That hat is ridiculous, and I must have it. Today’s MMOrning Shot comes to us from Red 5 Studios and their open world shooter Firefall. There isn’t anything particularly spooky or scary about Firefall’s Halloween event, but there are skeletons. Kind of. Did you know that Firefall is valued at $100 million? Check out the open beta at http://www.firefallthegame.com/
Hello everyone,
First of all, we’d like to thank all players for supporting this game since the very beginning; it couldn’t have come this far without you.
Circumstances have contributed to a significant loss of players and we’ve decided to cease the current game operations for the Global English version and take City of Steam back. This is a decision we have taken months to reach, and are confident that it’s best for the health of the players, the community and the game itself.
City of Steam is not shutting it down. We at Mechanist Games will improve and self-publish the game, and endeavor to make it available to as many of the original fans as possible by cooperating with popular English language browser-gaming platforms (to be announced).
City of Steam will be upgraded during the time it is offline to better suit the player demographics of the new browser-gaming platforms publishing the game; new content, new features, new systems, massive change to the economy and statistics, new equipment and cosmetics, new quests and an overhaul of most of the level art and main quests. Some features will be removed. There will also be a massive flying fortress for characters of any level to congregate in.
Because of these numerous and sizeable changes, the game will be re-launched in November under the title City of Steam: Arkadia.
Thanks to all the game’s players, and the support of the City of Steam community.
Mechanist Games
(Source: City of Steam)
If you hadn’t heard, today is the day that Path of Exile finally graduates from Open Beta University and makes its way into the open world. In celebration of this achievement, I figured I would dig up the oldest piece of concept art sent to us by the folks at Grinding Gear Games and show it to you all. As you can see from the picture, this is concept art for the game’s Shadow, a class that relies on hitting fast, setting traps, and evading attacks.
Path of Exile’s launch introduces the seventh class, the Scion, as well as new zones and a number of other enhancements. Check it out at http://www.pathofexile.com/.
Back when I previewed City of Steam’s open beta, I noted that while the game was still fun in multiple aspects, that the game had been taken a rather notable hit in quality since its closed beta and before R2 Games was announced as the publisher. Certain game mechanics were severely simplified, the FAQ for the game was so shoddily put together that it was a combination of Engrish, questions and answers that had nothing to do with City of Steam, and bits rolled over from other games. The cash shop grew, prices rose, and suddenly Electrum found its way into many aspects of City of Steam life. And then the game stopped receiving updates and patches, and customer support went silent.
Players who left due to the monetization and simplification will be happy to hear that R2 Games will soon be out of the picture. Mechanist Games has announced on Facebook that they are taking back City of Steam. While the R2 Games servers will be shutting down November 21st, it will be relaunched as City of Steam: Arkadia.
Hello all, today we officially announce that Mechanist Games has taken CoS back. Stay tuned for City of Steam: Arcadia this November! More info coming soon!
R2 Games will not be offering refunds for any recent Electrum purchases.
(Source: City of Steam)
You may remember The9 as the developer in charge of World of Warcraft’s operations in China up until 2009 when operations moved over to NetEase. The9 is also the parent company of Red 5 Studios, the creators of the oft-delayed and ever changing MMO shooter Firefall. As reported by GamesIndustry.biz, The9 plans on issuing $24 million in stocks to Shanghai Oriental Pearl Culture Development Ltd. That name may be a mouthful, but if the deal goes ahead as planned, Oriental Pearl will have a twenty percent stake in the company.
Firefall is valued at $100 million and is currently in open beta/soft launch.
(Source: Gamesindustry.biz)
Turbine’s Senior Producer has posted an announcement on the Dungeons and Dragons Online forum announcing that due to player feedback and internal testing, the price of Heroic Hearts of Wood will be greatly reduced when Update 20 goes live. Additionally, players will still be able to purchase Hearts of Wood from the Twelve barter NPC, at least for the time being.
The prices on Lamannia are not final – inspired by the Lamannia feedback, the Heroic Heart of Wood will be greatly reduced from the price displayed in the bartershop today. We’ll be looking at your additional feedback and how players play through sagas, and adjust the costs appropriately. We expect the average player to, upon reaching the minimum level requirement, spend additional hours to obtain a Heart of Wood – but never hundreds of hours.
The post goes on to explain that the original change was to address two goals, the unification to a single currency for Hearts of Wood and to address a major oversight with Tokens of the Twelve, the currency players currently use to buy Hearts of Wood. The tokens were originally intended to be rewards for completing difficult tasks, however the development team did not factor in Epic levels and the tokens have since become rather trivial to obtain. In response, Turbine has been slowly depreciating the value of the token and has not added to the reward system in the past year.
(Source: DDO Forums)
Zenimax has a fresh batch of questions and answers regarding the Elder Scrolls Online, and the topics range from skills and campaigns and everything in between. While campaigns between the factions last for three months at a time, nothing is reset at the end of a campaign except for the leaderboards and score. Keeps, scroll ownership, emperor status, and location do not. The most interesting answer from the Q&A was that Zenimax dodged the question on whether or not a player who is infected and becomes a werewolf or a vampire will be able to transform back. Our guess is yes, but Zenimax is being coy.
No word on how this affects player-operated gentleman clubs.
(Source: Elder Scrolls Online)
Sony Online Entertainment has posted the latest Producer Letter detailing the upcoming Update 31 and gearing up for launch on the PlayStation 4. What does Update 31 entail?
On a high level, that means a sweeping, game-wide graphical upgrade, a massive design effort to polish and remaster the core leveling game, and a host of technical work that prepares DCUO’s underlying technology not only for launch on a next generation gaming console, but for a long future on it as well. This is without a doubt the biggest technical update we have ever done.
Aside from a massive amount of under the hood fixes, tweaks, and optimizations, DC Universe will also undergo a graphical upgrade (not pictured above), a redesign of several major areas including Centennial Park and Robinson Park in Metropolis and Gotham respectively. The letter also notes that the 1-30 leveling process will be made much more fluid, alongside updates to textures and geometry to make the world feel more seamless, and updates to the way that NPCs act to make them more consistent in combat.
These updates will go live on all platforms, including PlayStation 3, and can be previewed on the test server this week. The update is expected to go live in November.
(Source: DC Universe)
Losing your character name due to a server merger sucks, especially if you can’t find a new name because all of the good ones are taken up by people who haven’t logged in since the game first launched. The good news is that players who do end up losing their names when the servers merge on October 23rd will have a bigger pool of alternatives to choose from. Trion has announced that characters who have been inactive for a long time will have their names reset when the servers merge.
Trion has not detailed exactly what counts as “inactive,” but characters that fall into this pool will be contacted via email to warn account holders to log in before it is too late. If you don’t log in, well that’s on you.
If one of your characters is going to be impacted by this change, you’ll be getting an email from us in the next day or two with instructions. If you are one of these inactive characters and want to keep your name, you’ll just need to log in with that character before October 23rd.
(Source: Rift Junkies)
Some of you may remember that Sony Online Entertainment originally slated Everquest Mac to shut down in 2012, but decided against it due to passionate feedback from the community. Well passion can only get you so far, and in a letter posted to the community, John Smedley has announced that Everquest’s Mac iteration will be shutting down effective November 18th.
We said this before and now we really have to do it – we’re sunsetting EQ Mac. As a passionate Mac player, I’m disappointed to have to share this news. We decided to keep the game running after receiving your feedback when we originally announced the sunset plans early last year, but with all of our development aligned towards our upcoming slate of games, we simply cannot justify the resources required to continue to support this version of the game.
Everquest on the PC will not be affected by any of these changes, and it is unlikely that players will be able to move their characters over due to the massive difference in versions. EQMac was never updated past Planes of Power, the fourth expansion released in 2002.
(Source: Announcement)
MMO Fallout 