Rock, Paper, Shotgun

NCSoft send word that the mighty Korean grinder Lineage II will be ending subs and allowing currency farmers (and maybe some players) to sign up for free! Good times. They explain: “Unique among MMO offerings in the west, Lineage II will be available to players completely free – there will be no restricted zones, no limited class selection and no gear stuck behind a pay wall.” (Is that really unique in the west?) There will even be new content for players to enjoy during their trip through Lineage II’s 99 (!) level structure. As for the how and the why of the cash payment system they say that players “will have the opportunity to buy supplemental in-game items and premium item packs from the L2 Store”.

Brriiiiiing! Briiiiiiing! Briii-
“Hello, Alec Meer speaking.”
“Hello, is that Alec Meer?”
“Yes, that’s why I said ‘Alec Meer speaking’. God, why do people always do that?”
“Sorry, yes, it annoys me too. Alec Meer here too – you said I should give you a call.”
“What?”
“You said you have so many half-forgotten interviews to transcribe that you needed to find some sort of fool-proof reminder system. This is it. When you sell RPS for $4 billion in 2027, you spent your share on a machine that could send phone calls back through time.”
“What?”
“So this is your reminder to transcribe the Wildstar interview you did back in August.”
“What? Wait, that’s actually really useful. Thanks.”
“Oh, and if you post that beta sign-ups for the new NCsoft MMO are now open, that’ll further help you to remember. Bye!”
“Oh, that’s a very sensible idea.”
“Oh, and don’t play Duke Nukem Forever, it’s rubbish.”
“Hang on, I thought you said you were from the future?”
“Er… Gotta go!”
[Click]

You may remember that Richard “I Wish I Were Still Lord British” Garriott de Cayeux was suing NCSoft for fifty gajillion dollars. Well, he’s won.

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You know, the only MMO I’ve ever missed playing, apart from Eve Online, is City Of Heroes. I am vaguely tempted to see if I can somehow resurrect my age old tanker character in the new, free world that NCSoft are touting. I bet it’s changed a bit since I was last in there over three years ago. The latest update “Freedom” has a bunch of stuff new content (see below for the full feature list) but also opens up the game pretty substantially, allowing people access to most of what made the game great (character creation) and the capacity to play through to level 50. Paragon’s Brian Clayton says of the update: “We aren’t just flipping a switch and going ‘Free-to-Play.’ We’re embarking on the biggest content and feature update to City of Heroes in its seven-year history.” I hope he’s right, because I have a genuine soft-spot for the ageing villain-biffer.

Details and video below.
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Guild Wars 2 lies in a strange place between being something of a man of mystery and having been on show for so long that our eyes have crawled across most every element of it. A lot of the promises being made are conceptual or may rely on idealised circumstances, but nonethless people are being won after dramatically: most recently, it won game of the show at the Eurogamer Expo. So when do we all get to try it? Well, a closed beta has been promised before the end of the year, with an open beta to follow and then a release date dependent on the success of that.

For now, perhaps the best you’re going to get is TotalBiscuit’s substantial videoing (a good 40 minutes, all told) of his high-level play sessions at the Expo – it shows off some the more ambitious mechanics as well as plenty of day-to-day beast-slaying. He seems very impressed indeed, for the most part.
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Here’s an interesting little bit of GW2 info over on MMORPG.com, who have been talking to ArenaNet at PAX: “Not only will ArenaNet be making up their own servers for the quick and dirty PVP matches, much like the shooter genre’s setup, but Eric and Colin said they plan for players to be able to create and host their own servers or games with specific rule-sets as well.” I’ll be fascinated to see how that actually works. I have to admit that despite the original game’s heavy PvP focus, I’d barely paid any attention to how PvP will work in the new game. (I just want to wander around those environments.)

Anyone here a GW PvP with great expectations for the sequel?

Earlier in the week we revealed that NCSoft will be publishing Carbine’s space MMO, Wildstar, and Alec delivered his impressions on that. Now eight minutes of footage has appeared (below), and holy crap there is a lot in that eight minutes: the player-character starting out getting revived by an NPC, exploring a valley and dodging avalanches, setting up and using bits of equipment, fighting some kind of space yeti, and appearance and destruction of some awesome spacecraft thing. The visual references are clear, and it’s certainly an MMO in the classic sense, but with some surprises. It does look like it might be entertaining.
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They’re just showing off! Stop showing off, Arenanet. No one likes a show off, ESPECIALLY when they’re pretty. As if the PvE action stuff wasn’t showy enough, the flyovers of intricately produced cities and other superlative-stretching environmental features are just too much. And then that dude totally decks a centaur… and what is that robot thing?!

Really, everyone’s impressed, you can go be humble in the corner now. Christ.
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UPDATE: New embed.
There’s the preview of NCsoft/Carbine’s ambitious new sci-fantasy MMO Wildstar, and here’s the first scene-setting video. Pre-rendered intro vid kinda stuff rather than in-game footage, but sets the scene, the tone and introduces the three playable races and some of the classes… Take a look. Now, I must run off to a giant German convention centre to go see many, many games.
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