Slashdot Mirror

Pika writes "According to the Business Wire, Electronic Arts is to acquire Mythic Entertainment, makers of the popular MMORPGs Dark Age of Camelot and the forthcoming Warhammer Online. With EA being well known for killing MMORPGs, even those with loyal and sizable followings, how does this bode for Mythic's titles?"

Pika the Mad writes "Reuters has a concise but interesting article up about how video games will help decide the format war between Blu-ray and HD DVD. According to industry analysts "What Sony and Microsoft decide to announce publicly or to dealers at E3 next week will be key." So this year's E3 could very well be a deciding factor in how you view your movie library for years to come."

Pika the Mad writes "Wired News has a neat story about the recent U.S.A. National Memory Championship.'The finalists competed in three brand-new recall events that forced them to remember and recite aloud random words, personality characteristics of guests at a fictional tea party and the order of cards in two decks of playing cards, parroting answers in front of a crowd of onlookers, photographers and video cameras.' The winner claims that in the world finals he'll be competing against people who can memorize an entire deck of cards in 30 seconds."

SirBruce writes "Corpnews is reporting that two separate sources have told them The Matrix Online has been sold to Sony Online Entertainment. Monolith is getting out of the MMO business altogether. SOE has also acquired the rights from Monolith for another MMO that was in development but recently cancelled a DC Comics MMOG. (ed: Remember the DC vs. NCSoft squabble?) Most of Monlith's MMO employees are being laid off with SOE taking over." Commentary at Plaguelands. Obviously at this point still just a rumour, so have some salt with this news.

Garthilk writes "In the last two weeks since E3 I've read at least three gushing reviews about an upcoming game by Simutronics, called Hero's Journey. MMORPG.com gave it their E3 best of show award. CorpNews said it blew their pants off. IGN even had a good interview with the CEO of Simutronics. Warcry even goes so far as to say that it will turn gaming world upside down. The question still lingers though, can a company who has focused on text based roleplaying games cut it in the graphical world?" From the MMORPG.com article: "In a year full of big budget, big company titles, Hero's Journey offered graphics on par with all the major players and an extremely exciting look at their game play. E3 2005 marked a show where several high profile games were touting very similar features (state based combat), and in swept Hero's Journey with their innovative group combat, highly cinematic missions, interactive environments and hands down the best character creation ever put into an MMORPG."

Modesitt writes "Corpnews offers some thoughts on how E3 has changed for the worse. Several factors are mentioned, but the increased number of people sporting 'Exhibits Only' badges courtesy of Best Buy, CompUSA, and EB Games is focused on as a cause of the descent of E3." From the article: "The only legitimate purpose to E3 is as a media event, for companies to show off their products to the public via the media (after all, such a tiny sliver of the gaming public could go to E3, even if it was open to the public, that the press must inevitably mediate this process), and it is failing terribly at that. Companies are no longer courting the press, or even attempting to develop new contacts among them; now, it is an established siege war between giant website network and shitty magazines, and arrogant companies who divulge the merest crumbs and act as if this were a thunderous pronouncement from Yahweh."

Modesitt writes "Corpnews offers some thoughts on how E3 has changed for the worse. Several factors are mentioned, but the increased number of people sporting 'Exhibits Only' badges courtesy of Best Buy, CompUSA, and EB Games is focused on as a cause of the descent of E3." From the article: "The only legitimate purpose to E3 is as a media event, for companies to show off their products to the public via the media (after all, such a tiny sliver of the gaming public could go to E3, even if it was open to the public, that the press must inevitably mediate this process), and it is failing terribly at that. Companies are no longer courting the press, or even attempting to develop new contacts among them; now, it is an established siege war between giant website network and shitty magazines, and arrogant companies who divulge the merest crumbs and act as if this were a thunderous pronouncement from Yahweh."

Bungie will be making a lot of changes at the home office, doubling their staff to ramp up for Halo 3. Changes for fans of the City of Heroes comic are coming as well, as NCSoft announced early this week that they were signing Top Cow publishing to take over the book. There will be plenty of announcements next week at the Game Developer's Conference, where Nintendo will be discussing their plans for Network gaming. MMOGs are, of course, the most networked of games and there is lots of MMO-related news to share this week. Final Fantasy XI players have a new Vana'diel Tribune to peruse, and if you'd like to share some stories the folks over at videogamestudies.com are interested in your characters. Not a new story, but one worth sharing is the republishing of The Big Scam. The Eve Online tale of real-life scammery and backstabbery is well worth a read. Sharing online tales is fun, and 1up.com has excellent journals about their online adventures. Warcraft Stories, My Life in Vana'diel, Memoirs of an Urban Vigilante, and Hooked on Evercrack were all updated this week. Finally, Corpnews has a bright note from the world of Star Wars Galaxies to share as Lord Vader took some time to visit the troops in the field. Update: 03/07 17:18 GMT by Z : As CapeMonkey pointed out, I had the wrong barnyard animal in talking about the CoH Comic.

The interview on Okratas we mentioned yesterday was mostly funny. Game currency seller IGE responded to the honest (if ham fisted) questions of a reporter with harsh marketroid speak. A reporter at Warcry responded with his own reactions, expressing publicly some of the distaste the average MMOG player has for IGE. Since then threads started last week in various online communities have started to appear on online news sites, shedding some more light on uncomfortable realities about IGE. Namely, that the currency seller apparently owns gaming media outlet OGaming. Read on for more.

Ogaming is a hub site much like Warcry, with a sub-site about most of the major Massively Multiplayer Games out there. Some enterprising /whois work by the original author of the WowCensus thread led him to realize that OGaming was registered with the same street address used for IGE's New York Office. OGaming's registration information was updated on the 10th, and now displays the name and address of a proxy registration service. Further damning is the thought that at one point a page on the Ogaming site claimed to own Thottbot.com, a universally respected and utilized tool for World of Warcraft in-game information.

The page that once claimed this (an advertising page) is now blank, with the words "under construction" displayed there. The Internet Archive's last update for ogaming.com is this time last year, so there is no way to check on the authenticity of that claim. If it is true it's disquieting to say the least. Thottbot is a massive database of in-game quest, item, character, and drop frequency information. Thottbot's information was gained through the goodwill and work of World of Warcraft players. The popular UI enhancement, Cosmos, included a plugin that sent information from the user's playing experience back to Thottbot. This included locations of enemies, the types of loot dropped, items the character had, and other specific details. While Thottbot claims to only keep information that is pertinent to other players, with the revelation that they may be owned by the disreputable IGE their trustworthiness is out the window.

This revelation didn't stay quiet for long, with MMOG sites CorpNews, Grimwell.com, and Allakhazam all creating discussions of their own about this weighty topic.

The authenticity of this story is hard to prove or disprove at this point, with the OGaming.com and Thottbot.com domains having a proxy listed under their contact information. But if it's hard to believe that IGE would go to the trouble of owning a media outlet and a popular plugin, think again. Garthilk writes "Cindy Bowens, community manager for Sigil Games online and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, outlines their stance on secondary market items, and how they deal with IGE. Most interesting is the fact that IGE approached Sigil, and had offered to cut Sigil in on the revenue that IGE might make in the future."

Update: 02/15 20:07 GMT by Z : Drey pointed out in the comments that, at least for the time being, Google still has a cache of the page listing Thottbot as an Ogaming site.

An anonymous reader writes "The Corporation recently posted a four-part series asking a few well known MMOG developers their opinions of the past year in the genre. Participants include Richard Garriott, creator of the Ultima series and Tabula Rasa, Walter Yarbrough, Content Producer for Dark Ages of Camelot, Damion Schubert, former Lead Designer for Meridian59, the cancelled UO2, and presently the Lead Designer for Shadowbane, and Raph Koster, former Lead Designer for Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, and present Creative Director for Sony Online Entertainment."

An anonymous reader writes "The Corporation recently posted a four-part series asking a few well known MMOG developers their opinions of the past year in the genre. Participants include Richard Garriott, creator of the Ultima series and Tabula Rasa, Walter Yarbrough, Content Producer for Dark Ages of Camelot, Damion Schubert, former Lead Designer for Meridian59, the cancelled UO2, and presently the Lead Designer for Shadowbane, and Raph Koster, former Lead Designer for Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, and present Creative Director for Sony Online Entertainment."

An anonymous reader writes "The Corporation recently posted a four-part series asking a few well known MMOG developers their opinions of the past year in the genre. Participants include Richard Garriott, creator of the Ultima series and Tabula Rasa, Walter Yarbrough, Content Producer for Dark Ages of Camelot, Damion Schubert, former Lead Designer for Meridian59, the cancelled UO2, and presently the Lead Designer for Shadowbane, and Raph Koster, former Lead Designer for Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, and present Creative Director for Sony Online Entertainment."

An anonymous reader writes "The Corporation recently posted a four-part series asking a few well known MMOG developers their opinions of the past year in the genre. Participants include Richard Garriott, creator of the Ultima series and Tabula Rasa, Walter Yarbrough, Content Producer for Dark Ages of Camelot, Damion Schubert, former Lead Designer for Meridian59, the cancelled UO2, and presently the Lead Designer for Shadowbane, and Raph Koster, former Lead Designer for Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, and present Creative Director for Sony Online Entertainment."

An anonymous reader writes "The Corporation recently posted a four-part series asking a few well known MMOG developers their opinions of the past year in the genre. Participants include Richard Garriott, creator of the Ultima series and Tabula Rasa, Walter Yarbrough, Content Producer for Dark Ages of Camelot, Damion Schubert, former Lead Designer for Meridian59, the cancelled UO2, and presently the Lead Designer for Shadowbane, and Raph Koster, former Lead Designer for Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, and present Creative Director for Sony Online Entertainment."

Thanks to Corpnews.com for its discussion of the history of the Ultima MMO franchise in the content of the recent cancellation of MMO title Ultima X: Odyssey. The author argues of the cancellation: "This isn't a surprise. No, really. More fundamentally, all this points to the fact that somebody in EA's headcheese department is scared stiff of potentially sapping subscribers from the only truly successful title [Ultima Online] to come out of the company's development sweatshops." He claims: "Furthermore, all this comes at a time when the amount of 'surefire bets' in the industry seems to be dropping exponentially. Miniscule subscription bases for former hot-ticket games like Horizons and Shadowbane, coupled with disappointing numbers for Star Wars Galaxies - at last count, the game widely predicted to crack the MMO industry open and bring in a new rush of players... make it easier than ever for suits to pull the plug on projects which require millions of dollars to even hit the shallow waters of beta." Where does EA go from here with the online Ultima franchise, given that this is the second cancelled online Ultima title?

Thanks to CorpNews for its recent round-up analyzing and rating the biggest PC massively multiplayer games. Along with subscription estimates similar to the SirBruce analysis graph, there's sharp-tongued comments on performance for Ultima Online ("It's really all your fault. If you weren't a big hit, would others have followed?"), EverQuest ("Say what you will... it knew its target audience and hit it hard enough to make EQ part of popular culture"), and Asheron's Call ("Talk about the little engine that could.")