Posts Tagged ‘mmorpg’
EVE Online: Dominion coming this Winter
The eleventh free expansion for CCP Games’ MMORPG EVE Online has been announced today. Titled Dominion, the expansion is currently set for a Winter release this year.
EVE Online: Dominion will focus on primarily endgame content – alliance warfare. A complete overhaul of sovereignty mechanics will occur, and new epic arcs for pirate factions will also be introduced.
The game has been around since 2003, so it’s very surprising that it’s still going strong against giants like World of Warcraft and Lineage II. Blizzard only offers paid expansions for their game, so CCP Games’ approach is a very unique one.
Read (EVE Insider)
Neo Steam goes live, is still free
Atlus Online has just announced that their free-to-play MMORPG Neo Steam: The Shattered Continent has officialy gone live.
The game’s beta apparantly went live back in May which recieved generally good feedback. To celebrate the game’s launch, Atlus will be holding both screenshot and national anthem contest which have you sending in the coolest screenshot you can grab and writing and reciting a national anthem for one of the games nations.
If you want to check Neo Steam: The Shattered Continent out head over to Atlus Online’s website and sign-up, what do you have to lose?
EA Announces New Ultima Online: Stygian Abyss Expansion
For the many fans who are addicted to online games, Ultima Online is back better and promising. Mythic Entertainment today officially announced Ultima Online: Stygian Abyss the upcoming expansion to legendary MMORPG Ultima Online. Slated for release this summer, Stygian Abyss will be the eighth expansion to one of the longest-running MMORPGs in the genre’s history. The expansion will introduce a flood of new content for the citizens of Britannia to explore and conquer.
Stygian Abyss revolves around the introduction of the playable Gargoyle race. Since taking center stage in the original Ultima series, Gargoyles have been a fascinating part of the Ultima story – now, Ultima Online players can enjoy Gargoyles firsthand, with a variety of unique skills, including Throwing, Imbuing and Mysticism.
Players will find expansive new areas to explore, including Ter Mur, the Gargoyle homeland, and the Stygian Abyss dungeon itself – the largest dungeon area ever introduced to Ultima Online. The dungeon will contain new boss monsters of unparalleled difficulty including the Medusa, Primeval Lich and the Stygian Dragon, as well as Player vs. Player zones where adventurers will be turned against each other.
(Source) Press
Free Realms to go public tomorrow
Having been released as a closed beta back in February, Sony has decided to finally take the wraps off of their free MMO Free Realms — It was recently announced that Free Realms will be leaving its beta stage and be released to the public tomorrow, April 28th
Free Realms is a different kind of MMO, focusing on exploration, mini-games, and pet training (among other things) instead of hand to hand combat. Of course, it includes hand to hand combat but Kotaku reports it is completely optional.
This unqiue approach makes Free Realms a good experience for young and old gamers alike.
PETA Invading World of Warcraft
Those animal-lovers at PETA are now invading the realm of World of Warcraft to launch their new propaganda campaign against Canadian seal hunters.
The campaign will apparently draw a parallel between the in-game slaughter of seals by Horde characters and the real-life hunting of seals in Canada.
"Thrall refused to ban the slaughter of seals, despite multiple requests from the Alliance to do so, because Orgrimmar stands to make a large profit from the fur," wrote PETA.
They will stage a violent assault on the game’s seal-populated Howling Fjord zone soon.
The West Review–Sometimes You Get What You Pay For
It probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone that, following the massive success that is World of Warcraft, that there was more than a little “me, too!” action going on. And, perhaps also surprisingly, is the growth of a new business model in MMORPG that involves free-to-play RPGs located totally online. One of these that I found just recently is called The West.
You’ll start out in The West much as those who actually went that way in the United States’ westward expansion did–by hitting the dusty trail as a dirt-poor laborer. And from there, you’ll do odd jobs for cash and take on quests until you build up your resources and reputation. From there, you can do harder jobs, stage gun battles with other players, and do pretty much everything that you could’ve done in the ACTUAL Old West.
The only problem is, that it’ll take about the same amount of time. For instance, my first hour with The West allowed me to do the following–put on a t-shirt and shoes (apparently there are no pants out west), take a bottle of whiskey to the sheriff, pick a leaf of tobacco and pick a bit of sugar cane. That was IT. For an HOUR. I played Warcraft, and I tell you this, in an hour’s time if I was in the right place I could have a drift of corpses piled up sufficiently deep to make a decent-sized house from their bones. It maybe took me an hour to do all the research for the Drifter’s Guide to the Wasteland in Fallout 3. But this game thinks it’s doing me a favor by letting me blow an hour to PICK TOBACCO and not CHARGING me for the privilege.
On the up shot–surprisingly, there is an up shot–The West is an incredibly compartmentable game. One click on a button is sufficient to start the twenty-minute time clock that allows me to pick one round of sugar cane, so in the meantime, I can go play a couple small flash games, browse some forums, read a book, watch most of X-Play or The Chaser’s War On Everything, whatever. And all the while my poor little character is off a-slavin’ in the sugar cane field so that later on I can have actual fun on the money he made.
The game is fair enough, especially for a free game…the graphics aren’t terrible, the sound is nonexistent (it’s a text-only game) and the mechanics aren’t that hard to work with. The elephant in the room here, meanwhile, is the incredibly slow gameplay. For instance, I read about one fellow who’d had a particularly rough time with the game despite almost ludicrous endurance–he’d been playing for a month, got to level eighteen, and even at that point he was armed with a slingshot, and about the only things he could do involved picking beans and repairing fences. Why? Because the only gun available in the store was a “rusty shotgun” with a price tag of FIVE GRAND. In terms of the game this is several months’ wages. In terms of the REAL west, you could buy a TOWN for five thousand dollars.
The West tries desperately to be the Wild West, but the most it can manage is the Mild West.
Mythic: Warhammer Needs to Succeed for Industry’s Sake
It’s a do or die situation for Mythic Entertainment, the studio behind the upcoming Warhammer Online MMO, as studio VP Mark Jacobs commented that their game needs to succeed or else “it’s not going to be good for the industry.”
The current MMORPG scene is dominated by Blizzard with World of Warcraft that has a staggering amount of subscribers.
“We need to show the world that it’s not just Blizzard who can make a great game, and that the audience is absolutely willing to try new things and to play a game other than WoW,” said Jacobs. “If we don’t succeed with EA behind us, the Warhammer IP behind us, with one of the most experienced teams in the industry, that’s not going to be good for the industry.”
He also revealed that he hoped Conan would be more popular than it currently is.
“At some level I wanted Conan to succeed because for the last few years people have been saying it’s all Blizzard and nobody else can do it,” Jacobs stated. “‘Only Blizzard can get those kind of numbers,’ and so far they’ve been right. But now it’s our turn.”
Warhammer Online goes live September 18.
Blizzard Finds WoW Success ‘Exhausting’
Many find success exhilarating, thrilling even. But no, Blizzard feels ‘exhausted’ by the runaway success of World of Warcraft, its insanely popular MMOG.
Speaking to Gamesindustry, company co-founder and senior VP Frank Pearce commented that the studio found the success “as ‘interesting’ as much as exhaunsting.” He elaborated, stating that as a company they have found themselves spread “very, very thin”, blaming the “voracious appetite” of the WoW community for new content.
As for the company’s other projects, Pearce responded to speculation that their next game announcement might be a new intellectual property. “If there was a development team [within Blizzard] that was really passionate about a new intellectual property idea, then we’d give that strong consideration,” he said.
Blizzard currently has Diablo 3 and StarCraft 2 in the works, as well as a next-gen unannounced MMO.
Closed Beta Testers Now Allowed to Talk About Warhammer Online
Those who were allowed into the closed beta of Mythic Entertainments Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning first first made to agree to a non-disclosure agreement, or NDA, making it illegal to spill the beans about the MMO
Well this is no longer true as the developers have announced that they are ditching the NDA, now allowing beta testers to talk freely about the game, get ready for a whole slew up YouTube gameplay videos.
Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is an MMORPG currently under development by Mythic Entertainment and will be released for the PC on September 18th of this year.
Warhammer Online Gets Date
EA today announced that Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning will launch September 18 whether it is ready or not. The newest MMORPG from Mythic Entertainment will have a monthly subscription costing $14.95, with discounts available for subscribing for longer periods.
“The countdown has officially begun. Mark your calendars! September 18th is the Day of Reckoning,” said Mythic founder Mark Jacobs. He added, “For the last three years, the entire team at Mythic has poured their hearts into making Warhammer Online the next great MMORPG. We are so excited to open up this world and share it with the fans that will live in it, quest in it, go to war in it and make it come alive.”
It was recently revealed that several cities and races had been cut from the game due to quality concerns.