MMO Fallout

Paladins Ditches Heavy Customization

Paladins is a MOBA game that puts emphasis on players being able to customize their characters via collectible cards, at least until Hi-Rez decided not to. While originally billed as a game that would carry a small number of highly customizable heroes, a recent interview with Erez Goren has revealed that the developer plans on limiting just how much the cards can change a character. In the interview, Goren points to play tests revealing that players wanted more heroes, but heroes that were easily identifiable much like they are in Dota or League of Legends.

“People don’t seem to appreciate the variation on a character as much as they do having a new character that does things that particular way.”

Check out MMO Fallout’s coverage of Paladins here.

(Source: Rock, Paper, Shotgun)

John Smedley Returns, Crowd Funding New Game

John Smedley, former of the Daybreak Game Company Smedleys, has returned to gaming in the form of Pixelmage Games. The startup has a few names you might recognize, including Patrick Rothfuss, Jon Handy, and Bill Trost, and their first game is Hero’s Song. Hero’s Song is a 2D rogue-like RPG where each world is shaped by its own history. You might find yourself in a world where the dwarves never existed, and neither has their technology, or one where necromancy reigns supreme.

Each server is hosted by players with the capacity for thousands to join in. You can check out more details at the link below.

(Source: Kickstarter)

Eternal Crusade Can Always Use More Cashmoneys

Warhammer 40k: Eternal Crusade is on its way to Steam early access, and Nathan Richardson wants you to know that the game is doing just fine so far as cashmoneys are concerned. The game is launching on Steam early access, yes, but not for the money. Simply put, the game is funded to launch this year, Steam early access offers luxuries like a decent pay system, news delivery, oh and a lot of customers.

As Richardson puts it:

No, our philosophy of being agile, is that we strongly believe that the inclusion of more people, as early in the development process as possible will ultimately make a better game. We are simply continuing this program (previously called Founders) in the Steam Early Access framework.

You can read the rest of the Q&A at the link below.

(Source: Eternal Crusade)

How Blade & Soul Distributes The Wealth

Drops have always been a divisive issue when it comes to raids, particularly when you’re dealing with players using the roll system to hoard items that they don’t need and probably can’t sell, but want anyway because of greed. In the early days, this was dealt with through a need/greed system, but players would simply roll need on everything. To combat this, games like Neverwinter restrict the need button to classes that can actually use said item.

In Blade & Soul, as one Reddit user points out, party leaders can set the loot rotation to a bidding system. Players bid on drops above a certain value with the winner paying out for the item. To ensure that no one comes out empty handed, the winning player’s bid is distributed among the other players. This way, the more you lose bids, the more money you have to win them in the future or just outright buy the equipment.

(Source: Reddit)

Column: Jagex and the RuneScapes

I’ve written quite a bit about Jagex and the issue of “not-RuneScape” in the past, and while I penned an editorial about its history over at MMORPG.com earlier last year, I’ve been meaning to give the topic another look for quite some time. If you aren’t acquainted with Jagex’s history of developing games that are not RuneScape, I highly recommend reading that article before you continue here otherwise it’ll probably look like I’m just trashing a successful company for no reason. It’s a long history of failed “hobby projects,” mismanaged and abandoned long before anyone would bother to inform the public.

So since my last full editorial in 2012, there has been a lot of stuff going on at Jagex. Transformers Universe went into beta and, as I suspected, it fumbled the ball at the two yard line and Hasbro pulled the IP. Block N Load launched and has subsequently plummeted in traffic, relaunched as a free to play game and has been on the decline ever since. The winter league was a mess and ended in a cancellation due to the number of teams dropping out. Carnage Racing, released on Steam in 2013, can no longer be purchased and its online was shut off with no announcement if you read the forums. It looks like Jagex pulled out of publishing Entropy since they are no longer credited and the game has a monthly average of six users.

But something else happened in that time frame, Jagex successfully launched Old School RuneScape. So successfully, in fact, that Old School has surpassed the population of RuneScape 3. It launched as a snapshot of what the game was like back in 2007 with Jagex talking about how they might make a few small changes here and there, and it has grown into a separate title entirely, one that continues to receive substantial content on par and possibly even better than its bigger budget big brother considering the team size.

If I had to comment on Old School, however, I’d say that the original point I made years back still stands: That RuneScape is Jagex’s sacred cow, and that any venture outside of that property is doomed to failure. Old School RuneScape was an experiment that went right, but at the end of the day it is RuneScape. It’s like the model train you pull out of a box in the attic. While you dust it off, give it a fresh coat of paint, and make some additions to it, its core remains the same. The guys and gals working on Old School made the right choice by allowing the community to dictate what updates the game is allowed to receive.

RuneScape Chronicle is in beta right now and we’ll have to see how it does considering that while it is based on the RuneScape lore, it isn’t RuneScape. There is still the MMO that Jagex announced earlier last year that may or may not be Stellar Dawn. Ace of Spades and Block N Load are still online with their small communities.

But who knows where Jagex’s new CEO will take the company. Mark Gerhard apologized a few years ago for treating their non-RuneScape games like “hobby projects.” We’ll have to see what direction the company takes under Rod Cousens, and I’m holding on to faith that the company can break ground into games that are not RuneScape.

In the meantime, check out our interview with Jagex on Deadman Mode from last year.

Firefall Going Under For 26 Hour Maintenance

Trove isn’t the only game to take an extended vacation this week. Firefall will be launching update 1.6 on January 20th, but in order to do so will be taking down the servers for more than a day to perform maintenance. The servers will go down in the morning on Tuesday and come back online (hopefully) around the same time the following day.

Because of the nature of the changes coming in this update, we need to bring the servers offline for maintenance and migration. On Tuesday, January 19th at 8:00 AM PST we will be bringing all of our production game servers offline to perform this required maintenance. Because of the nature of the work that needs to be performed, we expect to be down for approximately 26 hours.

Update 1.6 introduces the Jetball PvP arena, a new instanced game mode, new missions, new events, changes to battleframes and progression, as well as numerous other tweaks and content additions. You can find all of it at the update preview at the link below.

(Source: Firefall)

Trove To Take Two Days Off, Upgrade Servers

Who’s to say that MMOs shouldn’t get a nice two day weekend every few years? If you’ve been playing Trove recently, you are likely well acquainted with the ongoing server issues. The issue, naturally, is that the game has grown too large in scope for the current hardware to handle, with player clubs particularly outgrowing in size what the server can reasonably process. As a result, the game is going offline from the 19th to the 21st in order to place in new hardware.

For the last few weeks we’ve been testing our new storage system on the on the Public Test Server. We’re happy to say that it’s gone well, and it’s time to do it live! However, it’s going to take some time – up to 48 hours to complete the full upgrade.

The Trion team hopes that the new hardware will result in less downtime, more stability, and faster reboots should anything go haywire. Anyone who logs in between the 21st and the 24th will receive a number of items as compensation for the downtime.

(Source: Trion Worlds)

Gloria Victis Adds NPC Battles, War Is Coming

Gloria Victis’ latest patch is putting focus on player immersion, in the form of NPC battles and exhaustible resources. While the scope is starting out small, with animal hunting and mercenary fights, NPCs will eventually be engaging in all out war that players can join in on or dutifully side step away from. In addition to NPC battles, resources dotting the world will now deplete and be replaced with other goods, forcing players to move around if they want to find the best spots.

The most important change is implementation of fights between NPCs – foxes sneak towards the farms to hunt chickens and gooses, poachers hunt wild animals and mercenaries serving one nation rush on the another faction’s guards in sight in Valley of Death. In the upcoming updates various groups of NPCs will start waging their wars against another ones, bringing even more life to the world of Gloria Victis!

Meaningful NPC battles is a rarity in MMOs, with games like Tabula Rasa allowing NPCs to capture bases and prevent players from accessing quest NPCs, vendors, spawn points, etc.

(Source: Gloria Victis)

Deadman Polling Death/Combat Changes

Jagex has announced that notable changes to Deadman mode will be coming in a future content poll. The latest developer diary details a number of content additions to be added in the upcoming player poll, including additions and tweaks to the recently released Zeah continent. Among the changes, however, are two key tweaks for Deadman Mode content. The first, whether the community will approve of new players receiving a six hour grace period during which they cannot be attacked. The second, whether or not killing a player more than forty levels below you will no longer generate a bank key.

Other Deadman updates include a timer on login similar to that found in pvp worlds, the ability to obtain dragon claws as a very rare drop from dragons, and adding pvp armor to wilderness boss drops. Voting opens soon.

(Source: Deadman)

Daybreak Game Company Branching Into Xbox One

(Update: Clarified that DC Universe is the first game to be released)

When Daybreak Game Company spun off of its Sony corporate overlords, most of us assumed and hoped that this would lead to their titles eventually being released on the Xbox. That speculation has come to fruition with the announcement that DC Universe Online will be hitting Xbox One later this spring. The console release will include the full game and all 20 currently released episodes. According to Game Informer, the release will also come with updates for all systems tying in the game with the Legends of Tomorrow television show.

A number of quality of life updates are coming as well, including account-wide unlocks for gear and styles, as well as cross-platform play between PC and Playstation with Xbox players on their own servers.

Hopefully this means more of Daybreak’s games coming to Xbox such as Planetside 2 and Everquest Next.

(Source: Game Informer)

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