Lego Universe Free To Play Today


Check your Calenders, folks. August 15th brings with it the partial free to play transition for Lego Universe. Starting today, players will be able to download the game for free and access two adventure zones and one player property, as well as a large amount of mini-figure customization options and equipment to acquire. Of course this is all an incentive to get players into the game to eventually upgrade to membership, so consider this not much more than an extended trial with no time limits, similar to World of Warcraft’s.

More on Lego Universe as it appears. You can read the whole news story here. A subscription to Lego Universe costs $10 USD a month.

Week In Review: This Article Is Private To You Edition

World of Warcraft phasing, North Korean isn’t (?) gold farming, Nintendo wants massively single player games, Guild Wars 2 has breasts, and Darkfall’s “wipes” in this week in review.


For the one or two of you who have followed my Star Wars Galaxies articles, you’ll notice I’ve stopped doing them. The short end of the story is that I have nothing more to talk about with the game, while writing up the fifth week article realizing that from a few weeks in my articles were nothing more than “I’m having the same problems, there are these bugs, and I’m traveling far for the missions.” I know all three of the people I saw over the month and a half that I played will be angry at me for saying this, but at this juncture (with the shutdown coming) Star Wars Galaxies is like a museum. You go in an see the exhibits, how the cavemen lived years ago, and you walk out. The game hasn’t aged well and if Sony and Lucas Arts had anything to say about it, the massive size of the game (You truly have to experience Star Wars Galaxies to understand how enormous this game is) made a free to play transition simply unfeasible.

I will be covering Galaxies in the final days, however.

1. When You’re Phasing: Important Quest NPCs.

I’ve recently re-subscribed to World of Warcraft after being offered seven free days, and one of the more impressive features I’ve seen so far is the phasing technology. Now, I’ve commended the story telling in Runescape as allowing moderately world changing events to take place in the player’s own vision, but Blizzard takes this a step further by introducing far more story moments, cutscenes, and the aforementioned phasing. To the unfamiliar, phasing is a system where players can see different versions of the same area, depending on the completion of quests. So if I lead the invasion into the Worgen territory, I will see an empty battlefield afterward. A player just entering the area would still have hostile NPCs and a war raging around him.

For the complaints players have of being in the same area yet not seeing one another, this relieves one of my biggest gripes with MMO quests: The “Kill the leader of the Centaur,” quest only to have the leader respawn after a predetermined time. Or being given a quest to eradicate rats from an area, only to have them still be in that area. The quests feel far less superficial, as you have the visual feedback that you’ve actually accomplished something.

My main issue is that the quests were clearly not co-written. All of these quests were written specifically when Cataclysm released, but clearly not with any overlap. Thus, I’ve had to abandon three or four quests because the phasing caused the NPC I needed to turn the quest into to die, turn hostile, or simply leave. My research on the forums shows these quests bugged with reports dating back to around Cataclysm’s release, meaning I can chalk off those low level rewards.

2. North Korea…Isn’t Gold Farming?

Believe what you will. Following last week’s news that North Korea is funding hackers to bring in a few million dollars by breaking into South Korean MMOs to set up bots to farm gold, the North Korean state-run propaganda machine has come out to state that all claims are false, and made up by their South Korean neighbors. Granted, we won’t know for sure who is telling the truth, as either side could be using this as a propaganda machine against the other.

3. Nintendo Patents Massively Singleplayer Online Games

Say hello to the future additions to MMO Fallout, perhaps. In a bizarre move, Nintendo has patented the concept of the MSO, or Massively Singleplayer Online game.

“A method and apparatus that allows a player to play a massively single-player online game without directly interacting with other players, while affecting and being affected by other players playing the online game.”

An idea for this would be a Diablo-esque game where players can play in a single player or multiplayer environment, but with a global auction house (similar to Diablo 3). Granted: This is a Nintendo patent, and generally when Nintendo patents something weird, we never see that idea again. So this may be the last you hear of the MSORPG.

4. The Tree People Have Breasts

I saw an interesting thread on Guild Wars 2 this past week detailing two things the MMORPG.com forums can’t seem to get enough of: The Sylvari and breasts. The poster went on a rather impressive explanation as to how the Sylvari join with other races and must thus make themselves more attractive to that specific species. The Charr are easily satisfied, but the humans are more xenophobic and likely to become hostile to an overly different species, IE: The Charr. So in order to be more attractive, the Sylvari took on traits attractive to humans, ie: big mammary glands.

It’s a very detailed way to say “because we know what percentage of our players are heterosexual men, therefore boobs. Breasts, melons, headlights, creampuffs.” You know the recipe.

5. I May Be Right About Darkfall’s “Wipe.”

I’ve revised my speculation on Darkfall’s wipes a few times, after revelations that the wipe may not be a wipe in the sense of “characters deleted, starting fresh.” The more Aventurine talks, the more a better image begins to come into focus, and after their latest blog I think it’s safe to say that the “wipe” refers to new skills that will replace old skills (but start at 0) and redundant skills being removed completely, which Aventurine has confirmed as true. Such a system isn’t really a wipe in the traditional sense, and regaining the few new skills will be far less enduring than a full wipe.

But who knows? I know I don’t.

Cowen And Company: The Old Republic Could Sell 3 Million


Cowen and Company may sound familiar, and that is because they’ve been featured here on MMO Fallout once before. Back in June, the analyst group got a look at The Old Republic, and they weren’t impressed, quoted as saying:

“Despite promises from EA/Bioware that the title represents a major step forward in MMO design, what we saw was essentially a World of Warcraft clone with Star Wars character skins and the Bioware RPG nice/nasty dialogue tree mechanism bolted on for non-player character conversations.”

Well it appears Cowen and the rest of the company have had a change in heart, as the analyst group has recently upgraded its prediction to 3 million sales in the first year, with two million of those players staying on to continue subscribing. This comes on the heels of the announcement that The Old Republic has become EA’s fastest selling pre-order.

Read the whole article here, without falling too deep into the “Bioware is bribing Cowen” conspiracy crowd.

SOE Authenticator Coming To Device, iOS, and Android


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).

Unsurprisingly: F2P Raises Population, Revenue In Age of Conan


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.

Then again I could be wrong.

Gamersfirst Unleashes Brawndo: Lag Mutilator


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).

Vanguard Gets A Patch


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.“

More on Vanguard as it appears.

Mortal Online Secures A Publisher!


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.”

Week In Review: Why Hath WoW Forsaken Me?


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.

World of Warcraft: Come Back For 7 Days


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.

Still, World of Warcraft.