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Defiance Switching To Free To Play

Trion Worlds has announced that Defiance is shedding its box price and going completely free to play later this year. The PC version is set to make the switch on June 4th, with the PS3 version following on July 15th, and the Xbox360 changeover to come at a later date. New players will have access to the Bay area, including original endgame content and future missions for free. Players who pick up a copy of the game will receive a number of perks, including inventory space, ark keycodes, character slots, and more. Existing owners will also have these same perks.

More on this announcement in the coming weeks.

(Source: Trion press release)

ArcheAge Criminal Sentenced To 13 Hours Prison

Criminals beware, you’re in for a fair…trial. ArcheAge has one of the most interesting crime systems that I have ever seen. It is far too complicated to explain in this article, but the gist of the system is that crimes leave behind evidence that can be found by other players, and if you die as a criminal you are sent to a court and sentenced by a jury of five players. As one gamer found out in the alpha test, that sentence can be rather harsh. Especially if you’ve racked up over one hundred charges. As you can see from the screenshot above, the player was sentenced to 770 minutes in prison, or just under thirteen hours.

Prisoners in ArcheAge can either wait through their sentence or try to break out.

(Thanks to DSWBeef for uncovering this, and credit to Reizla in the same thread for the picture)

Zenimax Lays Down Roadmap For ESO

The launch of Elder Scrolls Online has doubtlessly been, well, turbulent to say the least. In a newly released post on the official website, Matt Firor has laid out the roadmap for coming updates. In it, he assures players that customer support is actively banning gold farmers and chat spammers, as well as many of the game’s bugs that seem to dot the landscape. The first content update for the game available “soon,” Craglorn, includes a new adventure zone as well as twelve player raids, death recaps, tweaks for Cyrodiil, and a number of bug fixes and modifications for classes, abilities, animations, etc.

The article even goes into recent press reviews of ESO, not all of which have been very positive.

As those who follow ESO closely know, a wide range of reviews have been posted for the game, with scores ranging from 90s to 50s. ESO generates strong emotions in gamers—both positive and negative. While I obviously don’t agree with the more negative articles, the reviews are out there, and we read them to determine if there are legitimate complaints that we should address.

You can read the entire piece at the link below. Firor includes a list of updates planned for the future, as well as a note that players will receive an extra five days added to their accounts as an apology for the downtime over the past month.

(Source: Official Website)

Pirates of the Caribbean Online Revived by Fans

It’s hard to speak negatively about private server operators sometimes. After all, for every guy who runs a World of Warcraft server because he think it’ll be a good way to make some money, there’s another guy who simply wants to play his favorite MMO again. It’s rather depressing when a company chooses not only to shut down their servers, but actively shuts down operators willing to pick up the slack. No one wins in those cases, not the players who want to continue playing a game that the publisher deemed no longer viable, nor the company that puts its ex-customers in an adversarial position.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, advertising private servers is not allowed here at MMO Fallout, unless the servers come with the express permission of the publisher. In this case, Pirates of the Caribbean Online fans have apparently been given the blessing of Disney to recreate the MMO. The game is strictly non-profit, 100% free to play, otherwise Disney will sue.

(Source: Alpha Beta Gamer)

The Old Republic No Longer Considered Canon

The Old Republic officially never happened. According to a surprise announcement by Lucasfilm, only the six films and Clone Wars show are considered canon going forward. All of the comic books, video games, and stories are now considered “legends” in the Star Wars lore, and will still be available for purchase despite no longer being part of the official canon.

“Lucas always made it clear that he was not beholden to the EU. He set the films he created as the canon. This includes the six Star Wars episodes, and the many hours of content he developed and produced in Star Wars: The Clone Wars”

You can find the entire blog post here. The upcoming Rebels is the first new piece of official canon to come out.

(Source: Eurogamer)

Guild Wars 2 Megaserver Is Complete

Arenanet has announced that the Megaserver technology has been fully implemented in all PvE maps and Heart of the Mists.

Although we’re excited that you have more players than ever to explore the open world of Guild Wars 2 with, our work is not yet complete. Our megaserver team will continue to monitor the performance of the technology on live and evaluate your feedback. We will continue to tweak and update the way the system works until it is providing even better megaservice!

(Source: Guild Wars 2)

Star Vault Lays Down Road to Steam

With its big show on Steam just over the horizon, Star Vault has laid out how the hardcore sandbox MMO will make its way to gamers worldwide. Before Mortal Online is allowed to release, however, Star Vault is implementing a number of updates and fixes. In the latest press release, Star Vault has laid down just how the Steam rollout will happen.

Each block, according to the release, has a lead time of about one month, noting that multiple blocks may run in parallel.

? Block 0 – Unreal Engine update
? Block 1 – Territory Control
? Block 2 – Territory Control Testing and release
? Block 3 – Continent Support
? Block 4 – Continent support testing and release
? Block 5 – STEAM API release on STEAM

Henrik Nystrom, Star Vault’s CEO, made the following comment (translated):

We continue our focus on working towards STEAM, it looks we all look forward to the team, but I also believe that our current players see the value in this. We will increase communication about the development work currently involves about 40 resources in our global development team. For transparency to our shareholders, we have teamed up with Axier, specialists in communication to the stock market. They have produced an analysis of Star Vault. I hope you find it interesting

(Source: Star Vault Press Release)

H1Z1 CS Items Lootable, In A Sense

With all of the hubbub about H1Z1 and the prospects of free to play and pay to win, John Smedley took to the game’s official subreddit to explain just how the game’s cash shop will work. Players will be able to buy wearables which can be looted by others upon death, in a manner of speaking.

We’ve also come up with a pretty awesome idea to let players who kill other players loot stuff. So if a player has a black ski mask and gets killed by another player, that player can wear the ski mask for a few deaths (we have durability in the game. Station Cash wearables won’t degrade at all but when you loot something.. it will degrade. Please note the original player always keeps their SC purchased wearables.

Smedley also confirmed that the shop will not sell guns, ammo, food, water, “etc,” nor will they sell boosts. Emote packs will be available for sale as well as character slots and crates ala Valve’s monetization system.

(Source: Reddit)

Carbine Studios Donates To Child's Play

This year at PAX East, Carbine Studios has announced a special donation to Child’s Play. In addition to a comically sized check for ten thousand dollars, Carbine Studios has partnered with LEGO artist Mariann Asanuma to recreate the Wildstar rocket house in all of its blocky glory. The structure stands three feet high and four feet long and is the result of fifty thousand LEGO blocks.

The rocket ship will be auctioned off later this year at the annual Child’s Play Dinner and Auction. Mona Hamilton, Vice President of Brands at Carbine Studios, weighed in on the contribution.

Child’s Play is a wonderful charity doing really great things with the gaming industry and we’re looking forward to seeing the result of the auction later this year. It was also important for us to say thanks by giving back to the Boston community; they’ve been great to us over the years at PAX East.

Child’s Play’s goal is to improve the lives of children in hospitals and welfare facilities through the positive impact of video games.

(Source: Carbine Studios Press Release)

Zenimax Realtime Bans

It looks like Zenimax is ramping up their efforts against gold farmers in The Elder Scrolls Online. Intrepid explorer Necropsie over at the MMORPG.com forums snapped a screenshot in-game of a game master announcing to the area to step away from the boss or be slain. Presumably those slain by the GM would have their accounts flagged for review, if not banned outright.

This isn’t the first time an MMO has employed lethal force against bot. Back in the day, Aion GM’s could be seen executing accounts used to spam gold selling websites.

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