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/
Considering the recent library of kid-friendly MMOs shutting down, I decided to check in our friends at Sanrio Town and see how Hello Kitty Online was doing after all these years. We don’t talk about games like Hello Kitty Online much here at MMO Fallout, except to point to the company’s knack for charity work, and it’s been a good year or so since we last checked in with our feline friend. Unfortunately, while the lights are still on, it appears that no one is home. The servers are online, however the game has not received any new content since March 2012. To top it off, Google went berzerk as I tried to enter the forums, warning that the domain had been flagged for containing malware.
According to a few members of the forum, concurrent population is in the single digits assuming it doesn’t drop down to zero at times. It looks like Hello Kitty Online is essentially over and done with.
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)
The good news is that Phantasy Star Online 2 is fully localized in English and ready to go for a launch in the west. The bad news? It will likely never launch here. According to an undisclosed source in an article by Tristan Oliver over at TSSZ, Phantasy Star Online 2’s localization will only be rolling out to English speaking Asian countries. Sega hasn’t officially shot down any prospects of the title coming to the Americas and Europe, however the source speculates that there may be enough doubt that the game would be profitable in the west to prevent the game from ever making its way overseas.
Sega has been silent about a western launch since their appearance at the Penny Arcade Expo last year. Some gamers are already playing PSO2 on the Japanese servers with English patches, and you can too with this handy guide from Kotaku.
(Source: TSSZ)
MMO Fallout 