Tag: Codemasters

Lord of the Rings Online: Europe F2P Delay


European.

Even solely a subscription game, Lord of the Rings Online ranks in the higher tier of games that are not World of Warcraft, in terms of population. Turbine has been setting up for the past few months in preparation for the transition to partially free to play, doing everything from beefing up existing servers to adding in new servers. With today’s launch of the head start, Codemasters is having stage fright.

Unlike the United States servers, where the transition went live today, the European servers have been delayed for a yet to be announced time.

“Given the complexities and challenges faced in the preparation and implementation of the new store to work within our infrastructure, we feel more time is needed to deliver the high level of service our players have quite rightly come to expect. As a result, we have decided to delay launch to ensure that we can support the massive increase in players that we are anticipating and deliver them a Free to Play experience like none other.”

I feel bad for the European Turbine fans. I mean, sure the delay may only be the rest of tonight, or it may be next week, but it seems like the European players always get the short end of the stick. Look at how long it took Dungeons and Dragons Online Europe to transition to the free to play model after its much more Yankee counterpart.

I, on the other hand, will be downloading the client off of Turbine’s website, as my special edition (seen below) is so out of date that the client it installs won’t even update.

I used my scanner this time.

Epic Loot: Sony, Codemasters, and Blitz Looting Realtime Worlds’ Unemployed


Here in my town, there’s no better moment than when an electronics store goes out of business, generally because that means 50+% off on expensive electronics. When FYE went out of business, I managed to pick up Tabula Rasa at 90% off, and it was only one year after the game shut down! When a company starts shedding property (read: Employees), and said company is Realtime Worlds, it’s a veritable picking day for other companies to come in and get recruiting.

Sony, Codemasters, and Blitz were reported shipping off recruiters, designers, and artists to populate the nearby hotels as they pluck up ex-Realtime Worlds employees for interviews in one of their many studios. Codemaster’s chief talent acquisition manager had this to say about the company’s outlook on the ex-RTW staff:

“Realtime employees expertise is unquestionable,”

Blitz’s CEO Phillip Oliver had equal amounts of praise;

“We know that Realtime World has some fantastically talented people and were very sorry to hear the  news as it broke late last week. We think Realtime Worlds staff will be pleasantly surprised at the opportunities we can offer them and look forward to talking with them.”

The administrators are doing their best to keep Realtime Worlds alive, but for the time being it is nice to see that ex-employees are getting every offer to jump back into the work force as quickly as possible.

Epic Loot: Sony, Codemasters, and Blitz Looting Realtime Worlds' Unemployed


Here in my town, there’s no better moment than when an electronics store goes out of business, generally because that means 50+% off on expensive electronics. When FYE went out of business, I managed to pick up Tabula Rasa at 90% off, and it was only one year after the game shut down! When a company starts shedding property (read: Employees), and said company is Realtime Worlds, it’s a veritable picking day for other companies to come in and get recruiting.

Sony, Codemasters, and Blitz were reported shipping off recruiters, designers, and artists to populate the nearby hotels as they pluck up ex-Realtime Worlds employees for interviews in one of their many studios. Codemaster’s chief talent acquisition manager had this to say about the company’s outlook on the ex-RTW staff:

“Realtime employees expertise is unquestionable,”

Blitz’s CEO Phillip Oliver had equal amounts of praise;

“We know that Realtime World has some fantastically talented people and were very sorry to hear the  news as it broke late last week. We think Realtime Worlds staff will be pleasantly surprised at the opportunities we can offer them and look forward to talking with them.”

The administrators are doing their best to keep Realtime Worlds alive, but for the time being it is nice to see that ex-employees are getting every offer to jump back into the work force as quickly as possible.

Dungeons and Dragons Online Going Free To Play August


Just replace September with August.

I know what you’re asking: Omali! Dungeons and Dragons Online is already free to play! To which I answer: Not in Europe. No, for the past ten months or so North American players have been enjoying the freshly free to play Dungeons and Dragons Online, while our compatriots over the ocean have not. When Turbine’s title went into cash-shop-freemium mode this past September, the dungeon crawler saw an enormous revival both in players and revenue. Since then, Turbine has added yet another server, and has seen increases in revenue in the triple digits.

This fall, not to be out of line with a few other developers, Turbine is taking back Dungeons and Dragons Online in Europe, from the current publisher Codemasters (this is not the first time Codemasters has lost their rights to an MMO), where the title will be reworked and re-released under the Eberron Unlimited title. I don’t think many people should be surprised at this, given the recent introduction of Warner Bros. into the workplace, as well as Europe’s transition being in the cards for some time now.

Turbine is promising that the transition will go as smoothly as possible, hopefully even more smoothly since the transition has already happened once. Dungeons and Dragons Online is currently the third most played MMO in the US, according to NPD Group.

More on Dungeons and Dragons Online as it appears.

Codemasters Loses Archlord Rights


archlord2

Just as I’m talking about the battle over the future of Dungeons and Dragons online, here comes news from another sector of the internet: Codemasters has lost their rights to operate the MMO Archlord in the United States and Europe. Instead, the servers will shut down on October 1st, only to be reopened a couple days later by the new host, Webzen.

As far as MMOs go, Archlord in the west was the MMO that never was, isn’t, and never will be. The game by itself received unfavorable reviews, with Gamespot summing it up in two words: Dull and repetitive. The title was smashed for its countless hours of dull grind, with little reward, in a world that often seemed to be populated only by yourself. It isn’t any surprise that it took only ten months after release for Archlord to ditch the subscription rate, and go completely free to play, ala Guild Wars. Nowadays Archlord is described as “empty and full of bots.”

What caught my attention was, in every location I found discussion on Archlord, the discussion regularly turned to one factor: Corruption from Codemasters. Shady bans and a response along the lines you would expect from your local Wal Mart or Mcdonalds. Players being conveniently banned after spending large sums of cash on the in-game currency (Archlord kept its microtransaction service), and more. According to some of my sources, this activity is almost a mirror image of RF Online, another MMO published by Codemasters in the west.

This may not be the end for Codemasters driving MMOs into the ground. According to several of my sources, Turbine is looking to bring their MMOs home, meaning Codemasters may lose its European publishing rights to Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online.

If you have any dealings with Codemasters on LOTRO, DDO, RF Online, or the soon to be murdered and then resurrected Archlord, please drop us a comment.