Today’s MMOrning Shots comes to us from the upcoming JJ Abrams Star Wars film: Star Wars Episode VII: The Lens Flare Strikes Back. In reality, it is a screenshot from Bioware’s upcoming expansion to Star Wars: The Old Republic, also known as Galactic Starfighter. Releasing this winter, Galactic Starfighter is a digital expansion focusing solely on getting space flight off of its rails. This also means that there will be no new planets, no increase to the level cap, no new story missions, no new PvE content. The digital expansion will be solely focused on PvP.
On the other hand, the expansion will be available for free. Subscribers will receive access on December 3rd, 2013 with preferred members joining them on January 14, 2014, with free players tailing behind on February 4th. If all goes well, hopefully this will lead to PvE space missions ditching their rails as well. You can check out the expansion website here.
Rift is shutting down in China, and the CEO of Shanda Games (Xiangdong Zhang) has revealed to the Chinese press that the problem lied with a lack of response from Trion Worlds leading to a poor experience for Chinese gamers. According to Zhang, Trion Worlds did not respond to requests for localized content, and eventually the call was made to shut the servers down just six months after launch. According to MMO Culture, Shanda Games has much more faith in Final Fantasy XIV, noting a larger effort toward international release by Square Enix.
Earlier this year, Rift shut down in Korea following a poor reception.
The prospects of success for the Neo Geo X, SNK’s revival of the classic system, have always been rather questionable. After all, this was the gaming system that many of us wanted yet none of us could have. Unless you were an adult with a fair amount of expendable cash, or a kid born into a family of doctors and lawyers, SNK’s asking price of $649 with quite a few games asking for more than $200. The system became known as the Rolls Royce of gaming consoles, or in my hometown the Willy Wonka golden ticket to being the most popular kid in school. Forget the asking price, this behemoth was an arcade in your house!
Anyway, the Neo Geo X was supposed to be SNK’s revival of the classic system, a handheld system that came bundled with an arcade joystick and a docking station to connect the handheld up to your television, and twenty games pre-loaded. The “gold package” cost $199 with five bundles of three games being sold for $30 each. Apparently the system didn’t do so well, as SNK put out a notice that they have terminated the US license for the Neo Geo X, aggressively, and with threats of legal action.
In addition, SNK has demanded TOMMO immediately cease all sales of the “SNK NEOGEO X Arcade Stick” product being sold separately from the NEOGEO X GOLD Plug and Play Console, and remove the “SNK NEOGEO X Arcade Stick” product from store shelves and online retailers. In order to protect our intellectual property rights such as “NEOGEO” and “SNK”, decisive measures will be taken against all unapproved NEOGEO X products not subject to the License Agreement.
Whether or not the product will still be sold in Europe is to be seen.
Undead Labs is reporting that State of Decay, available for Xbox Live Arcade and Steam Early Access, has sold over one million copies. Undead Labs is planning on developing an MMO set in the same universe, tentatively titled Class4. State of Decay was formerly known as Class3.
“Your encouragement drives us to keep working and keep improving. You got us here with your energy, your feedback, and your telling your friends about us. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts and brains.”
Path of Exile is finally ready to shed off its skin of being in fake-beta mode (no wipes, open cash shop) with an official launch on October 23rd. Alongside its official release, Path of Exile will also be coming to everyone’s favorite digital download location: uPlay. Actually it will be launching on Steam, but uPlay is your favorite store, right? The launch of Path of Exile will also bring with it the release of the Scion, the seventh class to be made available. Unlike her fellow exiled souls, the Scion isn’t just a character you can jump in and play with. In fact, you can’t even choose her as a class until you find her out in the world. The Scion is the first in a line of prestige classes and will be more difficult to play than the others.
Players will also enjoy an addition to the game’s main story, as well as new zones and expansion on PvP and guild functionality. You can read more at Massively’s lengthy preview.
At 11pm today I did what any normal person would do: I purchased Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs and played in the dark with my headphones on. The best image I can think of to describe playing Amnesia is to remember back to when you were a child and you would wake up in the middle of the night to use the toilet or because you were thirsty, etc. You are old enough by this point to know that monsters don’t exist, but still…was your door always that far away from the bed? Does the house always make these noises at night? It sure is dark, and that shadow illuminated on your wall looks a lot like someone standing at your window. Don’t look, it isn’t real. In fact you might just be in a dream where nothing is off limits. Don’t blink. What was that noise? It’s coming from under the bed, or is it downstairs? There shouldn’t be anyone downstairs. Come to think of it, I never realized my bed had just enough room for someone to hide under and grab my legs. I think I’ll wait until morning.
That, in a nutshell, is the first hour of Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs, except with the knowledge that yes, the monsters are real. And they will murder you.
It is nearly 1:30am EST at the time of this writing. After just a day on Kickstarter, Missing Worlds Media’s funding drive for City of Titans has raked in over $150,000 with the money just pouring in. With success seemingly in the bag, Missing Worlds Media has 31 of its 32 days left to make up the remaining 50% of the goal. The team posted an update on the Kickstarter page noting their surprise at the reaction. So far 1,134 backers have pledged to the campaign.
We’ve been working on that teaser video pretty hard. But we’ve been working on all the individual parts in parallel. We’ve got some scenes we didn’t use, and I think you’ll like them. We’ll have another video or two for you, and maybe more and newer things to show you, in a week or two.
You can check out the City of Titans Kickstarter at the link below or follow the campaign on our sidebar all month.
(Editor’s Note: This article was originally written in 2010 and subsequently shelved into the MMO Fallout archives. I don’t remember exactly why I cancelled it, but it is likely because I wasn’t sure if the nonspecific publisher that I mention threatening to sue me was serious, but I wasn’t going to find out by poking them with a stick. Enjoy)
Why are gamers so obsessed with the thought of customers suing companies, companies suing companies or companies suing customers? The last time I can think of a lawsuit being applicable would be when Sony released Trials of Obi-Wan right alongside the major changes to Galaxies that made a good amount of its content useless or so incompatible that it was removed. That was misleading to users, and possibly would have resulted in legitimate grounds for a lawsuit if Sony hadn’t quickly stepped up to offer refunds. But Star Wars Galaxies was a long time ago, what we need to focus on is the present, or at least the past couple of years.
I’ve seen an increase in the word “lawsuit” over at the capital city of trolls, occasionally referred to as the MMORPG.com forums. Every day there is inevitably a thread about how some developer is going to be, or should be, sued over an update, lack of an update, or just general dissatisfaction with the title in question. Cryptic should be sued for making Champions Online free to play, Turbine should be sued for making Lord of the Rings free to play, and Bill Roper should be sued for apparent crimes against humanity, depending on who you ask.
My favorite point of lunacy is when the fanboys of one game try to “incite” their developer of choice to sue another for making a “clone.” I’ve seen plenty of threads claiming a developer should be sued by Blizzard for making a WoW clone (exclamation mark for quests), while today I came upon a thread stating that Perpetuum Online should be sued for being “Eve Online but on the ground.” Even your good friend Omali has been threatened with lawsuits because someone believed enough that I was on a “crusade of misinformation,” and “had the goal of damaging their reputation,” among my readers by, in their words, reporting on news that put the company in a bad light. They were kind enough to mention me in a press release as an unaccomplished nobody, however. I take my attention where I can get it.
Is this really what you want? I’m all for justice and protection of creative rights, but this goes far beyond protection and into the gaming community’s dark void of hatred and vindictive blood lust. It isn’t enough for some people to just play the games they like and ignore those that they don’t, there is a very vocal minority that spends a lot of time actively campaigning against anything that isn’t in their liking. I suppose if there was some moral or ethical factor, this rant would even exist. There isn’t, so it does.
Stop talking about lawsuits. It muddles the water and makes legitimate cases more difficult to notice.
Was changing MMO Fallout’s menu layout necessary? I would argue yes.
Individual categories for games didn’t help organization, it harmed it.
Our metrics show that few actually used them.
Filing games into categories of “listed,” “covered but not listed,” and “not listed” was a massive waste of time.
Always trying to compact space.
I keep a list of people who actually care about which games are listed on this website. It is empty.
The growing number of categories didn’t help server stability.
So what does this mean for categories? Right now I have three main categories which will be expanded to:
News
Editorials
Games
Reviews
Previews
Reviews and Previews replace “Why Aren’t You Playing,” and “Beta Perspective,” but only because having that on the menu would take a lot of space. The “(p)reviews” we do will remain mostly the same, impressions pieces which highlight positives and negatives of the games without a final overall score. Overall, not a whole lot is going to change here.
The process is mostly to make the website more accessible, as well as more manageable by myself.
Missing Worlds Media has made it official: The Phoenix Project, codenamed for the upcoming spiritual sequel to City of Heroes, will be called City of Titans. While originally the Phoenix Project Kickstarter campaign was supposed to begin September 8th, unfinished paperwork and some restructuring of the team caused a few delays. The good news is that everything has been square away, and the Kickstarter is set to launch October 2nd. Speaking to Incgamers, President Sara Quinn thanked the community for their support.
“We are immensely grateful to our community for their continued support and understanding at this somewhat fraught time. They have been amazing, and without the morale boosts they provided, this would have been much harder on all of us.”
You can check out City of Titans at its main page.
MMO Fallout 