MMO Fallout

Paragon Studios Discusses Its Closure

It’s been five months since City of Heroes shut down, and the more we hear about the events surrounding the closure of Paragon Studios, the less realistic that NCSoft’s explanation that they had “exhausted all options” seems to become. Gamasutra has published a very informative piece on the closing of Paragon Studios, detailing how Paragon Studios management attempted to buy out the studio, its employees, and its games. Due to a last minute roadblock, the deal fell through and we all know what happened next.

“It was very much a surprise. We all were really working as if things were going to work out. … It was business as usual right up until the last day.”
-Matt Miller, former lead designer at Paragon

You can read the rest of the three page article at the link below.

(Source: Gamasutra)

MMOrning Shots: Fighting Dungeons

At level 11 in Dungeon Fighter Online as part of my traditional “race to the bottom” whenever an MMO shuts down, and I can’t help but notice a distinct lack of dungeons. And fighting. Why is it that 85% of the creatures you fight against don’t even bother fighting back? Does my character have bad body odor?

City of Steam Unveils The Wilderness

It feels like forever ago that Mechanist Games was running the last City of Steam closed beta weekend, so it’s easy to forget that the developer is still plugging away at its browser steampunk MMO, and boy do they have something cool to reveal. In the latest developer blog, we are given a look at a new feature coming to City of Steam: The wilderness. Those of you who played City of Steam during the beta weekends will be familiar with the basic structure of the game: Similar to games like Guild Wars, you have areas where players run around and trade, turn in quests, and buy and sell items, where there is no combat. Then you have the instanced areas where the action takes place.

So City of Steam really didn’t have any open world combat zones that you’d see in a traditional MMO, at least not until now. Mechanist has revealed the wilderness, an open zone where players can fight mobs, fight players, and not even be in a group.

Even though the basic concept of the wilderness is a giant open level with respawning mobs, there’s more to it. There are going to be public events in these areas, random rare mob spawns and some other things we’ll talk about soon.The areas being public also mean that you’ll sometimes be fighting for mobs; well, we might eventually have a way to settle your differences in there… We have some other ideas brewing that we may share at a later time.

City of Steam is still set for sometime after lunch, but before Duke Nukem For…no sorry that joke doesn’t work anymore.

(Source: City of Steam)

Jagged Alliance Online Coming To Steam

Cliffhanger Productions has some good news. The latest update from the Shadowrun Online Kickstarter deals with introducing armor and what effect it will have on players in the upcoming MMO when it comes out (hopefully) later this year. On the other hand, the folks had some good news about Jagged Alliance Online, which not so long ago launched its 2.0 version: It is coming to Steam.

We are bringing our current released game Jagged Alliance Online to Steam and we have been getting in more artists and QA to help us work on SRO.

Jagged Alliance Online can currently be played via web browser through Gamigo’s game services.

(Source: Kickstarter)

MMOrning Shots: Dragon’s Prophet

Today’s MMOrning Shot comes from Sony Online Entertainment and Runewaker, for the upcoming MMO Dragon’s Prophet. Players can capture, train, and ride their own dragons, and if this screenshot has anything to say, there are also towns and large pointless steering wheels? Imagine if that thing broke and fell off, you’d have a few dozen people dead! Dragon’s Prophet needs and equivalent of OSHA.

MMOrning Shots is a (somewhat) daily line of screenshots from various MMOs. Most are taken in-house or come to us in press releases, but if you would like your screenshot featured, send it over to contact[at]mmofallout[dot]com with the subject “MMorning Shots.”

MMOrning Shots: Dragon's Prophet

Greed Monger Is Back On UNITY

Greed Monger is the upcoming sandbox MMO being created by Electric Crow Games and the subject of a very successful Kickstarter project just a few months ago. Originally set on the UNITY engine, at some point the folks at Electric Crow Games decided to switch over to the HERO engine, which many of you will recognize as the same engine used in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Well that didn’t last long, as the Easter announcement confirms that Greed Monger has indeed changed back to UNITY.

We had some issues that caused us to step away from Unity and head into the world of the Hero Engine. It was a major decision considering all that we had done already and without being 100% certain how much of our already existing assets could be migrated into Hero. Well, the truth is, we switched back to Unity not long after we switched to Hero. Aside from the issues of the revenue model, no cross-platform support and other things the player base has been expecting, the engine just wasn’t a fit for us.

You can follow the link below to see the full explanation as to why Greed Monger was moved to HERO and subsequently moved back.

(Source: Greed Monger)

Darkfall Unholy Wars Launches April 16th

Darkfall is launching April 16th. Is the game ready for launch after five months of delays? That is not for me to say at the moment, considering the game is still under a nondisclosure agreement. Aventurine has announced today that they are going ahead and gearing up for launch in mid-April, bringing the relaunch of Darkfall to gamers homes all over the world. Unholy Wars brings with it major changes to the Darkfall we all knew and loved, including a brand new method of leveling, a new UI and improved graphics, as well as changing the way players choose their combat roles.

The Darkfall community who participated in the beta provided the development team with invaluable feedback a lot of which led to additions and changes to the game, and will lead to many more in the near future. We believe the game has benefited greatly through the Beta process, and we are excited about what lies ahead. We know we have a lot of work to do and we will never be satisfied as we strive to make Darkfall Unholy Wars the best PvP MMORPG experience.

You can read the full announcement below. Darkfall Unholy Wars has been available for some time for pre-order, with existing members receiving a discount on the initial purchase price.

(Source: Darkfall)

En Masse Entertainment Bringing Streaming To TERA

Hey, remember when En Masse Entertainment was offering a demo version of TERA on Gaikai? And then remember when Sony purchased Gaikai and shut everything down? We didn’t either, but luckily that doesn’t mean you have to miss out on The Exiled Realm of A Massive Installation just because TERA is about fifty gigabytes. In a press release sent out today, En Masse Entertainment has revealed a partnership with Happy Cloud Incorporated, to bring TERA to players devoid of time and bandwidth. Rather than having to download the 22gb file required to install TERA, players simply boot up the application and let the game download the files it needs as they are needed.

“Improving our user onboarding process for TERA: Rising is a priority for us, and using Happy Cloud’s system is an easy way for us to get more players into TERA’s immersive, 3D world,” said Soo Min Park, COO at En Masse Entertainment. “Taking a graphically rich, fast-paced game such as TERA: Rising, which contains hundreds of hours of gameplay, and delivering the bytes in the order they’re needed is no small task, but we’re confident this will provide an even better experience for our fast growing legion of fans.”

Happy Cloud’s download system is available now through the TERA website once a user registers for an account. As far as MMO Fallout knows, this service only applies to the North American version and there has not (to our knowledge) been any announcement by Gameforge in Europe.

(Source: En Masse Entertainment Press Release)

Disney Shuts Down LucasArts

In a truly disappointing move, Disney has confirmed to Game Informer that the game publishing subsidiary LucasArts has been shut down, accompanied by an expected number of layoffs associated with such a change. Instead, LucasArts will move toward licensing rather than developing games based on the Star Wars franchise.

“After evaluating our position in the games market, we’ve decided to shift LucasArts from an internal development to a licensing model, minimizing the company’s risk while achieving a broader portfolio of quality Star Wars games. As a result of this change, we’ve had layoffs across the organization. We are incredibly appreciative and proud of the talented teams who have been developing our new titles.”

Unfortunately this likely means the cancellation of the upcoming, and extremely beautiful looking, Star Wars 1313. As Game Informer points out, the shuttering wasn’t exactly unexpected, with the absence of both the Force Unleashed and Battlefront series, not to mention the total lack of any serious Indiana Jones games in the past few years outside of LEGO Indiana Jones.

MMO Fallout hopes for fast employment by those affected by the layoffs.

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