MMO News Wrap-Up

18 Dec 2009 at 11:53:26 by Bill Vaughan

Another week, another MMO News Wrap-up; Read on for the latest on Star Trek Online, Global Agenda, Aion, Age of Conan, Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV.

Final Fantasy fans were thrilled this week, when Square Enix began accepting beta applications for the fabled Final Fantasy XIV. So far there's been a frustratingly thin trickle of information about this game since it was announced in the summer, but the fact that there's likely to be a beta test so soon has got fans, and one or two of us here at IncGamers, pretty excited about getting our hands on a retail copy by perhaps as early as next summer, allowing for the four months+ SE said the beta test will last for.

In other MMO news, Felicia Day and a host of other actors appeared in a video about the voice casting of Guild Wars 2. Each actor speaks a little about the person they play, what motivates them, and what it's like to put a voice to an animated character. The video gives a nice insight into Guild Wars 2 and the background of the characters. If you're looking forward to GW2 as much as I am, you can see this new video over on IGTV.

As the video shows, in GW2 players will have a selection of races to choose from. The first Guild Wars game only allows us to play as human, and that's something our Jeff Hollis looked at in this week's MMO Weekly. In Jeff's previous article, he proposed that GW didn't do as well as it could have if it had offered more playable races, and that MMOs which only offer humans don't do as well as others. This week, he looks further into that claim, listing several MMOs that fell into the “Humans-Only” trap - Hellgate: London, Tabula Rasa and The Matrix Online are perfect examples, all now out of business here in the west.

That's Jeff's opinion though, I'm not too sure. There are many games that limit race choice to human-only and they get by. Aion seems to be one of them. After a tremendously successful start, the shine was somewhat dulled, though, when players started to find that a fair bit of grind was necessary to progress through the levels. As I discovered while playing Aion for my review, which looks at levels 20-30, I hit that very problem in the early twenties before instances became available. However, after I put in a considerable amount of time to get to 30, the very day my review went up, NCsoft announced that it is introducing double XP weekends to reduce the grind issue.

Despite the issues with low XP rewards and a slight shortage of soloable quests, Aion is stunning. I'm sure that some people miss being able to play as Gnomes or Orcs, but one of Aion's main attractions is looks, and people that like playing as angel-like beautiful beings are flocking to it. Besides, with the character creation options, you can make something that closely resembles a gnome and, if you really want to, you can make ugly people too (see pic).

Having said all that, one of the human-only games Jeff mentions, Age of Conan, is still struggling despite various offers and updates. The latest deal announced by Funcom this week is an unlimited trial. New players can play up to level 20, and there's no time limit, so no need to rush. The offer is open until 31 December and you can get the trial by visiting Fileplanet's AoC page.

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