Like the rest of us, MMOs are born, they live, and eventually they all die. Although 2009 has seen the passing of Richard Garriot’s Tabula Rasa, Shadowbane, and The Matrix Online, it has also seen the continuing run of Ultima Online (celebrating twelve years), Everquest (ten years), and now Asheron’s Call hitting ten years old. Sadly, we celebrate this over the death of Asheron’s Call 2, that occurred less than four years ago.
Happy birthday Asheron’s Call! Have a seat…no, not there, that’s the chair that hurts your back. Sit in your rocking chair, right over there. You old coot you.
Like the rest of us, MMOs are born, they live, and eventually they all die. Although 2009 has seen the passing of Richard Garriot’s Tabula Rasa, Shadowbane, and The Matrix Online, it has also seen the continuing run of Ultima Online (celebrating twelve years), Everquest (ten years), and now Asheron’s Call hitting ten years old. Sadly, we celebrate this over the death of Asheron’s Call 2, that occurred less than four years ago.
Happy birthday Asheron’s Call! Have a seat…no, not there, that’s the chair that hurts your back. Sit in your rocking chair, right over there. You old coot you.
This article doesn't have much to do with Darkfall.
You find yourself in a room with one thousand small tables, each table adorned with two objects; a button and a number from one to one thousand. A voice comes over the system and says “only one of these buttons will not electrocute you. Good luck.” You gaze upon the legion of buttons as the voice softly cackles.
You are now a Quality Assurance agent for a massively multiplayer online game. Now imagine this scenario: You are in the same room, same tables, same buttons, same numbers. This time, however, you have one hundred helpers at your side. Common sense says that you send each one down the line, starting with number one and moving up (or however you want to do it) shocking each one until you get to the right button.
This article has nothing to do with high level players.
Patch 1.3.2 has come and gone for Warhammer Online, bringing with it the new New Player Journey, the removal of fortresses, and other balances and tweaks to RvR. Mythic hopes to bring back new players and old veterans alike who are either afraid to join or became sick of the title long ago.
Along with this update comes unlimited free trials. Yes, the ten day limit has been removed, you have as long as you want in tier 1 (That’s level 1 to 10) to experience what the game has to offer, and to form your own ideas as to whether or not the title merits your subscription.
This Article has nothing to do with naked women...
If Age of Conan could be transposed into a human being, it would probably call you up at two in the morning, drunk, and wondering why you dumped it so long ago. Whenever it phones up, it has brand new explanations for why we should take it back, new incentives we may not have had several months prior, and new tricks it learned that it can’t wait to show us.
But let’s keep this about the game, shall we? Recently Funcom launched a slew of price reductions on the game, and its subscription rate. The boxed copy currently runs you around twenty dollars USD, and multi-month subscriptions were slashed, up to 45% cheaper as you increase in time prepaid.
Is it working?
“I can’t comment on any numbers,”
-Erling Ellingson
Gee…Thanks, Erling, chief spokesperson for Funcom.
What Funcom can tell us, however, is that the updates have been a huge success at least with the current players. Funcom also launched a veteran system recently, where players accumulate points for each month of subscription, that increases incrementally the longer you sustain a subscription. Funcom is continuing to address concerns of content gaps, and the title has its first expansion pack in the works: Rise of the Godslayer.
Here’s hoping this helps Age of Conan’s subscriber numbers. Otherwise, Funcom can always make the title freemium, offer a free basic version with a paid upgrade, similar to that of Anarchy Online. Doing so might entice more people into putting a 30 gigabyte game on their system.
It always pains me to see an MMO fail before it is even launched. As is the case with Mechscape, Jagex’s upcoming Science Fiction MMO, a spiritual successor to Runescape, as CEO Mark Gerhard confirmed to Eurogamer today that the title is indeed canned.
In an interview with Mechscapeworld.com, Mark Gerhard had this to say:
“Sadly the game was not as complete as we wanted and we spent the first few months trying to “fix” the game where we could. About a month or so ago we took the decision to stop trying to “fix it” as we still wouldn’t have the game we wanted and the game certainly did not meet all the objectives and specifications established in the original game design document and therefore it would be better to go back to the founding principles and build the game we always wanted –Andrew [Gower] is now overseeing the project and working very closely with the team to build Stellar Dawn, not all was lost as we naturally have developed the game engine substantially over the last few years and the new designs benefits massively from this as well as a ton of experience within the team as to what works and what doesn’t. So whilst the content and a lot of the game play will change from what was previously built almost everything else will go straight back into Stellar Dawn.” – Mark Gerhard
With the death of one comes the rise of another. Innovations brought about by the production of Mechscape have gone towards the production of Stellar Dawn, a different yet somehow similar MMO to the little guy who never had a chance.
Hopefully Jagex has learned the same truth that Richard Garriot learned with Tabula Rasa: Just because you are an established name, does not guarantee all of your products will succeed.
On that note, it is good to see Jagex catching up to the rest of the mmo world in terms of features. The company just launched a name changing service, and is currently beta testing a feature to see a log of your character’s activity, including amount of time played (see WoW Armory)
Imagine this, gentlemen: You’re walking through the streets, and at the corner you come across a beautiful woman, clad in nothing but a frilly bra and underwear. As she looks at you seductively, using the hottest /dance emote available, she says “4g 4 l4p d4nc3.” All of a sudden, you notice something about her is wrong. The chin, the hairy arms, the Adam’s Apple. IT’S A MAN, BABY!
If you’re a player who enjoys the occasional pixelated groping, or you work as a GM on Age of Conan, you’ll be glad to hear that, at least on King of the World that you won’t have to worry about that woman actually being a man behind the screen. Taking the phrase “pics or it didn’t happen” literally, and requires players to submit webcam pictures of themselves, otherwise male players playing as female avatars will be banned.
If you’re a visitor to mmorpg.com, you’ve probably found yourself stepping into the middle of a controversy. Apparently yesterday’s review of Fallen Earth caused such an uproar that mmorpg.com’s staff saw fit to remove it from the website. I decided to get my super sleuth kit, and by super sleuth kit I mean grabbing part 1 off of Google Cache before it was deleted.
If you’re a visitor to mmorpg.com, you’ve probably found yourself stepping into the middle of a controversy. Apparently yesterday’s review of Fallen Earth caused such an uproar that mmorpg.com’s staff saw fit to remove it from the website. I decided to get my super sleuth kit, and by super sleuth kit I mean grabbing part 1 off of Google Cache before it was deleted.
This article has nothing to do with T-Mobile's Sidekick
All two of you who visited my message boards will see that I am not a big fan of being explicit with rules. In fact, there are three rules on the Orb Boards; Don’t incite a flame war, keep your account secure, and don’t be a spambot. Apart from those basic rules, I don’t think the rest needs to be explained. What it comes down to is: Anything you wouldn’t do in real life, don’t do here. Unless you make a living out of stealing people’s identities, in which case…still don’t do that here.
I often like to see Game Masters getting intuitive when it comes to removing problems that may not warrant a complete rule, or that may be such a special case that putting a rule would be far too generalizing. Say, for example, the issues Aion had when it launched last month. Players were clogging the servers by going away from keyboard so they could sleep, go to school, etc, without being logged off. Rather than pull out the ban-stick and taking things far over the edge, NCsoft quickly released a patch making such an exploit impossible.
The idea is that you don’t have to issue permabans to get a point across.
More on Aion, World of Warcraft, and more after the break.
MMO Fallout 