Chronicles of Spellborn

Looking Back, Moving Forward: August 2010

Video of the month.

There is no doubt that All Points Bulletin stole the show this past month, showing up on MMO Fallout at least once every three days heading towards the middle of the month onward. Although Realtime Worlds announced APB carrying 130,000 active players, I have to question how many of those players are actively paying subscriptions, as I have my doubts that Realtime Worlds would be going into administration if the grand majority were pumping cash directly into the cash shop and game time veins at RTW.

August was filled to the brim with news that makes you scratch your head and question reality. Bill Roper is gone from Cryptic, I was sent a legal threat by David Allen, I had my wisdom teeth taken out and pretty much immediately went back to writing up articles despite being heavily drugged on hydrocodone, I was featured on Biobreak and Tobold’s blog.

On another good note, however, MMO Fallout now has five active backups going. For the sake of my own embarrassment, I won’t mention the incident that lead up to me being paranoid about losing my information, but irregardless I now have five flash drives, each carrying a backup of MMO Fallout that I update on a weekly basis. I backup this website daily, but I only transfer it off of my computer every Saturday.

I’m still disappointed that the Atari versus Turbine lawsuit resulted the way it did. I personally love legal drama (when it doesn’t involve me) and would have enjoyed seeing something come out of this other than secret settlements.

Warhammer Online fans rejoiced this month. Although BioMythArts Entertainment (or whatever they’re calling themselves nowadays) isn’t giving specific numbers, they are willing to announce that Warhammer Online is indeed profitable, with tens of thousands of new players streaming in thanks to the endless trial system.

Over on Sony’s front, Everquest is once again proving that although their alternate rule servers are unique, they more often than not crash due to low populations. Such is the case with Everquest’s 51/50 ruleset servers (players start at level 51 with 50 level AP) which are due to be merged into normal ruleset servers.

Unfortunately, another month brings another game shutting down. After a year of promises and well wishes, Playdom announced the shuttering of Chronicles of Spellborn, after the Facebook gaming company acquired Acclaim. Although Acclaim’s two other MMOs 9Dragons and 2Moon were transferred to other hosts, Chronicles of Spellborn was shutdown late August.

Speaking of which, Earth Eternal came very close to shutting down. The most adorable non-Asian MMO hit a brick wall running when Sparkplay announced that the company had laid off all but two employees, and that the game would be sold at auction, with high hopes that a buyer would pick up the title. Luckily, a buyer did indeed pick up the title, and we’ve received information that many of the Sparkplay employees may be making a return soon enough.

Alganon-WAIT IT’S NOT WHAT YOU THINK- ditched the initial client purchase completely by going 100% free to play earlier this month. While the free title is restricted in how many quests you may partake in daily, as well as a shorter level cap, players can remove these restrictions with a simple cash shop purchase.

While we’re on the subject of departures, Bill Roper announced that he would be leaving Cryptic Studios. In unrelated news, I’ve been receiving emails of gratitude for reporting on this story.

On yet another sad note, Realtime Worlds and their newly released MMO “Absolving Perot’s Blame” (or APB for short) have been pretty much a weekly staple for MMO Fallout news. What started out as a simple announcement of standard restructuring took a turn for the worst when Realtime Worlds went into administration (Bankruptcy) and announced that they were looking for investors with what was left of the team. With the recently released patch offering major updates to the game’s driving and shooting, we can only hope that these much needed enhancements didn’t come too late.

The Chronicles of Spellborn: What Happened?

Chronicles of Spellborn can be summarized by comparing it to a kid explaining his idea for a video game.

“It’s gonna be awesome! There’s gonna be first person targeting, a bajillion quests to go on with only three classes to choose from but they’re gonna have their own subclasses to branch things out a bit. There’ll be no grind too, and more backstory than you can shake a stick at, and we’re talking a pretty big stick too. It’ll be set in a post-apocalypse environment, and there’ll be explosions and crazy quest series that will allow the player to take control of important people and beat up some bad guys!”

So my above rendition may make Spellborn sound like a bad game, which it isn’t by any means. Chronicles of Spellborn is one of those games that shows up and has the potential to innovate the industry, or at least a small portion of it. The story was detailed and in-depth, the quests were the main staple of the series, and numerous at that, and there was plenty of activity for all varieties of players.

And then Spellborn Works went bankrupt. You can make the best game in the world, but unfortunately without cash the game will shut down. Spellborn Works went bankrupt very shortly after Chronicles of Spellborn launched in North America in 2009 (The game had been running in the UK since the prior November). The game was siphoned by then-publisher Acclaim Games, who announced that they would be performing a massive upgrade to the title, turning it into a free to play cash shop game to be re-released at some point in 2010. Until then, however, Spellborn Live would receive no attention in the form of patches or updates.

Earlier this year, Spellborn’s Asia publisher Frogster announced that they would be shutting down the title. Over in the west, things became less and less hopeful as the months went on. The client on the website stopped working, resulting in the community hosting its own client and patches in order to get new players interested in the game.

Of course, progress without money is no progress at all, and Acclaim went bust shutting down everything. Chronicles of Spellborn was sold to Playdom, who announced that the game would be shutting down.

If anything, Chronicles of Spellborn is a perfect example of a good title that was marred by bad luck with its hosting companies. Due to the bankruptcy of its original developers, Spellborn never saw the attention and maintenance it deserved, and as a result ended up spending over a year on life support being transferred from company to company before finally being shut down.

A Little Something To Remember Me By

The Chronicles of Spellborn closes down shop on the 25th, and many of you likely know me as a pretty nostalgic guy. So I got a package in the mail today I think a few of you will like.

Granted, I don’t have any place to put this game. The package it came in was basically a mail sleeve envelope. Luckily, I know just the place Chronicles of Spellborn can go where it will be loved and cherished forever.

Right here in the old nostalgia shelf. I could go for a good read.

No, not that one, although most of those are from 2003-2004.

That’s the one I’m looking for!

Good reading. Good reading indeed.

en pace requiescat, Chronicles of Spellborn.

Chronicles of Spellborn Shutting Down This Month

It feels like ages ago that Chronicles of Spellborn went quiet. Not only did the new developers (Acclaim) stop talking to us, but eventually the downloader and client for the game didn’t even work! Absolutely nothing came into or out of the company, and we were left with nothing more than a long-aged reminder that “we’re still working on stuff guys!” Ask anyone who does MMO news (like myself) and they’ll likely tell you the same thing: Chronicles of Spellborn was an absolutely baffling experience. It was quite a decent game, one that sat through its developers going bankrupt and the new publishers attempting (and obviously failing) to pull a free to play conversion.

So when I say Chronicles of Spellborn is shutting down, I think of it in the sense of putting a very badly hurting title out of its misery. Chronicles of Spellborn was taken over shortly after launch by its publisher, Acclaim, who was in turn acquired by Playdom, who was in turn acquired by Disney, who in turn decided to shutter the title this month.

TCoS will be online until the end of August, when the servers will come down for their final time. It is unknown, and unlikely, as to whether or not the developers are planning some kind of end-of-game event. Playing by the UK release date (November 2008), the game will still have not hit two years old by the time it shuts down.

I’ll be here with a “what happened?” when The Chronicles of Spellborn shuts down this September.

Chronicles of Spellborn Spells Doom In Asia

Chronicles of Spellborn is a very important lesson in the realm of MMOs: If you don’t have money to fund your project, your game is going nowhere. The game launched in April 2009 in the US, and almost immediately afterward developer Spellborn Works kicked the bucket, dissolving into the vast nothingness of space. Acclaim announced that the game would be going completely free to play, with a big relaunch in the works to be released at some point in the future.

Since then Spellborn has been running similar to many of my local state and county parks. Technically open, but nobody’s mowed the grass in a year, and no one ever stopped by to open the gates to actually allow people to get in. According to my reports, playing Spellborn is a matter of getting files off of another website, because the client Acclaim offers doesn’t work, and neither does their patcher. Since the breakdown of Spellborn last year with Acclaim and Frogster taking over for the game in their respective areas, prospects have gone from poor to worse, and in all respects Spellborn is sitting in a comatose condition waiting for the plug to be pulled.

Well Frogster is the first to throw the switch, and Chronicles of Spellborn Asia-Edition will be heading for the crematorium. So far there hasn’t been any news on what Acclaim plans to do with the title, although the standing claim still points towards a miraculous reincarnation of the game under a freemium model.

The problem with Chronicles of Spellborn, and I don’t blame them for this, is Acclaim is likely seeing a dearth of excitement for this title. It isn’t often a title goes to sleep for as long as Spellborn has so far, and wakes up to find a large number of players still waiting on it. Life goes on, and sadly it is leaving Spellborn behind.

I’ll be watching Chronicles of Spellborn as more news appears, but for the tiny handful of you who are still holding on to the hope of a relaunch and reinvention, I have a friend named Gary Whiting I need to introduce to you.

Chronicles of Spellborn 2.0 On Its Way!

Technically, The Chronicles of Spellborn never went anywhere. Back in MMO Fallout’s infancy, I wrote about Acclaim taking over the MMO, with the intentions of reviving the game and relaunching it the next year with a free to play, microtransaction model. Until then, of course, Chronicles of Spellborn would be completely free to play.

Well, 2010 has come around, and that means it’s about time for an announcement from Acclaim as to the status of this reboot. On the Spellborn forums, we were treated to not just any customer service rep’s explanation, but the CEO himself Howard Marks. Marks had this to say,

“The rumors are true! Spellborn Version Two is on the way. The developer has released the new version in Japan, and based on the success of that launch and the fine tuning of the game, we will keep you informed as to when we shall launch the English version of the game. When we do, we will be inviting registered players of the old version, who have valid email addresses on file, to become our beta players. In the meantime, why not check out some of our other great free games at www.acclaim.com? Hope to see you ingame! ”
— Howard Marks, CEO of Acclaim Games, Inc.

Thank you How-did he just say that this has already been released in Japan? The Japanese market must be a better litmus test for Chronicles of Spellborn if you are willing to base the relaunch of the title in a completely separate market based off of the results.

For the record, I still recommend trying out Chronicles of Spellborn, or Acclaim’s two other free to play MMOs. There hasn’t been much more information about the tweaks that will be coming, but MMO Fallout will be here to cover the relaunch of Chronicles of Spellborn.

Chronicles Of Spellborn: Frozen In Time

Earlier this year, Spellborn developer Spellborn NV, went bankrupt. There wasn’t much information as to what would happen with the game, but a month later it was announced that Acclam will be taking over the reigns. Next year, 2010, Spellborn will be reborn under a new system of free to play with microtransactions.

Until then, Spellborn is offered completely free of charge. There are no longer any upgrades or patches, but the game is being redeveloped for a full re-release next year. Acclaim promises to have player events in the meantime, and support player run events.

Check out the newly free Chronicles of Spellborn at http://spellborn.acclaim.com/

Note: This game is massive. According to the website, it requires 12 Gig of hard disk space.

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