I know at least one person will eventually reply with “Um, Omali, it’s technically buy to play not free to play, as you’d still need to buy the client.” Final Fantasy XIV players are coming upon November 22nd, when early adopters will start hitting the end of their second free month of game time. Just this week, Square Enix announced that Final Fantasy XIV would receive yet another extension on their free time, giving a total of three free months (two if you don’t count the free month included with purchase).
As Casey Schreiner pointed out on the G4TV MMO Report this past week, as Square Enix has a patch coming that will hopefully fix a lot of the issues, but that patch isn’t set to come until early 2011, players are likely to see a few more free months added to their game time. Until then, Final Fantasy XIV is technically a free to play title. Remember, if you buy Final Fantasy XIV and register your character before…no, that was the 19th. Never mind.
More on Final Fantasy XIV as it shuffles lazily into our path.
In its 13+ months of existence, the team over at Aion has done a lot to remove issues that plagued the game at launch, from overpopulation (to subsequent underpopulation), lag in large battles, and bugs and glitches. However, one of the biggest issues I still see people having with the game is the immense amount of grind still present, occasionally lessened with a double experience weekend.
Such is the case once again with Aion, where players will enjoy a double experience weekend in December, twice! Between December 3rd and 6th, and again from the 10th to the 13th, players will enjoy double experience on any of their toons. In addition, these weekends will bring 99% discounts to soul healing. If that doesn’t make any sense to you, soul healing is the cost you pay to instantly remove the sickness effect when your character dies.
In other community pleasing news, the announcement came that the siege times will be changed for people who would like to do other things aside from sieging every night. Sieges now happen in a two hour window rather than three, along with an hour block in between to allow players to participate in other activities. Up until now, if you were attacking or defending, that was your job for the night. Forts are now on a single layer, as well, to remove the tactical strategy of bum rushing all three at once.
The double experience times are on the calendar page.
Mortal Online’s launch feels like forever ago, and player reaction is still mixed. Ask a current player and they’ll likely tell you that the game has improved leaps and bounds but still has a long way to go before it is stable, complete, and balanced. Ask an ex-player and you are likely to walk headlong into a Hitler analogy accompanying a rant about how much Star Vault hates making money and just wants to drive their customers away. Either way you look at it, Mortal Online had a rocky launch, not lethally rocky like All Points Bulletin, but heavier than your normal MMO launch. For months, de-synchronization was the biggest issue plaguing the game, among other smaller but numerous problems. Star Vault launched the Epic Patch, promising to fix many of these faults.
Star Vault wants to apologize to their customers, both current an prior, by giving seven free days. In the November Newsletter, Star Vault announced:
Of course actions speak louder than words, so in order to reimburse our customers for the grief the latest patches might have caused we are adding 7 days of additional gametime to each active account today. And in order to give customers who are not subscribed at the moment the chance to check out the new engine build and the new content, we are adding 7 days to every customer who bought any of the game versions earlier and does not have an active subscription at the moment.
In addition, the company is offering free days to those who resubscribe. Five days for one month, twenty days for three months, and fifty days for six months. If your account was inactive, you’ll be able to log into the account section on the Mortal Online website and see:
Your subscription has been cancelled,
but has not expired.
No further payments will or can be processed on your current registered payment method. Your subscription will expire on Fri, 26 Nov 2010. If you want to continue playing after that you need to reactive your subscription.
More on Mortal Online as it appears. Hit more for the entirety of the newsletter.
Everquest II went free to play just a few months ago, and the folks at Sony Online Entertainment want to spread the wealth…for a few days at least. If you’ve been playing the free version of Everquest II and are interested in what those elite gold members are doing, you’re in luck: Sony is allowing you full access to what the gold members get, and for free. Bronze members will have access to higher level spells, extra bag space, bank space, extra coin and journal quests.
Dynamic events and MMOs go together like the layers of a sweet sweet cherpumple cake, and despite what some may claim you really don’t need to be a sandbox title in order to accomplish such a feat, and do it well. In the past, we’ve seen attempts at developer-run dynamic events, where the player’s success decides what happens next, but most of the time the idea of a dynamic world usually runs down to which guild/clan/corporation owns what territory. Eve Online, Darkfall, Mortal Online, etc, pretty much the same idea.
Over at Aventurine, the devs have been working on expanding and fleshing the lore of Darkfall, the latest being about a nomadic race called the Vargashi. The new lore is going to be used, according to a blog post, to spur on new dynamic quests. The blog doesn’t go into much detail, but does offer one example of a Vargashi NPC going into a town to request help in dealing with the Mahrim, or tasking players with aiding the nomadic race, even going against the person’s own race in some cases.
Overall it sounds like these dynamic quests won’t be necessarily world-changing, but rather on a more randomly timed, do-it-as-it-comes scale. Whether or not a player completing/failing the quest will have any impact on the world is yet to be seen.
In a blog post today, Aventurine discussed that the quests are being rewritten, with faction quests being more helpful towards newbies. Plans are also in place to optimize NPC cities to be more accessible, redistributing monster spawn, NPC locations, and dungeons, and far more than I can post here. You can read all about it on the link above, it is a long and very interesting read if you’re a current/ex/prospective player of Darkfall.
Back in October, Square Enix announced that early adopters of Final Fantasy XIV would receive an additional month of time to try out the game, play through it, and hopefully weather out the storm of issues with the game. This month, Square Enix announced a tentative update coming on the 25th of November, just a few days after most of the free extensions will expire. In response, Square has issued a news article detailing yet another extension to the free time:
Today, we have decided to extend the free trial period an additional 30 days. Please refer to the following for more details.
Players who purchase FFXIV before November 19th can also partake in this free month (giving them 60 days of free game time), while those who adopted early are enjoying their third free month. In addition, Square put out a comprehensive list of updates they have planned for the coming months, which you can find here: http://lodestone.finalfantasyxiv.com/pl/topics/detail?id=cb4dc09784bc24b4fde2e45de9f018ec5fb504d2
And since the discussion on other forums is already erupting on this subject, yes this is to appease early adopters and get them to stick around until Square can do some much needed maintenance on the game. In case you hadn’t noticed with All Points Bulletin, when a company doesn’t fix glaring issues fast enough, the game dies: fast. Hopefully Square can get the necessary issues fixed before the early adopters disappear.
Any account created before the 19th will be able to take part in the free 30 days. More on Final Fantasy XIV as it appears.
Back in 2009, Jagex implemented a jobs system on Runescape mainly for new players where they could take tasks doing menial work with low level skills in return for gold, as well as an occasional experience lamp. This gave players a reason to work on their crafting and combat skills for a reward other than what is commonly known as vendor trash. Of course, this feature was removed due to low player participation, but the point still stands: It was a useful system.
Turbine is bringing 250 new quests into Lord of the Rings Online in the form of a task system. Using a similar idea to Runescape, players will take up bulletin board messages in towns offering repeatable quests, tasking players with gathering vendor trash from nearby mobs in return for an experience reward to augment the grinding process, as well as an occasional reputation reward. These will also go towards new deeds offering unique cloaks.
The tasks are limited, however, starting at five per day and going up to 10 by completing deeds or purchasing the increase through the store. This system is mainly for free players who wish to augment their leveling but don’t want to pay for zone packs. Players may also only take a task up to four levels over the task (A level 8 task can only be completed up to level 12, for example).
Alganon has no subscription, and technically doesn’t even have a client price. You can download the game and play it for free, although doing so will incur some penalties on your account. For instance, you won’t be able to create a guild, access chat channels past say/tell/group/guild, get the last 20 levels, and you will have a decreased quest log capacity, not to mention additional character slots. Now you can buy all of these separately, which can get expensive (Over eight thousand Tribute, or about $40) or you can buy the super pack, which costs 3,627 tribute (You’ll need to invest $20 worth of tribute to buy it).
Quest Online regularly has sales on the Super Pack, and it is currently discounted to 3627 tribute, about twenty dollars USD. If you don’t care about most of the perks with the pack, you can always ditch guild creation and buy the communications and level cap for $10. In fact, you might want to ditch the communications perk, as Derek Smart posted on the forums:
I already asked for chat channel restrictions to be removed. In fact, I asked for that months ago once I heard about it; but the team gave a compelling reason for having it that way. Just last week, I overruled that and asked for it to be changed. Once the spam starts flying (now that they can do it with impunity just by downloading a free copy of the game), I hope nobody complains about it. There is a reason (stated many times) why it was done this way.
Type MMO Fallout in the reference box, and enjoy a 0% discount. Just don’t use me as collateral, because then your transaction is guaranteed to be declined.
Note: I don’t think there’s a reference box, but if there is MMO Fallout is not affiliated with Alganon or Quest Online, nor is this a solicited advertisement. But if there is a reference box, type MMO Fallout in for poops and giggles.
Anarchy Online is one of the oldest MMOs on the market, and for the fact that it never appeared much (read: at all) here on MMO Fallout, the game has brought a number of innovations to the MMO genre, foremost instancing, dynamic questing, and in-game advertising. Funcom also touched upon what we now think of as endless trials, when they made the original game completely free (plus in-game ads) that brought in major money for Funcom.
Last week, Funcom announced that the “new” cash shop would be coming to Anarchy Online. This week, in a forum post, they commented further on the upcoming update. In addition to hundreds of social items, Funcom is looking at adding some non-vanity items in the form of xp stims (boost experience gain for a limited time), time-limited access to expansion content, level packs (boost to level 50, 99, 150, 199 instantly) only available to players who have a level 220 character, and more.
We’ll see how this goes for Anarchy Online. According to the forum post, Funcom plans on rolling out a Funcom Points currency across their games, meaning a similar cash shop may appear in Age of Conan and upcoming The Secret World.
MMO Fallout 