Tag Archives: mythic

Not much this week regarding MMOs that we didn’t already cover with separate posts already, but there’s still some stuff passed the break.

Here’s just some of what we have for you this week:

Mythic has detailed City siege changes for Warhammer, shots of the Ascension expansion for Perfect World’s Jade Dynasty popped up, Star Trek Online player progression was discuseed, and the open Beta for Alganon starts next Wednesday.

Find out about all of that and more below.

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Mythic has announced that the 10-day limited free trail for Warhammer Online is no more.

Instead, it has been replaced with an endless free trial.

The new trial gives new and returning players and opportunity to play any of the 24 character careers and transfer them over once the player decides to purchase the game. There is a progression max of level 10, though.

Still, not a bad thing overall.

Full PR below.

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Mythic has announced that Warhammer Online will host a special live event, Daemon Moon Rising, for a limited time during the 2009 Halloween season.

Daemon Moon Rising, will run in-game from October 23 through November 2 and will feature the Daemon Mask event quest, a new Daemonball Rally Public Quest, a special RvR scenario, and treats both fair and foul.

Here’s the description:

In Daemon Moon Rising, a fiendish sub-cult of Chaos artificers have bound savage daemons into innocuous carnival masks and smuggled them into the Empire. The Daemon Mask event quest will task players with collecting these possessed masks and defeating the daemons bound within. As a reward for halting the menace of the masks, players will receive a souvenir Daemon Mask and a chance to discover the rare and powerful Magus Daemonarium within a sack of sinister secrets.

The Daemonball Rally Public Quest will pit players of Order and Destruction versus one another in a battle to seize the Daemon Cradle and empower the essence of nightmares against their opponents. Players can also don their masks and participate in “Wake the Dead”, a special running of the High Pass Cemetery RvR scenario available to characters of all tiers during the Daemon Moon Rising live event.

Other rewards available include: the Fiendfang with bonus to healing, damage, renown, and XP; the Face of the Unborn mask; the Meatcleaver’s mask; the Face-Eater’s mask; the arcane Malleus Daemonarium; and special talisman components imbued with the might of Chaos itself.

Sounds fun.

It’s that time of the week again, kiddos. Time for the MMO news round-up for the week.

Unfortunately, this week the pickings were slightly slim. We blame TGS.

However, past the break there is news concerning the artbook for Guild Wars 2, a massive update to Bounty Bay Online, a round-up of news concerning the launch of Fallen Earth, and your chance to score a Star Trek Online Beta key from IncGamers.

Go ahead. Hit the jump.

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Loads of news this week in MMO land, kiddos.

Massively is giving away Beta keys to Star Trek Online, Aion dropped GameGuard and launched its first server, Pirates are everywhere, and Sony is giving you double station cash this weekend.

There is also news concerning Champions Online, EVE, Guild Wars 2, EverQuest, Warhammer, Runes of Magic, and loads of other stuff you can find here instead of searching everywhere.

It’s all past the break.

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During his keynote at GDC Austin, Warhammer Online executive producer Jeff Hickman spoke to attendees about three of the major mistakes Mythic made with the MMO.

These mistakes being challenging play, the lack of economy, and the fact that the game was so easy that social tools were made irrelevant.

“There’s a big difference between easy play and ease of use,” he said. “One of the lessons that we thought we learned from ourselves and other games, was that it’s important to have ease of use, and it’s also important to hit the right balance between easy gameplay, challenging gameplay, and too difficult. We thought we hit that, but Warhammer, in PVE, in the beginning, is too easy. It doesn’t make you thrilled to do it.

[As for] our economy… we just missed the mark. If you look at the reasoning behind the economy, you’ll see things like, ‘Hey, we’re not going to let gold farmers in our game.’ ‘We’re going to try to make sure we have controlled inflation.’ We had all the best reasons in our game, but what it caused us to do was build a game where economy is not important enough.

“Economy brings people together.”

There’s loads more from his talk over on Gamasutra.

• Massively had a chat with Stew Chisam, VP of game operations at Hi-Rez Studios, during DragonCon last week. It’s a video interview, and in it, Chisam chats about how well things are going with Global Agenda since the two closed Betas. If this game has been on your radar, you should check out what Chisam had to say here.

• Ultima Online’s new expansion, Stygian Abyss, has been released and is now available for download on the game’s website. It will run you $29.99.

• The Secret World was all over PAX. Massively was lucky enough to get a preview of the game, Gamespot provided impressions, and Eurogamer talked to Funcom’s Ragnar Tornquist who told the site all about it. Wanna know all about the three different factions, the lore, and see some screens? Then hit all three links for information overload.

• The clown Malatina offers a new solo challenge for plucky adventurers in Runes of Magic. Once per day, she will give players the opportunity to enter a obstacle-packed dungeon, which will be included in the update for the full launch of ‘Chapter II – The Elven Prophecy’, on September 15. Hate clowns, man. US servers will be brought down for 24 hours starting Monday, Sept. 14, at about 3 a.m. PST until Tuesday, Sept. 15, at about 3 a.m. PST. During that time, the forums and Runes of Magic Web site also will be down. All systems will return Tuesday, Sept. 15, at about 3 a.m. PST. The forums and Web site will have a new design to match Chapter II: The Elven Prophecy. More details are through here.

• Before you get surprised and start screaming “Oh Noz! You’ve got zombies in my Star Wars Galaxies!”, read up on it via the official Random House website. Apparently, SOE and LucasArts are adding zombies as part of an October event called Death Troopers, which ties into the horror-themed novel of the same name by Joe Schreiber.

• ROHAN: Blood Feud (Renaissance of Human and Nature) now has one million accounts. Cool. To celebrate, the team are holding Million Member Mania events from now until September 21, where players who win the various games included will be awarded with one million in game currency. Very cool. More through Massively.

• The Aion team is aware of issues with lag, the authentication server, gameguard anti-cheating program, forum authentication script, and beta key release schedule, and are devoting resources to finding out the cause. Rest assured, a patch will be released ASAP. Good to know. More on that here. Thanks, Massively.

• Dungeons & Dragons Online went free-to-play in North America this week, and to get you excited for it, Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a couple videos posted, along with some information on it. If that just isn’t quite enough to placate you, Massively has a launch day news round-up for the title. Hooray!

• Karos Online is currently in closed Beta, and other than some interesting bits to PvP, the game takes a different approach to crafting and hobbies than what you may be used to in an MMO, by incorporating both into an alternate character progression tree. Also, instead of running around looking for mats, you may end up fighting over them instead, such as through the mining area which will be rife with PvP. More through the link.

The news this week in MMOs was a bit scarce, unless it was huge news that hit the front page – which a lot of it did.

However, there were other things going on: a new faction for EVE Online, bonus goodies for EverQuest II, content changes for Guild Wars, and a few other things you can read about on past the break.

TGS is coming up, so who knows what lies in store for us by way of new announcements.

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BioWare and Mythic boss Ray Muzyka is a pleasure to interview. Undoubtedly one of the most professional and ambitious execs in the global games trade, Muzyka heads up some of the world’s biggest core games projects in Mass Effect, Warhammer Online, Dragon Age and upcoming MMO behemoth, Star Wars: The Old Republic. He consistently uses words like “humble” and “honour”: not usual in games-boss-ego-land.

We caught up with the Canadian in Cologne last week. Hit the link for the full thing.

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Loads of World of Warcraft stuff is coming out of BlizzCon 09, but you knew that already.

We also told you about the new CCP game Dust 514 this week thanks to GamesCom, but there is other stuff that went on in the world of MMOs as well.

The Avaline service is now available in Second Life, Warhammer Online is having it’s Wild Hunt Event, an Aion has revealed the Cleric class.

More is through the break.

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Mythic and Electronic Arts announced that there will be celebration activities for the one year  of Warhammer Online.

Kicking off on August 31 and going through the month of September, there will be weekend-only scenarios, a month long 20 percent experience and renown bonus, special in-game items for all players, veteran rewards, and The Wild Hunt live-event.

“This anniversary marks a major milestone for WAR, the Mythic development team, and our fantastic community of players,” said Mythic’s Jeff Hickman.

“We could think of no better way of marking this occasion than by celebrating our success with our fans for the entire month of September. We’ve got new content to share with the Wild Hunt live event, special versions of popular scenarios, fireworks, Halfling pies, and exploding stout!

“Now that is a party Warhammer style!”

Loads more information is included in the press release past the break.

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Loads of stuff happened this week with MMOs. Bethesda laughed off an Elder Scrolls MMO, APB started the Beta application process, Aion released pretty trailers, Star Wars will be playable at GamesCom and all other sorts of interesting things happened.

What we didn’t tell you about was that Lord of the Rings Online got some new jewelry and bounty quests in Esteldin, Funcom will announce Conan stuff at PAX, and there were some rumored leaks on the upcoming WoW expansion posted all over God’s green earth.

For all of this and more, read on past the break.

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Loads of stuff as usual going on this week with MMOs.

CCP has files a trademark fro Dust 514, which strangely enough resembles the EvE Logo, Warhammer’s latest patch is up on the test server, Guild Wars had some more class tweaks, and the summer festivities have been extended for Lord of the Rings Online.

Load of stuff, really. Read on past the break for more.

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Loads of Beta news this week in MMO round-up.

IncGamers made good on its promise, and has posted part-two of its Aion Beta preview, Mortal Online’s second stage of Beta testing begins soon, CrimeCraft started its Beta and Alganon is prepping for one.

Loads of MMO are going to be coming out soon, and there will be more than just fantasy offerings on the table. Sci-fi, apocalyptic, modern, and steampunk are all heading our way.

Hit the jump for more on the week in MMOs.

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Mythic has announced that Mac users will soon be able to play Warhammer Online with the PC users this fall.

The Beta of the Mac version of Warhammer Online will allow current players to download a client to their Mac computers and play with their live game accounts.

Players who do not have an existing live account, can download a 10-day beta trial account and receive an exclusive title and trophy reward for their characters within the game.

To get in on the Beta and get the 10-day free trial hit this link.

Press release is through the break.
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Warhammer Online producer Jeff Skalski has revealed that the next in-game Live Event will be called The Wild Hunt.

It is slated for release around the time of the game’s first birthday in September and will be part of patch 1.3.1 which contains updates and streamlining to the Realm vs Realm play.

War’s latest patch is expected this month, and included crowd control and AoE ability changes, and tweaks to the Archmage and Shaman classes. RvR rewards will be increased, and a 150 percent bonus to experience when players buff themselves with Field of Glory.

Open RvR rewards will be increased for players that fight enemy players outside keeps and battlefield objectives. Players will receive a 150% bonus to experience with the Field of Glory buff, up from 100%, and a 150% bonus to renown.

More through IncGamers and the official Warhammer site.

BioWare co-head Greg Zeschuk has told Eurogamer that BioWare and Mythic are still two different entities, despite being pulled together into one EA group under Ray Muzyka’s leadership.

“There absolutely is still BioWare and Mythic, we’re not merged at all,” he said, speaking in London last week.

“That’s kind of how it all works. Ray and I, we’ve never operated by telling people what to do, that’s one of the reasons why we have great games: we don’t tell our team how to build Dragon Age. We say, ‘Here are the goals,’ and they go and figure out how they want it to work.”

It was announced last month that Mythic boss Mark Jacobs would be departing the developer, and that Muzyka would be assuming control of the new division.

Loads this week in MMO news, and some is more interesting than what we have been offered in previous weeks.

FussionFall is getting an expansion for its 5 million users, the EQI&II trademark rumors turned out to be new expansions, Star Wars will be on hand at Comic-Con, and Conan got a new update.

Also, Warhammer and LotRO are celebrating the summer with festivities to make things a bit more zany and fun.

Find out all about these and others after the break.

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BioWare co-founder Ray Muzyka has said that the reorganization at EA, putting him in partial charge of the newly formed MMO/RPRG group, has nothing to do with putting one studio above the other.

Instead, it’s about combining forces to make things more efficient.

“Structurally, each of the organizations remains intact. They’re working on the same projects they were working on before, I just have another studio that reports into me,” Muzyka told Gamasutra. “It’s not that BioWare or Mythic is changing; they’re retaining their brands, their unique cultural identities, their projects they are working on. I’m really excited about what we’re doing; we have great people at each location.

“It’s a collaboration opportunity. Each of the groups continues to make the same thing in their [own locations]. But it’s fuelling and enabling more communication, collaboration, best practice sharing, encouraging each other to play each others’ games — but no formal change per se in what anybody’s doing. It’s a recognition that there’s a lot of synergy between them already. I’m going to make sure everyone at each location knows who the others are, and their comparable roles, and to make sure they talk.

“The outward brands that are still very much the consumer-facing identities, the cultural identities, are Mythic and BioWare, and I’m really proud of those two brands. They’re storied brands, they’re award-winning studios. Very much they’re going to be partner studios. There are three BioWare studios already — Edmonton, Austin, and Montreal — and one Mythic studio, but Mythic is very much a strong identity and voice and brand and group. I’m really happy with that.

“That’s the way I want it, that’s the way they want it.”

More through the link.

Thanks, Blue.

Mark Jacobs has written a farewell of sorts to fans and former colleagues via his blog, Games are a Niche Market.

The former head of Mythic explains his departure and talks a bit about the changes at the company he co-founded with Rob Denton.

“Early in May, Electronic Arts let me know that they wanted to make some changes within the Games Label and as a result of those changes I have been out of the office (and out of touch with the team, game, etc.) since that day,” he wrote.

“If you are looking or expecting me to damn EA or anyone there, you will be sorely disappointed. Over my 23 years of making games professionally I have refrained from attacking the competition, former and/or current partners, other game developers, etc. except on a few very rare instances.

“I have no intention of breaking with tradition at the present time and I hope my track record in this regard remains unchanged for the rest of my career.”

You can read the full thing through here.

Via MMORPG.