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 was one of my favourite places in the first Guild Wars so I’m quite keen to explore it in full GW2 pretty-o-vision. Read the rest of this entry »
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 new elite specialisations for all classes. Here, check out the big ol’ video that ArenaNet streamed to announce all this: Read the rest of this entry »
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 [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.
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 can ‘tag’ between them mid-combat.
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.
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 (
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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.
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.
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.
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.
