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With Guild Wars 2 [official site] venturing off to new lands (well, old - from the first game) in its Path of Fire expansion next month, developers ArenaNet are inviting all and sundry in for a cheeky peek this weekend. All and sundry are invited to visit the Crystal Desert in a "preview weekend" starting on Friday, no pre-order or purchase necessary. The Crystal Desert…
The second paid expansion for free-to-play fantasy MMORPG Guild Wars 2 [official site] will launch on September 22nd, developers ArenaNet announced today. Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire will return to the Crystal Desert from the first game along with Elona from its Nightfall expansion. Continuing to follow and fight the return of the god of war, Path of Fire will also introduce mounts and…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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.…
Feature: An unusually generous free-to-play model
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…
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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.
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…
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…
Feature: The death and partial return of the superheroic MMO
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…
Feature: RIP, Two Years Late
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.…
Feature: WildStar is tonally and psychologically a free-to-play game already.
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…
Feature: "Not launching free-to-play shut out, potentially, millions"
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.
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.
Feature: Multiplayer martial art game
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],…
It's been a while since I dug out my copy of Guild Wars 2 [official site], but in just a couple days ArenaNet is going to start asking users to test out the new Stronghold PvP game in their Heart of Thorns expansion.
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