Thankfully the news this week isn’t all bad. Massively.com is reporting that Gamers First is restructuring in order to bring more focus on the company’s in-house IPs. As part of this move, a couple of titles are moving services, and the publisher announced that the contractors working on Fallen Earth have been removed in favor of in-house development.
We had a large contractor crew on FE and we are focusing on creating our own employee pool to manage the game.
I know what you’re thinking: Sure, denial is exactly what someone would do when they have something to hide. Well take a moment to remember that denial is also something a person will do when they are truly innocent of the charges, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Coming off of the release of Diablo III was the well-expected surge in accounts being stolen and stripped clean. Some of those people also happen to have authenticators, raising suspicion as to whether or not the security method has been successfully cracked. I have good news:
Blizzard wants you to know that you are a liar, if you claim to have been hacked with an authenticator already on the account. According to Blizzard, not a single case has been filed where an authenticator was already on the account.
While the authenticator isn’t a 100% guarantee of account security, we have yet to investigate a compromise report in which an authenticator was attached beforehand.
On the other hand, you can rest assured that the Blizzard servers have not been breached. And once again to the paranoid conspiracy theorists who think Blizzard compromises/sells accounts to scam/scare users into buying authenticators, you are still wrong.
Discussing layoffs after a game launches is akin to beating a dead horse. I should know, as the Human Resources director in my old company had brought in a live horse and a baseball bat to give the saying more meat (or to be blunt about it, depending on your flavor of pun). The Old Republic is one of the largest, most stable launches in MMO history. So large and stable in fact, that Bioware laid off an unnumbered amount of staff to keep the system from being too balanced and stable.
Of course this is all conjecture. Layoffs following an MMOs release are to be expected as the game’s requirements shift downward in scope. There isn’t any more detail than what I’ve pointed out here, but if you are interested in some marketing lingo, you can check out Greg Zeschuk’s statement at the Old Republic forums below.
Best of luck to the recently laid, and in case you are still looking for jobs, Turbine is hiring.
If the Elder Scrolls community can be called anything, it is passionate. So with the details that the Elder Scrolls MMO will, for better or for worse, share very minimal game features with its single player brethren, response has understandably been mixed. In an interview with Eurogamer, Game Director Matt Firor wants it known that the same style of epic storytelling will be present in the MMO, albeit in an instanced form. Firor likened the technique to killing Mehrunes Dagon in Oblivion:
The last thing you want to do is have the final confrontation with Mehrunes Dagon as he’s stomping across the Imperial City, and you see like 15 guys behind you waiting to kill him because they’re on the same quest.
The Elder Scrolls Online story will be 100% instanced and solo, according to Zenimax. You will be the one true hero. You and everybody else.
Where have I seen this before? Oh yes, before Realtime Worlds went bankrupt. 38 Studios may still be alive, but that isn’t going to stop the vultures from coming in and taking dibs on who gets what cut of meat. Back in 2010, we had the combination flock of Sony, Codemasters, and Blitz to drain whatever remained of Realtime Worlds. Now that 38 Studios is facing layoffs, however, it is Turbine’s turn for first picks.
In a press release today, Turbine announced recruiting in Providence, Rhode Island is set to begin on May 22nd, from 5-9pm at Hotel Providence. You can even check out a list of currently available positions. Rhode Island Governor Chafee announced today that Project Copernicus is set for a June 2013 release date.
When reached for comment as to whether or not the two events were related, Turbine’s career center (pictured above) simply responded “Oh gorgh, nope nope nope nope, I’m not gonna do it ma, you can’t make me, nope nope nope nope.”
Age of Empires Online has had something of an identity crisis. Although enjoyed by plenty of players, the team at Gas Powered Games has been on the receiving end of some harsh criticism that the game isn’t so much “free to play” as it is “free to try.” Premium civilizations aren’t so much an optional add-on as they are a necessity to compete, adding a considerable road block at $10 a piece (they used to be $20).
Starting this summer, players will be able to obtain Empire Points either through buying them or by playing the game. Premium civilizations aren’t going anywhere, but by playing Age of Empires Online a player could accrue sufficient Empire Points to purchase the premium packs without paying a dime. According to GPG developers, a regular player might take two to three weeks of playing daily to obtain a premium civilization.
Age of Empires Online becomes more free to play this summer.
MMO Fallout would like to apologize to any members of the Rhode Island legislator who might be offended by the implication that the state makes poor decisions in business loans, and does not recommend the resurrection of Thomas Tew to create a zombie pirate crew.
Looking at my calendar, there are approximately 17 days to go until the Storybricks Kickstarter runs out of time. As of today, 347 backers have contributed $21,522 to the fund, which means there is a long way to go before the $250,000 goal can be reached. Here at MMO Fallout, we are supporters of the indie-MMO development scene, so when the opportunity arose to interview the team behind Storybricks, I jumped at it.
First, a little about Storybricks itself. Storybricks is a toolset where players are able to create their own worlds, populating them with NPCs that are programmed to react not just to the player, but to each other. The alpha build, which is still available here, is a small yet very impressive proof of concept. I recommend you check it out if you have an hour or so.
So how did Storybricks come to light? As is the case with many off-the-beaten-path titles, Storybricks has its origins in a group of MMO and MUD players with a dream of one day creating their own world, dissatisfied with the products being offered by other developers. So a team of eight full-time and three part-time developers began work on Storybricks around a year ago, culminating in the recently released alpha-module with the full release next year.
The initial pitch for Storybricks, before most of the team even joined, was to put advanced AI into our own MMO to create more believable NPCs. We kept a lot of that concept but we focused on the Storbricks tool to let people tell their stories within an MMO we develop instead of just having designers make more advanced NPCs.
While the current alpha build only showcases a fantasy theme, the toolset is flexible enough that Storybricks will be able to encompass many more settings. Without going too specific, the themes of dystopian science fiction and Three Musketeers were mentioned briefly.
In the long term, Storybricks is all about customization, allowing people to create their own worlds and characters to match the stories they wish to tell.
For NPCs, we would like a creation system like the character creation system found in many RPGs. We’d like people to be able to customize the characters to a high degree to match the story they want to tell. We have also designed a system for letting people edit a location. Instead of a set location, people can edit the tiles of a location to swap in and out features. Our goal is to allow a lot of customization without making players feel they have to do busywork like placing individual trees.
So Storybricks is on Kickstarter for a very real reason: Funding. So I had to ask, why are investors so hesitant to fund the title?
Considering women in Shakespeare plays were played by men, this is stunningly accurate.
I think the big hesitation from investors and from the audience has been trying to figure out exactly what Storybricks is. People who have played a lot of tabletop RPGs or who have played MMOs for a long time “get” Storybricks more than others do. It’s so different that when people try to compare it to existing games, the comparisons don’t quite work. It’s not a toolset like Neverwinter Nights, it’s not a traditional MMO like World of Warcraft, it’s not a construction setting like Second Life. So we’ve had a hard time coming up with a good way to describe it to people to let them know why Storybricks is so awesome and why we feel it’s the future of MMOs.
Expect more on Storybricks as it develops. I want to thank Brian Green and Kelly Heckman for taking the time to answer my questions.
It’s been almost two years since Bill Roper has had anything to do with Cryptic Studios, but with some of the recent money-related decisions made by the developer, you would never know he’d left. Not long ago, Cryptic introduced lockboxes, cash shop items that have the chance at offering valuable items to the players who buy them. Apparently the lockboxes constitute gambling in some countries, including the Netherlands, and according to several users on the Star Trek Online forums, are being investigated by various government bodies.
And if your laws do prohibit such gambling, Cryptic’s Borticus wants you to know that Cryptic is listening. Not so the company can react, just so they know which country to ban.
I hope you realize that the most likely course of action here, if any is taken, is that the STO becomes unplayable in the Netherlands. IP blocks, proxy blocks, etc.
And I know what you’re thinking, but you have absolutely nothing to worry about for Cryptic’s bottom line. Your money wasn’t really that significant anyway.
Honestly? Probably less revenue than would be lost by not doing any more Lock Boxes.
And sure, some people might point out that Cryptic’s past monetary decisions didn’t prevent the company from posting six to seven figure losses, leading to them being dumped on the streets by Atari, but those people are missing an important point: Cryptic asked for your money, not your opinion.
MMO Fallout 