MMO Fallout

Red 5 Studios Sees $24 Million Investment

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 Responds To True Heart Criticism

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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)

Elder Scrolls Online Ask Me Anything

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)

DC Universe Remastered Is Coming

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)

Phantasy Star Online 2 Isn’t Coming Westward

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)

Phantasy Star Online 2 Isn't Coming Westward

(Source: TSSZ)

MMOrning Shots: Trick Or Treat

No, I’m not here for candy, and if you rustle my head one more time I will stab you.

Player Protest True Heart Update In DDO

MMO gamers are hardly strangers to in-game protests. We’ve seen plenty of protests in games like RuneScape, Aion, and more over everything from updates to lack of communication and more, the removal of a mechanic or the reintroduction of one that had been removed. The size and efficiency of said protests ranges based on the catalyst and the game in question, but players have had quite a bit of success in the past with organizing sit-in’s and mass exodus or unsubscribing. There is plenty of debate as to whether or not protests actually accomplish their goals, because you won’t find many developers willing to admit if they are.

Players in Dungeons and Dragons Online organized a sit-in on the Wayfinder server in Stormreach city, to show their dissatisfaction toward a change in the True Reincarnation system coming with Update 20. True reincarnation resets your character to level one with bonuses from your “past life.” The update removes the primary way players obtained True Hearts of Wood and will require players to run epic-level sagas in order to obtain commendations to trade in for True Hearts. In layman’s terms, the update will add a lot of grind and make the process of True Reincarnation much longer, with the goal of either directing player’s attention to sagas or toward the cash shop to open their wallet.

Will Turbine cave in to player demands? Tune in next time to find out.

(Source: Occupy Stormreach)

Player Operated Gentleman Clubs In Elder Scrolls Online

According to Matt Firor of Zenimax Studios, Elder Scrolls Online will not have a pre-installed gentleman’s club. Fans of the series will recall that in Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, players could visit Desele’s House of Earthly Pleasures. Not as popular a location as Mehrune’s House of Strider Sausage and Goat Cheese, but that’s beside the point. Instead, Firor inserted a side note that just because the game doesn’t come with such a facility out-of-box, doesn’t mean players won’t find an empty house to set one up for themselves.

Similar to what we saw with the (in)famous Goldshire Inn from the incredible World of Warcraft, we Ultimately decided to leave these choices up to the player to establish things like the House of Earthly Delights from Morrowind. Were not implimenting it ourselves…but whose to say there isnt a vacant building in Suran just waiting to be turned into ESO’s first whore-house! ESO is about choice, and well leave the implementation of those choices up to the “creative” players.”

Does anyone object to me naming the building Mehrune’s Dagger?

Warhammer 40k Q&A Monday

Behaviour Interactive is the developer working on Warhammer 40k: Eternal Crusade, and naturally some of you may have a few questions for the developers. Luckily, MMORPG.com has announced that several key members of the Behaviour crew will be on hand for a Q&A on Monday. If you have anything you would like to ask of the development team, head on over to the link below and drop a question or two.

The live Q&A is at 4pm eastern on Monday, October 21st, but you can ask your question now by putting it in the thread at the link below.

(Source: MMORPG.com)

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