Slashdot Mirror
Online World News
Several tidbits of info for you today regarding developments in Online Worlds. Lineage II is going to be adding a gambling component. Players will be able to place bets on monster races or purchase lottery tickets. MMORPG.com has a story discussing the fact that the excellent crafting based game A Tale in the Desert now has a Mac Client. Players on Windows, Linux, and Mac can now experience the Second Telling. Anarchy Online is now available for free download. Prospective players can download the client and have 14 days to experience the game before they have to decide to take up the monthly fee or not. Starting next week FilePlanet will be giving away 20,000 Beta Slots for The Matrix Online. Speaking of Betas, the Dark Age of Camelot: Catacombs Beta application is now available. Congratulations also to Mythic Entertainment and DAoC, who is celebrating it's 3rd Anniversary this week. The Blizzard site has up a new Q&A about World of Warcraft. It sounds like some features of the game are going to slip to post-launch. Combined with the rapidly approaching Open Beta this would seem to confirm that the game will be launching within a month or two.
You forgot to mention Everquest 2... probably the biggest competitor to WoW at this point.
-fanboy
Not enough line breaks... head exploding.
...but I'm still playing on a neverwinter nights persistant world. Being addicted is bad enough without having to pay by the month for it.
Beep beep.
Why is this offtopic? The user who posted the story, "Zonk" has no link on them, of course, we'd ask who it is!
I would be sold if they included a BFG and railgun.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
So anyway, since AO is free for 14 days is it worth giving it a shot? I played EQ for a couple years, was addicted to it, got depressed by my "/played" and quit it one day. I've been playing a bit of Planetside lately because that's only $10 to download, but I doubt I'll keep it up much longer. It gets rather boring and repetitive. Is AO "EQ in space"? Or is it more interesting?
Carl
Vote Libertarian
It is worth mentioning that you can play Anarchy Online in Linux using CVS Cedega:
AO Linux
Works great for me! I use Windowmaker and while playing full-screen, desktop switching still works without texture corruption (I get texture corruption switching desktops running in windowed mode).
--
That really makes me question when this kind of thing is going to run afoul of U.S. gaming laws. Ultimately, if it can be shown that virtual currency has quantifiable value and and exchange rate with real world currency, would this not constitute real gambling? I am aware that Lineage may not be hosted in the U.S., but many online games are. Any opinions from lawyers or others who may be knowledgable?
Gambling in MMORPGs has already been done for a while now. I know for a fact that Star Wars Galaxies has both slots and roulette, and I'm sure other games have similar gambling systems with in-game money. Whoever is posting this stuff really should do a little more research than believing whatever they read on the internet..
I expect many people to drop whatever they are playing to switchover. I know people that cancled their five year old everqust accounts after playing WoW for an hour.
If space MMORGs are your thing, you might consider checking out Vendetta online, which is currently in Beta testing and features Windows, Linux and Mac clients.
This is the same Vendetta that had been alpha testing for ages, looked like it wasn't going to happen, got all but abandoned and yet somewhere from the ashes the developers have pulled out the stops and built a mission-based, group-orientated space fighting and trading MMORG. So far so good and if you see "Nexus 6" knocking around, give me a couple of shots across the bows and say hello.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Guild Wars is the next mmo i'm going to get in to. It has mmo features but looks like it will remove the tedious parts from mmos. Plus there is no monthly charge. But out of the current mmo's I think WoW looks the coolest. I played it till level 4 and I was impressed about how cool the early quests were.
www.guildwars.com
and it wanted my credit card number. Why? I know World of Warcraft didn't required it. I wonder if the beta will require it too.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The news post says:
Starting next week FilePlanet will be giving away 20,000 Beta Slots for The Matrix Online. The Beta starts early next month, and between now and then there will be many opportunities to gain access to the closed Beta.
I think you are being way too picky with how he words it. He states that the 20,000 slots being added to the beta starts next month. In fact he even states that the closed beta is currently going on when he says there will be many opportunities to gain access to it BEFORE the 20,000 slots are added.
Your spinning the World of Warcraft thing a little. How many MMORPGs have shipped complete? That's right: 0! In fact, some launches have been total disasters, such as WWII online, Horizons, Shadowbane. World of Warcraft even "incomplete" is more complete and stable than most existing MMORPGS. It's for the best that WoW launches soon, because if Blizzard was not given a shove from Vivendi they would not have released it until 2006 :)
To me, it is ridiculous that they make you pay for the original game media and then ALSO charge you a monthly fee! And then keep grabbing for your money with expansion packs, ugh.
Unfortunately, it kind of needs to be done if they're going to make any money off it. The first buy is because a lot of work went into making the software, the monthly fee is necessary to maintain the servers, pay the GMs, etc., and the expansion packs cost money for the same reason the main software does. TANSTAAFL.
By reading this you acknowledge that you have read it.
Before you get bored with EVE's utter lack of content.
:(
I got myself a battleship, then promptly got bored completely, despite being in a relatively large corp that did lots of PvP (Xanadu). I just never liked EVE's PvP... Hours of boredom camping gates/jumping around for 10 seconds of excitement.
I returned to DAoC this summer, after having experienced another game, I can appreciate DAoC's endgame much more, partly because they overhauled their RvR (DAoC's equivalent of PvP) system completely with their New Frontiers expansion and it's a lot more fun than Emain Gate Pong used to be. (Note that NF is one of Mythic's free expansions, so any DAoC player can enjoy it without spending any extra money.)
EVE had a LOT of potential, and still does. It just has no content and no endgame.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Jump To Lightspeed (the expansion to SWG) is also entering a public beta and should ship sometime soon.
The players tried to take the field. The marching band refused to yield...
My small business, MultiUser RolePlay Entertainment, is currently in the process for the development of a Java game engine plus a Java-based combination online game client integrated with a distributed, streaming MPI client (i.e. Seti@Home, Capcal, etc) that only runs while the user is online playing games.
For more info on the work being done, feel free to check out our site: http://www.murpe.com/ and look under the 'XML Game Client' link.
-- M
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
Several weeks ago there was a major shake-up in the Planetside universe - the story was that the Ancients (the alien race known as the Vanu) briefly returned, activating technology that displaced the landscape. This was, of course, just cover for the developers to delete one of the maps (which sucked and was the least-liked) and add three completely new maps to the game instead.
This laid the groundwork for the series of additions coming this month to owners of the Core Combat expansion pack - a whole new class of vehicles. Battle Frame Robotics (BFRs). Yes, giant robots - which will make for the coolest and most epic battles yet. (You can still kill and be killed by BFRs if you don't own the expansion pack, you just can't pilot them or visit the regions required to obtain them).
To coincide with the release of the upgrades, a brand-new bundle, Aftershock will be released at retail - which includes the base game and the previous expansion pack, Core Combat. Additionally - the price of the expansion pack has been dropped to $9.99 for existing subscribers.
(not a developer, just a rabid fan who's been playing this game since release over a year ago. Any and all additions to this marvelous game are welcome, but the community (and me!) wants SOE to forget this Everquest crap and start making Planetside 2 RIGHT NOW, dammit.)
Up until I was hired on as the Slashdot Games editor, I was an editor over at MMORPGDot.com, where I was known as Dialogue. I also recently worked with simoniker on the Gaming Hacks book for O'Reilly Press. I do have a website, located at Randomdialogue.net. I don't keep my editor name linked to it because I'm not sure I could handle the traffic.
Another enjoyable game is Saga of Ryzom which resently launched.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
...these features that won't make retail have been known for quite some time that they won't be in retail. No big news here.....
Interesting that there was no mention of Cryptic Studio's game, City of Heroes http://www.cityofheroes.com/ Recently hit the 200,000 subscriber mark and is still going strong.
So far CoH is a nice change from any other MMORPG that I have played. No items, no player economy, no camping and lots of action. Hopefully the fun factor in this game will influence new games in the future to think outside the box...
I can't bring myself to pay for something like fileplanet when the rest of the internet offers what they have for free. I understand that bandwidth isn't free but when my ISP downloads all the major demos to their local file servers so that they save bandwidth, it just doesn't make sense.
Mmmmm I remember when they first opened up- then everyone discovered there was a "flaw" in the math and you could exploit it to make millions.....
Then they reset the servers to a save game that was 24 hours before the patch...
I was looking forward to Guild Wars however since it is being created by NC Soft I will now skip that one too.
Actually Guild Wars and City of Heroes are published by NC Soft, but are created by ArenaNet and Cryptic Studios respectively. And there is a world of difference...CoH is pretty much the antithesis of Lineage 2 in terms of MMORPG philosophy: a shipload of character options, fast-paced and exciting combat, no crafting, and no PvP (yet). So don't hold Lineage's suckitude against the other dev teams...
If you aren't in to the lastest FPS and don't really want to invest 80 hours a week building up your charaters, you can play some classic and fun games at Game Table Online. The have Kill Dr. Lucky and other card games and usually have players available. I found them at Gen Con and signed up as soon as I got home.
Viv
Gmail invites for ip
In fact, Anarchy Online was one of the first, if not the first, MMORPG to offer a free trial. The 'news' here is that the trial length has just been increased from 7 days to 14 days.