Halloween Massive Gaming News

Holidays are always interesting times in the Massive Gaming market and this weekend is no exception. Spooks, trick or treating, interviews, anniversaries, and conferences are just some of the Halloween weekend news to share. Read on for the details.

City of Heroes is running a Trick or Treat and Zombie invasion event this weekend. Folks in Europe looking to get their cape on can look forward to participating sometime next year.

Anarchy Online is celebrating the season with a holiday ball and costume contest, as well as nanotech transformations and monster sightings.

Final Fantasy Online players and developers have a lot to be happy about this weekend. Today is the one-year anniversary of the North American launch, and they're throwing a party to celebrate. In-game, the annual trick or treating, costuming, and spookery is going on. This year they're also throwing around some glamours to let players take the part of monsters for a while. Square-Enix revised upwards it's earning estimates this week, giving even executives reason to smile.

In non-holiday news, Richard Garriot was interviewed by HomeLAN about the upcoming Tabula Rasa game, and MMORPG.com has some new info on Dungeons and Dragons Online from the lead designer.

Finally, the Second Annual State of Play conference is this weekend, drawing Virtual World academics from all over to celebrate Halloween by lecturing. Nerd on, guys.

Update: 10/28 18:50 GMT by Z : There's a press release going around stating that City of Villians playtesters will be drawn from the ranks of veteran CoH players.

Comments

A shame there aren't better player tools for event

[thesandtiger]

In CoH, at least, there have been several player-run events that were very interesting, if only because players interested in hosting them took the time to RP things pretty well.

I would love to see a game that has a system in place for players to do some things that would enhance the events they can do - drop clues and so on.

I bring this up in this topic because CoH has had a few "invasion" type events that lacked any real flavor beyond "oh, look! A thingy spawned!" and maybe a forum post saying "be on the look out for strangeness."

Players, however, would take the ability to make mini events and would likely spend more time on them than Cryptic employees who need to focus on other stuff.

More layers of separation

[happyemoticon]

In-game, the annual trick or treating, costuming, and spookery is going on. This year they're also throwing around some glamours to let players take the part of monsters for a while.

The practice of going into a game and assuming a different persona only to have that persona assume yet another persona is kind of mind-boggling especially if you're a humanities student. I mean, it was bad enough last year when I dressed up as a vampirate.

Re:More layers of separation

[Palidase]

EQ tried this a couple years back and had to quickly shelve it because toons were getting owned by monsters that were manned by actual players with skill and strategery.

EQ did do this for a very short time several years ago. It was not publicized widely at all, and was only available on the test server for a very short period of time. By clicking a special button on the character select, the player was spawned as a randomly selected monster, with a max level of 13.

It was initially intended as a short term concept on Test. Due to the levels involved, the risk wasn't getting wiped by monsters with strong tactics. In fact, it was the opposite. The random monsters still qualified as experience, when killed.

Player_01 loads 2 accounts. One goes in as a toon able to talk to other players. The second account would go in as a monster. The player would then tell friends, through the toon account, where he/she is located. The strategies from this point split into 2 methods.

The first method, was that the friends would kill the "player monster" for easy xp, who then cycled through monsters quickly to get another in the same zone.

My personal favorite tactic was the second. In each zone, some mobs are a significant bit harder than others in the zone. The player would log in and out until getting one of these monsters, and hunt WITH their friends. As none of these mobs are KoS, they were free to roam all over without agroing other monsters, making pulling even easier.

Personally, I leveled many friends' alts, by tanking as a basilisk in Lavastorm.

Interesting concept? Yeah. Unbalancing? Absolutely.

Puzzle Pirates

[diagonti]

Puzzle Pirates (puzzlepirates.com, clients for mac/linux/win) has changed all the hat designs to have very spooky masks and changed all the map graphics to have appropriate themed island maps.

Re:More interesting *after* Halloween

[sakshale]

The most interesting things happening to the MMORPG world will happen in November. Everquest 2 is set to launch on November 8th, while a large majority of the Beta testers have said that it is not ready for release. Of course, that didn't stop SOE from releasing Star Wars: Galaxies well before it was stable, so why should it stop them for Everquest 2?

I beg to disagree. This is the third or fourth time I've participated in a MMORPG beta and EverQuest2 is better prepared than any of the others were, especially SWG and Horizons. Most of the beta testers are busy playing, while a small collection of whiners are busy complaining.

Agreed, there are issues that still need to be addressed, but nothing like those still present in SQG. EQ2, based on character balance, zone construction, mob AI, the questing system and simply great playability, is game is definately ready for release.

I want my, I want my, I want my EQ2!

Re:A shame there aren't better player tools for ev

[fleck_99_99]

Among all the weaknesses (and as a player since launch, trust me -- there are MANY) of SWG, this is probably what kept me hooked the longest. With a rich player-crafting environment, I've seen all sorts of creative uses of in-game vendors, well-named items, "actors" to roleplay key characters, and some out-of-game (typically Web) content to create mini "adventures." Of course, a lot of that was simply the minds behind them -- I've had the pleasure of working with some really creative folks (even professional game designers in their off time) to build these sorts of events.

Then of course, there's Second Life -- nobody can say that lacks tools!