MMO Gaming Expansions Released, Announced

News regarding two new expansions to Massively Multiplayer Games today. Thanks to Gamespot for the fascinating news that Asheron's Call 2 will roll out a new expansion sometime in the future. This announcement was anticipated after Turbine's purchase of Asheron's Call 1 and 2 from Microsoft, but no firm details had yet to be announced. Meanwhile, Yahoo has the press release on Planetside: Aftershock's release today. The waning FPS massive game has finally been reduced to the reasonable price of $20. The new offering includes the core game, the first expansion, and a new expansion that incorporates mechs into the game.

Comments

Planetside: Aftershock

[Dragoon412]

Planetside: Aftershock isn't an expansion, it's just a bundle of Planetside with the (rightfully) maligned Core Combat expansion. They mechs they're advertising (BFRs) on the box are free to any subscriber that has Core Combat.

Re:AC2 was never one of the most popular...

[llefler]

AC2 died before birth. A horrid beta where the developers ignored the constant and loud complaints that all proved true in release.

I've been playing AC for nearly 4 years (unsubscribing this month) and participated in the beta for AC2. Basically, it looked like they took out everything that made AC good and slapped pretty graphics on what was left.

Aside from that, I have never understood the whole MMORPG sequel thing. From a business standpoint, it's absurd. Fragment your existing user base in hopes of attracting new customers, while at the same time doubling your fixed system costs. MMORPGs aren't games that people play for a few months and then move on to the next version.

For Turbine, there's a good chance that the risk they took creating AC2 could kill the entire franchise. Instead of updating AC, they risked their resources on a sequel that failed, now AC is so far behind the curve in technology that new MMORPGs (like World of Warcraft, City of Heros, Final Fantasy) are stealing the few remaining players they have. So by the time the expansion comes out next spring, they're going to have to fight to get us interested in their game again before they can tell us all the new stuff they want to sell.

I'm curious to see the effect EQ2 has on Everquest. It's not going to be the same as when they released Star Wars Galaxies. SWG won't interest a lot of the fantasy genre players.