Everyone has a fighting chance
Eforb Games has announced that its post apocalyptic MMO, The Skies, has officially kicked off its limited alpha testing phase of development. Recently approved via the Steam Greenlight program, the game world developers around player choices and the various factions throughout the world.
The Elite: Dangerous forum has been updated with a new developer post that lays out some of the upcoming features players can expect from the beta update v1.2. According to the post, the update should arrive in March. Of particular note, the update will feature a debug camera that will allow players to take epic screenshots of their ships from the outside, though the caveat is mentioned that it is not a game play camera.
From February 26th through March 2nd, Star Trek Online captains will be able to take advantage of a special double experience weekend. Content that provides skill points and expertise will be rewarded with 100% extra experience. The move is to help players prepare to take on the forces in the Delta Quadrant. Be sure to log in today and start moving up the ranks!
Gamemag will be bringing its Taiwanese MMO, Weapons of Mythology, to this year’s Game Developers Conference. Popular on the PC in Taiwan, Gamemag will also be leveraging the console market in the West by making the title cross platform between PC and the PlayStation 4. The game is expected to launch in China and Russia later this year while the PS4 optimization is in progress. To show off Weapons of Mythology, Gamemag has released a new trailer.
Dragon Quest Heroes for PlayStation 4 just launched in Japan but Western audiences and fans need not despair. The PlayStation blog has been updated with the announcement that the game will be heading to North America and Europe sometime this year!
The H1Z1 team has unveiled a fantastically hysterical new video showing the team reading the outraged letters from banned game hackers. Some claim innocence, others apologize, others spew on and on in long run on sentences. Sometimes, a video says it all. This is one of those. Enjoy!
A rather oblique Twitter post has appeared on the Overwatch feed that shows a magazine cover with a shadowed figure on it. While nothing on the cover says anything about Overwatch, the appearance on its Twitter feed and the follow up post by a fan for people to scan the QR-code seems to indicate that a new character will be revealed soon. See what you think!
Starr Long had mentioned during my last visit that they’d start rolling Shroud of the Avatar over to Unity 5 this month. When I bumped into Finn Staber, one of the Shroud developers, at a hub for Austin startups, I wasn’t surprised when he told me they’d been working on it. The shocking part was when I asked how much they’d managed to get rolled over for the updated engine over the last two weeks. "All of it," was his reply.
In the recent Producer’s Roadmap, Bruce Maclean dropped the news we’d known about for awhile, Star Wars: the Old Republic would have some kind of Outfit Designer. Coming in the spring with Game Update 3.2, it’s supposed to be an ‘awesome new feature’. Let’s speculate as to how this new feature will work and how it will integrate with the existing crafting system.
I think a change in acronyms is due to match the change. MMORPG has always been a mouthful and sort of sucked all of the immersive qualities out of the genre. MMORPG sounds like a scientific categorization. And, as this column hopefully shows, the semi- or pseudo-MMO market is alive and well within the blurry lines in between genres, so we need some new terms.