Category: News

Please Buy All Points Bulletin, Epic Games!


Apple Pie Baking

I normally don’t talk about rumors, but if Earth Eternal can get bought up I’d like to think 130,000 player strong All Points Bulletin can get a reprieve as well. There are rumors flying around that Epic Games is gearing up to buy All Points Bulletin, no doubt a disappointment to the players currently working on private servers for the fledgling, if slightly cancelled, MMO. Say what you want about APB, the game didn’t really deserve to crash so early after launch, if anything for the sake of the people who still had 30+ hours of their gametime left (me).

If Epic Games picks up APB, hopefully they will relaunch it as a free to play game with microtransactions and VIP, ala Crimecraft. With the recent updates to the driving and shooting mechanics, APB improved vastly over its previous incarnation.

For those of you who are still wondering how this rumor came to be, Epic’s CEO Mark Rein loves APB. Loves it, almost like a man loves his football. Epic’s spokesperson commented that if there are talks going on, they are in full confidentiality, so there won’t be any information until it goes official, assuming it is credible.

More on APB if it ever appears.

Wait…What? WHAT!? All Points Bulletin Is Gone…Taken Offline


OBJECTION!

See? This is what I get for going to school. Several hours ago, Realtime Worlds announced that All Points Bulletin will be shutting down within the next 24 hours. It feels like just last week we were reporting on Realtime Worlds heading into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, selling off MyWorld, and desperately trying to find a new bidder for All Points Bulletin. At the time, Realtime Worlds expressed that the game was still lively, holding 130,000 active players. In a post on the APB forums, Brett Bateman had this to say;

“APB has been a fantastic journey, but unfortunately that journey has come to a premature end. Today we are sad to announce that despite everyone’s best efforts to keep the service running; APB is coming to a close.”

According to Eurogamer, a source close to Realtime Worlds disclosed that the game will be pulled within 24 hours, as the company could not find a buyer.

“Despite all the talk, no buyer has been found so it looks like the plug is about to be pulled. We’ve heard that it could go tomorrow”.

Our thoughts and hopes go out to the now ex-employees of Realtime Worlds. It appears as though All Points Bulletin is already offline, as neither the forums nor the game itself are working currently.

I’ll be updating as more information appears, but this for all intent and purpose, this is the end of APB.

Looking Back, Moving Forward: August 2010


Video of the month.

There is no doubt that All Points Bulletin stole the show this past month, showing up on MMO Fallout at least once every three days heading towards the middle of the month onward. Although Realtime Worlds announced APB carrying 130,000 active players, I have to question how many of those players are actively paying subscriptions, as I have my doubts that Realtime Worlds would be going into administration if the grand majority were pumping cash directly into the cash shop and game time veins at RTW.

August was filled to the brim with news that makes you scratch your head and question reality. Bill Roper is gone from Cryptic, I was sent a legal threat by David Allen, I had my wisdom teeth taken out and pretty much immediately went back to writing up articles despite being heavily drugged on hydrocodone, I was featured on Biobreak and Tobold’s blog.

On another good note, however, MMO Fallout now has five active backups going. For the sake of my own embarrassment, I won’t mention the incident that lead up to me being paranoid about losing my information, but irregardless I now have five flash drives, each carrying a backup of MMO Fallout that I update on a weekly basis. I backup this website daily, but I only transfer it off of my computer every Saturday.

I’m still disappointed that the Atari versus Turbine lawsuit resulted the way it did. I personally love legal drama (when it doesn’t involve me) and would have enjoyed seeing something come out of this other than secret settlements.

Warhammer Online fans rejoiced this month. Although BioMythArts Entertainment (or whatever they’re calling themselves nowadays) isn’t giving specific numbers, they are willing to announce that Warhammer Online is indeed profitable, with tens of thousands of new players streaming in thanks to the endless trial system.

Over on Sony’s front, Everquest is once again proving that although their alternate rule servers are unique, they more often than not crash due to low populations. Such is the case with Everquest’s 51/50 ruleset servers (players start at level 51 with 50 level AP) which are due to be merged into normal ruleset servers.

Unfortunately, another month brings another game shutting down. After a year of promises and well wishes, Playdom announced the shuttering of Chronicles of Spellborn, after the Facebook gaming company acquired Acclaim. Although Acclaim’s two other MMOs 9Dragons and 2Moon were transferred to other hosts, Chronicles of Spellborn was shutdown late August.

Speaking of which, Earth Eternal came very close to shutting down. The most adorable non-Asian MMO hit a brick wall running when Sparkplay announced that the company had laid off all but two employees, and that the game would be sold at auction, with high hopes that a buyer would pick up the title. Luckily, a buyer did indeed pick up the title, and we’ve received information that many of the Sparkplay employees may be making a return soon enough.

Alganon-WAIT IT’S NOT WHAT YOU THINK- ditched the initial client purchase completely by going 100% free to play earlier this month. While the free title is restricted in how many quests you may partake in daily, as well as a shorter level cap, players can remove these restrictions with a simple cash shop purchase.

While we’re on the subject of departures, Bill Roper announced that he would be leaving Cryptic Studios. In unrelated news, I’ve been receiving emails of gratitude for reporting on this story.

On yet another sad note, Realtime Worlds and their newly released MMO “Absolving Perot’s Blame” (or APB for short) have been pretty much a weekly staple for MMO Fallout news. What started out as a simple announcement of standard restructuring took a turn for the worst when Realtime Worlds went into administration (Bankruptcy) and announced that they were looking for investors with what was left of the team. With the recently released patch offering major updates to the game’s driving and shooting, we can only hope that these much needed enhancements didn’t come too late.

The Chronicles of Spellborn: What Happened?


It's Gone Somewhere...

Chronicles of Spellborn can be summarized by comparing it to a kid explaining his idea for a video game.

“It’s gonna be awesome! There’s gonna be first person targeting, a bajillion quests to go on with only three classes to choose from but they’re gonna have their own subclasses to branch things out a bit. There’ll be no grind too, and more backstory than you can shake a stick at, and we’re talking a pretty big stick too. It’ll be set in a post-apocalypse environment, and there’ll be explosions and crazy quest series that will allow the player to take control of important people and beat up some bad guys!”

So my above rendition may make Spellborn sound like a bad game, which it isn’t by any means. Chronicles of Spellborn is one of those games that shows up and has the potential to innovate the industry, or at least a small portion of it. The story was detailed and in-depth, the quests were the main staple of the series, and numerous at that, and there was plenty of activity for all varieties of players.

And then Spellborn Works went bankrupt. You can make the best game in the world, but unfortunately without cash the game will shut down. Spellborn Works went bankrupt very shortly after Chronicles of Spellborn launched in North America in 2009 (The game had been running in the UK since the prior November). The game was siphoned by then-publisher Acclaim Games, who announced that they would be performing a massive upgrade to the title, turning it into a free to play cash shop game to be re-released at some point in 2010. Until then, however, Spellborn Live would receive no attention in the form of patches or updates.

Earlier this year, Spellborn’s Asia publisher Frogster announced that they would be shutting down the title. Over in the west, things became less and less hopeful as the months went on. The client on the website stopped working, resulting in the community hosting its own client and patches in order to get new players interested in the game.

Of course, progress without money is no progress at all, and Acclaim went bust shutting down everything. Chronicles of Spellborn was sold to Playdom, who announced that the game would be shutting down.

If anything, Chronicles of Spellborn is a perfect example of a good title that was marred by bad luck with its hosting companies. Due to the bankruptcy of its original developers, Spellborn never saw the attention and maintenance it deserved, and as a result ended up spending over a year on life support being transferred from company to company before finally being shut down.

NIDA Online: What Happened


NIDA Online shut down late last night, after approximately eight months in service, so last night I decided to take a plunge into the game and see just why the title fell short of its one year anniversary.

What I found was a game that wasn’t all that terrible, but nothing special. In terms of cookie-cutter MMOs, this cookie was that plate of Christmas cookies you get from relatives and neighbors that eerily look identical. They are home cooked, but have the strong sensation that the person simply unwrapped store bought items, arranged them on a plate, and called them their own.

I created an Artificier, a tech-based character, who did all of his fighting through guns, not unlike my character in Aika Online. My starter pistol was replaced at level ten with a shotgun, and buying ammo was quick and easy (click on a button on the HUD, no need to be in town or at a vendor). At level fifteen, however, I purchased myself a machine gun that tore through enemies like a hail of knives through air.

By the time I logged off for the night (the game shut down at approximately 3am my time), I hit level 20 and felt like I had accomplished absolutely nothing. I had finished a total of five quests, each one having me kill dozens, if not hundreds, of the same two or three mobs for the sake of finding three or five of whatever item they dropped. Sayries, for example, dropped shells that I needed for a level five quest. I leveled from eight to fifteen before I retrieved all five shells, which I turned in to find my next quest? Get three Sayrie shells. These are non-repeatable quests.

I wanted to get the essence of what new players see when coming into the game, and what I found was an uninviting world filled with monsters who, should you partake in the game’s quest system, you will be slaughtering by the hundred until they no longer give you a viable source of exp, only to finish one quest and then be sent right back for the next. It isn’t a test of patience, or tolerance of grind like in most other Asian MMOs, but instead you get to a point while questing where you simply ask yourself “where is the challenge?”

Moving around is a chore, with the WASD system broken, and the point/click system shoddily put together (I had regular moments where clicking yielded no movement). The combat system is a combat system, there isn’t much more to say about it. Nothing special, but nothing horrible about it either.

I’m sure I will be berated for not giving the title more of a chance, but the focus of my play time over the course of the day yesterday was to experience the game as a new player would, and judging by the dearth of posts on the forums pre-shutdown, and the lack of people in-game, I get the feeling I was one of the few remaining who cared to even take a peek.

NIDA Online is a reminder that for all we rag on mainstream Korean MMOs, there is in fact a level of quality that borderlines on comatose, and I for one feel bad that Gamekiss put so much of their own support and funding into a title that the developers obviously couldn’t care less about.

My videos below:

Yet Another Korean MMO Shuts Down


NIDA Online is a Korean free-to-play MMO. For some of you, that is enough to avoid this game like the plague, and for others it is enough to question: Omali why are you bothering reporting on yet another cookie-cutter MMO shutting down. Why is this significant? NIDA Online opened in September 2009, around the same time as Aion, Champions Online, and Fallen Earth. So, from start to finish, NIDA Online lasted slightly less than eight months.

Now I have never played NIDA, so I’ll leave the quips about the game’s quality to another person, but eight months says a lot. Consider, for instance, the fact that two very widely panned MMOs are still going rather strong to this day, after two years of being live (I’ll leave you to fill in what those two MMOs released in 2008 with high preorder numbers are). NIDA’s run even knocks out FURY, the only MMO we are aware of to fire off emails to its ex-players calling them losers. FURY, for reference, had a ten month life span.

Perhaps now Gamekiss can focus on its other riveting titles, such as the Freestyle basketball MMO.

As It Turns Out: MMOs ARE Expensive


Project: World of Halocraft

This should be obvious by now, but it’s not just the world that is massive in an MMO, the budget is as well. Virtually every mainstream title (sans Runescape) has sucked up millions of dollars in the process of being developed. Not too long ago, it was revealed that Ensemble Studios was working on Project Titan, the fabled Halo MMO, that was canceled under unspecific circumstances. In a recent comment by ex-Ensemble programmer Dusty Monk, the title was canned because of its enormous budget: 90 million. The publisher (Microsoft) decided to pull the plug on the project due to the long distance the MMO still had to go before it was anywhere near completion, and the already high cost.

One only has to look at EA’s upcoming The Old Republic, as well as Age of Conan and Warhammer Online to see just how big budgets can get. So yes, Microsoft, MMOs are expensive, but did you really think that a Halo MMO would do that badly?

Stargate Worlds Unofficially Officially Defunct


Just like Yoko and the Beatles

If MMO Fallout was alive back in 2008, I would likely reference back to an article detailing the death of Star Trek Online in the hands of Perpetual Entertainment, and what ultimately lead to the falling out of the title, into the hands of Cryptic Entertainment. The most important part of this story is to note that both of Perpetual Entertainment’s titles are in the hands of completely different entities, with Star Trek Online being released this past February by Cryptic Studios and Gods and Heroes to be released by Heatwave Interactive at some unknown point. The point being is that, despite the company going under, there is still the possibility of the game being picked up and released.

I say “unofficially officially” because, if Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment had an employee left, and you were to ask him if Stargate Worlds is canceled, he would probably say no. There’s no one working on it, no funds to work on it, and the company sold off its assets, but we don’t want to paint a dismal look at the future. Will the game be coming out this year? No. Will CME be developing it? No. Is there any hope? Well, you could look at Star Trek Online’s over-hundred-thousand subscribers and make up your own mind.

At this juncture, Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment is selling off all of their assets, which will include their license to Stargate Worlds, assuming this sale hasn’t already taken place. As was the case with Perpetual Entertainment, Cheyenne will likely last until the duration of the Chapter 11 bankruptcy is finished, and then dissolve into the abyss of nonfunctional developers. Since Cheyenne has already fulfilled my first set of engagements for Stargate Worlds, I have a new set of possibilities:

  1. Stargate Worlds goes the way of Star Trek Online and Gods & Heroes and is picked up by another studio (Cryptic Studios?), who either collect what Cheyenne had or start anew. It is likely that this studio will be Fresh Start Studios, which is a new developer made up of ex-Cheyenne employees. How well the game does is irrelevant at this point, as we are simply dealing with post-closure events.
  2. The title is not picked up by anyone, and sits in limbo forever.

If the part about Fresh Start Studios picking up Stargate Worlds doesn’t happen, expect option #2. At this juncture, I find it difficult to believe that many studios would pick up the Stargate IP for an MMO.

More on Stargate Worlds if it ever appears, but it seems as if this saga is finally coming to an end.

Dungeon Runners: What Happened


“Dungeon Runners just isn’t cutting the mustard. If she were a ship, she’d be taking on water. Yeah, she’s been taking on water for a long time now. Are my cryptic references too hard to decipher? The game just isn’t profitable. And, the first rule of business is to be profitable!”
-Stephen Nichols, NCsoft, on Dungeon Runners.

Today marks the first day of a new year, as well as the death of two MMOs: Dungeon Runners and Metaplace. Dungeon Runners shut down earlier this morning following an event that saw a giant bomb explode in the game’s main city: Townston. Here at MMO Fallout, “What Happened” has to be my least favorite section as, despite popular opinion, I don’t get my jollies from watching companies fall.

Continue reading “Dungeon Runners: What Happened”

Shadowbane: What Happened


Out of all the titles that appear on What Happened, Shadowbane is the longest running. At six years, I would agree that although the game shut down, it was definitely a success in all manner of speaking. One of the top selling PC games at launch back in 2003, Shadowbane is still considered one of the best open pvp MMOs on the market. Offering fully open player vs player combat in a dynamic world where players can morph terrain, hire AI guards and have them patrol, as well as building and destroying buildings.

Shadowbane was not without bad times, however, and unfortunately when the bad times hit, they were very bad. The game transitioned to a free to play in 2006, where ads would be shown at different points in the game (open, close, and upon death). The game still suffered from a number of bugs and glitches, and in 2008 would be completely rebooted.

In 2008, Shadowbane went offline to perform a complete reboot in order to stabilize the servers and increase performance. As a result, all characters were deleted and all houses were destroyed. Only three of the five servers were brought back online.

Shadowbane was, from the start, a cult hit that never truly got off the ground, despite the rabid following of its fans. On one side, Shadowbane may be the only example of an internet petition actually accomplishing something. The original shut down date of May 2009 was extended to July due to player feedback.

Overall, Shadowbane was an interesting period in several ways: For instance, it showed how successful a game with Ultima Online’s mechanics can be, one that is parroted by Darkfall and Mortal Online. It gave ultimate freedom to the players, and did away with instancing, pre-set plots for housing, and other standards of MMOs.

There is the possibility that Shadowbane will be making a comeback, in the form of a non-MMO title. Ubisoft has recently trademarked the title for non-MMO purposes.