cancelled – Page 2 – MMO Fallout

Jagex Cancels Weapon Diversity Update, At Least For Now

Jagex today announced that they are cancelling the weapon diversity update, a project that had been in beta for the last month. The weapon diversity program was meant to differentiate weapons from one another on a more solid grounding, but the major impression was that the update just wasn’t transformative enough. Most changes were being made to weapon DPS which left players simply choosing the weapon with the most optimized damage.

In the end, we were unanimous as a team. The QA resource could be used on projects that we are currently working on (and planning to announce at Runefest), tightening them up and increasing our confidence in them. That came with a caveat: we still believed in the aims of Weapon Diversity, so we agreed that we would get our design team to design completely new utility benefits for weapons, which could be introduced over time rather than in one big clutch. For example, a quest might have a reward of a javelin; we would then take the opportunity to release a javelin effect to be rolled out for all javelins at the same time.

With their options being plough ahead, restart the project from scratch, or cancel it and focus on other major projects, Jagex chose to cancel. The good news is that while this project is dead, the spirit remains alive and is still being planned for the future.

Regardless of all of this, the aims of Weapon Diversity have not gone away: we still want to bring strategy back into weapon choice, and we believe that will make the gaining of weapon rewards so much more joyful.

Incidentally the weapon diversity beta ran alongside the bank rework update which was also temporarily cancelled only to be brought back, so those who had been looking forward to this update may not be completely disappointed.

Source: RuneScape

Mark Laidlaw Reveals Half Life 2: Episode 3 Plot

With the launch of Duke Nukem Forever now more than half a decade behind us, Half Life 2: Episode 3 (or Half Life 3 depending on who you ask) has taken the throne as the king of vaporware. Initially announced in 2006, the next episode in the Half Life 2 series, which Valve ironically moved to an episodic format to avoid long development delays, has been in limbo with nary a shred of evidence that the developer is actually working on said title.

While Valve has been silent on their development plans for Half Life, one thing that the company cannot hide is that its Half Life writers are jumping ship. Over the past two years, at least four big writers have left the company: Eric Wolpaw, Chet Faliszek, Mark Laidlaw, and Jay Pinkkerton.

Mark Laidlaw, evidently not content with his story being lost to the Valve offices forever, recently posted a “fan fiction” story titled “Epistle 3” on his blog. The blog post is from the perspective of a “Gertie Fremont,” discussing the death of “Elly Vaunt” and heading to the antarctic with Alex Vaunt to find the Hyperborea. The story is a clear nod toward Half Life 2, with events detailed that have leaked out through interviews and documents over the years.

In Laidlaw’s story, Freeman and Alex go north to find the Aurora Borealis, a ship created by Aperture Science (thinking with Portals) that can phase in and out of existence and time. The duo comes across Dr. Breen who had transferred his consciousness to a Combine slug, now regretting his decision and wishing for death. They take over the Borealis and plot to crash it into the Combine homeworld, when the illusive Gman shows up and pulls Alex out to rescue her.

Gordon, meanwhile, remains on board the ship to realize that the plan is destined to fail, as the Combine power is too great. He is rescued at the last second by the Vortigaunt, setting the game up for a possible sequel. Gordon wakes up on shore, not knowing where he is or how much time has passed, or even if the resistance won. The story ends on a somewhat chilling note,

“Expect no further correspondence from me regarding these matters; this is my final epistle.”

The last full game to be developed by Valve was released in 2012, with much of the company’s focus being on maintaining Dota 2, Team Fortress 2, and Counter Strike: GO, as well as its various investments in competitive gaming tournaments, VR, and the Steam marketplace. More story-driven titles including Half Life, Portal, and Left 4 Dead have sat neglected for the better part of the last decade.

As time goes on, the hopes for Valve wrapping up the Half Life series have understandably faltered. Valve remains silent, writers from the series are leaving, the voice actor for Dr. Breen passed away, and leaks from the company suggest that all attempts to revive the sequel have ultimately died off and gone nowhere. Valve is currently working on several VR titles, and the flat structure ensures that anyone can start working on Half Life as soon as they feel like it. So will they?

It feels less likely as they years tick on.

2016 Predictions For The Year 2017 Part 1

2016 is coming to a close and that means starting predictions for 2017. This is the part where you make notes of everything I say and then come around at the end of February to let me know that my predictions were wrong.

1. Hero’s Song Will Shut Down

(Editor’s Note: About 20 minutes before this article published, John Smedley announced that Pixelmage is shutting down and Hero’s Song is cancelled.)

As much as I’d like to see the game succeed, I have a strong feeling that at some point in early 2017 we will learn that negotiations to fund Hero’s Song have failed and that the game will be shutting down. John Smedley will apologize for something that many of us saw coming when the game failed to achieve even half of its $200 thousand Indiegogo campaign, which it was glad to take anyway, and the sunsetting will be followed either by the announcement of Pixelmage closing down or of its next crowdfunding campaign.

Until that happens, however, we will sit back and watch as the numbers on Steam continue to dwindle and talent continues to jump ship to other developers.

2. Star Citizen Will Continue To Disappoint

And MMO Fallout will cover none of it. Star Citizen’s development cycle feels like the end product of sitcom writers sitting around a table and creating a fake documentary about a video game’s development. The kind where the protagonist starts out with a big promise and over the course of the episode just keeps digging himself in deeper because he started off with a promise he couldn’t keep and just keeps lumping on more and more stuff to cover the initial lie. It would probably star Kevin James as Chris Roberts.

The more Star Citizen tugs along, the bigger it gets and the more incapable it seems to be of following up on its promises. The fans and backers have sat through delay after delay, the game is now years behind schedule and slowly becoming something quite different than what was promised, Chris Roberts & Co. are making pretty regular changes to the terms of service to make refunds harder, if not impossible to obtain.

For the record, I think it’s pretty stupid to think that Star Citizen will never launch, and pointlessly malicious to hope that it fails. That being said, I know how hard gamers are to please when they’ve invested $60 into a game. Star Citizen has a lot of people pledging into the three and four digits for JPEG concepts of ships. Imagine your clientele base is hundreds and hundreds of clones of your mother. “Honey why couldn’t you be more successful? I know you raked in hundreds of millions in pledges but the Miller boy down the street became an oral surgeon and gave his mother grandchildren, why do you hate me and want me to die alone with no grandchildren?”

Star Citizen in 2017 will create more frustrated backers, will continue to be the light of the universe for the optimists and those desperately trying to justify their thousand dollar purchase, and Derek Smart will be there somewhere.

3. Corgis Will Continue to Appear in Games

This is just a given. The internet loves to fixate on certain things and presently one of those things are corgis. Why not? They’re adorable! They invoke that same reaction we have to babies, with their big heads, stumpy legs, and let’s not forget the fluffy rumps. Dogs love you unconditionally, but they’ll love you even more unconditionally if you provide them with meat, bacon, or just any old food and give them a scratchin on their heads and bellies.

Corgis are already being used as holiday pets, anniversary pets, pre-order bonuses, cash shop bonuses, and more. If you’re sick of the furry little devils, and shame on you if you are, expect to see a whole lot more of them in 2017.

4. More MMOs Will Hit Consoles

And it’ll be amazing. Perfect World Entertainment has been making huge strides this year on launching their library of games on Xbox and Playstation, to great effect with both consoles. Hopefully 2017 will be the point where Daybreak’s games start launching on Xbox, along with H1Z1 and whatever shooter they were working on a few months ago. Personally I’d like to see console users get their hands on Marvel Heroes, a great alternative to a very small list of similar titles on both systems.

More over, I feel like console games will continue the shift into pseudo-MMOs, like Destiny, now that developers are no longer considering the 360 and PS3, and their multitude of technical limitations, part of the equation. I think that Destiny 2 is going to be what Destiny was always advertised to be, and while the fans will be angry that they had to wait through a full game launch and a hell of a lot more money in expansions to get the product as originally intended, that it will be worth the wait.

5. I Will Continue To be Usurped While Writing Prediction Articles

This year I noticed a trend that whenever I wait until the next morning to publish predictions, the entity in question ends up fulfilling those predictions and making me look like an idiot. I predict that in 2017, my knack for procrastination won’t get any better, and as such I will continue to lose out on the very valuable currency called “I told you so.” Don’t believe me? See #1 on this list.

Everquest Next Wasn’t Fun, Development Ceases

Development on Everquest Next has ceased, leaving gamers wondering about the health of Daybreak Game Company and the future of Landmark. Daybreak President Russ Shanks took to the official website to announce the unfortunate reality that during development the team came to the harsh conclusion that the game just wasn’t coming together. As a result, the blip that was Everquest Next will fade into the what could have been pile in the ever growing timeline of MMO development.

Russ Shanks was also interviewed today by MMORPG.com, which you can read here.

For those familiar with the internals of game development, you know that cancellations are a reality we must face from time to time. Inherent to the creative process are dreaming big, pushing hard and being brutally honest with where you land. In the case of EverQuest Next, we accomplished incredible feats that astonished industry insiders. Unfortunately, as we put together the pieces, we found that it wasn’t fun.

The announcement comes with the vague promise that the world of Everquest has not yet stopped growing. The announcement of Everquest Next’s cancellation may not come as such a surprise to gamers who have been waiting a long time since any newsworthy information was released. The layoffs and financial issues over at Daybreak since the company spun off of Sony haven’t helped matters either.

(Source: Daybreak)

NCSoft Shuts Down Project HON

NCSoft Korea has shut down development of Project HON, allegedly due to a perceived lack of interest in giant mech games in the local market. Project HON is being shelved to allow NCSoft to focus on its other titles, including the upcoming launch of Lineage Eternal and further growth of Blade & Soul in foreign markets.

Project HON came up earlier this year when three employees were fired for embezzling funds.

(Source: Steparu)

Blizzard Cancels Project Titan

Blizzard has confirmed in an interview with Polygon that the company’s ambitious next-gen MMO Titan has been cancelled. Mike Morhaime, co-founder and CEO of Blizzard, commented that the team just “didn’t find the fun,” adding that after seven years in development the team had to take a step back and evaluate whether Titan was the game that they wanted to be making. “The answer is no.”

“We took a step back and realized that it had some cool hooks. It definitely had some merit as a big, broad idea, but it didn’t come together. It did not distill. The music did not flow. For all our good intentions and our experience and the pure craftsmanship that we brought together, we had to make that call.”

Titan’s days have been numbered ever since Blizzard announced last year that the game (which was never officially announced) would be revamped from the ground up alongside layoffs to the development team. As I said then, you can’t miss what you never knew you had.

(Source: Polygon)

Whatever Happened To: Hellgate 2

I know what you’re thinking: There was a Hellgate 2? Technically no, which is why we are here in the first place. I had absolutely no idea that a Hellgate 2 was in development, partly because it was announced way back in 2011 and we haven’t heard anything about it since. Set to appear on the Unreal 3 engine, Hanbitsoft announced that the sequel has been canned for a myriad of reasons, not least of which being an inability to work with the Unreal 3 engine. The game was originally supposed to launch in Winter 2013, which again flew right over our heads here at MMO Fallout, and naturally missed said deadline.

Hanbitsoft took over global development of Hellgate: London following the demise of developer Flagship Studios, and even managed to put out an expansion pack called Hellgate: Tokyo. There hasn’t been any further development in the last couple of years.

(Source: MMO Culture)

Ridge Racer Driftopia Cancelled Mid-Beta

Bandai Namco has announced that Ridge Racer Driftopia will shut down its servers on August 15th. The free to play racing game launched September 9th on the Steam Early Access with the hopes of launching on the Playstation 3 down the line. Players are able to purchase vehicles, experience, and other items via the in-game cash shop, and the game is still available on Steam for the time being.

“The leading developer and publisher wanted to take this opportunity to thank all its players for their permanent support and dedication! All the feedbacks will be taken into account for the upcoming projects.”

Bugbear Entertainment’s next car game, appropriately titled Next Car Game, is also on Steam Early Access albeit at a price of $30 for admission.

(Source: Gamespot)

World of Darkness Cancelled

CCP has officially announced that World of Darkness has been cancelled. Some of you may remember that, last month, CCP’s annual financial report stated that the company had written off a piece of software as no longer having any value. It looks like that property was World of Darkness. In his note accompanying the announcement, Hilmar Veigar Pétursson states that the team was unable to deliver the experience that they wanted, and as a result development has ceased and some 56 employees have been laid off.

The decision to end the World of Darkness MMO project is one of the hardest I’ve ever had to make. I have always loved and valued the idea of a sandbox experience set in that universe, and over the years I’ve watched the team passionately strive to make that possible. To our current and former employees and fans of World of Darkness, I am truly sorry that we could not deliver the experience that we aspired to make. We dreamed of a game that would transport you completely into the sweeping fantasy of World of Darkness, but had to admit that our efforts were falling regretfully short. One day I hope we will make it up to you.

To those of you keeping a magnifying glass on World of Darkness, this news should not come as a shock. Between multiple layoffs and comments that World of Darkness was very low priority for CCP, with nothing to show for so long, it was only a matter of time before CCP cut their losses and moved on.

(Source: CCP)

Final Fantasy XI Is Not Being Ported To Vita

Bad news, bears. All five of you who purchased a Playstation Vita (and I include myself in that) in hopes that Square Enix would eventually port Final Fantasy XI to it, as hinted in a news post from two years ago, are going to be sorely disappointed. Interested in seeing if there was any new details on the port (there were absolutely none at the time), I asked Square Enix over Twitter if there were still plans in place to port the MMO over to the Vita. Whether through technical limitations or the poor sales of the console, I received a very simple and to the point response:

no I’m afraid not.

So that is that idea out. There is still Phantasy Star Online 2 coming to the Vita, but otherwise the market is quite barren in the realm of open world MMOs. There is always hope for the future, and as long as the Vita is still in production we can always hope that someone will care enough to port an MMO over to it.

(Source: Twitter)

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It: