Author: Admin

Wait, Earthrise Is Back On Preorder? Off Shelves?


Dear Internet,

Perhaps I’m missing something obvious here. To the best of my memory, Earthrise has been launched and is still running live, at least a quick trip to the official website would lead me to believe so. According to the website, there is a plan to drop the price of Earthrise to $29.99 USD on June 1st, which may coincide with this oddity over at Direct2Drive. At MMO Fallout’s #2 favorite distributor, the game is strangely back on pre-order for a June 1st release date, but is listed at $20.99, with a regular price of $29.99, which fits the development plan.

Meanwhile, I also noticed that Earthrise dropped off the face of the earth from my local Target, as well as Target in general (you’ll remember Final Fantasy XIV was still being sold through the website). Not even the computers had the game still in the system.

I’ve contacted Direct2Drive in regards to the listing, but I’m not expecting an answer soon (it is a Saturday after all). I might actually pick up Earthrise tomorrow morning (I never make a purchase after midnight, it is not in my best financial interest), if it’s going for $20.

[Update]: I got a response back from Direct2Drive:

The preorder status would be at the publisher’s request.  I can only guess that it is to do a special “re-release”. For more info on that you may want to ask the publisher, we follow their instructions on selling their game.

Major Fallen Earth Announcement Coming May 31st


Fun fact: The announcement is not for content coinciding with the release of a Fallen Earth line of Lego minifigures and playsets, although those odds would be much higher were this the 1990’s. So what is the big major extraordinary amazing unannounced news? You’ll have to wait until Tuesday to find out.

The Fallen Earth team has a MAJOR announcement during the scheduled maintenance set for next Tuesday, May 31. We’re giving ya’ll a chance to sit down with Senior Game Designer Marie “Aro Sei” Croall as she discusses the State of the Game and plans beyond.

Take out the trash, call off work, heat up those microwave dinners, put your pets to bed and your kids in the kennel, you won’t want to miss this. You’ll have two chances to hear this amazing announcement live (or just check this website), which you can find here on Fallen Earth’s ustream. Once at 3pm and once at 8pm Eastern.

Of course, the question now is…what would be this major? Of those answers I can think of, it is either:

  • Fallen Earth is going free to play.
  • Fallen Earth is shutting down.
  • Icarus Studios is making a new game.
We already know of a lot of upgrades coming to the game. Combat changes, that housing system, and more. What better time than now to announce a free to play section? If the announcement starts out with “we want to thank everyone who supported Fallen Earth from beta to launch and onward,” then you might have grounds to be concerned.

Mortal Online Doing A Little Better: Costs Cut


Nothing to lose your head over. The last time we took a look at Star Vault’s finances, the company announced that:

With the new cost structure, the Board expects that an additional approximately 1500 players to achieve break-even, a goal that we hope to achieve in the second quarter of 2011.

Well the Q1 financial reports are out, and it appears that although Mortal Online’s subscribers have remained mostly stagnant, the cost of running business has gone down significantly.

 The sale of licenses in the first quarter of 2011 remained largely unchanged compared to the fourth quarter of 2010.

The Board of Star Vault decided, in order to reduce its costs, to cancel the liquidity guarantee. Star Vaults last day of trading with market maker was on 29 April 2011 and the company’s first trading liquidity without being 2 May 2011.

With our current cost structure, the Board expects that an additional approximately 1000 players to achieve break-even, a goal that we hope to achieve during the second quarter of 2011.

If you don’t understand what a liquidity guarantee is, that’s okay, I don’t fully understand it either. What is important is that Star Vault requires less income to break even, meaning Mortal Online’s long term viability just became that much better.

You can read the entire release here.

Aion: 10 Day Free Trial And Welcome Back Week


Aion’s 2.5 patch brings a whole lot of sexy to NCsoft’s already big-hitting title. The patch brings with it a new graphics mode, new content, customizations, pets, mentoring, armors, abyss changes, dynamic maps, and more changes than you could legally shake your finger at. In fact, NCsoft is so excited, that they want to welcome back their old players (again) to show them just how well the game has improved…just not for a few weeks. Possibly to give the current subscribers a leg up on the update and work out any kinks before reopening the doors, the welcome back week runs from June 3rd to June 13th.

If you haven’t logged into your NCsoft account since the security update, you may want to get a head start. NCsoft enacted a new security policy, requiring computers to be authenticated before an account can log in from them. In order to authenticate a computer, you will need to enter your password hint answers, and if you don’t know those, go through support to get them changed. Do so soon, because there’s no saying how much NCsoft’s Customer support will be backed up.

Furthermore, those of you who never played Aion will have the opportunity to take part in a ten day trial, experiencing up to level 20. The trial goes live May 26th. Oh NCsoft, why did you have to pick June 3rd and make me choose between Aion, the Hellgate Global beta opening, and the Duke Nukem Forever beta (among other things that week)?

Third Square Enix MMO In The Works…Why?


Square Enix’s past with MMOs can be summed up a such: Final Fantasy XI was released and still trucks along well to this day. Fantasy Earth Zero was launched, died a quick death, and was revived by another company only to die again just this year. Final Fantasy XIV, however, is where the story gets interesting. Still reeling from its own launch, FFXIV has yet to institute subscriptions and has no timetable for doing so. The PS3 version has been delayed indefinitely with no release in sight. Finally, Square Enix’s upcoming MMO…hold the phone, upcoming MMO? One moment please.

And we’re back. Yes, folks, Square Enix is working on a third MMO, according to their most recent earnings report. The game is set to be announced this fiscal year, which means this article is essentially show boating and a reason to incorporate Tough Guys Don’t Dance into MMO Fallout.

There is good news, non-Final Fantasy fans. The MMO will be a different IP, it appears, meaning it could be anything from Dragon Quest to Thief, Kingdom Hearts, or more (personally I’m rooting for Snoopy’s Red Baron MMO). More on this title as it appears.

Age of Conan Going Free To Play This Summer!


Crom, I don’t normally pray to you. I don’t have the time, what with writing all those forum posts making jokes like “Funcom? More like… not… so… funcom!” If you will grant me one thing, make it Age of Conan free to play. I’m playing in the welcome back week, and I’m very much enjoying the game, but I need to see more. And if you don’t, then to hell with you.

At least that’s what I imagine some Age of Conan player somewhere prayed before he went to bed last night, because Funcom delivered. Formally announced on the forums, Funcom is launching Age of Conan: Unrated this summer, allowing free players access to the majority of the original game, and a little bit of Rise of the Godslayer, absolutely free. Free players are limited from certain dungeons, Alternative Advancement points, offline levels, and veteran rewards, as well as specific raids, certain classes, and sieges altogether. Still, there is a lot to see in new Age of Conan free…for free.

You can check out the free/members perks here. Age of Conan free to play goes live this summer.

Age of Conan Film/Game Tie-In


Craig Morrison strikes me as the kind of guy who would immerse himself deeply enough in his work that he’d require the Funcom employees to pray to Crom every morning before work begins:

Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought, or why we died. All that matters is that two stood against many. That’s what’s important! Valor pleases you, Crom… so grant me one request. Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen, then to HELL with you!

A good few people are asking: Will the upcoming Conan movie save Age of Conan? According to Craig Morrison, the game doesn’t need saving.

First of all I’m not sure we need saving! We wouldn’t still be running the game with the size of team and the operation that we have if the game wasn’t perfectly viable, profitable and doing well. We still have a sizeable team working on the game, we are still adding new content – we’ve added as much new content this year already as any of our other competitors and we’re only going to do more for the rest of the year.

If Funcom is as happy with the current state of Age of Conan as Morrison wants us to believe, Age of Conan has a healthy future ahead of it. According to the Eurogamer interview, not only did last year’s Rise of the Godslayer maintain the population, it actually brought players back.

You can read the entire interview at the link above, which goes into detail on the new content that is appearing in Age of Conan to tie in with the film.

Bioware: No, TOR Is Not A Sandbox


Star Wars: The Old Republic is not a sandbox title. Let me say that again for emphasis: The Old Republic, developed by EA/Mythic/Bioware, is not. a. sandbox title. That is a very simple recipe of “this is not Star Wars Galaxies 2.” I don’t know why Bioware needs to reiterate this on a constant basis, but once again the usual troop of Galaxies vets have come in to make demands that the developers never promised and only they were expecting to begin with.

Although granted, we had this same conversation with Clone Wars Adventures, where I had to point out that the game is for children. Over on the Old Republic forums, Georg Zoeller posted in a thread asking for sandbox elements, to clarify once again that TOR is not a sandbox game.

There will certainly be out-of-combat player activities and activities that promote social interaction in the game, but you will not be able to take a job as a moisture farmer on Tatooine and simulate the life of such an individual in our game.

Zoeller states that concepts like player built housing are not completely off the table, just low priority. As far as MMO terms go, you can pick up your tickets at the booth, because TOR is about as theme-park as it gets.

In short: Uncle Owen and his life is not the kind of heroic journey we’re going for with this game. (The jawa’s with their rocket launchers wouldn’t make that a very fun activity anyway).

The amount of misinformation around The Old Republic is less surprising when you recognize that it’s looking to be one of 2011’s big players.

Rift: Free Weekly Transfers Coming in 1.3


[Update]

I apparently picked the worst time to write this. The news is in, and server transfers will be allowed once a week, for free, and will allow even entire guilds to transfer including all of their items, titles, and achievements. Guild Leaders can move their guild and levels and perks.

Hey, Rifters. It’s been a couple months since Rift launched, and your server may be feeling the effects of what doctors refer to as “a lack of population.” Currently (11:59am EST on a Monday) all of the servers are on medium, with two servers at high load. That being said, Trion is still listening, and is working on allowing players to transfer servers. In a post on the forums, Elrar stated:

We’ve seen renewed discussion lately asking about character transfers and how we plan to allow more of you to play together and enjoy RIFT with friends. While it has been mentioned in interviews we wanted to clearly state that a character transfer feature is currently under development. We’re still ironing out the details which we will share as we get closer to its release, however, we wanted to let you know today that it is something we’re actively working on.

Server transfers. No doubt Rift has a lot of servers, and hopefully the transfers will keep the community active and interacting.