Category: Editorials

SOE Releases Revised List


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Ask and you shall receive. Owing the massive amount of feedback regarding SOE’s recently announced changes, John Smedley has posted a revised list of coming changes to Sony All Access. In short, the “pick an item” system won’t be coming, however players will be forced to claim the stipend monthly.

  1. We’re lowering the price of All Access to $14.99
  2. We’re going to make it so every subscriber to all our PC games an all access member. Basically there will be one SOE membership for our PC games. Please note there are some minor restrictions around our kids titles (simply put – if you’re a 12 year old who signed up for FR you won’t have access to the adult games so we’ll likely leave the lower priced kids offerings as separate subscriptions for under 12 for the same low prices).
  3. We’re keeping the 500 SC included with the subscription instead of going to the “pick an item” system. We heard you. You didn’t like the change. The only change we are making is that we’re now going to make you claim it monthly. You can still hoard it though I realize this is a bit of a pain but honestly it’s the best compromise we could come up with that solves the problems I mentioned in the other thread.
  4. we are going to be giving our members a 10% discount in our marketplaces.
  5. European players – we have an idea on how to include you in this but we need to discuss with our partners.We have a pretty good idea on this though. give us a bit of time to suss this out.
  6. Nothing is changing with Player Studio items – you’ll still be able to buy them with your 500SC.
  7. Console titles – you’ll notice I only mentioned the PC titles. Our goal is to include the PS3 and PS4 games that we have, but I want to be up front and say that isn’t a done deal.

So you can still hoard station cash, but you will have to claim it manually rather than allow it to accumulate automatically. I have a feeling that something is coming to alleviate SOE of the station cash hoarded on accounts that haven’t been used in years. While a few things have been reversed and cleared up, the details surrounding Sony’s plans for all access are undoubtedly not over yet.

(Source: Reddit)

Video of the Now: Skywind Development


Today’s video comes from a team of developers working on taking Morrowing and remaking it using the Skyrim engine. The mod team of more than 70 is looking to go further than a simple port, adding in voice acting and sprucing up an otherwise dated and barren game world with more scenery. Check out the entire development video above.

MMOrning Shots: Big Baby


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The TERA winter event is probably over. It wasn’t over for me when the Philadelphia airport cancelled ten flights at the same time (one of them being mine) and the customer service kiosk turned into a free for all pvp area. After ganking someone for the ticket, I was able to make it home in a timely manner with a slight jetlag debuff. Did anyone else notice the giant baby in that picture?

MMOrning Shots: Live Together, Die Together


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I recently started playing through Path of Exile with a group of friends, rather than going it solo. There is an organized chaos to playing Path of Exile with a party that usually ends up with people shouting “where did you go” and a long list of expletives if someone picks up an item that they don’t need that you do. Then again, that may just be how we talk to each other.

Mark Kern Responds To Departure From Red 5


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Recently we learned via a leaked email from Red 5 Studios that Mark Kern had been voted out by fellow board members. In a blog post on MMORPG.com, Kern gave his well wishes to those remaining at Red 5. As for his alleged termination, don’t believe everything you hear. Kern refers to his leadership at Red 5 as his Kobayashi Maru test, going on to use multiple film references to convey a rather vague point.

For the past twelve months, I was presented with a Kobayashi Maru test.  When that occurs, the Captain must always find his own solution.  While there have been rumors about whether I was demoted, terminated or maybe even corporately executed, I will only say this: remember that Han always shot first.  It does not matter if the person revising history is George Lucas himself, because Greedo never shot first (sorry George).

As internal office politics often go, we may never know what really happened at Red 5 Studios apart from some anonymous employee comments.

(Source: MMORPG.com)

Special Nods Of The Year: 2013 Edition


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2013 is on its way out the door, and I figured why not jump on the train and talk about some of the year’s notable MMOs? Those of you who have read my previous year roundups know that I’m not a huge fan of “best of” awards, and rather than assume that any developers would put much stock into my opinion, I decided to go ahead with pointing out some of this year’s highlights. This is not an awards show.

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I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I dropped Planetside 2 like a sack of hammers barely a month after the game launched. I loved the original Planetside and Planetside 2 is quickly becoming the game that wasn’t possible on a technical level back in 2003 when Planetside launched. There are a few disagreements over how Sony monetized the game and how it is a massive shooter rather than an RPG, but I feel that the team has done a lot in listening to player feedback since launch, especially with the addition of the lattice system. I just couldn’t play it, the game wasn’t optimized properly and would not run on my system on the lowest settings.

I talk a lot about how easy it is for a game to lose players simply because it falls out of their habitual cycle, and that is exactly what happened to me. Eventually I uninstalled Planetside 2 to make space and haven’t come back to it until this month. Let me just say that the difference is day and night in performance, if you quit for similar reasons. Planetside 2 is a very fun game, especially now that the lattice system has congregated players and given the game some organization and flow. I managed to boost up my video settings and get into a massive battle without a single hitch in the frame rate. If I had such an award, I would give Planetside 2 the Most Improved for 2013. But I don’t have such an award, so ignore that statement.

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Path of Exile offers the entire game for free in the least offensive, yet still commercially viable, method possible. Everything in the cash shop is cosmetic, minus character and bank slots, and you can’t pay to progress because there is no method available. No grinding for Turbine points to technically play for free, no dealing with timers or lockouts unless you pay a fee, no experience boosts, no nothing. It’s incredible, and not at all surprising, that Path of Exile is regularly targeted by the same group of entitled children who travel from game to game and demand that everything that the game has to offer be given to them for free and attacks any attempt by game developers to, gasp, make money. My only gripe with Path of Exile’s cash shop was that it didn’t offer much for players who wanted to spend five or ten dollars here and there.

So I award Path of Exile as the most free game of 2013, or I would if I’d been handing out awards.

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RuneScape! Every time I think Jagex can’t surprise me, they do. RuneScape 3 launched in July and has thrown the game into an entirely new direction. A brand new customizable UI, new graphics, a more powerful engine, world events, and more. The first world event was a massive grind fest, but the latest has players battling each other all over the world for the glory of their god. The world entering a new age where gods walk amongst men, war could break out at any time, and the scars of their battles are left on the land forever. Seasonal high scores, bot busting technology, a second new skill coming early next year, and yet maintaining the same schedule of (mostly) weekly updates.

Of course, not everything worked out. The HTML5 client was developed with the expectation that browser developers would be increasing their performance along a specific schedule. The stars did not align, and RuneScape’s HTML5 client is still stuck in limbo alongside the original client release of Planetside 2. In response, Jagex is working on a dedicated client for HTML5 rather than relying on browser support.

In this hypothetical award ceremony, I would give RuneScape 3 Best Upgrade of 2013.

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Final Fantasy had what few other MMOs get: A second chance, one that should solidify Square Enix as a company that has a side that actually gives a damn about their games, FFXIII notwithstanding. By any other company, FFXIV would have been dumped as the commercial disaster it was and forgotten in the big cementary of failed MMOs. Square Enix not only instated new leadership, they wasted little expense in getting the game back up and revitalized in a relatively short period of time. And what was the result? A Realm Reborn has been a major success.

I hope that Square Enix never forgets the opportunity they’ve been given, it doesn’t come around much. With that in mind, FFXIV: A Realm Reborn is the Best Revival of 2013, which does not exist because this isn’t an awards show.

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We knew Electronic Arts wasn’t willing to spend the money to convert Warhammer Online to free to play, and there was no way that the publisher would willingly shut down a game that they had spent so much to develop and promote. If EA wasn’t going to give up the ghost on their own terms, the question simply became how long until the license expired and would Games Workshop be careless enough to renew given the abysmal performance of Wrath of Heroes and the fact that Age of Reckoning was in maintenance mode with just a couple of servers remaining. The answer is 2013 and no, respectively.

Warhammer Online’s shuttering was the exhale after a very long time of holding its breath.

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Those of you who read MMO Fallout will know that I don’t have pet peeves, I have major psychotic hatreds. And I find it interesting that Arenanet set up this whole advertising campaign centered around players pledging their allegiance to the game and to no longer suffer through horrible grind. The introduction of bi-weekly living content updates brought out what I believe to be the worst kind of grind in an MMO, the temporary kind. You have two weeks to get the achievements and then your opportunity has passed, forever. I don’t hate the living world in Guild Wars 2, but I’d like to participate in the events for the enjoyment of the event itself, not to run down a list of chores every two weeks.

I have no award for this because this isn’t an award show.

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Had Defiance been released as an open world shooter with DLC, I think it wouldn’t have been received as the large-scale Borderlands that it essentially is. As a general video game, Defiance is severely underrated with its base content and the numerous improvements that Trion has made over the months. As an MMO, however, Defiance deserves its low score thanks to a small world and a lack of stuff to do other than shoot things. If that doesn’t make sense, just think about how ice cream can be a fantastic dessert while still making for a poor laundry detergent.

With that, I would nominate Defiance the MMO that shouldn’t have been sold as an MMO.

TERA Receiving New Class In 2014


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I feel bad for not noticing this sooner, but in my defense neither did any of the other major MMO news websites. On November 25th, Tera Today published an interview with Bluehole Studios on some upcoming updates in 2014 to the Korean service. Alongside a rookie server where players will be able to ease into the game as well as level up a bit faster, TERA will also be enjoying the release of a new class. The class is specific to the Elin race, a powerful mid-range damage dealer, although Bluehole is not saying that the class will never be available to othe races. According to the interview, developing new animations for each race takes approximately eight months.

You can check out the entire interview at the link below to read more about additional updates coming to KTera, and hopefully followed by other regions.

(Source: Tera Today)

MMOrning Shots: Winter Festival


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Today’s MMOrning Shot comes to us from me, more specifically the very dangerous act of walking out onto a frozen lake in heavy metal armor. One of Neverwinter’s claims to holiday events has been to include a temporary skill that lasts for the duration of the event, and give players another thing to grind for. For the winter event, which thankfully caps out at level three, the skill is mostly just good for upgrading your fishing pole and finding better lures. There are fireworks and a few other pieces here and there, but the meat of the grind is for lights of simril from the various events.

If you fish up my corpse, have the dignity to bury the body.

Steam Holiday Sales


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[Insert December holiday here] is upon us, and that means the Steam holiday sale is invading our wallets and making us choose between dinner and a pile of cheap games. As always, prices are in USD and may vary slightly based on your location and may not be available in all areas. Most of these sales last until January 2nd.

Embers Of Caerus And Volunteer Projects


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I love our indie friends, in fact I went as far as to devote space here at MMO Fallout to promoting the City of Titans Kickstarter effort not to mention multiple others. And even though I added the widget to the side-bar, I never went as far as directly telling people to pledge their money. It isn’t because I don’t trust Missing Worlds Media, but because I’ve been part of enough volunteer projects to know that even with all of the best intentions, they have a tendency to die at a moments notice. Usually this happens when the most talented and dedicated of the group realize that they could do the same thing but get paid for it at a real company. With that in mind, I wrote an editorial about how the next step in City of Titans was to ditch the volunteer bit now that players had a monetary stake in the game.

As far as risk goes, a project whose employees are entirely made up of volunteers is about as high as you can go, barring an office comprised entirely of corgis working on computers built out of beef jerky. Take a moment and look in from an investor’s point of view, here you have a project of questionable direction being built by volunteers of varying degrees of loyalty, skill, and reliability, all under the leadership of an “ideas guy” powered by hopes and dreams rather than experience or knowledge. People who have little or no incentive to stay on board, especially when during times where things go sour, which they certainly will. I’m talking about Embers of Caerus, in case you’ve forgotten the headline.

Embers of Caerus is an MMO being developed by Forsaken Studios, a team of volunteers. As is usually the case, development has hit the proverbial brick wall thanks to a lack of direction, unity, and leadership, and the game has lost not only the support of many of its volunteers, but also of its potential investors. CEO Rob Steele posted on the forums to let everyone know that the game is being taken in a new direction, shifting focus to game and system design with the hopes of partnering with another studio to get the ball rolling.

As you all know, several months ago a decision was made to move to Unity to prototype our systems and provide proof of concept to community members, supporters, and potential investors alike. This transition was not seamless in terms of how it was handled internally, and mistakes were made in regards to how we released the information to the public. Those mistakes unfortunately cost us a great deal of support from one particular individual who was on the verge of providing start up funds for our office and overhead costs – enough for at least a couple of years to be sure. At the same time, this put a lot of pressure on our development team to bang out modules and updates to our demo in a timely fashion. With a purely volunteer group, it is extremely difficult to have enough man hours available, from the appropriate part of the team, to set and hit benchmarks that we have – whether set internally by us, or by others.

Business is difficult, especially for those who don’t have any experience. And this isn’t just video game companies, either, so don’t think I’m picking on them. There is generally a 40-55% percent chance that a business will go under in the first four years after opening, no matter what industry you are in, and 46% of those cases are due to “incompetence,” or lack of knowledge and experience. That statistic comes from this website, by the way.

I apologize if I sound like a jerk or that I’m picking Embers of Caerus out and ignoring other examples. I’m talking about Embers of Caerus because its redirection prompted this article, and I didn’t include other examples to keep it focused and avoid rambling. As far as being a jerk about the whole ordeal, that is business. I have said time and time again that this is an incredibly high risk, high price, saturated market. There is also great potential for success, but the path to success is littered with failure. A lot of authors said that.

In case you also noticed, I used a screenshot from Black Mesa Source to show an example of a volunteer project that became something great, so it is absolutely possible.

(Source: Embers of Caerus)