Tag: MMO

Early Access: Inferna Is A Quaint Little Grinder


Inferna is a quaint little murder box that is kinda fun to run around in for a bit and kill mobs. If it wasn’t free to play, I’d suggest staying away from it.

As part of MMO Fallout’s year end checkup on various early access games, I decided to check out Inferna which launched into early access on December 20 of this year. Inferna is what AAA developers would probably refer to as “minimum viable product,” in that the developers over at the properly named INFERNA LIMITED have created some base systems and tossed the player into a map with gratuitously sprinkled in mobs of varying size, shape, and level.

Otherwise there isn’t a whole lot going on in Inferna at the moment, which is to be expected from a game that literally just launched into early access a week ago. There are some basic equipment enhancement systems in effect, mobs occasionally drop gear that can be sold to other players or to NPC shops. There is the option to create a personal shop like you tend to see in Korean MMOs and plop it down in town to sell items while you are off and about obtaining more goods.

Honestly there’s not a whole lot to talk about with Inferna. On a positive note the developer has clearly been hard at work pushing out patches, and in my short experience the game seems to have a vibrant and active trading community. If you’re expecting a game that is feature complete, you’ve immediately made a mistake by downloading an early access title. If you want a free game to tinker around in for a bit, give it a download.

As for me, I’ll be making a note on my big paper calendar to check in on Inferna in a year.

Kritika Reboot: Stop Buying Gold Ya Mooks


The Kritika Reboot team has not exactly been quiet about their bot-banning sprees, but you might not be aware that the company is going after gold buyers as well. This week the team at ALLM Co. posted a reminder to users; three strikes and you’re out. The message has been reposted below for your enjoyment.

Kritika:REBOOT responds seriously to all of illegal trades including trade in cash. When such behavior is caught, disadvantages can be applied as follows.

– 1st time caught : Sends Warning mail.
– 2nd time caught : 3 days account suspension
– 3rd time caught : Permanent account suspension.

Illegal trades effects bad influence to the economy of the game, we are sorry for those of you who play in manner.

We ask for your cooperation to form better environment of the game.
Thank you.

Source: Kritika

One Year Later, Edengrad Remains Offline


Edengrad

MMO Fallout has been keeping an eye on everyone’s favorite MMO Edengrad for the past year, and at the conclusion of 2019 I can definitively say that the game is still dead.

It feels like forever ago that the Edengrad servers went offline, but the calendar suggests that the actual date might be closer to 2018. Probably around the time that its developer Huckleberry Games went bankrupt. News from the bankruptcy suggested that Huckleberry was receiving attention from investors as well as the government to get them more funding and put the train back on the tracks.

And back on the tracks they were put. Back in November 2018 a dev account just called “office” posted an ominous ‘we’re back soon’ message. How soon is too soon? Thirteen months, since the company hasn’t posted anything to the Edengrad community since then. Huckleberry Games is still alive and kicking, and more importantly pulling money from investors. The company just filed actions a couple of days ago to issue new shares and bring in more revenue. Bully!

The only thing the company doesn’t seem to want to talk about are its games. Will Edengrad come back? If so, when? What else is Huckleberry working on? Does the company exist to do something other than vacuum in investor money? Who knows.

What I do know is that the Edengrad website remains offline, although you can’t buy the domain. I tried. For everyone else, we’ll just have to wait and see if 2020 brings any news.

An MMO On Steam: Spelling Quest Online


Spelling Quest Online is certainly a game and is absolutely on Steam.

I’ll come right out and admit that I downloaded Spelling Quest Online because it is free to play and in early access, and also because it is tagged in the MMO category. Spelling Quest Online is multiplayer free-form scrabble, which is a fancy way of saying that nobody takes turns as much as you just throw down tiles and hope for the best. You can connect to random boards and just go to town for the ten minutes until the game gets boring and you want to stop and play something fun.

The boards have words that people can easily spell, like anal and bruv. There is a dictionary check when you want to make a word, but I’m not sure what dictionary the game cross-references that thinks bruv is a word because while the Cambridge dictionary recognizes it, the Oxford dictionary does not. There are daily quests that offer you gold which can be used to replace letters. I assume that most of the people playing this game are cheating. I cheated and used a Scrabble helper website because my gaming skills are only second in their inadequacy to my knowledge of words.

I will readily admit that I quit after ten minutes when completing words left me with a hand consisting almost entirely of Y’s, V’s, and X’s and literally no way to continue playing (I didn’t have any gold) on that map. I probably could have found a spot to put one or two of the Y’s but I didn’t feel like putting more effort than this game is worth. Which is nothing.

As for the developer Craig Schwartz, I will continue to love your character in the film Being John Malkovich, even if they didn’t give you anything to do in the sequel; Being John Malkovich 2: District Dafoe.

Pearl Abyss Reveals More On Plan 8, Exosuit Shooter


Plan 8 is one of several games recently revealed by Pearl Abyss. It is an exosuit MMO shooter built on a new proprietary engine being developed for PC and console Minh Le, co-creator of Counter-Strike. A key feature surrounds finding and equipping different gears to the suit which Pearl Abyss promises to create a unique shooter with MMO gameplay elements.

A number of new screenshots have been released for Plan 8, which we have shared below. For more details, check out the official website.

Mortal Online 2: It’s Coming Out


Mortal Online 2 is happening, Star Vault this week released a teaser trailer and a heap of information.

Coming soon, Mortal Online 2 continues the level-less skill system of the original title, introducing an open-ended skill system where players become better at abilities just by simply using them. The company aims to make player characters more versatile and move away from the Mortal Online system that tended to push players toward specific roles.

The world of Myrland is built on the Unreal Engine 4 technology and features a massive four hundred square kilometer landscape to play around in. A closed combat alpha will be held in Q2 2020 for those interested in testing out the new game.

Daybreak Game Company Registers Dimensional Ink Games


Daybreak Game Company looks like it’s getting closer to announcing a reverse Voltron move, splitting the business into multiple parts for one reason or another.

We’ve been following this for quite some time. Earlier this year, Daybreak began registering trademarks for new studio names that appear to be centered around its major IPs: Golden Age Studios, Darkpaw Games, Rogue Planet Games, Bronze Age Studios. Just this month, Daybreak filed for another trademark: Dimensional Ink Games. The purpose? Your guess is as good as ours, the filing just occurred three days ago.

Daybreak’s statement about the latest round of layoffs is even more telling:

“We are taking steps to improve our business and to support our long-term vision for the existing franchises and development of new games. This will include a realignment of the company into separate franchise teams, which will allow us to highlight their expertise, better showcase the games they work on, and ultimately provide tailored experiences for our players.”

The running theory with the trademarked studio names was that Daybreak would basically be splitting off their games into separate shell companies for some purpose (maybe to sell them). Daybreak’s latest comments seem to confirm that theory. Dimensional Ink has a Twitter account that was set up this month and has yet to post anything.

We will have to wait to see what this week’s news brings.

[Column] Astellia’s Subscription Trial Should Be Free/Contribute


Astellia Online is launching with a subscription, by which I mean it’s launching with a trial subscription, and it’s a bunch of tat.

When Astellia launches it will cost $40 for the introductory kit, with no word on how quickly the game will go free to play once the market wholly rejects paying up front for what is otherwise a rather generic import MMO that feels like it came out roughly ten years ago. If you’re not interested in the $40 up front fee, you can penalize yourself by spending $10 per month to check out a “trial” version that is otherwise the exact same thing and contains no restrictions. Astellia is not a subscription title otherwise.

Here’s the fun part: Your $10 per month doesn’t contribute to your purchase price, so if you are going to “play it safe” your penalty is that you’ll be paying a 25% premium for the privilege of doing so. If you sub for two or more months, and I can’t imagine why anyone would outside of forgetting to cancel their auto-renewal, well you might as well just call it a day. BarunsOn Studio calls it a “risk vs reward” system, whereas I’ll just call it a “contempt for the customer” system, one where the publisher knows that they have a steep uphill battle convincing a large number of people to buy into a $40 game that looks a lot like the dime-a-dozen Korean MMOs that launch for free by the thousands every year, but there’s no way management is going to open the door to thousands of gold farmer accounts without getting at least a little bit of dosh in return.

Astellia’s business model runs the risk of death by a thousand cuts of apathy, and the whole thing is worse considering it’s been done before. Other games have introduced starter editions that get you into the game at a lower cost, and then allow you to upgrade to the full game if you like what you’re playing. Many of those games (Rainbow Six: Siege, Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, etc) are insanely successful, more than Astellia Online is likely capable of conceiving. They don’t begrudgingly punish people for their skepticism.

Astellia asking players to throw away ten dollars risks immediately creating a relationship of animosity. There is no reason outside of contempt or greed (or some combination of the two) to immediately start your outreach to potential customers on such a hostile note, and no reason that the $10 first month can’t go toward the cost of the game. That would foster a more welcoming image. The number of sales you get from people who pay the $10 and then eat the cost and upgrade to the full version won’t be zero. I’m also willing to bet it won’t be a large number either. Ten bucks isn’t a lot of money, but Astellia isn’t a particularly high quality game. In the grand scheme of things gamers have a lot of other options either through the games that they already bought or through the multitude of free to play MMOs that are of much higher quality, far more content, and already have an established user base.

I’ve seen posts in the forums with people boasting about the idea that this acts as a gatekeeper and that it “weeds out people like you” toward critics. I’ve been writing about MMOs for fifteen years, these are the same people who will be wondering why nobody was willing to give the game a try in 2020 when the announcement comes that the game just didn’t get a good enough return to remain solvent.

All this for yet another game coming out of Korea that promises it will totally never include those crazy pay to win schemes that the Korean version has. Developers have never broken their promise in that scenario, right? At the very least, we can hope that the gold farmers (whom I suspect are at least tangentially related to this lower price version) who bulk-buy accounts to spam chat with advertising aren’t using stolen credit cards. Don’t forget, every dollar lost to a chargeback costs roughly $2.40.

This is where my free consultation of Astellia Online comes to a close. You can have your people call my people for more details.

Beta Perspective: Astellia Transports Me To 2009


Astellia is an MMO in 2019 that makes me feel like I’m back in 2009. It’s another game in the long line of titles that come westward and while I don’t have much faith in the game being a runaway success, I decided to jump into the beta to see just how dated it felt. Boy does it feel dated. Before I go into this I’d like to state that neither MMO Fallout as an entity no myself have any inherent problem with sexy characters in games and you can safely read on without the fear of having this random internet commenter make assumptions about your personality based on the games you play.

Now let’s continue.

Astellia Online seemed dead set on making me angry within the first twenty seconds of playing the beta because like much of its ilk, the game handholds you through the tutorial like you are a moron. I generally don’t have an issue with tutorials in games, but the point where I lose my patience is when the game starts treating you like a moron and locks the UI and refuses to let you do anything until you complete some menial task like adding a potion to your hotbar. I also thought I had skipped the tutorial, but then the game still overloads me with ridiculous nonsense that shouldn’t be new to anyone who has ever played a video game.

Unfortunately Astellia takes this even further in its tutorial by just throwing in enemy NPCs that you can’t attack for absolutely no reason. You almost think that the game is broken because there is no indication or response to your keypresses, and the game does let you target these mobs, but your character just doesn’t follow through on your commands. These sound like minor complaints, but it’s a starter to the game’s more asinine ideas like filling the world with invisible walls that are often out in the middle of the level, don’t block anything, and are just shoddy level design. Nothing says wasting my time like making me walk the long way around an area because the game won’t let me jump down an ankle-high embankment.

Eventually at the end of the tutorial you meet Sella, who is an angelic character of good.

Also her jugs are enormous.

It’s at this point I made this possibly bad decision of boosting my character to level 50, which the devs have enabled so people can check out the end-game dungeons during the beta. It also gave me the opportunity to check out the game’s Astels; companions that you level up, each one being a temporary summon that grants various buffs based on the character. There are defensive Astels, offensive Astels, healing Astels, all kinds! And they come in various flavors of cute anime girl, cute anime boy, cute animals, and the strange.

There’s even Scorpio who is his own deal.

Eventually I got bored of being level 50 and thus being horribly overleveled compared to the story content. So I ditched my mage character and decided to go with my old favorite: The ranger. The ranger is my go-to class in MMOs because they reflect my real life personality. Striking from afar because I’m a no-skill scrub who can’t take a punch.

Also her jugs are enormous.

In case you’re wondering, your character staring deadpan into the camera when you flip it around to view yourself from the front is just as unsettling as it looks in the screenshot. At this point, I’d like to state a few things that I have actually found enjoyable in Astellia. I like the story so far. There is a lot of generic “the world is being invaded by demons” storytelling, but there is also an interesting plot about the valiant white knights of the world and how they’re basically moronic, corrupt, and incompetent, led by an enormous jagoff named Meruf who utterly hates you and your Astels for no good reason, and rewards you after you’ve just saved his people by telling you to go fudge yourself.

You come back at one point to find a dude berating Meruf to his face about how much the knights suck and how they’re incapable of protecting civilization under his worthless leadership, and you follow him to save him from a demon named Voltra, who is also dressed like a BDSM queen.

Also her package is enormous.

Another little feature I came to enjoy is the simple fact that Astellia lets you have a spell queued up. It’s a simple function, but astoundingly rare in the MMO sphere. Thankfully the game doesn’t run like unoptimized trash, unlike Bless Online. I’m not going to make any comments about the validity of the cash shop since God only knows how much that could change before launch.

It looks like a big part of Astellia’s income is going to be from subscriptions which offer experience boosts, and selling skins which change the look of your Astel as well as equipment overrides. Astellia isn’t a horrible game by any means, but it’s been done so many times that I can’t see many people flocking to it with great excitement. It’s more of a filler MMO, something to play until the game you’re really looking forward to comes out.

 

Legends of Aria Hits Steam August 6


If you need Legends of Aria to release on Steam and preferably before August 7, then you have hit a stroke of very specific luck.

Citadel Studios announced today that the global launch of the hit MMO Legends of Aria is coming sooner than you think: August 6. Legends of Aria bills itself as a modern take on classic MMORPGs such as Ultima Online and Eve Online, and is a living breathing world shaped by its players. While much of the game world is safe from the harsh life of open world PvP, lawless regions still exist inhabited by those looking to make your day that much worse.

“Not only have we added a new playable skillset in the Bard and a whole new armor and weapon enchanting system to make the crafters in our community even more important, but we’re making the world of Aria a much friendlier place to live,” said Derek Brinkmann, CEO. “We’re ecstatic to finally be launching Legends of Aria on Steam after so much hard work and love were poured into the game. We cannot wait for MMO players of all sorts to join us on our journey.”

Legends of Aria will launch into Early Access on Steam on August 6. New features include the bard class as well as equipment enhancement, rulesets, a fresh start server, an optional premium subscription, quality of life improvements, and much more. Check out the official website for more information.

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