Maplestory M is celebrating its one year anniversary with style as Nexon has announced the latest class to be added in: The Phantom. Set for release on July 17, players can pre-register for the Phantom today to receive a pack of items including a Unique Weapon Whetstone, Unique Armor Whetstone, Auto-Battle Charge Ticket and more.
“Featuring a cane as his main weapon, the Phantom is a master thief who steals the abilities of characters in the Explorer class. Skills including Phantom Shroud, Return of Phantom and Steal help players plan more strategic strikes, while the Phantom’s most special skill – Judgment – comes into play when delivering critical damage to mobs, triggering randomly stacked cards that give players additional attack. Phantom characters between levels 3 to 100 will also be able to level up a total of 3 levels per each level up through the Mega Burning event.”
Also included in the update is an updated wedding system allowing players to team up with their dearly beloved for buffs and gifts, as well as a new emote wheel and more. The one year anniversary will have events of its own with special experience rewards, skins, accessories, and more. Starting July 25, players can take part in the Monster Park amusement park event for heavy experience gains.
Today’s video comes to us from Neowiz and shows off some of the features coming with the upcoming console spinoff Bless Unleashed.
There is an upcoming beta test for Bless Unleashed coming on Thursday July 11 at 10 a.m. pst running until Monday July 15. The beta will be available for preload on July 10.
Those of you who keep tabs on the industry will remember that Entropia Universe turns 16 this year, meaning that not only can the game now drive in most states, but it retains its discount card along with the other long-lasting MMOs. As it goes, I had to know what their secret was. Thankfully MindArk was kind enough to let me chat with their CEO Henrik Nel to answer my numerous questions.
The full interview is below, and once you are finished I highly recommend checking out Entropia Universe for free.
MMO Fallout: Entropia Universe launched in 2003, which in the gaming industry is basically three lifetimes ago. What is the secret formula that has kept the game running so long?
Henrik Nel: If we told you it wouldn’t be a secret would it? We are very proud about our real cash economy. Having the game being built around it has created something truly unique which can’t be found anywhere else in the gaming industry. We have achieved a level of trust after 16 years where players can feel confident about their investments being secure and treated with bank level security. It also helps that our community is very mature, entrepreneurial and newcomer friendly.
M: Being free to play, Entropia lacks a barrier to entry. Does Entropia still see a lot of new people peeking their heads in?
H: Yes, we do have a constant stream of players eager to check out the game. Even though some our players started over a decade ago, it is still very possible to start from nothing and
play with them on an even field with some cunning strategies quickly.
M: It seems like growing technology is the biggest threat to older MMOs; with some titles shutting down simply because they have hit their ceiling with new operating systems/hardware. Have you had any major technical hurdles to cross with Entropia now being old enough to get its learner’s permit?
H: In 2009 we made the change from Gamebryo game engine to Cryengine 2. With that change, we had to re-develop a lot of our systems to adapt with the new game engine. As many of the developers are still around from that time, we still possess the knowledge from that transition which will make another upgrade much smoother. We do actually have a graphical improvement just around the corner which utilizes Cryengine, but unfortunately I can’t go into detail about it just yet.
M: How would you most succinctly describe Entropia’s real money economy to someone who only knows it as “that real money MMO”?
H: In Entropia Universe everything has a real-life value since all items has a PED value. PED is our in-game currency which is exchangeable with USD at a 10:1 ratio, so if you loot an item
worth 1000 PED it is worth $100 in the real-world. Your avatar skills can also contain a PED value so everything from your weapon to your acquired skills is worth real USD. Just like in the real world, the actions you make inside Entropia Universe have a real economical consequence.
M: Similarly, I think that for a lot of outsiders, their major experience with Entropia is through these record-breaking land deals. Can you give a brief detail on how land ownership works and how people end up spending tens of thousands of dollars investing in virtual property?
H: Sure, a good example would be the Crystal Palace Space Station which was originally sold in 2009. The player who purchased it at the time got access to four different domes filled with unique creatures only found there. These creatures offer users in Entropia the possibility to loot rare and unique items and in exchange the land owner receives a small tax from the users. The land owner also needs to stay vigilant and listen to the users of their land too as they to possess the ability to alter the look and feel of the area. If done properly, they, just like anybody else in Entropia Universe can withdraw their profits to their real-life bank account.
M: And for a final question in that category, how would you bring in a gamer who is curious but afraid that they will need to put in a substantial investment to get started?
H: Try it out and see for yourself, speak with other players when you are on the inside. There is nothing to stop them from downloading it as it is free to play. We do have Starter Packs for new players which are intended for people that want to start out with a smaller investment, but again it is not a prerequisite to enjoy the game. The Starter Packs are made in such a way that they are extremely helpful for all newcomers. Another important thing is the great society we have inside the game, that as well as the mentor systems really help new players to get a great start and a good way to meet new friends.
M: What kind of content updates does Entropia see these days? Looking at the website there appears to be a steady flow of events for players to participate in.
H: You’re right, we do have a lot of events which is suitable for a lot of different users no matter if you’re a high level or new user. And we have some very interesting content updates coming out this year, with new systems attached. But as Entropia Universe is a Real Cash Economy I can’t go into details on this as it might affect the in-game markets.
M: Has the idea of an Entropia Universe 2.0 ever been tossed around the office?
H: It has been tossed around for sure, and while you should never say never, it is nothing that we are planning to do in the foreseeable future.
M: With many MMOs making the leap to other systems, is the plan to keep Entropia PC-bound?
H: In the future you might very well see more parts of Entropia Universe on other platforms, we already have an Android app connected to our systems, which we have had since 2012. With Virtual Tycoon users can craft and trade while on the move. But currently, we focus a 100% on our PC platform.
I want to extend a big thank you to Henrik Nel and the folks who helped make this Q&A a reality.
Caret Games has announced the official launch of their mobile MMO RebirthM in North America for January 24.
RebirthM starts players off at level 100 and lets them loose to level up indefinitely through a new upgrade system. Exclusive elite dungeon challenges will open as players level, facing off against powerful bosses that will reward valuable items. The game also boasts as PvE environment with an endless world, as well as challenging PvP modes for more rewards including a battle royale system where players fight to the last person standing.
To celebrate its launch, RebirthM is holding a number of launch events for players to receive exclusive items. More information can be found on the official Facebook page. While the launch is exclusive to North America and Brazil, Caret Games has stated that the title is slowly expanding to more countries with a global server on its way.
Com2Us this week posted its third quarter revenue for 2018 and the results are positive.
Third quarter sales amounted to $106.7 million USD with $33.8 million in profits, beating out the previous record of $26.5 million. Overseas sales accounted for 83% of revenue with North America and Europe accounting for 50% of those sales.
For the future, Com2US is looking to expand its popular Summoners War title from the mobile gaming scene and into cartoons, comics, and other merchandise. They have also opened up pre-registration for Skylanders Ring of Heroes on mobile devices.
I have to assume that there is a template for Facebook games on the same level as those stock Unity games that get released on Steam by the dozens. These games populate Facebook, they advertise using fraudulent means, and they disappear as fast as they showed up. Their developers/publishers are all based in Hong Kong, most of them have no physical address, and I can only assume that they’re being pumped out with something resembling sweatshop labor given their speed, frequency, and obviously mass-produced quality.
Blade of Queen, one of two “games” spawned by budding shovelware developer/publisher CarolGames is an embarrassment, its publisher is so embarrassed by what it has to convince people to play that instead of using Queen of Blade screenshots in its Facebook advertising, they went ahead and used a snapshot from Suikoden 2.
Blade of Queen is a game in the sense that there are graphics and animations of figures fighting on screen. It’s not a game in the sense that you have no control over your characters and the only influence you have is spending silver to boost your stats so that they can automatically fight and win their match by simple virtue that your combat rating is higher than their combat rating. The combat is punctuated by poorly translated Engrish dialogue, about some nonsense that most people won’t care about enough to try and read.
I can’t remember the last time I lost a battle in the story mode, nor can I remember the last match that did not end with a SSS rating. Giving ratings at the end of each combat match is pointless because the player didn’t do anything. There is no strategy, nothing to congratulate. There’s a game that Nexon published whose name escapes me, but it supplements the fact that the combat plays out automatically by giving the player varying types of troops, forcing you to plan out a strategy with your characters.
As if to further the idea that this game is a hastily compiled mess, combat sounds work about 5% of the time.
I’m rank 69 and I haven’t even fought a battle. Nobody is playing this. What am I doing with my life? You know, that rank 1 player looks oddly familiar. Where have I seen that name before?
I’ve found the game’s major financier, folks.
Here’s the thing about these games: They’re cobbled together in Hong Kong sweatshops for sweatshop budgets, get translated to English for about a dollar, and ultimately nobody ends up playing them because they see the game in the Facebook ad and have either been conditioned to immediately recognize the scam, or they click on the link and immediately see that the game looks nothing like what was advertised.
Sure, you’ll get maybe a half dozen, dozen players who spend more than the game deserves, but ultimately it’ll be shut down within a few months and nobody will notice because by that point it will have been replaced by several dozen more clones, all of which will similarly shut down several months later.
On the other hand, the game has boobs and booty for miles, it doesn’t take a genius to know that someone said “let’s throw some jigglin tiddies in here, that’ll make people overlook the rest of the game being worthless.”
I live in a detached house somewhere in the city. My clothes consist of a pair of trainers I found in the dump, some leather clothes I bought at the local clothing store, and a crowbar and Glock 17 that I carry around for personal safety. My job as a bag boy at the local grocery store helps pay for my modest accommodations, but I mostly get my income through gambling at the casino and finding various items at the dump and selling them at the pawn shop for cash. I found two personal computers thrown out by some guy, they work so I sold one and kept the other for when I’m smart enough to use it for its intended purpose: Writing viruses and selling them on the open market.
I may have also waited for a dude to get out of the hospital, only to mug him and put him back in the hospital. With my crowbar.
Such is life in Torn, a game that by its own admission is meant to be played for the long term. Torn has been running on PC for a long time, it has thousands of people online and living their lives in the city at any given time, with tens of thousands online over any 24 hour period. It is a completely text based game and it just launched an app for Android devices that I was invited to take a look at. Over a week later, I’m hooked.
Torn is something of a life simulator, not in the sense that you’ll need to click the button to eat your morning bowl of pizza before heading off to work at exactly 7:30am or you’ll be fired and screw you if you think you’re going to have a real life and play this game, but in the meaning that you’ll be doing life things like going to the gym, betting money on League of Legends games, beating up a random stranger and sending him to the hospital, and then losing the money you stole from him playing craps at the casino.
There is always something to do in Torn, some new feature popping up as you level up, some new goal that comes your way, some new activity to take part in. Upon hitting level three, I gained the ability to visit the bookie at the casino where I found out that players who I believe are employed by the casino (in the video game sense) are able to set up betting pools on actual events. I bet $100 that Fnatic would be Flash Wolves in an actual League of Legends match and came out with the winning bet. There are also bets on real life sports games, in fact I threw down a grand on the 6/4 odds that Manchester United will beat Chelsea in an FA Cup match later this week.
Otherwise I like the fact that everything in this game is going toward an overall goal. Having a job doesn’t just provide a daily income, it boosts your various skills and grants points that over time allow you to do things like steal out of the till and get some cash. Education not only unlocks new things but grants boosts to various stats like intelligence which in turn allows you to get promoted at work faster, upping your daily income even further. Running low level crimes like searching for cash or selling bootleg DVDs gives experience that can lead you to bigger crimes, but getting caught will reduce that experience.
I’m looking forward to continuing to play Torn and will continue to document my experiences as they come about. I apologize to anyone for whom the formatting of this page is absolutely borked because of the mobile screenshots.
You just don’t hear about large-scale text based games these days, but Torn has been rather quietly seeing massive success on desktop PCs. Launched 14 years ago, Torn bills itself as the game that Mafia Wars was built on. It lets players build a life in the city as a business owner, mob boss, or somewhere in between. You can take part in robberies, invest in the stock market, race cars, manage properties, the sky is the limit.
Continuing its success on PC, which has seen more than 2 million players worldwide and 20 thousand daily active users, Torn will be coming to Android devices on May 8. Alternately you can play right now by visiting the link down below.
MMO Fallout should be running some preview coverage of the mobile version at some point in the future.
Here’s a head scratcher: Should shuttered online games be exempted from Digital Millennium Copyright Act claims if the product is abandoned by its owners? The answer is yes, at least sort of. Under current US law, there are exemptions made for circumventing a game’s copyright protection if said servers have been abandoned by the owner and the game has a single player component. It does not protect against changes made to bring multiplayer games back online. It also does not protect people who alter their consoles to circumvent shuttered server authentication.
Well all of that may change, as the US Copyright Office is taking comments in regards to potentially adding exemptions for online services. This could pave the way for explicitly legal MMO servers for shuttered games, so if you have an opinion on the matter then now is the time to give it. The Copyright Office is taking comments until mid-December.
An empty wilderness, terrible sound quality, cheap animations, and unfinished assets everywhere with nothing to do but die and see your character irreversibly bricked. It may be in alpha, but Wild West Online is easily a fast contender for worst game of 2017, what is looking to be a shoddy title with questionable connections to one of the most incompetent developers in the gaming industry. Read this preview and stay far, far away.
One thing I’d like to ask about developer 612 Games: Who are they? Do they have a website? No. Does WWO Partners have a website? No. According to the Wild West Online website, the name is trademarked under the US Trademark system by WWO Partners and others. So I decided to do some digging and found exactly what I was looking for:
DJ2 Entertainment Inc. DBA WWO Partners
DJ2 Entertainment doing business as WWO Partners, or in layman’s terms WWO Partners isn’t a real company. Imagine DJ2 Entertainment is Adam Sandler in the Jack & Jill movie and WWO Partners is when he puts on a wig and pretends to be his own sister.
The announcement that Wild West Online is following the model of The War Z, another low effort shovelware title pushed out in connection with Sergey Titov, immediately red flagged this game in my book. Impressively, War Z also had such a refund. It wasn’t until after the refund period that OP Productions (or Hammerhead or whatever they’ve changed their name to these days) stopped pretending that it would live up to certain promises and started coming down hard on the invasive microtransactions. Let me also remind you that War Z was one of the first games to be involuntarily pulled from Steam over fraudulent advertising.
But this game has nothing to do with The War Z or Free Reign Entertainment, the company just by coincidence uses the same engine, had similar website/forum structure, utilizes the same payment processor, and creative director Stephan Bugaj happens to be friends with Sergey Titov on Facebook. DJ2 Entertainment just happened to have worked on Romero’s Aftermath, the equally low quality War Z clone pushed out after the original was abandoned, and was similarly abandoned in short time. Wild West Online’s PR is being handled by Vim Global who, you guessed it, also worked on Shattered Skies. And finally Wild West Online’s trademark was filed by Steven A. Bercu of Lime LLC, also responsible for filing trademarks for all of Titov’s other shell corporations under a slightly different forming of his name.
In case all of the companies I’m listing is confusing you, don’t worry. Sergey Titov and his Free Reign Entertainment crew go through LLCs like they’re candy, each new reboot of War Z was created by a completely new developer with absolutely no online corporate presence, that seems to exist in name only just like WWO Partners.
This weekend’s alpha test is supposed to sell you on Wild West Online, this much is obvious to everyone but the community manager and its tiny cabal of fans. It’s one of two alpha tests before the refund policy ends and you’re up poop creek without a paddle (unless you know how to dispute a transaction via Paypal or issue a chargeback), so rather than treat this like a stress test with minimal features, I’m going to preview Wild West Online like it’s already trying to show off for my money. Which it is.
Everything I need to know about Wild West Online, I learned in the first half hour. A wild west shooter, the game starts you out with a six shooter and no money in a safe zone town somewhere on the open world map. I went to the shop to find that I couldn’t buy anything, watched players run around town, and ran off toward adventure. About three minutes out of town, another player ran up and started a shootout. I lost. Upon respawning, I found that my gun, my medicine, and my ammunition were gone. My character was effectively dead and couldn’t even be deleted it seemed.
And that’s pretty much it. The graphics are nowhere near what we saw in earlier videos, the towns are barren of bystanders, and the world doesn’t have any NPCs roaming around. Your character doesn’t make any footstep sounds when running around, there are hundreds and hundreds of unfinished assets lying around, and the developers don’t seem to understand how skin tone works.
This is what black people looked like in the wild west.
I am hoping that Wild West Online isn’t being developed by the guys who made The War Z, and I say this only because it would mean that the team has become even less competent. While War Z’s alpha may have been a two-bit hack job, it at least masqueraded as what could potentially become a competent product. Wild West Online shows up to work with yesterday’s clothes and a half-empty bottle of whiskey, still drunk because it never stopped from the night before.
Wild West Online is an embarrassment, both in the idea that it is a paid alpha and that WWO Partners expects players to use this to judge whether or not they want to refund their purchase. And they can complain to unhappy customers all they want that this weekend was clearly a “technical test” and was deliberately gutted of content, it doesn’t change the fact that players have two weekends to decide whether or not the game is worth keeping their money in, and WWO has clearly squandered its first of two impressions.
MMO Fallout 