Darkfall Suicidal: Character Wipes Not Off The Table


One week ago, I put my money on the table that Darkfall 2.0, a relaunch of the game, would bring free to play to the game. There is still no information as to whether or not the game will indeed go free to play, so let’s focus on another avenue of the Darkfall 2.0 launch: Character wipes. As far as MMOs have it, the topic of character wipes is akin to playing that five finger game where you move a knife around your hand stabbing without hitting your fingers. In this case, however, it’s a chainsaw instead of a knife.

How badly do communities respond to character wipes, especially two years out of launch? As ZTZ on Massively put it, it would make the Galaxies NGE look like a set of patch notes. In the Darkfall Epic Blog, Tasos Flambouras (potentially soon to be renamed John Smedley Junior) toyed with the idea of a character wipe, noting that such an implementation would not be necessary, but indeed a possibility depending on how Aventurine sees the update:

This is a topic we’ll open up for discussion after we’ve given you more information on the new version of the game, so you can understand all the parameters involved.

Tasos refers to this update several times as the end of a chapter, and the beginning of chapter 2, and for the record my money is still on some sort of free to play, or buy to play, coming with this update.

I’ve seen a few people liken this to Shadowbane. Some of you may remember that Shadowbane was shut down in 2008 (five years after launch) to reboot the title, during which all characters were wiped. The game stayed up a good year after that, before shutting down. We’ll need more information on the specifics of Darkfall’s relaunch before making any comparisons between the two titles, however.

Smörgåsbord of Sony Online Entertainment News


Sony Fan Faire 2011 is still live until tomorrow, but there has been a plethora of information coming from the Las Vegas convention center. New expansion packs, updates on upcoming games, and more.

Everquest and Everquest II respectively are set to receive yet another expansion in the coming months. In Everquest, Veil of Alaris opens up a new continent, and releases Guild Hall exteriors so players can place their guild halls in neighborhoods which will be part of a further revamp. When the expansion launches this November, it will also raise the level cap to 95. In Everquest II, Age of Discovery brings with it a ton of new content, including new hired mercenaries and the ability to design your own dungeon. Also coming this November, the expansion will bring in a new class: Beastlord.

Plenty of updates were announced for DC Universe Online (including a fight against Brainiac at the Fortress of Solitude), Free Realms and a cross promotion with McDonald’s Happy Meals for Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures.

What is likely to draw the most attention is Planetside 2, which Sony revealed will bring back all three factions and has been redesigned from the ground up to not only ensure that most if not all of the field is worth battling over, but so even players with old computers can play. Players will fight over resources and will have to coordinate with their individual goals to boost their faction’s overall progress. There was also talks of player generated content, customization with weapons and vehicles, and user generated content. Planetside Next will be PC exclusive and still has no release date.

Everquest Next received very little information, other than a screenshot and a note that the game would also run on the same engine as Planetside Next.

Check out this trailer for Planetside Next:

Eve Online Heading To Japan Under Nexon


Despite what some may like you to believe, the cultural differences between the East and West are astronomical, and nothing showcases these differences better than our choice in consumer goods. In the MMO sector, grind-based cutesy free to play cash shop MMOs tend to do better in the east while the west prefers  less anime games, has a far higher tendency to reject pay-to-win cash shops, and isn’t afraid of paying a subscription or two.

CCP announced today that Eve Online is heading to Japan, partnering with Nexon who will take care of the localization. Japanese players will connect to Eve’s Tranquility server, unlike the Chinese market. The game hits Japan later this year, with Nexon also handling the release of DUST 514 in Japan.

It’ll be interesting to see how well received Eve becomes in Japan, given a major focus of the game is how corporations deal with one another, between players building up empires and stabbing each other in the back. More on Eve Online as it appears.

War Announcement Coming…At Some Point


I don’t make myself out to be an expert in the business side of MMOs, although I do try my best when writing articles here at MMO Fallout, even I recognize that the prospect of Warhammer Online going free to play is a tough one. On one side you have monetization, the need to populated the cash shop with items people would want to buy without feeling they need to buy. On the other side, Warhammer is primarily a player vs player title, so placing armor, weapons, or buff potions on the cash shop is a minefield Mythic would have to tiptoe quite carefully over. With a cash shop, Warhammer takes the risk of bringing in new (albeit less loyal) players at the risk of alienating their current base.

But this article doesn’t have much to do with free to play, at least not presumably. Earlier this week, Mythic took in a few WAR bloggers to see some interesting material regarding some upcoming patches. Thanks to the j0y of a magical document we call a non-disclosure agreement, we won’t hear about what that information is until some point in the near future.

From what we do know so far, it appears there will be a focus on fortresses, incentives to defend, and new zones. Other than that, as blogger Werit posted:

It is substantial news.  However, it is probably not what you’re thinking it is.  I was quite surprised when they told us about it.  Is that cryptic enough?  Don’t worry about it too much though, as we may see an official announcement in a few weeks.
So it isn’t free to play?

That Is Real Roleplaying: A Mortal Online Moment


Here at MMO Fallout, I’ve always said that most of my issues with sandbox games stem from a lack of content. When a company puts out a sandbox title, you have the option of being a crafter or a fighter, and often the choices are a toss up between pressing a button for hours on end or joining a group and kicking some serious ass. So you can see why such games generally devolve into systems where fighting is the main staple, and resource gathering is something done by macros through the safety of your guild.

The story I want to bring up today comes from BubbaJones on the Mortal Online forums. You can make of it what you want, this kind of scenario sounds like something that would keep me subscribed.

The other day (during MO’s night time), in Vadda, i was lounging around the bank and chatting with someone and out of the corner of my eye, i saw Cyde (a Red) proceed to run up to a crafter (by the utility vendor) from out of the bushes, one shot said crafter and promptly disappear into the darkness.

It created a commotion indeed, everyone yelling and running around, people panicked and warning others to huddle for safety.

Fighters were running around in groups of 2 and 3 to find the lurking Red who was hiding somewhere in the city.

It was Awesome, that feeling of danger – and what MO should be about.

Planetside 2 Announcement Coming.


Hold your BFR’s folks, something big is coming from Sony regarding Planetside 2, and hopefully not like March’s announcement. A clock has appeared on the Planetside 2 website, at 45 hours currently, putting the countdown to end sometime late Friday EST. Stay tuned for more information.

http://www.planetside2.com/

Mortal Online: Welcome Back Week, Play Until July 10th.


We recently passed the one year mark with Mortal Online, and our first expansion. We are very proud of how far the game has gone, and we will continue pressing forward with Mortal Online. If you have been holding out on jumping in, then the summer sale would have you covered. If you are someone who has drifted away from the game, we are giving you a chance to once again step in your character’s shoes, and rediscover Nave.

Mortal Online. Never before have two words been able to incite as much arguing as these two, next to count Bill Roper, John Smedley, Derek Smart, and Combat Upgrade. Can you believe it was one year ago that Mortal Online launched? I sure can’t.

With the release of Dawn, Mortal Online’s first expansion pack, Star Vault would like to bring in a new batch of players with a 30% discount. For those who have played and gone, you have not been forgotten. Star Vault has opened up accounts until July 10th, for a short welcome back week.

Read more about it here.

Week In Review: Butterfly In The Sky Edition


Given that today is Sunday July 5th and not a Tuesday, it must be time to put out the Week in Review completely on time, and that means another weekly topic to think about. Today I’d like to talk about NCsoft, namely the idea that they are this evil corporation that murders babies (metaphorically) and would sell their own mothers if it meant profit. Take a look at the below graph that I have compiled detailing the sales of all NCsoft games each quarter between Q1 ’05 and the latest release: Q1 ’11.

I know how a lot of you like to claim NCsoft shuts down successful games that they don’t like, but consider this: Look at how low Tabula Rasa started out, then see how low it got to before it was cancelled. The first quarter for Others was listed as Exteel, but the game was grouped in to show higher sales. Dungeon Runners is never even referenced by name, just lumped in with “others.” Auto Assault is also never mentioned, and is presumably lumped in with “others.” It’s pretty obvious looking at this chart that NCsoft sets a bar for when they shut down games, and that bar is far lower than many of us would like to admit.

1. The Star Wars Galaxies Challenge: Week 1.

My first log of the Star Wars Galaxies challenge, or my attempt to level as high as possible by the time Star Wars Galaxies shuts down in December. My character is a Twi’lek smuggler named Qa’ashi currently residing on Tatooine if you’d like to visit me, she is level 17 and was created on server I don’t know. The point of this line of articles is to give my experience playing Star Wars Galaxies during its last months of life, and I hope to make this my staple for shuttered MMOs (I can only hope two games don’t shut down at once) otherwise I may need an IV drip.

So far the adventure has gone with its highs and lows. If you haven’t played Star Wars Galaxies the age really shows on an engine that almost feels like it’s falling apart. I’ve had a few times where missions bug and a creature I’m tracking doesn’t spawn where it’s supposed to, or the waypoint doesn’t update and I have to abandon the mission. Small annoyances, like enemies spawning inside of structures and not allowing me to shoot them, or strange lag bugs where enemies regain health faster than I can shoot them. I love the missions though, and I love my free house (which I am populating with posters) and promotional vehicles.

There are a lot of factions in Star Wars Galaxies, to the point where shooting just about any humanoid is likely to lower your standing one faction and raise it in another. My biggest issue with alignment is the random checks in cities. I’ll be running along and I’ll just see “You have lost 20 standing with the Republic” or “you have lost 20 standing with the empire,” and a quick look in the chat box will show an empire/republic guard has been following me shouting “stop! You must submit to a random security check for illicit goods or you will be suspect!” I get that the game is old enough to not have voice acting, but how about some sort of noise indicator? I only suggest this for the same reason a police officer can’t arrest me because I was walking down the sidewalk and didn’t look over my shoulder to notice he was flagging me down by waving his arms wildly but not saying anything or tapping me on the shoulder.

2. Eve Online: No Non-Vanity Items. Ever.

So the Eve Online scandal comes to an uneventful close with CCP promising to the CSM that there will be no non-vanity items added to the NeX store, there were never any plans, and there will probably never be any plans. Maybe. Perhaps. Now, obviously CCP could change face at any time, and to speculate on a time and date would be a big waste of time given it would add unnecessary flames to a dying fire.

I think the lesson to be learned here is that CCP started the cash shop far too early, putting out the expensive items before they could get out the cheaper items. They also messed up by trying to fight the community rather than explain the system to them right off the bat, and by comparing Eve items to vanity clothing you’d buy from a Japanese boutique.

Perhaps, as one poster put it, this is just CCP’s success getting to their heads.

3. At Least MMOs Are Honest In Their Draconian DRM.

I was looking forward to Capcom’s Resident Evil: Mercenaries on the 3DS, and I was planning on buying it used (or new when/if the price drops), until I learned about the game’s DRM. You can only have one save file, and you cannot delete the save. According to Capcom, you would think this was a restriction out of their control, as they claim that the game saves to the cart and thus cannot be removed:

In Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D, all mission progress is saved directly to the Nintendo 3DS cartridge, where it cannot be reset. The nature of the game invites high levels of replayability in order to improve mission scores. In addition, this feature does not remove any content available for users.

If you want to get into specifics, MMOs have the most draconian DRM of any game on the market. You must maintain an internet connection, play on their servers, pay a subscription fee for many or don’t play at all, and if the servers shut down you are absolutely screwed unless someone somewhere maybe leaks the source and a private server is set up that often functions nowhere near the actual game. And God forbid you join a game that doesn’t get off the ground, your $50 and $15 a month for a year or so is gone, down the toilet.

But MMOs are a service, and it isn’t fair to compare an MMO’s DRM to a regular game’s DRM.

4. The Year of F2P And Revival

This has been an interesting year so far, with a decent number of titles being revived while others have gone free to play. We’re only slightly over halfway through the year, so there’s no telling what will happen by December, and then beyond. World of Warcraft debuts its unlimited demo, with players able to play up until level 20 for free forever.

Over at Global Agenda, Hi-Rez has announced that the free to play transition for Global Agenda has resulted in “ revenues are higher than they ever have been before” meaning more content at a faster pace. No doubt Age of Conan will report higher earnings this month, with Fallen Earth following next month, and City of Heroes at some point this year.

5. Speaking of Free to Play: Rock Paper Shotgun Free To Read

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/06/29/rock-paper-shotgun-goes-free-to-read/

Rock Paper Shotgun did a hilarious parody of the free to play announcement, with the reveal of RPS: F2R, a way for the Rock Paper Shotgun crew to take what was once free and monetize the hell out of it.

Of course there will be no need for readers to pay anything at all to read the new Rock, Paper, Shotgun. The first two paragraphs of every post will always be accessible to everyone, and readers can read them as often as they want, wherever they want, unlimited times*. The rest of the post will become available to those who make the RPS patented NanoPayments™, of anything from just $0.59® to only $299.99 per article. And Premium Users will continue to receive the same excellent service for exactly the same price as everyone else.
*Up to a maximum of four times.

You can read the entire article at the link above.

Free Because No One Would Pay For It


As much as I hate to say this, the old cardinal rule still stands. While games like Dungeons and Dragons Online, Lord of the Rings, Champions Online, etc went free to play because of the prospect of making more money, there are plenty of products that are free because no one would pay for them otherwise. Dungeons and Dragons Online is about halfway in between, going free because not enough people were willing to get past the initial payment barrier to make the game profitable, but that has no stand on the game’s quality.

I thought about this because of my podcast subscription to Real Time with Bill Maher, a political talk show that airs on HBO, a premium channel. The audio podcast, on the other hand, is available for free on Itunes, and it will remain free because HBO puts less effort into maintaining it than I do with my press (mmofallout gmail) email. Episodes premiere on Friday and don’t make it to iTunes until maybe Monday or Tuesday, if we’re lucky. This week, I managed to download the episode on the following Friday because the files were not uploaded correctly and would not download all week. For a lot of episodes, the podcasts had random skipping, looping audio, and other random issues. For the first few episodes in the season, the episodes weren’t even being uploaded.

The audio issues have been going on since about 2008, according to reviews on iTunes’ app store, so it’s pretty clear that HBO just doesn’t care about the podcast. Yes, it’s free, but I’d be willing to pay the same subscription I have for my other podcasts (about $6-7 a month) if HBO would offer it and increase the quality, not forget to upload episodes, upload them the same day, keep the audio from cutting out, etc. In this stage, however, the quality of the podcast sucks, and I wouldn’t pay a cent to listen to it.

So I thought: What games are such low quality that I wouldn’t pay a dime for them, cash shop or not, and the first game I thought of was Earth Eternal. Now, Earth Eternal was a quaint game, but structurally it was World of Warcraft with everything stripped away except for vendoring trash and killing mobs for quests. That’s it, and that’s why the company crashed after just a few months of the game running. There was no reason to buy anything from the cash shop because the game was so shallow that you never felt compelled to spend money on it. It’s like when you were a kid and your “entrepreneur in training” friend would try to sell you his peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or that rock he found on the road that looked like Abraham Lincoln’s hat. It’s funny, until you realize he is completely serious. So you give him an Indian Brush Burn, eat the sandwich, and tell him to stop being such a dork.

I should clarify a bit on the quality aspect, as this doesn’t just apply to the quality of the goods. This is also why I become, and I’ll describe it as a few companies have referred to me, a “disrespectful ass” when I see some games coming out with subscriptions attached to them, and I poke fun at them for having no business sense or etiquette. To announce a shooter that has a subscription and is not Planetside (an open world MMO), you are turning that shotgun around and firing it directly into your feckless noggin. Sure, Global Agenda had a massive amount of initial sales, and when the time came for the subscriptions to renew that game’s population dropped like a drunk in a ball pit. I said the same thing when CitiesXL tried to charge a subscription for its not-really-massively-but-still-charged-as-such multiplayer system, and what happened? They shut it down. They then released a new edition of Cities late last year that featured no multiplayer. If it’s any consolation to people angered by Cities XL’s multiplayer, Monte Crisco as a company was killed off by Cities’ poor sales.

Call of Duty’s subscription might work when it comes out, but I’ll say the same thing for this as I do for MMOs: They ain’t World of Warcraft, and you ain’t Call of Duty. You have neither the built up userbase or the tenure in the gaming world to pull off a stunt where only 2% of the community can opt in and still make you millions of dollars a month.

I used Earth Eternal as my sole example because it’s the only game that came to mind writing this article. I’m sure most of you can think of games that are free because nobody would pay for them otherwise. The fact that Earth Eternal was bought gives me a lot of faith in the genre, however, because if Earth Eternal can find a buyer, any MMO not restricted by legal issues (Star Wars Galaxies by licensing, for instance) has a chance of being bought and reintroduced.

$20 Says Darkfall "Relaunch" Is Free To Play


When was the last time you heard the phrase “this patch is like a completely new game?” In my line of work (work? Blogging), a whole lot. Such is the case with Darkfall, where on the Epic Blog head boss man of Aventurine Tasos Flambouras talks about a complete relaunch of the game. How much of a relaunch is it? Well it is certainly no linguine, and it is without a doubt not just an expansion pack.

This relaunch is not an expansion.

Thank you, Tasos, but we need more information.

It’s a new game we’ve been developing in parallel with the current version of Darkfall. The scope is massive, and it has been difficult to stay on schedule after several unexpected issues we’ve had with the current version, changes and additions we decided to make for the new version, some business developments, and the decision to add the siege system into this version of the game rather than in the relaunch.

That’s more like it. But let’s discuss the title of this post, and my assurance that this is likely a prelude to a free to play announcement, and continue reading the announcement:

There are shifting priorities having to do with business issues for this relaunch, and another part being some Asian developments we also need to take into consideration. We can assure you that everything we’re doing in this regard is in the best interest of our players and of Darkfall, and that the relaunch of the game will be very exciting for everyone.

I distinctly remember Dave Georgeson saying something along these lines shortly before Everquest II went free to play, when they announced big changes coming but wouldn’t actually announce free to play because the service was going to be considered a new game, because the existing community would have flipped the chess board and went home if they had to share space with the freeloaders. By that I’m referring to the comments about making this decision for the betterment of the community.

The current estimated completion date for development is August, which makes release somewhere between now and when Rift consumes World of Warcraft as the most subscribed MMO…In Burundi. At least we can be assured, despite the vague language, that this isn’t a prelude to Darkfall shutting down or being sold to Gamersfirst. It’s a new version being developed, Tasos isn’t in the process of lifting Darkfall up so he can suplex it.