Tag: Gameforge

[Community] First Impressions Are Everything


Raiderz 2012-11-11 10-45-07-01

Jbuck1984 over on Reddit wants RaiderZ developer MAIET Entertainment to know that it took him ten minutes to decide that the MMO wasn’t worth investing the time into. Simple: Upon entering the game, Jbuck1984 was immediately greeted by a spam bot that could not be blocked due to poor UI and an impossible to read name.

Would have loved to give it a shot, but there was a random gold spammer with the name llllllllll. In game I couldn’t differentiate the L’s from the I’s and I couldn’t click in the chat window to block him. The only next logical step for someone like me who gets annoyed very quickly was to uninstall the game. Thanks Raiderz for making the interface so horrible. If you couldn’t develop a functional chat window I can only imagine what the rest of the game is like.

Some of you will likely see uninstalling the game as a bit of an overreaction, but that doesn’t make Jbuck1984’s point any less true. Walking into an MMO and being presented with an environment like the one described is a bit like entering a nice restaurant and having solicitors start berating you from the entrance to your table to try and sell you stuff. The food might be of five star quality, and odds are a good few people with higher levels of patience will stick around long enough to eat it. There are, however, others who will just get up and go to a restaurant that doesn’t tolerate solicitors.

The post over at Reddit was deleted before this article was published, so you’ll have to excuse there not being a link to the original post. If you have a thought you would like to submit to Community Concerns about RaiderZ or any other MMO, throw us a comment below.

Star Trek: Infinite Space Cancelled, No Publisher Found


Star Trek: Infinite Space was announced a couple of years back by Gameforge as a browser-based free to play title. Set in the Deep Space Nine sector of the Star Trek universe, Infinite Space had the consultation powers of Denise and Michael Okuda to make sure that the game stayed true to the series. Unfortunately, times have not been great for the German developer, as last year the company was hit with layoffs that saw 100 staff cut and the cancellation of Mythos and Hellbreed. No longer able to publish the game themselves, Gameforge paused the beta in an attempt to find a co-publisher.

Well it seems that the endeavor has not been met with success, and Games Industry has reported that the project has been cancelled.

“”Unfortunately, our efforts were not successful. So we have decided with a heavy heart to finally abandon the project Star Trek: Infinite Space. The discontinuation is very regrettable. “

(Source: Gamesindustry.biz)

NCSoft Outsourcing European Hosting?


You know, I hadn’t really noticed until tonight how small NCSoft’s library has become in the west. With the shuttering of Lineage, Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa, Exteel, and Dungeon Runners, us westerners are left with Aion, City of Heroes, Guild Wars, and Lineage 2. Four titles? Granted, we have Blade & Soul (hopefully) coming out at the end of this year, and Wildstar and Lineage Eternal coming at some point in the future.

I can’t help but notice, however, that NCSoft’s personal appearance in Europe has taken a lesser role recently. Lineage II’s European service was recently handed over to Innova for the free to play transition, and when Aion goes free to play early this year, Gameforge is taking over service of that title. So far this is only on NCSoft’s titles in Europe that have transitioned to free to play, with the exception of City of Heroes in which case the two services (US/EU) were merged into one under NCSoft. This leaves Guild Wars.

If I’m lucky, NCSoft will answer my emails about future title publishing.