Even if you did hide the authenticator image behind several pages of CSS. With the recent hacking of Sony’s services, one might be slightly concerned about the safety of their account. Following in the steps of Blizzard, Square Enix, and a select few other companies, Sony Online Entertainment has announced that the company will be releasing their own version of the authenticator.
Right now, players can purchase a dongle at Sony’s website for $9.99 (USD) with free shipping for the time being. Sometime down the line, an iOS and Android app will be released, but there is no timetable for release.
This will no doubt be a pleasant addition to any SOE fan’s accessories. There are no plans to my understanding for a Blizzard-like incentive (in-game pet).
In case you haven’t been following the pattern, when subscription games add free to play aspects the population tends to increase, as well as revenue. Following this trend, Age of Conan opened up its servers to free players over a month ago, and has since seen the related spike in population. How many? 300,000 according to Funcom. The revenues have more than doubled over the first month.
If you take the announcement that activity has more than quadrupled, this gives Age of Conan somewhere around 75,000 active players prior to the free to play transition. At $15 a pop, that counts for around $1.1 million in income per month, meaning Age of Conan is worth over $2.2 million now in revenue, even more since we’re only counting minimum.
This is just a very side thought, but is there even a conceivable future for a game moving from subscription to free to play and still shutting down due to low population? I don’t think there’s been a notable case so far of an MMO going free and managing to continue losing revenue.
BRAWNDO’S GOT WHAT PLAYERS CRAVE! Brawndo’s got electrolytes. And that’s what players crave. They crave electrolytes. Which players crave. they crave electrolytes. Which is what Brawndo has. And that’s why players crave Brawndo. Not water, like from the toilet.
Good news, All Points Bulletin fans. In the latest APB dev blog, Gamersfirst is proud to announce that serverside lag has been almost completely eliminated. The issues stemmed from the manner in which the server would attempt to invoke various external libraries, causing congestion in the server. After some work under the hood, and the help of some new hardware, the team believes that this is the end of APB’s lag problems.
In fact, the system works so well that Gamersfirst touts players connecting from Australia to Frankfurt, and achieving a reduction from 1500ms to 500ms, the remaining 500 due to distance rather than congestion. They do want you to know that you may still experience lag, but that it will be mostly your fault.
Will you or some of your friends still see game lag? Sure – under three conditions; (1) your home network runs in to congestion, (2) your ISP has a freak-out and messes up its routes to its peers or (3) your home computer is not up to spec and you end up lagging all the time (but that’s of course client side lag which is a whole different beast).
Allow me to be the first to exclaim: Holy cow! If you don’t understand why Vanguard being patched warrants an article, you probably don’t follow Vanguard, and if you don’t follow Vanguard…Well I’ll let the community’s wrath be a surprise. So far, MMO Fallout is running on comments that Sony would like to take Vanguard to a free to play system, but that some key infrastructure must be put into place first (updates to the game, actual developers working on the title, etc).
The update added in today doesn’t do much apart from some bug fixes, but the overall message is that Sony does indeed still notice this red-headed step child. This will likely still not quell discussion surrounding John Smedley’s comment over their subscription service back in January:
“The monthly subscription fee means players can expect a lot of new content from us. And I say a lot — I really mean that. This is something that we feel obligated to the players, because they are paying a monthly sub fee.“
To be a fly on the wall of the Star Vault offices. Not too long ago, I uploaded a comment by Henrik Nystrom that Star Vault was receiving a large quantity of offers to publish, and even buy Mortal Online from the developer. With the recent announcement that the Unreal 3 MMO will be published in Asia, Star Vault has announced a marketing deal with OnLegends to publish the game worldwide. Oddly enough, the article makes the claim that Mortal Online has attracted over 170 thousand players. Hopefully this partnership will bring forward some much needed attention to Mortal Online.
OnLegends will be showing off Mortal Online at Gamescom, with a hint at that dirty c-word: Console.
“We strongly believe that Mortal Online can play an important future role on both PC and console MMO markets and we expect Mortal to be one of the trendsetting next gen titles.”
Thanks to World of Warcraft’s seven day welcome back week, I have something to hold my attention for seven days, at least until the little girl from The Ring comes through my television set to murder me (the joke’s on her, I’ll be playing The Room on a second television. Try and brave that to kill me). Other than the thought of impending death, I’m having a lot more fun on my recreated toon than I expected. I started a new undead hunter to test out the phasing and new quests. There are a lot of major changes to the game, like the removal of weapon levels and ammunition. I’m taking notes, and I’ll be doing a “Why Aren’t You Playing” on World of Warcraft at some point.
1. Earth Eternal Is Officially Back
At least to the point where you can play it. If you head over to the Earth Eternal website, you can log in with Facebook and install the client. You will need to make sure that the previous Sparkplay version has been uninstalled before you do, as conflicting installations can cause problems. There may be an issue with the requirement to sign in via Facebook, and you may have to wait a little while before the website recognizes that you have the game installed (this happened to me), but otherwise you can jump right in.
Earth Eternal is just as adorable as it was when we left it, and the game has undergone quite a substantial upgrade in the graphics department. Find me in-game, my username is Omali.
2. Bioware Hates The Heterosexuals
This falls into the category of “I wish this wasn’t true.” Over on the Old Republic boards, a poll popped up asking players what type of relationship they will pursue with their companion characters, choosing from same sex, opposite sex, all relationships, or none. Of course, this sparked a bit of a fizzle (not an explosion) on the blogosphere from the lunatic fringe, claiming Bioware was “discriminating against heterosexuals” presumably by not allowing them to spew homophobic drivel on the Old Republic forums.
What this ultimately ends up as is a matter of civil discussion, and people who don’t understand what that means. The subject of homosexuality is a touchy one, but in the context of the thread, Bioware was simply asking about your choice of partner, not your opinion on who will burn in eternal hellflame.
3. I Buy My Gold Straight From Kim Jong Il
This is an odd story, yet not all surprising. According to the New York Times, North Korea is employing hackers to break into South Korean MMOs in order to write bots for them to farm gold to sell for the government (and of course so his son can get his epic mount in World of Warcraft). The outfit that operates the bots reportedly brings in some hard cash, $6 million over two years, and is the same office that operates drug trafficking, counterfeiting, and other illegal practices for the glorious leader.
So the next time you see a gold farmer in-game, ask if you can have Kim Jong Il’s autograph. They like that. Also consider this another reason to gank bots in your favorite MMO. That gold you just looted could keep North Korea from achieving nuclear technology.
4. Firefall is Releasing Similar To Google Mail
In an announcement on the Firefall website, CEO Mark Kern has expressed his interest in launching the free to play MMO as close to the Gmail method as possible. The project is currently in friends and family beta, where it will slowly expand to allow more people. Oddly enough, Kern considers the game already “launched,” and believes that the expanded base is not bringing in new beta testers, but rather simply expanding a low-key launch to a wider audience via invitation.
First person to send me an invitation gets a free…something, I’ll figure it out.
5. Then Again, Darkfall Could See More Success
I admit, I’ve been hard on Darkfall for the past few weeks, given Aventurine’s refusal to acknowledge a wipe. I’ve hinted in the past that the wipe may have to do with the removal of certain skills, and revamping of others, explaining why Aventurine won’t call it a “wipe in the traditional sense,” or why the company feels that the issue won’t be as hot topic as players are turning it into.
What I have seen over the past few weeks is an outbreak of support for a wipe, even going as far as a full wipe. Some see it as a necessity to level the playing field, while others see it as a way to rid the game of ill-gotten gains through bugs, dupes, macroing, and exploits. Overall there appears to be equal pull in both directions on the forums, for and against a wipe of any sort.
My stance throughout all of this has not been predictive. Rather than trying to read the community and predict death or success, I’ve kept to stating the possibilities (on both sides) and citing past examples of wipes and their resulting success, or lack thereof. I’ve leaned a little more toward the death side of the fork in the road, so consider this a balancing “I still have faith this can work out” piece.
Seven days is all Samara needs to come out of the television and kill you. Oddly enough, that may also be how long it takes to get hooked back into World of Warcraft. If you quit World of Warcraft more than a month ago, odds are there is an email in your inbox inviting you to come back for seven days to give the game another go, assuming you hadn’t already with the fairly new up-to-level-20 extended trial.
If it’s been a long time since you last played, you will be relieved to hear that installing WoW is no longer an all day venture. Rather, thanks to Blizzard’s relatively new streaming service, you can get in the game in as little as a half hour, with the only downside being longer load times as the game downloads that zone’s information (30 seconds to a minute, I’ve found). You may also have to reset your password, as my initial attempts to log in were met with “your account has been locked” and requiring me to reset my password, and that is with authenticator ownership.
As my emails have shown, I’m not the only one still confused about DC Universe’s upcoming server merger/melding on Monday. Previously, I presumed that this not-merge-merger would allow players to keep their names, as the servers weren’t merging. As it turns out, however, that is not the case. When the mergers go live on Monday, players may find that their superhero title is no longer accessible, and must be changed.
Sony is handling this in a semi-traditional fashion. Players who are subscribed will take precedence over those who do not. If two players carry the same name, the character with more hours logged will be allowed to continue the honor of having that name. If you are on the losing end of the ticket, you will receive a token for a free name change. Also mentioned is how players will change between PvE and PvP phases. In order to swap roles, heroes will have to visit the Watchtower, while villains will need to visit the Hall of Doom.
Hopefully this will bring the much needed population to a game whose multi-year longevity is still deeply in question. The megaservers roll out Monday.
Why Should I Play is a new series where I dive into games and discuss my experiences. This article is not meant to be un-bias’d and due to the intrinsic nature of MMOs, reflects the product at the time of publish but may not reflect the product at the time of reading. As always, MMO Fallout suggests you make use of free trials to form your own opinion of the game.
Gods & Heroes launched back in June to a rather low reception and equally mediocre ratings. A couple of weeks after launch, Heatwave Interactive announced that the game didn’t garner as much attention as they were hoping, and that the company had plans to implement several ideas including free to play at some unannounced point in the future. A few days ago, the company announced the release of the 3-day trial, allowing unlimited access (for three days) to all Gods & Heroes had to offer, along with a price drop to $29.99. I dived in head first into the three day trial to check out what Gods & Heroes had to offer.
Through my first day in Gods & Heroes, I kept asking myself why the game felt so familiar, and it wasn’t until around level six or seven that enlightenment hit me: Gods & Heroes feels like a game that should have come out years ago. The landscape in many places looks stunning, with impressive detail and variation in the flowers and trees that populate the landscape. The armor shows off the multiple pieces that put it together, and the characters look decent, although a bit shiny and emotionless. The buildings, however, are the sore spot in visual design, with a small amount of structures reused to populate the world.
The main advertising points of Gods & Heroes are the estate system and the minion management. Almost immediately, you are introduced to your private, dilapidated estate that must be built from the ground up to its former glory. As you complete quests for the NPCs in your village, you gain access to better perks for your minions, from armor, weapons, etc. The game uses a rather cheap method of having your buildings phase through construction right in front of you when you complete an upgrade quest, but that’s a rather inconsequential aesthetic flaw.
The meat of the game is a been-there-done-that fantasy MMO set in ancient Rome. Your main mode of leveling consists of going around and finding quests that task you with killing a number of NPCs, harvesting nodes, or killing NPCs to harvest things off of them. As you level up, you will follow the basic system of taking your trash to the vendor, buying new armor and weapons, setting up your alternate advancement points (feats) and upgrading your minions. The idea of bringing squad mechanics into a solo-oriented game will make your time spent in Rome a little too easy, however.
Gods & Heroes is funny and charming in parts. In one memorable quest, I had to bust up a multi-day long party by smashing wine vats that we then discovered were spiked with a magical essence. Inevitably, I killed the guy behind the magic and given the confirmation that the party would be broken up as soon as everyone sobered up.
Why You Aren’t Playing Gods & Heroes
You may have heard that Gods & Heroes is on the easy side, and that would be completely accurate. Having one minion makes the game easy enough, and that is before you hit higher levels and your squad increases to four. Now, to its credit, there are supposed to be later sections in the game that only allow for a limited number of minions, but with two sword wielding minions, I was steamrolling over anything that came my way. But you can put minions away if you want to make the game more difficult, there is no obligation to have your minions out.
Perhaps the biggest problem with Gods & Heroes is that the game is bugged like a hotel room in a prostitution sting. The game crashed maybe once every two hours, either giving me a “Godsandheroes.exe has stopped responding” Windows error, or simply losing connection to the server. Not that I was at risk of dying, thanks to my two tanks, but that doesn’t ease the frustration of those few moments when you know the game is about to crash, but hasn’t actually displayed the message yet. Otherwise, I didn’t have any lag issues while playing, there was no rubber-banding or jolting NPCs to speak of.
Invisible wall.
Second on my list of three big gripes: The terrain. The terrain needs to be revamped so walking isn’t a fight between myself and my character. Slight inclines or tiny but sharp inclines seem to stop my player in his tracks, and I am fairly certain that Heatwave has installed invisible walls in some areas because I’ve found multiple spots that I cannot pass. In the above picture, you can see my character on pretty level ground, but ground that he cannot pass. It is worth noting that this is nowhere near the area limits.
Third: The game has some issues with lack of context sensitive response, or my character is a pacifist. When fighting, I had several instances where my character would just cancel auto-attack, wouldn’t attack at all, or I would hit something on the hotbar and I would see “queuing quick shot” but my character would never use the power. This isn’t a lag issue, to my knowledge. When using hotbar actions, I also found that there is no context for cooldown. The buttons are grayed out until you can use them again, but the countdown timers always say: 00:00:00 remaining, and the buttons regaining their color doesn’t necessarily mean that pressing the associated button will result in attacking again.
So Should I Play Gods & Heroes?
Gods & Heroes is fun, and its major issues are on the hardware front (performance, responsiveness, and terrain/pathfinding). The estate and minion systems are enjoyable and innovative, but the experience is just crushed under the foot of your minions managing to kill the mob before my scout decides to stop ignoring my button presses.
I’m going to leave this up to the reader to decide, download the Gods & Heroes trial and give it the whole three days before you make your decision, but you may want to wait to activate your key until some much needed terrain/stability issues are fixed. I would buy the game as it is now, because I didn’t find the issues to be game-breaking, if it weren’t for the fact that the Star Wars Galaxies weekly article is my primary MMO right now.
Otherwise, I’d give Gods & Heroes a thumbs up. If you haven’t taken part in the 3-day trial, do so.
Why Should I Play is a new series where I dive into games and discuss my experiences. This article is not meant to be un-bias’d and due to the intrinsic nature of MMOs, reflects the product at the time of publish but may not reflect the product at the time of reading. As always, MMO Fallout suggests you make use of free trials to form your own opinion of the game.
Gods & Heroes launched back in June to a rather low reception and equally mediocre ratings. A couple of weeks after launch, Heatwave Interactive announced that the game didn’t garner as much attention as they were hoping, and that the company had plans to implement several ideas including free to play at some unannounced point in the future. A few days ago, the company announced the release of the 3-day trial, allowing unlimited access (for three days) to all Gods & Heroes had to offer, along with a price drop to $29.99. I dived in head first into the three day trial to check out what Gods & Heroes had to offer.
Through my first day in Gods & Heroes, I kept asking myself why the game felt so familiar, and it wasn’t until around level six or seven that enlightenment hit me: Gods & Heroes feels like a game that should have come out years ago. The landscape in many places looks stunning, with impressive detail and variation in the flowers and trees that populate the landscape. The armor shows off the multiple pieces that put it together, and the characters look decent, although a bit shiny and emotionless. The buildings, however, are the sore spot in visual design, with a small amount of structures reused to populate the world.
The main advertising points of Gods & Heroes are the estate system and the minion management. Almost immediately, you are introduced to your private, dilapidated estate that must be built from the ground up to its former glory. As you complete quests for the NPCs in your village, you gain access to better perks for your minions, from armor, weapons, etc. The game uses a rather cheap method of having your buildings phase through construction right in front of you when you complete an upgrade quest, but that’s a rather inconsequential aesthetic flaw.
The meat of the game is a been-there-done-that fantasy MMO set in ancient Rome. Your main mode of leveling consists of going around and finding quests that task you with killing a number of NPCs, harvesting nodes, or killing NPCs to harvest things off of them. As you level up, you will follow the basic system of taking your trash to the vendor, buying new armor and weapons, setting up your alternate advancement points (feats) and upgrading your minions. The idea of bringing squad mechanics into a solo-oriented game will make your time spent in Rome a little too easy, however.
Gods & Heroes is funny and charming in parts. In one memorable quest, I had to bust up a multi-day long party by smashing wine vats that we then discovered were spiked with a magical essence. Inevitably, I killed the guy behind the magic and given the confirmation that the party would be broken up as soon as everyone sobered up.
Why You Aren’t Playing Gods & Heroes
You may have heard that Gods & Heroes is on the easy side, and that would be completely accurate. Having one minion makes the game easy enough, and that is before you hit higher levels and your squad increases to four. Now, to its credit, there are supposed to be later sections in the game that only allow for a limited number of minions, but with two sword wielding minions, I was steamrolling over anything that came my way. But you can put minions away if you want to make the game more difficult, there is no obligation to have your minions out.
Perhaps the biggest problem with Gods & Heroes is that the game is bugged like a hotel room in a prostitution sting. The game crashed maybe once every two hours, either giving me a “Godsandheroes.exe has stopped responding” Windows error, or simply losing connection to the server. Not that I was at risk of dying, thanks to my two tanks, but that doesn’t ease the frustration of those few moments when you know the game is about to crash, but hasn’t actually displayed the message yet. Otherwise, I didn’t have any lag issues while playing, there was no rubber-banding or jolting NPCs to speak of.
Invisible wall.
Second on my list of three big gripes: The terrain. The terrain needs to be revamped so walking isn’t a fight between myself and my character. Slight inclines or tiny but sharp inclines seem to stop my player in his tracks, and I am fairly certain that Heatwave has installed invisible walls in some areas because I’ve found multiple spots that I cannot pass. In the above picture, you can see my character on pretty level ground, but ground that he cannot pass. It is worth noting that this is nowhere near the area limits.
Third: The game has some issues with lack of context sensitive response, or my character is a pacifist. When fighting, I had several instances where my character would just cancel auto-attack, wouldn’t attack at all, or I would hit something on the hotbar and I would see “queuing quick shot” but my character would never use the power. This isn’t a lag issue, to my knowledge. When using hotbar actions, I also found that there is no context for cooldown. The buttons are grayed out until you can use them again, but the countdown timers always say: 00:00:00 remaining, and the buttons regaining their color doesn’t necessarily mean that pressing the associated button will result in attacking again.
So Should I Play Gods & Heroes?
Gods & Heroes is fun, and its major issues are on the hardware front (performance, responsiveness, and terrain/pathfinding). The estate and minion systems are enjoyable and innovative, but the experience is just crushed under the foot of your minions managing to kill the mob before my scout decides to stop ignoring my button presses.
I’m going to leave this up to the reader to decide, download the Gods & Heroes trial and give it the whole three days before you make your decision, but you may want to wait to activate your key until some much needed terrain/stability issues are fixed. I would buy the game as it is now, because I didn’t find the issues to be game-breaking, if it weren’t for the fact that the Star Wars Galaxies weekly article is my primary MMO right now.
Otherwise, I’d give Gods & Heroes a thumbs up. If you haven’t taken part in the 3-day trial, do so.
Through my first day in Gods & Heroes, I kept asking myself why the game felt so familiar, and it wasn’t until around level six or seven that enlightenment hit me: Gods & Heroes feels like a game that should have come out years ago. The landscape in many places looks stunning, with impressive detail and variation in the flowers and trees that populate the landscape. The armor shows off the multiple pieces that put it together, and the characters look decent, although a bit shiny and emotionless. The buildings, however, are the sore spot in visual design, with a small amount of structures reused to populate the world.
The meat of the game is a been-there-done-that fantasy MMO set in ancient Rome. Your main mode of leveling consists of going around and finding quests that task you with killing a number of NPCs, harvesting nodes, or killing NPCs to harvest things off of them. As you level up, you will follow the basic system of taking your trash to the vendor, buying new armor and weapons, setting up your alternate advancement points (feats) and upgrading your minions. The idea of bringing squad mechanics into a solo-oriented game will make your time spent in Rome a little too easy, however.
MMO Fallout 