Tag Archives: mythic

Mythic and EA are giving away Warhammer Online for free.

That’s right. The game will cost you nothing. Sort of.

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Warhammer Online producer, Carrie Gouskos, has posted a new state of the game message up on the official site, and in it is quite a bit of information on upcoming updates to the game.

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Not much this week that didn’t hit the front page, but head on through the break and you will find out all sorts of stuff.

Information on the upcoming Warhammer patch, Martial Arts for City of Heroes, and a Beta weekend for Global Agenda.

Go on and hit the button.

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EA’s been getting a little too friendly with its axe lately, and word is, Mythic was one of the many developers that got in the way of said budding romance. In response, Mythic Executive Producer Jeff Hickman posted a letter to the community, wherein he restated his company’s commitment – first and foremost – to its games.

“With all that is going on within Mythic Entertainment and EA, I would like to take a moment to reinforce the studio’s dedication to both our games and our players. At Mythic, we remain committed to our games and the passionate people who play them – we’re going to continue to deliver the content and service that keeps you playing,” he wrote.

“We want to assure our community that we will maintain the same high level of customer support you’ve come to expect and continue to improve our games with an exciting schedule of patches, live events and new content.”

Keep on fighting the good fight, Mythic. Stormy weather’s ahead, but the ship’s certainly not underwater just yet.

Rumor has it that the 1500 jobs and the dozen or so in-development games that were cut at EA affected studios Pandemic, Maxis and almost the entire Command & Conquer team.

According to a source close to Kotaku, the team working on Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight was notified today that once the game ships some time in 2010, almost the entire team is to hit the road.

While this is not a surprising move by the studio, as loads like it have a tendency to do that once a game ships, the cutbacks also landed blows to EA Maxis, Rupture Studios and Pandemic with remaining workers being relocated to EA Los Angeles and Redwood.

Rumors also state that EA has laid-off staff at Black Box, Mythic Entertainment and Tiburon.

We’ll sent out a mail and see if anyone gets back with us.

According to a report by Kotaku, EA has cut loose a fair bit of it’s staff today from some of it’s studios.

It comes as the publisher today bought social games firm Playfish for $300 million.

The studios affected include Tiburon and BlackBox, as well as Mythic and EA’s Redwood studio from their QA department.

We’ll leave EA an email, and see what they say.

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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