The world of Assassin’s Creed is frightening enough with just what characters we have, but thousands of would-be assassins running around? Horrifying. According to Gamespy, Ubisoft is hiring for a next generation online RPG, and rumors are floating around that this may be an Assassin’s Creed MMO.
Given Ubisoft’s wide array of IPs, the game could be just about anything, including the possibility of a new/outside IP altogether. Of course, the game could just wind up being a fantasy MMO based around the Might and Magic series.
Kickstarter and independent developers are starting to become great friends, so it is no surprise that indie MMO teams have come forward to get some startup cash without as much reliance on investors or publishers. I have two currently running funds for MMOs to advertise to you, and will let them speak for themselves, but since this a rather touchy subject, let me explain some details of Kickstarter to you:
You are making a pledge. If the Kickstarter does not reach its goal by the due date, no money will exchange hands.
A successful kickstarter does not guarantee that the product will see release. Remember: You are playing investor. Spend your money wisely.
1. Squad Wars
Space Combat the way it was meant to be: Fast, uncompromising, and totally intense. Jumpgate Evolution might be dead and buried, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get a spiritual sequel to the series. In development by the creative forces behind Jumpgate, Squad Wars is an MMOG based on scripted scenarios with fast paced dogfights, giant space fights, and massive capital ships.
END Games is offering some pretty nice perks for pledging, from beta access to in-game credit, xp boosts to badges to your own vote in which scenarios are built first.
Personally I am looking forward to Storybricks more than most other AAA titles, for the simple factor of the story telling. Storybricks allows players to create their own worlds in a fashion you may be aware of in tools like RPG maker. Using visual editors, players are able to create NPCs that interact with one another, the world, and the player, in order to tell vast, amazing tales.
Storybricks is being supported by Brian Green, who some (some) of you may remember from the great grandaddy of graphical MMOs, Meridian 59. I personally backed up Storybricks with a $45 donation.
It is with a heavy heart that I have to say goodbye, or at least goodbye for now. We simply cannot deliver the game you deserve with the resources we have. We never quit trying, even when hope faded, because you – our community – kept us inspired.
It is a sad day for sandbox fans, as another title has died on the operating table. Dominus, or Prime: Battle for Dominus as it was once known as, is being shut down mid-development due to a lack of resources over at Pitchblack Games. This may not be the end of Pitchblack Games, or Dominus, however.
Interested investors are kindly asked to email info@pitchblackgames.com. The notion of using Kickstarter has been thrown around by the community, with no response from Pitchblack on the matter.
Either way, it is sad to see another prospective gem fizzle out before it even has a chance to compete.
Back in 2007, Ukrainian developer GSC Game World stunned us all with S.T.A.L.K.E.R Shadows of Chernobyl, an alternate reality where the Chernobyl power plant explodes once again causing all kinds of oddities to emerge in the zone. Over the next few years, GSC would release two followup titles: Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat. The games were applauded for their open worlds, extensive AI system, and disturbing atmosphere. Unfortunately, as of yesterday, GSC has officially closed its doors, resulting in the cancellation of S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2.
In keeping with the spirit of the franchise, the team from GSC has gone on to form Vostok Games, and has announced their upcoming free to play MMO, Survarium.
“The topic of mankind who survive, but in totally new conditions, very dangerous ones where death is around, where there are mutants, factions, where there are some mysterious goals, where there is something like the Zone, explored by the well-known stalkers.”
Most important is that this is not a S.T.A.L.K.E.R MMO. That is a completely different game, and will probably never be released outside of Russia.
Part of MMO Fallout deals with the harsh reality of the current market: There are too many MMOs currently competing for players, and even more hit the market each day. For every MMO that dies here at MMO Fallout, another three or four take its place! Considering that MMOs are still releasing under the $50-60 client bracket, and with the increasing amount of free to play titles on the market, there is an overwhelming demand to know whether or not an MMO is worth investing in.
That being said, life expectancy can be very difficult to measure, especially before launch. Below I have a few items that should not be taken as exact, but rather observations of past trends that generally hold true.
1. Hacking Off Limbs Before Birth
This is a very important factor. Keep an eye on your MMO of choice and see if the developer starts discussing features that were planned for launch and had to be “suspended” due to budget restraints, but will be included later on once more funding comes in in the form of boxes and subscriptions. I’m not talking about easy to implement features like Looking For Group tools or cosmetic slots. I mean features that were once major parts of the game’s advertising, like Warhammer Online where each race would have its own living, breathing city. That announcement was in 2008, would anyone like to put money on Mythic ever releasing those cities?
If you see a game being advertised as releasing bare bones with no specific details for release, you can probably expect to see the cut features sometime in the year two thousand and never. Assuming of course the game doesn’t pull a Warhammer Online and go into maintenance mode quickly after launch. If your MMO exhibits these signs before launch, you might want to keep your friends close and your wallets closer.
2. How Many Times Has It Shut Down?
Market viability is very important when determining…well, market viability, and MMOs are like psychotic murderers: Once they’ve tasted blood, they can’t stop. So ask yourself before you make a purchase: Has this game killed a company?
Let’s take a look back, shall we? Perpetual Entertainment died with Star Trek Online and Gods & Heroes still in the oven. Star Trek Online went on to become a horrendously rushed release due to a licensing agreement and Gods & Heroes went on to pull in one of the smallest launches in MMO history. Flagship Studios died after Hellgate London and Mythos, the former spending a few years touring Asia while the latter went on to be picked up by Hanbitsoft where it was shut down in Europe under Frogster and eventually launched as a global edition.
There are plenty more to bring up, including All Points Bulletin killing Realtime Worlds, or Earth Eternal being shut down more times than I can count, but you should exercise caution around any game that has previously been shut down: Especially if the prior company went bankrupt.
3. Is The Developer A Known Face?
I apologize in advance to my dear friends in the independent field who will hate me for saying this: I love indie-gaming. I hate indie-MMO developers. Don’t get me wrong, your developers have a great big vision for the future where you can not only take a chunk of sand and turn it into a sword, but you can also use that sword to commit murder and theft. Assuming that the sand is ever fully implemented.
In order to buy into an indie-MMO, you need zen-like patience. The development team might be completely new to the genre, having never developed an MMO or even a full retail game for that matter. You should expect major features to be cut and not implemented for a good year or two, and for development to be slow and sloppy. If video games are an art, buying an indie MMO is not unlike buying a sculpture before it is completed, you assume the artist doesn’t die sometime in the process.
So, although it guarantees that the MMO will be delayed further, possibly by years, I have always suggested that my indie-developer friends create a game and release it first. It gives the developer credibility in the marketplace, not to mention extra cash in the bank, not to mention a successful product makes them much more appealing to investors.
4. Time Spent Trashing the Competition
I’ve seen this marketing strategy fail time and time again, but publishers still have a habit of spending more time trashing the competition than they do talking about the benefits of their own game. Some of you may remember the Global Agenda “No Elves” campaign which focused on how people were sick of elves and magic and wanted shooting and headshots. Global Agenda was to be everything these games weren’t, which ultimately included the desire to pay a subscription for it, because Global Agenda lost its subscription not long after launch and eventually lost its cover price. This is just one example, but around 2007-2008 there were quite a few MMOs released under the “WoW killer” brand that released with major features broken or delayed.
And as far as upcoming MMOs go, I will include TERA in this with their “Are You An MMOFO?” campaign. While somewhat funny, the fact that Enmasse has started directly naming games (DC Universe, Lord of the Rings Online, World of Warcraft) as boring crap (my words, not theirs), has me worried that the developer is writing a check they have no ability to cash.
5. You Know Who Is Working On It
I’m referring to several different people, and you all know who I am talking about. For the sake of MMO Fallout, however, I cannot name them on this page as these people have a habit for threatening to sue me every time I mention them by name. But you all know who they are, the names who are either head of the pack or somewhere in the middle when everything seems to upend and your big ship suddenly goes the way of the Titanic.
This person, you may not personally know them, but they are well known to you. They seem to pop up everywhere bankruptcy and turmoil follow, the games they work on or lead are released unfinished with a priority on selling cash shop items rather than fixing the broken parts of the game, and when pressed to fix them responds with “well since it was broken no one plays that portion so we won’t work on it because not enough people play it.” To these men, hypocrisy knows no boundary, and integrity is just something you sprinkle on a nice lasagna.
One thing you can always expect out of this man is that he will flee the ship before it sinks. When he leaves, you can expect that the end approaches.
“It’s a persistent game, it has persistent player data, the character grows and gets better over time. I think most gamers expect that now anyway, but this was a design I’d done a while ago. I think it’s pretty valid.”
John Romero is one of the industry’s finest, even if he no longer works with John Carmack, and if the man wants to make his own MMO-ish shooter, then by God he will. In an interview with Eurogamer, Romero stated that while the game is still in pre-production stages, he has a solid vision of what he expects the title to become. Romero discusses his distaste for the current shooter genre, and mentions that his game will play faster than the Gears of War titles currently available, and won’t rely on the slower-paced cover based systems and characters who act as bullet sponges. Not to say Gears isn’t a great game, it just isn’t the type Romero would like to create.
If this makes you think of Quake Live, you probably aren’t too far from the target. Granted, very little about Romero’s game, so we will simply have to wait for more details.
Minecraft is a game that has stolen the hearts, the lives, and a whole lot of time here at the nonexistent MMO Fallout office. I’d love a reason to talk about Minecraft, but sadly the game is not an MMO. Notch’s next game, however, will give me plenty of time to talk about Minecraft. Announced just recently, the game is titled 0X10c (figure out the pronunciation yourself), which we will simply refer to as Notch’s MMO from here on out.
The game is set as a sci-fi title and is very early in development, and appears to be an Eve Online style game with a very heavy focus on engineering, mining, trading, and looting. Players have a spaceship that carries a certain fixed wattage that is consumed by additions added to the ship (very Eve-like). At its heart, each ship will operate as its own fully functioning 16-bit CPU.
You can check out the website below. Notch’s MMO will carry a singleplayer and multiplayer mode, and will likely carry a subscription fee for the multiplayer universe.
“From the mediocre game that nobody bought and doesn’t really like that much, comes a big giant version of that game!”
-Todd McFarlane
Todd has a point. Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning released one month ago and sales figures place the title at over one third of a million sales. Now that gamers are well versed in the realm of Amalur and the inner working concepts of fate, the team at 38 Studios is instituting phase two of Operation Franchise: Release an MMO. Labeled Project Copernicus, the Kingdom of Amalur MMO is set for release later this year, 2012.
I have my own concerns over Amalur’s prospects for a 2012 release. Assuming the game can hit its 2012 release, the folks at 38 Studios will be competing against The Secret World, TERA, Guild Wars 2, the new World of Warcraft expansion, Neverwinter, and more. Never mind the recent and future free to play transitions of existing MMOs, of course the existing market as it is.
I have high hopes for Amalur Online (my name), but I also recognize the kind of risks that are taken when a developer puts out an MMO for the first time. Crafting an MMO is very different from creating a single player game, and 38 Studios did the smart move by creating a fan base and setting out a base expectation for quality.
More on Amalur Online (not the actual name) as it appears.
Jacmob is the creator of RSBuddy, one of the major bots back in the day. Why is he important? Following the bot nuke, and the shuttering of RSBuddy, Jacmob was hired by Jagex to work on anti-bot solutions. In a post on the RSBuddy forums, Jacmob talks about an upcoming March 2012 bot nuke:
It’s been a while since that preliminary bot nuke last October. Now that there’s been time for competent people to move on and various arrangements to be made, I will soon be making my final announcement on RSBuddy. In particular I will speak about the end of RSBuddy and what the approach will be to any further related projects. I will also speak in general terms about the larger bot nuke that’s due in shortly, which should encompass every type of bot and conclude the development time needed to deal with bots for a long while.
If you had purchased a Vita under the pretense that you would be graced with the free to play MMO shooter known only as DUST 514, prepare to be disappointed. In an interview with Eurogamer, Executive Producer Brandon Laurino has once again spoken up to clarify on a few questions and notes that the Vita DUST 514 app will be a companion app only.
“At the most basic level, you can do transactions on the market; equip and customise your character, your vehicles; set up strategies with your friends and Corporation members – all of these sort of companion functions on the go.”
That being said, CCP is still looking at possibilities for further development of the app, and while it is unlikely that gamers will be on the front line for the glory of whichever Eve Online corporation has the most expendable money, player feedback should bring in any features that don’t make it into the initial release.
On the other hand, this isn’t necessarily a death call for MMOs on the Vita. Square Enix has hope to port Final Fantasy XI over, and then who knows who else would be willing to step up and assault our productivity?
MMO Fallout 