I know what you’re thinking: “A MOBA that isn’t set in a fantasy theme? Bullschtack, Omali!” Personally I am still not convinced that this isn’t some hallucination brought on by the gas station sushi I ate just a few hours ago, but for the sake of staying true to reality, or for the laughs we’ll have when this sushi wears off, let’s just say that the press release is completely true. Bigpoint Games, best known for their UNITY has announced their upcoming MOBA game: Merc Elite. In Merc Elite, players will take the role of one of five classes and equip high tech weaponry in order to dominate their opponents. Merc Elite uses direct fire aiming and will require some strategic tactics to take on your opponents.
Bigpoint has boasted Merc Elite as the first ever military themed MOBA.
“A team of more than 40 people have developed our newest Unity Game,” says Jeff Lydell, Senior Producer at Bigpoint, “Merc Elite goes beyond standard free-to-play browser titles by employing stunning 3D graphics powered by Unity and delivering a flurry of PvP action that includes an array of high-tech weapons, cunning tactics and a variety of character classes, while ensuring fair gameplay with skill-based combat.”
Merc Elite is expected to launch this summer and take its place alongside Bigpoint’s other browser games.
What a terrible day. As posted on the Glitch website today, the fledgling MMO will be shutting down forever as of December 9th. The website and forums will remain up until 8pm Pacific on the 9th, during which time the website and all services including mobile apps will no longer be available. The team is heartbroken to have to make the announcement, but according to the news post, Glitch had simply not attained a level of income to remain viable.
Unfortunately, Glitch has not attracted an audience large enough to sustain itself and based on a long period of experimentation and our best estimates, it seems unlikely that it ever would. And, given the prevailing technological trends — the movement towards mobile and especially the continued decline of the Flash platform on which Glitch was built — it was unlikely to do so before its time was up.
All recent purchases will be refunded automatically, while all purchases made since November 11, 2011 will be refunded eventually as they are to be taken care of by hand. According to the FAQ, selling the game is not possible:
It’s complicated, but it comes down to this: if that were a transaction that made sense to the purchaser, we wouldn’t be shutting the game down.
There is a ray of sunshine in this story, however. Even though Glitch will die, Tiny Speck will continue on as a company.
Tiny Speck, the company behind Glitch, will continue. We have developed some unique messaging technology with applications outside of the gaming world and a smaller core team will be working to develop new products. But now is not the time to talk about that. Right now our concern is with the players and our comrades who are suddenly looking for new work.
If you want to get some final memories of Glitch, do it now.
Gameglobe is an upcoming free to play MMO by Square Enix. Published by Bigpoint Entertainment, Gameglobe will be a free to play MMO that tasks players with creating fun and interactive levels for others to play through, or simply playing through the levels that others have created. The game is currently in closed beta, and the short teaser trailer below gives a few small glimpses of action.
Well, don’t get your hopes up. Turbine today announced Gaikai, allowing players to trial Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online without having to download either game’s client. Playable through your browser, the trial is heavily limited: One hour, due to technical issues that prevent any repeat or extended play at this time.
Currently, the LOTRO trial on Gaikai will allow you to play for up to one full hour. For most players, this will allow you to create your character and complete the starting area for your race. At the end of the trial, you will be logged out from the game and your character and progress will be stored on our servers. You will then be provided with links to download the game client to continue your adventure.
You can find the entire FAQ at the link below, this promotion (for now at least) is only an incentive to give the game a try.
Jagex has come a long way from being known solely for RuneScape. Over the past few years, the British developer has released their own mini-game portal, bought up a few iOS and browser properties, and published their first microtransaction based game, War of Legends. In the coming future, they have plans to release two fully fledged MMOs (Stellar Dawn and Transformers) and the topic of this article: 8Realms.
8Realms is an MMORTS that strives for accessibility. Developed on HTML5, the thought of finding a computer that doesn’t meet the minimum requirements might require installing the game on your toaster, but only if you have a model earlier than 2005. I did have stability issues attempting to play on my iPad, which Jagex has promised will be improved at some point in the future.
Players start out in ancient times with little more than a few burning buildings, a handful of workers, and enough provisions to just about prolong your citizen’s starvation. The multi-hour long tutorial covers anything and everything you might need to know about 8Realms, so by the time you make it to the Classical age, the world doesn’t seem that frightening. Over the course of leveling up, players will take their kingdom through eight ages, taking advantage of new technology and expanding their kingdom into the surrounding areas and beyond.
8Realms is somewhat simplified compared to other MMORTS titles you may have played. Rather than overwhelming the player with a labyrinth of menus and buttons, the most important information is easily accessible either directly on the HUD or one or two clicks away. Resources are easy to keep track of, having only four to manage (three for a good few hours entering the game) and indicators of stock, production rate, and maximum storage clearly visible on the HUD. The difficulty ramps up in an elegant curve as you learn new concepts and mechanics, progressing at a speed where the game doesn’t suddenly shower you with new difficulties, but never slows down as to become insultingly simple.
Combat is a numbers game of building up a massive force and raiding/capturing other territories for their delicious resource-filled centers. Inevitably you will compete against other players for resource positions, leading to rivalries and even the potential for alliances. Alas, an action game 8Realms is not.
The cash shop system in 8Realms is one of the more balanced and less invasive I’ve seen in the genre, and Jagex has committed to ensuring that the game doesn’t devolve into a pay-to-compete system. Most of the items available through the cash shop have negative aspects to consider alongside any benefits they may provide. None of the items last more than a few hours, and virtually any item that speeds up efficiency in one area will reduce efficiency in another, a balance that starts to take a toll when your timers start hitting the 10+ hour range.
Jagex states that 8Realms is best played in short spurts and casually, and I completely expected to play in such a fashion. What I did not expect heading into 8Realms was to actually enjoy the game. In my tenure writing on MMOs, I have played every Evony clone to stumble out of the internet drunk and fumbling for my wallet, and not only is 8Realms not that drunk, it might just be the first game in the genre I came out of thinking “you know, I actually enjoyed myself.”
8Realms doesn’t take itself too seriously as a game with its goofy and immature advertising and animated images. I find myself continuing to log in each day because I want to, rather than a feeling of obligation that has pushed me away from other similar titles. I’m also rather impressed that the total lack of any sound effects in 8Realms had no bearing on my enjoyment of the game once the initial awkwardness wore off.
Over here at MMO Fallout, we follow the mantra of publishing and forwarding ego-driven banter, and generally for the sole purpose of its comedic value. Much like how most humorous situations begin with a simple “hey, look what I can do,” the MMO world is no exception to events that begin with high self esteem and end with someone face planting into a stop sign.
When tasked with finding an analogy to describe Battlestar Galactica to Star Wars, the only thing I could come up with was to look at each franchise’s latest foray into media. Caprica, a prequel series to Battlestar Galactica, was cancelled at season one due to low ratings, before the season had even finished. On the other hand, Star Wars: Clone Wars grossed almost $70 million worldwide in theaters, and another $20 million in DVD sales, despite low scores from critics.
So when Bigpoint, the developer behind Battlestar Galactica Online, comes out at the London Games Conference and says that The Old Republic will never be profitable, I can only assume he means to imply that Battlestar Galactica will either perform better, or at the very least become profitable. Given that Battlestar Galactica is being developed on the UNITY engine (Cartoon Network’s Fusionfall as another example) as a browser based MMO, I like to think it can be said that it won’t take much to cover the development costs of this venture into the MMOG realm.
With Turbine taking Lord of the Rings and Dungeons and Dragons Online free to play and doing greatly by it, there is an air of elitism coming from the less popular of the free to play ilk toward the companies that maintain subscriptions, like the Grover Dill to the Scut Farkus, the loud annoying toadies who hide behind the guy who can actually put up a fight. What companies like Bigpoint don’t realize when they preach Turbine is that Turbine has infiltrated the free to play cash shop from within and has set the stage into motion that will utterly demolish the existing standard, all the while the very people they are trashing are holding them up like dopes.
What Lord of the Rings has done is they have taken the best of the free to play cash shop idea, namely no up front fees and no in-your-face costs until you’ve leveled up a bit, with a cash shop that sells things people will actually want to buy. But Turbine introduced what can be formally called a price ceiling to the model, where once a player goes over $15 a month, they can choose the flat rate subscription, and get the same content another cash shop grinder might cost up to and over a hundred dollars a month for, for the same flat rate. Not only will they get the same flat rate, but Turbine gives free cash shop points for extras each month.
Bigpoint invoking Turbine is like Justin Beiber invoking Keith Urban. Yes, you are using a popular example to bring up the rest of the genre, almost none of which who can attest to the same success that Turbine has had with Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online. That would be like me invoking Blizzard by saying that none of the free to play ventures hold a candle to twelve million paying players (regardless of whether or not they pay a subscription or hourly rate, they are paying).
But people will tell me not to publish this, as it gives Bigpoint exactly what they want: Publicity, and I say give them more publicity, because publicity exponentially emphasizes the response, and when Battlestar Galactica eventually does take its leap off of the development branch, Bigpoint is either going to make a grand entrance or fall flat on its face.
Bigpoint may think itself cool trash talking a company that could literally drown them in a sea of development money, but as George Carlin once said:
“You ain’t cool, you’re chilly. And chilly ain’t never been cool.”
MMO Fallout 