Everyone has a fighting chance
Due to this column’s biweekly schedule, I’ve had a couple of weeks to think about the news that SOE was purchased by venture capitalist / technology investment firm Columbus Nova. During this fairly short span, we’ve already seen that the new owner isn’t hesitant to make significant personnel cuts at the newly renamed Daybreak Games. As is my wont, I can’t help wondering how this situation fits within and reflects the overall state of the MMOG genre.
Age of Wulin, the EU version of Age of Wushu, will be expanding on March 10th with Chapter 4: Betrayal & Forgiveness. This expansion is the third in the game’s history and will allow players to abandon their current sects to join one of the factions or Great Factions or to simply hit the road as a free agent.
This week we check in on some numbers for World of Warcraft and Hearthstone. We also see what it takes to bring social aspects back to WoW.
Being a guild leader is hard. It’s really hard. In fact, it may as well be considered a full-time job in a lot of cases. Between knowing all of your members just like a manager at work, running websites and forums just like a standard website owner, and organizing activities for everyone like some type of deranged virtual event planner, being a guild leader can bring out the best (or worst) in anyone.
French production company Forge Animation has launched a Kickstarter campaign in hopes of turning cult sci-fi novel La Horde du Contrevent into an RPG.
The Crowfall team is the latest to embrace the notion that the old standards of revenue generation have stagnated and that something else needs to be brought into the mix. Up to the last couple of years, MMO revenue was generated either with subscriptions or through item malls in free-to-play games. Yet with today’s more mercurial MMO community, those tried and true ways of generating cash seem to be inadequate for the task.
As MMO gamers, we’re conditioned to expect a handful of specific tropes in our favorite genre. When a new game hits the shelves, we’re certain to line it up against a series of checkboxes to determine if it represents our cultured interests. For some, that means an MMORPG has to have a solid character progression system and an open world worth interacting with and exploring.
Bioware made it official this week: Shadow Realms has been cancelled. The promising idea — a never-ending 4-versus-1 RPG — wasn’t enough to keep the tide from turning at Bioware Austin and now a wide swath of hopeful fans are disappointed. But should we be? Read on as we look at what might have happened and the gilding on this otherwise sorrowful lily.
n-Space and Digital Extremes have announced that they are working to bring the tabletop DnD experience to PC users with Sword Coast Legends. The game will feature five character classes and will allow players to work through what is described as an immersive story line. Most excitingly, Sword Coast Legends will offer "Dungeon Master Mode" that allows DMs to lead players through custom-created adventures, though it can also be played cooperatively as a more traditional RPG as well.
A bit of a somber Daily Quest for you all today. In the wake of Norrathian leaders Dave Georgeson and Steve Danuser, plus so many others leaving Daybreak/SOE… we have to ask the impossible. What’s going to become of EverQuest as a franchise?