If you ever want proof that a good chunk of people still play Defiance, just check out one of the game’s many Arkfall events. Arkfalls are a great place to go through your stockpile of weapons and figure out which are worth keeping or need to be thrown away. Check out Defiance at http://www.defiance.com/
Star Citizen has moves that just won’t quit, with the recent announcement that funding has surpassed twenty seven million dollars, or approximately one dinner for three at Red Lobster assuming you have a coupon. The milestone brings with it expanded development into the Banu technology. Who are the Banu?
At $23 million we dedicated additional resources to making Xi’An spacecraft a unique experience. At $27 million, we will expand that same thinking to the Banu! Starting with the merchant ship, the design team will expand Banu technology to offer players a completely different way of experiencing their universe.
So what’s next for the endless pile of money streaming into Roberts Space Industries? At $28 million, the team will add a new starter ship. At $29 million, the team will expand Squadron 42, a spiritual successor to Wing Commander and a single player game, with enhanced missions, more resources, and better design.
(Source: Roberts Space Industries)
Player housing has been a long time coming in World of Warcraft, after all the concept was in place going all the way back to the game’s internal alpha. Blizzard has referred to housing as “on the horizon” going all the way back to the game’s launch in 2004, with a few comments here and there of no particular detail other than to say that the idea was not in active development. One fear conveyed by Blizzard was that the world that had already become rather empty due to the Looking For Dungeon tool, would become even less populated if players had no reason to leave their house. On the other hand, Blizzard did not want to take the massive effort of creating a housing system only to have it underused out of lack of functionality.
With garrisons, Blizzard seems to once again be picking a “learn from the competition” approach to development. For those of you who didn’t catch the Blizzcon information, Garrisons are phased housing areas coming with Warlords of Draenor which allow players to create buildings and recruit followers. Followers add an element of offline progression as players can send them to gather resources, complete crafting tasks, and are able to gain character and item levels to find resources with which to build better buildings and obtain even more resources. Garrisons will also be a case with which to show off one’s trophies and achievements, and presumably will be updated with further features over time.
From what we’ve seen so far, garrisons feel like a slightly more jazzed up version of The Old Republic’s resource gathering, minus the ability to manage your crew portably through a menu. Unless you can, in which case ignore that previous sentence. I’m looking forward to seeing more about garrisons in the future.
Player housing has been a long time coming in World of Warcraft, after all the concept was in place going all the way back to the game’s internal alpha. Blizzard has referred to housing as “on the horizon” going all the way back to the game’s launch in 2004, with a few comments here and there of no particular detail other than to say that the idea was not in active development. One fear conveyed by Blizzard was that the world that had already become rather empty due to the Looking For Dungeon tool, would become even less populated if players had no reason to leave their house. On the other hand, Blizzard did not want to take the massive effort of creating a housing system only to have it underused out of lack of functionality.
With garrisons, Blizzard seems to once again be picking a “learn from the competition” approach to development. For those of you who didn’t catch the Blizzcon information, Garrisons are phased housing areas coming with Warlords of Draenor which allow players to create buildings and recruit followers. Followers add an element of offline progression as players can send them to gather resources, complete crafting tasks, and are able to gain character and item levels to find resources with which to build better buildings and obtain even more resources. Garrisons will also be a case with which to show off one’s trophies and achievements, and presumably will be updated with further features over time.
From what we’ve seen so far, garrisons feel like a slightly more jazzed up version of The Old Republic’s resource gathering, minus the ability to manage your crew portably through a menu. Unless you can, in which case ignore that previous sentence. I’m looking forward to seeing more about garrisons in the future.
For this week’s Community Concerns, I decided to put together a graph of NCSoft’s library of MMOs, past and present. The above graph shows each game’s support timeline from the year it launched to the year that it shut down or to present if it is still running. Several of the titles may seem inaccurate as they are based on the Korean launch and may be a year or more ahead of their western launch, and at least one title has not launched in the west at all. I also decided to include Lineage as it is still in operation in Korea.
Keep in mind that Blade & Soul has not launched in the west and Lineage has shut down in the west.
For this week’s Community Concerns, I decided to put together a graph of NCSoft’s library of MMOs, past and present. The above graph shows each game’s support timeline from the year it launched to the year that it shut down or to present if it is still running. Several of the titles may seem inaccurate as they are based on the Korean launch and may be a year or more ahead of their western launch, and at least one title has not launched in the west at all. I also decided to include Lineage as it is still in operation in Korea.
Keep in mind that Blade & Soul has not launched in the west and Lineage has shut down in the west.
Today’s MMOrning Shot comes to us from World of Warcraft, more specifically the recently announced expansion Warlords of Draenor. Warlords of Draenor introduces a number of changes to the World of Warcraft, including player housing and a bump of the level cap to 100. Check it out when it releases next year.
Sony Online Entertainment has announced that a portion of all proceeds made this weekend in Planetside 2 will be donated to the Travis Manion Foundation to support veterans and their families. The Travis Manion Foundation honors the fallen by challenging the living and empowering veterans and survivors. You can read more about the Travis Manion Foundation at http://www.travismanion.org/
This Veteran’s Day weekend, N?ovember 9th – 1?1th, 10% of all in-game marketplace item sales in Planetside 2 will be donated to the Travis Manion foundation to support the nation’s veterans and families of Fallen Heroes.
(Source: Planetside 2 Email)
With Blizzard’s latest quarterly report showing another drop in subscribers for World of Warcraft, the internet is once again asking the age old question: Will the game go free to play? If you have to ask, the answer is no. Blizzard’s Production Director J Allen Brack stated to Eurogamer:
“We would have to rework the game pretty significantly in order to make it free-to-play. It’s not something we’re currently considering.”
That sounds familiar for some reason. Blizzard opened its convention with the announcement of the next expansion pack, Warlords of Draenor, where players will travel back in time to the Warcraft RTS era.
(Source: Eurogamer)
I once read an editorial about the hardcore gaming scene that discussed how players could stand just about any form of loss as long as it was fair and the reason could be pointed to in an understandable way. Being perpetually stuck at a specific point in a game because the boss is too hard or a level is too difficult is frustrating, it can even cause you to quit, but at the end of the day you know that it was your own abilities that stopped your progress. On the other side of this idea, you have games that cannot be completed due to hard stops out of bugs or incomplete content. S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadows of Chernobyl is a game that can come to a hard stop when you reach the final area (the Chernobyl power plant) only to realize that you not only will not survive the radiation without the highest level suit, but the game does not allow you to go back at this point and get it. If you don’t have a save file from before entering Chernobyl, you are SOL.
But even that isn’t as infuriating as not being able to progress due to a bug, and when it comes to MMOs, I can think of no other game in recent memory than Defiance that I have wound up quitting temporarily due to bugs preventing progress. I still have not completed the levels in Defiance’s Castithan DLC pack, released back in August, because it is impossible. If you haven’t played through the content, the missions involve a series of arenas where you rack up points over several waves of enemies. There are five waves per level, and at any time the game can suffer a fatal bug where the round begins but the timer disappears and so does your score, forcing you to quit or be killed and try again.
And then you try again only to have the system break again, so you can try again to have the system break again, in an almost never ending loop. Only by sheer luck did I manage to get through the first four arenas after multiple forced reboots over the course of the past two and a half months, and finally after having to restart the last arena three times, I managed to get through all of the rounds without anything breaking. I did ultimately complete the Castithan content pack, but had I not already purchased the season pass, I likely wouldn’t purchase any further DLC. The fact that such bugs are going unfixed after two months time is unacceptable, especially in a game that is working double time just to retain its players, as Defiance is.
Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.
![[Community] NCSoft’s Support Timeline](https://mmofallout.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ncsofts.png?w=786)
