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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.
Planetside is having a hard time for two reasons: 1. Most new FPS games coming out support up to 64 players on a single server, and the netcode is good enough that you don't need a T3 to run a server. It's hard to pitch the idea of $13 a month to a gamer who can buy Battlefield Vietnam once and play on packed servers for free. 2. The Planetside dev team cut out pretty much everything that had anything to do with an RPG during the beta testing, so there's no long term goals, no "loot", no personalization of player stats... It's purely an MMOFPS. There's no role-playing aspect whatsoever, so you're not gonna appeal to the usual MMO crowd. I mean, the people who wanna shoot stuff buy a (free play) FPS. The people who wanna roleplay buy an RPG. And the people who wanna be elf mangina play EQ or Lineage II. :)
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It's called Throne of Oblivion, and looks to be a major upgrade to the sieging system in Shadowbane, lending more purpose to the pillaging of one's neighbours. Shadowbane is still suffering from lag, lack of quests, lack of dungeons, a dated graphics engine, and an abysmal physics engine. It's a real shame, because the concept and the lore are far and away the best in the MMORPG crowd.
You can not only automate everything but decal makes it very easy to do all sorts of stuff with the datastream. Basically it extends the capabilities of the UI FARFARFAR beyond what the developers of the game anticipated. Add to that UCM programs (WarBot) that have "stealth" modes that detect players well before they show up on radar and log you out, then wait a specified amount of time before logging back in. Plus they have alarm sounds in case an +admin actually shows up.
The only people that play the game now are those with nothing better to do and the ones that let their computers play for them. One prominent ebay seller (Killean) has 5 computers running Unnattended Combat Macros and Tradebots. The only time he touches them is when one crashes or when he actually has to make deliveries. It is utterly ridiculous and because of it I doubt I'll ever play another Turdbine game again.