a minor price decrease.
Now this is a surprising story. As a fan of the Dragon Quest series, the announcement of Dragon Quest X on the WiiU is about all the incentive I need to buy the console when it comes out next year. To add icing to the cake, however, the news feeds are buzzing that the game will feature persistent online multiplayer with components reminiscent of an MMO. The game, developed by Square Enix, apparently pairs up to the title enough that the game will carry a subscription fee in Japan (although this will likely be changed for American/European releases).
All I can say is where do I sign up?
As it turns out, Heatwave Interactive has more plans for libraries than simply burning them down while murdering your family and leaving you for dead. Announced last week, Gods & Heroes is exiting the digital world and entering the world of paperback novels. Book I, titled “Blood and Laurels” is set to release at some point in the future by a nondescript author who has won an award. You can read an excerpt with the rest of the announcement here, with another excerpt to release on September 16th.
I have a feeling this is going to be one of those book-learning Week in Reviews.
I haven’t played Star Wars Galaxies since my last article on the game, but with my newly renewed Station Pass, I will be rebooting the previously weekly series as a bi-weekly piece.
You may already be familiar with CrimeCraft (if not, I would start here), in which case Bleedout will also be a known name. Last year, Vogster teamed up with Mike Kennedy and a whole host of artists (Nathan Fox, Zach Howard, Sanford Greene, etc) to write and produce the cutscenes for the MMO shooter’s single-player campaign story. What you may not be as aware of is that Vogster paired up with Archaia Entertainment to turn the animated-comic style scenes into a hardcover book: Thus the CrimeCraft graphic novel was born.
Originally set for release way back in May, Bleedout didn’t ship until near late July due to unseen difficulties (printing issue, as I understand). As far as content goes, this is a direct reprint of the cutscenes in-game, without the motion or the gruff voice-over. Each chapter covers the equivalent chapter in the game, page for page recreated from the MMO. The art style stays true to the game: Dirt, trash, drugs, and violence litter the pages, characters that you can practically feel the slime seeping through the pages. As far as graphic content, there’s maybe one boob-shot and a character sticking the tip of his tongue with a needle. Nothing gut-wrenching.
I highly recommend playing Bleedout on CrimeCraft before you buy this, otherwise you will simply have no idea what is going on. As I already said, the comic mirrors the cutscenes, so each chapter in the book serves as an introduction to the various factions in and around Sunrise City. Looking at the overall story, to take the comic book without playing the game is more akin to buying a book and only reading the first two paragraphs of each chapter. The story will skip ahead too far, too fast for you to keep track of what is going on, who is who, and who you are supposed to hate and why.
CrimeCraft, as I’ve stated in the past, has a rich and deep story once you dive into it, one that is not done justice by this book. Bleedout, on the whole, serves as little more than a companion piece for the game. If you enjoyed Bleedout and you like comics, it’s worth the $10. Otherwise, if you have no interest in Crimecraft (in which case you wouldn’t be reading this), this comic isn’t for you.
Mythic Entertainment is taking a unique approach to advertising Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes, their upcoming MOBA game, and I’m not just referring to presenting the title with all the apathy of a high school student’s PowerPoint presentation on the agricultural impact of Wyoming on its neighboring states pre-dating the 1900’s. Back when Wrath of Heroes was announced, a good number of people noticed that the game is essentially Warhammer Online’s scenarios, minus the grinding and leveling, with the original three faction battles that die-hard Dark Age of Camelot fans have been begging for since the game’s unveiling.
Turns out they were right. At the PAX panel, the WoH development team directly stated that Wrath of Heroes is for people who liked Warhammer Online’s scenarios, but did not want to invest the time or money into the MMO. Or as the panel put it, they cut out all the “boring crap” so that players wouldn’t have to grind for “748,000 hours” to gain small incremental advancements in skills and power. If your average WAR fanboy isn’t steaming at the ears from this news, the team goes on to explain that much of the armor in Wrath of Heroes was either used or scrapped in Warhammer Online.
Mythic is going to need to clean the tire treads off of Warhammer Online, because Paul Barnett and the rest of the panel did their best to trash the MMO and throw it under the bus, a sentiment that the WAR community is not at all happy about.
Philip Reisberger, Chief Games Officer at Bigpoint Games, is a complicated man. I want to hug him, because he turned Battlestar Galactica into an MMO. But Reisberger’s company is consistently cruising for a patriotic wedgie, talking down the status of companies whose chump change amounts to more than Bigpoint Game’s quarterly revenue. Last November, Heiko Hubertz (Bigpoint CEO) stated that The Old Republic will never be profitable.
Not to be one-upped by Hubertz, Reisberger stated in an interview that the big developers just don’t understand monetizing games, and that developers should be pursuing systems where players can pay extra to gain an advantage instead of offering vanity items.
“It’s a delicate balance, though, and that’s why I love my game designers. All of them have understood how to do this. If you have a sophisticated approach to free-to-play games, in the end you can monetise everything.”
Even more interesting is Reisberger’s insistence that it is possible to offer an in-game advantage for cash without altering the balance of the game, which exactly untrue. By selling items that players can attain through normal grinding/leveling, developers have found a way to technically give players an advantage (time) by removing the factor of grind, without unbalancing the game as those items can be attained through standard gameplay anyway.
We’ll see how players respond to Reisberger’s statement as time goes on.
Star Trek Online heads free to play later this year, leaving players wondering what will be available with no cost attached, and what players will be expected to cough up some Cryptic points to enjoy. Well, thanks to some much needed love from Cryptic Studios, I can tell you exactly what will be made available:
While the MMO Fallout inbox is never saturated with emails, so to speak, I get a fair amount of tips especially regarding outbreaks of account theft. For the most part, these thefts are not real. A person will have his account stolen at the general time his friend did, so his conclusion is that a lot of accounts must be getting stolen (or the company is selling accounts to gold farmers, please stop emailing me with those conspiracy theories). A quick check of our archives will show that I do indeed report on legitimate server breaches.
One particular email I received prompted this article: To sum it up, a “regular reader” made the claim that I am being paid off by “illegitimate gold farmers and bot developers” to not post warnings when a bot program is actually a trojan horse or a gold farming company starts stealing credit cards. To start off, my apologies to this disenfranchised man. Secondly: I don’t believe in warning potential cheaters that their service of choice may be even less legitimate than thought.
Let’s break that down, shall we? To use the term “illegitimate gold farmer” implies that there are legitimate gold farmers, which would only apply if the developer sold the gold/items or authorized players to do so. No, I’m not going to make the baseless claim that all gold farmers are identity thieves, but to call the business legitimate is about as disingenuous as you can get. Rather, I see the system as knowing the risks. You buy gold knowing full well the potential consequences if this person turns out to be an actual criminal. To give an outside comparison, this is akin to the people who buy laptops off of truck beds in parking lots and then find out the box is full of rocks.
So I don’t write warnings about criminal cheat websites for a few reasons, but I do write articles like this one warning the unwary (however few of you might exist) that gold farming outfits are indeed shady business that has become a haven for identity theft. This way, when the time comes that your Runescape account is cleaned out and Jagex bans you for buying powerleveling services, you might not write to me and ask me to warn other people about an illegitimate service turning out to be a scam.
Every time I think Jagex can’t be more out of touch with community relations, they pull another move and surprise me. As you can read above, Jagex revoked the “gold” status of a fansite after one of its operators was “discovered” to be registered on the sex-offenders list in Tennessee. So instead of discussing the matter privately with the fan site operators, Mod SteveW (pictured above) decided the best choice was to head over to the Runescape official forums and publicly oust the person in question to tens of thousands of people who had never even heard of the fan site, let alone visited and knew this person. The result was that RuneVillage was forced to shut down its registration due to the virtual lynch mob that had formed on Jagex’s behest.
I’ll be the first in the blogosphere to call out Jagex (or at least the Community Management Team) as bullies. The way that this information was disseminated, with warnings and safety tips making up half of the statement, throws the whole situation completely out of context, making it appear as though the website was being used as a front for some sick predator looking for another victim, which according to outside documents has absolutely nothing to do with the actual charges.
For the record, I’m not against Jagex removing the fan site in question, they can do whatever they like. That being said, if Jagex had gone about this in a professional manner, most of you visiting this website tonight would still not know what Rune Village was, let alone the criminal background of one of its operators. Instead Jagex used the “we need to protect the children” route to portray a fan site as some kind of breeding ground for predators, accomplishing nothing more than harassing the members of the community and actually putting more people at risk due to the inherent risk of vigilante justice.
But for the guy at Rune Village, nothing says loving like being publicly shamed on a multi-million dollar company’s forums for a mistake you made two decades ago.
So GamersFirst have finally announced the launch date for Fallen Earth Free To Play: October 12th. That’s all you need to know, good night!
But seriously, since the announcement is nowhere in the realm of new, aside from the date, let’s take a look at the breakdown in subscription tiers, shall we?
Most prominently, free players will have access to all content. All missions, all skills, all world areas. Free players can create and join clans, have access to PvP, bloodsports, access to the help-chat channel. So unlike many other games, there are no content barriers. Free players even have unlimited access to the mail system, auction house, and trading, which I dare you to find in most other tiered programs.
Where free players will find restrictions is in the game’s crafting system. Foremost, players can only craft 8 hours worth of goods per day, and crafting takes a 20% hit in speed. In addition, your harvesting speed is 20% lower than subscribers, and your leveling/AP/Faction/Death toll gain rates are all clocked at 75%. There is also a limit on your bank size.
Look for me on October 12th, I’ll be the guy looting your sack while you sleep.
Seven days isn’t just enough time for a small Japanese girl to come out of your television and murder you. I’m going to go on a limb and guess that, although appealing to some, the three day Gods and Heroes trial just wasn’t long enough of a sample period for many prospective buyers. As a result, Heatwave Interactive has announced that the trial has been extended to seven days, without the hassle of phone calls or raspy voices predicting your imminent demise.
“We’d like to invite everyone curious about Gods & Heroes to spend a week sampling the brutality and glory of ancient Rome. By extending the trial period from three to seven days, new players will have a chance to really dig into the heart of the game and we know they’ll like what they find.”
MMO Fallout 