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

It's got no niche.

[hivemind_mvgc]

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. :)