Kai-Schober
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The Perfect Ten: Free-to-play holdouts
In the increasingly diminishing field of subscription-only MMOs, two distinct camps have formed. There is the Old Guard that has its established playerbase and is simply not interested in jumping on board the F2P train, and then there are the New Kids on the Block (which would make an excellent band name, by the way), who argue that their premium features and AAA content warrant a subscription in the F2P age. A few years ago, doing a list of the final few F2P holdouts would have been a ridiculous proposition, but now it's actually difficult to get to 10 of these. Each company has a different reason that it hasn't given these games more flexible payment options (FPO should replace F2P; pass it on!), and while some have addressed this publicly, others say nothing and leave us to speculate on it. For today's Perfect Ten, we're going to look at the 10 biggest current F2P holdouts in the industry and muse about what's going on behind the scenes. Will this list be impossible to do in a few years or will subscription-only titles come back in a big way? Hey, I don't predict things; I just make lists.
Dark Age of Camelot quest revamp in the works
Big changes are in the offing for Dark Age of Camelot fans. The latest Mythic dev diary sets the stage for a "return home to the Albion, Midgard and Hibernia of old." While the diary is long on pseudo in-character prose, it's short on specific details. What we've gathered, though, is that extensive revamps are in the works for many of the game's quests and more than a few of its classic adventuring locales. Mythic's Kai Schober says that new and returning players "may be hard-pressed to find their way at the outset of their journey," and as such the devs have set about revisiting many of the game's famous towns and villages with an eye towards modernizing the progression path. New types of quests are also in store, and the diary describes them as full of "moral deliberation" that will make for "diverse gameplay experiences as well as provide unique item rewards." Read more at the official DAoC website.
