MMO News Wrap Up - Page 2

18 Sep 2009 at 12:31:11 by Bill Vaughan

Strangely enough, news emerged this week that players apparently spend more on free to play games than any other game. A survey revealed that over half of the people taking part had spent money on a F2P title, whereas only a third had spent money on a regular MMO. The majority of people bought in-game currency, something that's prohibited (though it still goes on) in most subscription-based games.

Depending on which way you see it, some possibly sad news came out this week that Star Wars Galaxies is cutting its number of servers in half. Sony Online Entertainment announced that 12 of its 25 servers will shut down on 15 October, following a prolonged free character transfer program. The FCT has been in place for some time, and many of the source servers had been left virtual ghost towns. On the up side, the destination servers are now likely to be bustling with activity, maybe drawing some old players back.

While one Star Wars MMO shrinks a little, another one grows in popularity; Developers for the much-hyped Star Wars: The Old Republic revealed screenshots, concept art and a video of Coruscant, the capital of the Republic. Still recovering from the battering it got from the Sith recently, the Republic are slowly rebuilding their sprawling city.

Cryptic Studios has been busy patching the recently-released MMO, Champions Online, to address issues highlighted by the community. The first patch last week dealt with the adjustment of powersets, and granted a free talent retcon for any character that was made before 08:30 UTC on 10 September. The ability to change weapons at character creation was also added. A couple of days later, an online manual for the game was released, which Cryptic promised would contain useful info for new and veteran players. Not satisfied with that, Cryptic went on to add yet more changes to the game in response to player feedback, nerfing Gadroon critters, making changes to supergroups and the game's performance. Open missions also had their timer increased to 10 minutes to prevent exploits.

Finally, what would an MMO news wrap-up be without mention of the Colossus that is Aion. We exclusively posted the third podcast from the NCsoft developers last week, which revealed a couple of very interested snippets of information about the upcoming game. What may be the game's first expansion, a sort of “fourth dimension” in the Abyss, is discussed, and talk of the game expanding further away from the Tower of Eternity. The podcast also revealed that when the game launches in the west next week, it will contain brand new features that haven't even been seen on Korean live servers yet.

Aion continues to hit the headlines, and only yesterday it was announced that the record-breaking figure of almost 400,000 people had pre-ordered the game. The server pre-selection period begins today for anyone who has pre-ordered Aion, and they also get early access to game servers from Sunday. Aion Launches in NA next Tuesday and in Europe on Friday. We will be keeping a close eye on this title and its progress in the MMO market. Unlike other developers in the past, NCsoft hasn't claimed that this will be the MMO to end all MMOs, but judging by the game's reception so far, we're guessing it's going to be quite a hit.

That's about all for this week, I'll let you get back to levelling, grinding, raiding or whatever you spend your spare time doing. Check back next week for another MMO News Wrap Up.

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