World of Warcraft’s in-game store has arrived in the form of the Battle.net shop. Right now the cash shop is rather limited, offering access to the standard fluff players have come to know and either love or hate from Blizzard’s web client. Vanity pets run about $10, with mounts at $25, although most items from both sets are 50% off for the time being to celebrate the launch. Grab them before they go back to regular price on January 1st.
(Source: Joystiq)
Eldevin only just launched a few days ago, but the folks at Hunted Cow are already looking toward the future. In a post on the forums, lead programmer Glenn Murphy discussed a few pieces of content that the team is working on. Foremost, Hunted Cow hopes to address the very restrictive camera, a byproduct of the game’s rendering. Eventually players will have better control of the camera, offering a wider range of movement and better visibility of their surroundings. Additionally, since Eldevin is running on an engine built in Java around ten years ago, the game is rendered on a software level. By performing some upgrades, the team hopes to bring the tech forward and allow for hardware rendering.
Also on the bucket list are guilds, an auction house, mail system, housing, pets, and WASD movement.
(Source: Eldevin Forums)
Archlord is one of those games whose history I have found difficult to track. This MMO began under Codemasters way back in 2005, launching to pretty low reviews before it went free to play and ultimately shut down in 2009. Webzen, who published Archlord in other territories, took on the role of global publisher. At one point, Webzen started talking about something called Archlord X, which according to this rather poorly translated Facebook notice from September 2012, has ceased development.
Thank you for waiting for release of Archlord X. We notice that all Archlord X contents containing various quest, enhanced battle system and efficient user interface will be applied to Archlord’s major expansion on September. We believe that qualified contents from Archlord X, which was used to enhance Archlord contents, will offer you exciting game environment. Please come to Archlord to enjoy Archlord X contents.
Sadly, Archlord itself will be shutting down January 1st, likely in preparation for the launch of Archlord 2. Compensation packages have not been finalized, and Webzen has promised more details in the coming weeks.
On August of 2009, Webzen.com was thrilled to release Archlord globally. Since official launch, we have been working hard to build a strong community and gaming environment through new content updates and various events. Unfortunately, we have come to a difficult decision to end this long journey we have enjoyed and cherished together. We understand that this will disappoint many of our players.
(Source: Archlord)
The folks at Grinding Gear Games are enjoying a successful first month. One month after launch, Path of Exile has enjoyed a rather sumptuous four million registered users with a quarter of a million logging in every day. Development and release was funded primarily due to founders packs, ranging from fifty to nine hundred dollars in price. Last Wednesday, Path of Exile launched version 1.0.2, bringing with it a host of new features.
Version 1.0.2 includes several new Unique items, vendor recipes, achievements, and microtransactions, as well as final touches on the rapid-fire PvP Tournaments, various bug fixes, and some balancing changes to the game’s damage over time mechanics.
(Source: Path of Exile press release)
Last year, Jagex rolled out the Premiere Club. Players were able to buy limited packages of 3, 6, and 12 months of membership for a reduced price and receive added bonuses for doing so. In a post on the official website, Jagex has laid down the plans for 2013 Premiere Club. The packages are only available until “early 2014,” and the deal last year expired on February 4th. At the highest, gold tier full year package, players receive bonus loyalty points, exclusive pets, extra daily spins, access to VIP exclusive worlds, exclusive Q&A’s, chat and forum badges, and cosmetic promotional items that generally can only be obtained through special game cards.
This year’s deal is more expensive than last year, by a margin of about $12. It will be possible to redeem bonds for premiere membership, so dedicated players can get it all for free. You apparently need six, twelve, and twenty four bonds for each package respectively.
(Source: Jagex)
MMORPG.com recently conducted an interview with Yinzi Cheng of XLGames, creators of the MMO ArcheAge. The interview is based entirely around the game’s monetization format, which Cheng believes makes the game impervious to gold farmers. There are three currencies in ArcheAge: Gold, Arcs, and Crystals. Gold is the usual in-game gold, crystals are the real money currency, and Arcs are used to purchase many of the game’s premium goods. Gold and crystals are not tradeable, but arcs are. As Cheng says:
Gold that is earned from game contents is untradeable. Arcs could be earned by purchasing Crystals, by enjoying some contents such as catching boss monsters, or by trading with other users. So ‘gold farmers’ cannot produce gold illegally. Therefore, the ‘gold farmers’ easiest way to earn gold, which is auto playing, will no longer bring them profit.
I don’t think XLGames fully understands how gold farmers work. Don’t believe me? When Jagex introduced trade restrictions to RuneScape, players simply converted to a currency based in junk items, allowing them to bypass the system completely. Materials can be traded between players, so what’s to stop a gold farmer from botting millions of gold worth of materials and trading those materials to the buyer who then sells them to an NPC for gold? Arcs are open season for gold farmers to generate in-game, as they can be mined from bosses.
ArcheAge’s non-tradeable gold idea isn’t new, and XLGames should be aware that the process hasn’t done much to impede gold farming in the other titles, like ArcheAge, where despite a strong insistence that the process isn’t feasible, there is quite a variety of gold farming services with varying methods of delivery. The lesson here is that so long as there is a trade system, people will find a way to farm gold.
(Source: MMORPG.com)
Video games are serious business, serious enough that every once in a while here at MMO Fallout we hear about employees leaking update information to players. Generally this insider information is related to upcoming updates that will cause a rise or drop in the price of certain goods. As for the employees themselves, assuming they are caught, punishment ranges from company to company. Usually they are fired.
In a post on MMO Culture, however, XLGames has promised a very serious reaction. Recently a leak was discovered when several high ranking guilds began hoarding very specific items, with the community taking to the forums to demand action. In response, XLGames has revealed that an internal investigation is going on, with the possibility of criminal prosecution against those held responsible. I assume that the charges would fall under revealing trade secrets. Was it worth it?
(Source: MMO Culture)
Lineage is NCSoft’s most successful title to date, launching in 1998 and still going strong fifteen years later in Korea and not in North America or Europe where the game was decidedly less popular. Still, Lineage has quite a following in Korea, Japan, China, and several other territories. With the game’s fifteen year anniversary a couple months behind it, NCSoft has revealed that Lineage has raked in $1.8 billion in sales. On second thought, that doesn’t sound impressive enough. Think of it as two trillion won, or ?2,000,000,000,000.
If South Korea celebrated Thanksgiving, I imagine the folks at NCSoft would be stuffing their turkey with money today.
(Source: Destructoid)
Hi-Rez today announced that their upcoming MOBA, SMITE, will finally be launching on March 25th, 2014. Since the game entered open beta, over 2.5 million people have signed up for the free to play game. The opening also coincides with a $100,000 tournament to be held on March 29-30 in Atlanta, Georgia between the top American and European teams.
All player progress in SMITE’s Open Beta will carry over to the game’s general release. Also, all Beta players who reach level 30 before the launch date will unlock the Cacodemon skin for the playable god Ymir.
(Source: SMITE)
I recently read a column on MMORPG.com asking what I consider to be a relatively simple question, why are there no HD remakes in MMOs? The answer to end all answers is time and money. Art is expensive and the engine may be so old that to incorporate higher resolution graphics would require extensive work under the hood, likely breaking other processes and requiring those to be fixed while you’re in there messing around with the graphics engine. For many of these old games, the investment required to overhaul the graphics does not add up to how much additional interest that such a revamp could theoretically produce. Instead of massive graphical overhauls, generally what you get is a slow revamp of graphics and animations over a very long period of time.
There are exceptions to this rule, of course. RuneScape, a runaway success, has had numerous HD “remakes” over the years, from upgrading to newer engines and its multiple overhauls to the recent release of RuneScape 3 and the bungled, yet still in development HTML5. The difference is that Jagex happens to have enough cash on hand that they can field several failed multi-million dollar games, afford a nearly constant stream of weekly game updates, and have enough to fill a swimming pool with the gold coins left over. Not a lot of other companies have that luxury, or if they technically do they don’t have the cooperation of the people holding the checkbook.
Then you have to deal with the fact that the game itself is quite outdated at this point. Jagex dealt with this by introducing Evolution of Combat, noting that while the game had come a long way graphically, the combat was still stuck somewhere in 2001’s RuneScape classic with some special attacks, equipment degradation, and set effects. Taking the outer layer of a 2013 Corvette Stingray and throwing it on a 1930 Woodie Wagon won’t make the car sell any better, you’ll just wind up with an automobile that looks just as great as it underperforms. Which isn’t to say that they are bad, Everquest is still enjoyed by many gamers, but upgrading it to look like a 2013 release does not make it a new game.
So where does that leave us? Creating an MMO is a high risk, high cost venture, and creating an HD remake is even riskier. For the same reason that full on sequels are generally frowned upon, unless you’re building a franchise or your original launch was a financial disaster, developers would rather create a modular system that can be improved over time rather than uprooted and replaced in one big chunk.
