Fun fact: That is not my hand. Blizzard is still adamant that World of Warcraft may one day come to handheld iOS.
MMOrning Shots is a (mostly) daily article displaying random screenshots hidden in the MMO Fallout archives. If you would like your own screenshot featured in this article, send it to us via email at (mmofallout at gmail dot com)
I had a Playstation 2 last year when I was covering Everquest Online Adventures shortly before it shut down. I have no idea what happened to it, but it disappeared.
Talk about springing back. Strong sales in Lineage, Guild Wars 2, Blade & Soul, as well as mobile games, NCSoft has recorded historical high quarterly revenues for the fourth quarter of 2012. In the latest report, NCSoft marked a 56% increase in quarterly sales, a 208% increase in quarterly operating profit, 110% increase in pre-tax income, as well as a 116% quarterly increase in net income. The fourth quarter saw moderate to high increases in sales for Lineage, Lineage II, with the sales from Guild Wars 2 nearly tripling during the same period. Aion, as well as NCsoft’s latest title, Blade & Soul, saw marginal decreases over the same time period. Lineage II managed to reverse, at least for this quarter, a downward trend in sales that began in Q4 2011 while the original Lineage continues on an unpredictable, yet averaging upward, trend in sales despite its age.
Guild Wars 2 has already proven itself as NCSoft’s most successful product to date, breaking the record set by Aion during its peak sales by a long shot. NCsoft’s parent-company reports are, sadly, not as inspiring. While sales went up 15% quarterly, quarterly operating profit went down 1% with pre-tax income and net income both falling hard and ending up in the red for Q4.
And to wrap this up, we’ll look at everyone’s favorite part of NCSoft’s quarterly reports: Demographics. As expected from the launch of Guild Wars 2 and Blade & Soul, sales in Korea shot up with North America and Europe also taking a dramatic shift upward. Sales in Japan and Taiwan mostly remained the same while sales from royalties were boosted slightly.
It feels like ages since we last spoke of Mark Jacobs and City State Entertainment, the end of September in 2011 if you’re keeping track. Since then, the team has been hard at work on what many of us have hoped would be the spiritual sequel to Dark Age of Camelot. Today, Jacobs has graced us with the announcement of Camelot Unchained, an upcoming MMORPG. Why don’t I let Mark Jacobs tell you more about it?
The core concept for the new MMORPG focuses tightly on three key elements, RvR, housing and a true player-owned economy. The central conflict encompasses a trio of diverse, competing realms – Arthurian, Tuatha Dé Danann and Viking – each seeking to assert its dominance over an open and persistent world reflecting the universally familiar but greatly re-imagined Camelot and European mythos. All aspects of this RvR-focused MMORPG are tied into and support the three realms’ ongoing battle for superiority and control. The player housing and crafting systems will also be very significant components and both key closely into the RvR theme.
Three faction, RvR focused, with housing and a player-driven economy? Someone cancel my happy pills, I shan’t be needing them anymore. For more details, Massively.com has a fantastic interview with Mark Jacobs about the concepts and ideas behind Camelot Unchained. City State Entertainment will be launching a Kickstarter campaign soon to raise funding for the MMO.
(Source: City State Entertainment)
Remember this guy? Bas Rutten played the spokesman for TERA Online, also known as Bas Rutten Online, with the “MMO-FO” line of trailers. You may have also noticed him in the role of Niko in the recent film Here Comes The Boom.
Remember this guy? Bas Rutten played the spokesman for TERA Online, also known as Bas Rutten Online, with the “MMO-FO” line of trailers. You may have also noticed him in the role of Niko in the recent film Here Comes The Boom.
Wizardry Online has officially launched, and the problems appear to be stacking against Sony Online Entertainment. Players are reporting issues including being unable to create characters, rampant server instability, a mass of gold farmer spam in chat, disconnections and other bugs resulting in item loss and permanent death, and more. While Sony runs around performing maintenance on the servers and releasing patch after patch in an attempt to fix the issues, several keen players on the forums noted that Wizardry Online has been removed from Steam.
SOE Community Manager Piestro posted to confirm that Wizardry has been removed, but that the removal was voluntary and performed by Sony itself, not Valve.
It wasn’t steam, we’ve removed the download for the time being as we resolve the current issues.
Wizardry Online will presumably be added back to the Steam library once the issues are ironed out.
(Source: Wizardry Forums)
TERA goes free to play on February 5th, and you can still pick up a copy of the game on Amazon for $10. Why buy a copy of a game that will be free to play by this time tomorrow? If you haven’t been paying attention (and if you have to ask, you haven’t), TERA’s free to play model segregates players into free, subscriber, and founder. Founder status players are those who have a serial code attached to their account, through purchasing a boxed or digital copy of the game. As I pointed out, founder status players have a number of advantages granted to them that a new account will never have access to, even if they subscribe, including a monumentally increased bank storage.
Now here’s the catch: Starting February 5th (tomorrow), En Masse Entertainment will be discontinuing the sale of digital copies of TERA, making founder’s status impossible to obtain unless you happen to come across one of the remaining out-of-print box copies. So if you’re going to be playing TERA, you live in the United States (important), and don’t mind dropping $10, having founder status is ultimately a better deal than running with a standard free account.
And founder status is just an alternative to the free account. You don’t pay a subscription to keep it.
(Source: Amazon
I consider myself more of an older school MMO gamer here at MMO Fallout, so I have a simple policy regarding beta status: Once the wipes stop and the cash shop starts rolling, the game is in soft launch and the “it’s just beta” excuse doesn’t fly anymore. Path of Exile has become quite popular recently, not just because it has shown itself to be a pretty solid game, but because the free to play model is exactly what people want out of it: No nickel and diming, no pay to win. Path of Exile also has the opportunity to display itself to jaded gamers who purchased and were disappointed with whatever feature from Diablo 3 (take your pick) they didn’t like. Path of Exile builds upon the dungeon crawling experience, while simultaneously taking much of what you knew about the genre and throwing it right out the window.
You may have noticed a very important detail missing from the screenshot above (apart from the incredibly limited inventory): A gold counter. There isn’t one. Path of Exile does not feature a cash currency of any kind, a move that is surely at least partially intended as a repellent to any potential gold farmers. You can still buy and sell items at vendors, however depending on what you want to transact, the “currency” you’ll be using is actually a combination of several key items from Scrolls of Wisdom (identify items) to specific stones which can also be used to grant magical properties to items. The lack of currency also means that if you plan on trading with other players, you’ll need to be decent at bartering (or at least hope that they aren’t). It also means that you’ll need to bring something to the table worth trading, since the option to grind mobs for hours to generate gold is no longer viable.
You also won’t have cash to spend on massive amounts of health potions. Your character has five slots to fill with health, mana, and miscellaneous potions. As you level up, better vials become available in the shops and dropped through creatures, and those vials themselves can be upgraded with magic stats and various buffs to offer better healing power, more uses per vial, etc. The kick to the vial is that they refill whenever you enter a new zone, as well as randomly during combat.
While we’re on the subject of reinventing the wheel, why don’t you have a look at Path of Exile’s skill tree:
Yikes! Don’t panic, though, that overwhelming monstrosity is not an active skill tree. As you level up, you’ll gain the regular assortment of points that go into what is called a “passive skill tree.” The tree branches out like an active skill system, except instead of dictating your abilities, you put your points into slots which grant passive traits. +10 dexterity or +8% bow damage, or +10 intelligence, etc. It is worth doing some research down the line into where you want your traits to go, and although you won’t make use of a great majority of the board, you’ll find the game becomes much easier if you know where you are heading. Find the traits suitable to your class, and branch toward them. Once you make your destination, you can start branching out from there. It seems that unless you completely ignore stats related to your class, it’s pretty difficult to gimp your character down the line.
So if the active skills are not delegated through points, where do you get them from, you might be asking. Another simple answer that shakes even more ground. As you complete quests and continue the massacre of various creatures, zombies, and mud monsters, you’ll come across skill gems which are placed into the sockets of your equipment. Gems come in green, red, and blue flavors and are how you obtain and customize your abilities. For instance, my ranger is equipped with a fire shot, split shot, rain of arrows, puncture, and poison. Each skill corresponds to a key on the mouse (left, right, middle) as well as five customizable keyboard keys (Q,W,E,R,T). Skill gems level up universally as long as they are equipped while you are in combat, so you don’t need to grind poison shot (for example) in order to level it up. Just play as you normally would, and each gem builds up power as you go. To add to functionality, skill gems can be added and removed from equipment with a simple right click, no need to worry about enchanting or failure.
As you may have expected, this adds another level of depth to Path of Exile. In order to use a skill gem, it must be linked to your weapon or armor (it doesn’t matter which). This means that often times you may have to trade some of your abilities in return for far superior equipment that doesn’t have the same gem sockets. You may, for instance, be using a bow with two green sockets, only to find a much superior bow that only has one green, or perhaps zero green sockets. So you can either lose one or two abilities for the time being (until you find a bow or armor with suitable slots) or go without the boost to your base stats.
The cash shop, true to its word, only offers cosmetic items. You can buy pets which are purely cosmetic, special dance animations, alternate skill effects, and alternate item effects. The only piece that has an actual effect on your account is the ability to buy extra stash tabs and extra character slots, and unless you are an intense hoarder of items or altaholic, you won’t have much use of either.
If this review seems like I’m just rattling off a list of features that Path of Exile has that aren’t present in many other ARPGs, that is intentional. At its core, Path of Exile is the same Diablo style game you already either love or hate, but I felt from the start that some of the features I mention above may take the game down a path that some Diablo/Torchlight/etc fans don’t want to go down. So if the core of your fun in Diablo or Torchlight was the constant running of vendor trash, you won’t find that here. If your idea of combat is buying limitless health potions and chugging them down in mass quantities, you won’t find that here. If you’re a gold farmer and want an easy free to play game to con, you won’t find that here.
Path of Exile feels like a separate generation from the rest of its ARPG brethren, keeping what makes the genre great while at the same time creating a new path for itself to walk down. It is a free to play game with a cash shop that most gamers would only hope to dream of if their game of choice didn’t charge $5 for the Sweet Dreams lockbox. I would definitely recommend Path of Exile as a must play.
I consider myself more of an older school MMO gamer here at MMO Fallout, so I have a simple policy regarding beta status: Once the wipes stop and the cash shop starts rolling, the game is in soft launch and the “it’s just beta” excuse doesn’t fly anymore. Path of Exile has become quite popular recently, not just because it has shown itself to be a pretty solid game, but because the free to play model is exactly what people want out of it: No nickel and diming, no pay to win. Path of Exile also has the opportunity to display itself to jaded gamers who purchased and were disappointed with whatever feature from Diablo 3 (take your pick) they didn’t like. Path of Exile builds upon the dungeon crawling experience, while simultaneously taking much of what you knew about the genre and throwing it right out the window.
You may have noticed a very important detail missing from the screenshot above (apart from the incredibly limited inventory): A gold counter. There isn’t one. Path of Exile does not feature a cash currency of any kind, a move that is surely at least partially intended as a repellent to any potential gold farmers. You can still buy and sell items at vendors, however depending on what you want to transact, the “currency” you’ll be using is actually a combination of several key items from Scrolls of Wisdom (identify items) to specific stones which can also be used to grant magical properties to items. The lack of currency also means that if you plan on trading with other players, you’ll need to be decent at bartering (or at least hope that they aren’t). It also means that you’ll need to bring something to the table worth trading, since the option to grind mobs for hours to generate gold is no longer viable.
You also won’t have cash to spend on massive amounts of health potions. Your character has five slots to fill with health, mana, and miscellaneous potions. As you level up, better vials become available in the shops and dropped through creatures, and those vials themselves can be upgraded with magic stats and various buffs to offer better healing power, more uses per vial, etc. The kick to the vial is that they refill whenever you enter a new zone, as well as randomly during combat.
While we’re on the subject of reinventing the wheel, why don’t you have a look at Path of Exile’s skill tree:
Yikes! Don’t panic, though, that overwhelming monstrosity is not an active skill tree. As you level up, you’ll gain the regular assortment of points that go into what is called a “passive skill tree.” The tree branches out like an active skill system, except instead of dictating your abilities, you put your points into slots which grant passive traits. +10 dexterity or +8% bow damage, or +10 intelligence, etc. It is worth doing some research down the line into where you want your traits to go, and although you won’t make use of a great majority of the board, you’ll find the game becomes much easier if you know where you are heading. Find the traits suitable to your class, and branch toward them. Once you make your destination, you can start branching out from there. It seems that unless you completely ignore stats related to your class, it’s pretty difficult to gimp your character down the line.
So if the active skills are not delegated through points, where do you get them from, you might be asking. Another simple answer that shakes even more ground. As you complete quests and continue the massacre of various creatures, zombies, and mud monsters, you’ll come across skill gems which are placed into the sockets of your equipment. Gems come in green, red, and blue flavors and are how you obtain and customize your abilities. For instance, my ranger is equipped with a fire shot, split shot, rain of arrows, puncture, and poison. Each skill corresponds to a key on the mouse (left, right, middle) as well as five customizable keyboard keys (Q,W,E,R,T). Skill gems level up universally as long as they are equipped while you are in combat, so you don’t need to grind poison shot (for example) in order to level it up. Just play as you normally would, and each gem builds up power as you go. To add to functionality, skill gems can be added and removed from equipment with a simple right click, no need to worry about enchanting or failure.
As you may have expected, this adds another level of depth to Path of Exile. In order to use a skill gem, it must be linked to your weapon or armor (it doesn’t matter which). This means that often times you may have to trade some of your abilities in return for far superior equipment that doesn’t have the same gem sockets. You may, for instance, be using a bow with two green sockets, only to find a much superior bow that only has one green, or perhaps zero green sockets. So you can either lose one or two abilities for the time being (until you find a bow or armor with suitable slots) or go without the boost to your base stats.
The cash shop, true to its word, only offers cosmetic items. You can buy pets which are purely cosmetic, special dance animations, alternate skill effects, and alternate item effects. The only piece that has an actual effect on your account is the ability to buy extra stash tabs and extra character slots, and unless you are an intense hoarder of items or altaholic, you won’t have much use of either.
If this review seems like I’m just rattling off a list of features that Path of Exile has that aren’t present in many other ARPGs, that is intentional. At its core, Path of Exile is the same Diablo style game you already either love or hate, but I felt from the start that some of the features I mention above may take the game down a path that some Diablo/Torchlight/etc fans don’t want to go down. So if the core of your fun in Diablo or Torchlight was the constant running of vendor trash, you won’t find that here. If your idea of combat is buying limitless health potions and chugging them down in mass quantities, you won’t find that here. If you’re a gold farmer and want an easy free to play game to con, you won’t find that here.
Path of Exile feels like a separate generation from the rest of its ARPG brethren, keeping what makes the genre great while at the same time creating a new path for itself to walk down. It is a free to play game with a cash shop that most gamers would only hope to dream of if their game of choice didn’t charge $5 for the Sweet Dreams lockbox. I would definitely recommend Path of Exile as a must play.
MMO Fallout 