Posts Tagged ‘ncsoft’

NCsoft’s MOBA Master X Master adds City of Heroes star

Four years after NCsoft shut down City of Heroes, fans are still announcing new unofficial takes on its superhero MMORPG antics. NCsoft seem to have no plans for a new game of their own but they haven’t entirely forgotten it, as they’ve announced that iconic hero Statesman is coming to their crossover MOBA Master X Master [official site]. It’s not quite the CoH news one might hope for but hey, perhaps a nod is better than oblivion. If you rock yourself to sleep hugging your Statesman body pillow and dreaming of his Fist of Justice, hold on, he’s coming. Read the rest of this entry »

MXM, An Action MOBA With A Sad Hench Ghost

MXM [official site] is NCSoft’s action MOBA involving characters from games like Guild Wars 2 as well as new folks. It’s been in beta for a while in Korea but it’ll be coming to Europe and North America later this year. In case you’re about to head straight to the comments, hear me out…

The “action” part refers to the fact you control the characters with WASD rather than a click-n-move arrangement, but its main point of difference lies in the hero-swap mechanic. They’ve called it a “tag” system and what happens is you can swap between your two chosen heroes as you play. The heroes are actually called Masters, though, which explains the MXM of the title – it’s short for Master X Master.

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WildStar Devs Reportedly Lay Off 70 People

On Friday, WildStar [official site] publisher NCSoft announced that a “reorganisation” of Carbine Studio’s “operating structure” had resulted in staff layoffs at the developer. While there’s been no official mention of exactly how many folk have been made redundant, reports suggest more than 70 employees were shown the door – as much as 40 percent of the studio’s total staff.

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NCsoft’s MOBA Master X Master Coming Our Way

Blizzard’s MOBA Heroes of the Storm is a big crossover between all their games, and NCsoft think that’s a grand idea. The Korean publishers have announced a western release for Master X Master [official site], a MOBA whose lineup includes characters from their other games. As with gin & tonics, no MOBA is complete without a twist. MXM’s is that players pick two characters and can ‘tag’ between them mid-combat.

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Guild Wars 2 Free As A Bird Soon, AND THIS BIR- Ok, Ok

If I could skateboard (I gave up trying to learn after clumsily busting a board) I’d skate everywhere. When rolling is an option, walking is surely pedestrian. Beyond the bounds of the skatepark, I’d insist upon skating down to the shops, over hills, through bogs, and up the stairs in my building. Walking be damned! And yet MMOs keep adding fancy new modes of locomotion which are restricted to certain zones.

Good news on that front for Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns [official site], as the expansion’s gliding is coming to the rest of Tyria.

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Martial Arts MMORPG Blade & Soul Due In January

Blade & Soul [official site] is a pretty-looking free-to-play MMORPG with fantasy martial arts flair. What’s mostly caught my eye, though, is that this week’s announcement of a full and proper European and North American launch – January 19th, calendar-keepers – comes more than seven years after we first posted about it. It’s important to close your stories; if you post an announcement, gotta post about the release. People in comments get real worked up about unclosed things, I’ve found (

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Guild Wars 2: Heart Of Thorns Expansion Released

Guild Wars 2 was always subscription-free, but since August you don’t even need to buy it to play. That’s kinda free-to-play, but sorta not, since the base game hasn’t been filled with loads of extra microtransaction bits to squeeze players. What won’t be free is its expansions, and today the first of those arrived. Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns [official site] launched this morning. Doing all the usual expansion things – new areas, a new class, new enemies, new items, and so on – Heart of Thorns costs £35.

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RPS Feature An unusually generous free-to-play model

Wot I Think: WildStar Reloaded

Released in June last year, WildStar’s player count didn’t so much dwindle as vanish into the nether. Despite comic book stylings and zany humour, logging on was a lot like touring a nursing home, the party atmosphere muted by the aspect of Death trailing behind and checking his watch. Or if not death, then the spectre of the game’s inevitable free-to-play conversion.

For the past few days I’ve been relearning the ropes in WildStar Reloaded [official site], which isn’t a shot in the arm so much as a new bionic hip. Quaint trappings like the subscription fee have been removed, but developers Carbine have gone much further, also overhauling and streamlining the game in umpteen different ways. Here’s wot I think after a hectic opening week.

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WildStar Is Free-To-Play As Of Today

After a few weeks of running on test servers, WildStar [official site] is officially free-to-play as of today. That means you can play the scifi western MMO without a subscription, though existing subscribers who keep paying will get various bonuses and extras to reward them for their loyalty. Hop below for a finely animated CG launch trailer.

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Giveaway: 5000 WildStar EU Closed Beta keys

WildStar [official site] is going free-to-play, breaking loose from the shackles of a subscription model in order to let new players through the front doors for nothing. Before that happens, NCSoft are running a closed beta for the new version of the game, and we’ve got 5000 keys to giveaway if you want to try it out. Hop below to find out how to get one.

Update: Please note that all codes are EU specific and so will not work from other regions. Apologies for the inconvenience; we weren’t initially told.

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Dancing Like A: WildStar Going F2P This Month

Giorgio Moroder and Foxes’ jumpy discodance song Wildstar was probably not the inspiration for Carbine’s MMORPG WildStar [official site] (the MMO came first – but that’s the only reason this can’t be true), but Wildstar has the same bouncy, fun tone that seemed to set WildStar apart from oh-so-serious other WoW fangames. I’ve wanted to check WildStar out but don’t have the attention/inattention span to warrant buying MMORPGs. Good news, Alice! This morning you’ve managed to both wedge a fun pop song into a post and discover that you’ll get to play WildStar soon.

Its switch to free-to-play will come on September 29th, say publishers NCSoft.

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RPS Feature The death and partial return of the superheroic MMO

City Of Heroes Reborn

Three years ago, I wrote an epitaph for NCSoft’s axed superhero MMO City of Heroes, and for my beloved character within it.

“The City of Heroes has been closed down forever, and so The Entomologist is dead. Does he still exist on some dusty server, or have the bytes that made him been wiped forever? It doesn’t matter. There’ll be no Jean Gray resurrection for him.”

I was wrong.

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RPS Feature RIP, Two Years Late

Remembering City Of Heroes

Sometimes you can wait too long, think it’s okay to put off saying that important thing to the game you love, and then they’re gone. Then time goes on, and it becomes less and less relevant to say. Then you never say it.

City Of Heroes shut off its servers about two and a half years ago. Alec had the sense to eulogise it then. I never got around to it. And yet my memories of the game still buzz around in my head, the fondness for the MMO that really was responsible for forming RPS, years before there was an RPS, all with no outlet. The game can’t really be included in Top X lists, since it’s unplayable. It doesn’t make good use of time or SEO to dedicate a feature to it on a major gaming website. So what to do? Waste some time, I say. Here are my memories of the long-lost City Of Heroes.

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RPS Feature WildStar is tonally and psychologically a free-to-play game already.

Suck It Up, Cupcake: It’s Good That WildStar Is Going F2P

Every few months I revive my World of Warcraft subscription, go poking about the old haunts and decide that yes, things were better back in my day. Then I order the local kids off my lawn and wish I had my £9.99 back. This is WildStar’s target audience: people like me who yearn for the hardcore days of yore, too jacked up on happy memories to recall that a lot of what Warcraft had going on 10 years ago was a massive arse-ache. WildStar offered 40-man raids, a lengthy pre-raid attunement process and hour-long dungeon runs to a fickle, flighty bunch on a nostalgia trip, and so, after an opening surge in rose-tinted interest, wrestling with obstacles WoW patched out years back was judged not to warrant £12 a month. Servers withered, and NCSOFT’s earnings reports took on an unhealthy pallor.

Free-to-play, Wildstar’s long-anticipated move to which was announced today, is smashing down the financial barrier to an old school reunion where the nostalgic can come and go as they please.
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RPS Feature "Not launching free-to-play shut out, potentially, millions"

Wildstar Goes Free-To-Play: Why & How It’s Happening

o frabjous day

When I ask Wildstar’s [official site] Chad Moore and Mike Donatelli why on earth NCSOFT would release a subscription-based MMO at a time when most other MMOs had gone free-to-play, their answer is accompanied by one particularly important factoid: Wildstar is also going free-to-play.

I found out why NCSOFT are making the switch now, and what happens next.
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Game Of Thorns: Test Out Guild Wars 2’s First Expansion

ArenaNet are letting seep a slow drip of Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns [official site], the sequel’s first expansion pack. There’s still no release date, but starting May 26th you have a chance to test out some of the new PvE content in the closed beta – if you completed the key tasks. If not, well, you can probably watch it streamed.

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RPS Feature Multiplayer martial art game

World Of Wuxia: Blade And Soul

What exactly is the incentive for a studio to bring another free-to-play MMO to the West?

Even among fans of these here grind-machines, the approval-rating of MMOs rises and falls with a steadiness usually reserved for politicians. But somehow NCsoft have managed to keep a stable of these games in their portfolio for years. The publishers have announced today that they’re localizing Blade And Soul [official site], its three-year-old free-to-play MMO, for North America and Europe this year, making this the fifth title from the company to launch in Asia before it releases in the West. We decided to take a closer look.

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Update Will Let You See Through The Eyes Of Your Guild Wars 2 Character

Camera POW

A Guild Wars 2 [official site] patch will introduce a first-person camera mode to the MMO on 10 March.

As far as I recall the only times you get a truly unimpeded view of the landscape is when you trigger the cinematic sequences associated with activating a vista point (I have a lot of screenshots from those vistas).

After the patch is released zooming in fully while playing will switch the camera to first-person view. It’s not intended as a special option for a particular scenario, just an alternative view. This is pleasing news to me and will necessitate my return to Tyria for the equivalent of a tourist trip. I will take a sandwich and explore some areas and take all the screenshots.

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RPS Feature It's Nexus Or Them

Into The Wildstar: Should You Re-Visit The Cartoon MMO?

It’s a strange feeling coming back to WildStar. I played it when it launched back in June 2014, both for professional reasons and personal curiosity. It really did feel… different. The bright, bold aesthetic, the humour, the ambition, the fresh setting, Carbine’s pedigree, it all combined to project a powerful air of confidence about the game.

Despite myself, I was swept up in the pre-launch hype. That gorgeous Pixar-esque trailer! I started planning my characters, their races, classes and names. An Excel spreadsheet may have come into play. Unfortunately, while I very much enjoyed my colourful space western adventures on Nexus, it was surprisingly easy to untether and float away as soon as a distraction presented itself. How has WildStar changed in the past eight months or so? Is it successful? Populated? Has the original vision stayed firm, evolved, or been compromised? Let’s find out.

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