dungeon-runners
Latest
Jukebox Heroes: Dungeon Runners' soundtrack
Does anyone still remember Dungeon Runners? I do, at least. It was that quirky Diablo-style MMO from NCsoft that ran from 2007 to 2010, openly lampooning RPG and online gaming tropes while actually being pretty fun to play. I dipped in and out of it over the years, never being fully engrossed but appreciating its sense of humor -- and its soundtrack. As Composer Tracy W. Bush put it in his interview with us a while back, "The music was a mish-mosh of straightforward Diablo-style dungeon crawly stuff in the exploration bits, but when it came to the boss fights, each of them was a specific sub genre of music. I did country and western, black metal, klezmer, an oompa loompa song, disco... I can't even remember them all. I had a blast." I had a blast myself listening through the score, which lives on to this day, and have a selection of hand-picked tracks that I think nails the attitude that Dungeon Runners exuded.
Jukebox Heroes: Tracy W. Bush opens up about WoW, Dungeon Runners, and DCUO
Odds are that even if you don't know who Tracy W. Bush is, you've allowed him to pipe music from his mind directly into your ears at one point or another during your MMO gameplay. Bush has contributed to tons of MMO soundtracks over the past decade-plus, including World of Warcraft, Tabula Rasa, Dungeon Runners, Auto Assault, and DC Universe Online. It was actually this column's discussion of the Tabula Rasa soundtrack that prompted Bush to write in (fun fact: Blue Turns to Grey was the first track he wrote for the game, but the team held off putting it in until the very end), and I asked him if he'd be open to chatting about his collective work here. That didn't take much arm-twisting, no sirree. So with that, I'm going to turn the mike over to Tracy Bush and let him share with you what it's like to create soundscapes that echo so powerfully in your memories.
The Perfect Ten: Final moments of MMOs, part 1
Maybe many of us would just rather remember MMOs as they were in life rather than at the moment of their demise. But I believe that how a game went out is incredibly fascinating for many reasons and worthy of examination. It's in these final moments when an entire community has to say goodbye. It's in these moments that the developers mourn as well before pulling the plug. It's in these moments that history is being made one last time. And it goes without saying that it's in these moments that everyone curses the unfairness of it all. Today we're going to watch the first half of 10 videos featuring MMOs in their final moments. It's here we'll see how weird, crazy, sad, and interesting things can get. Maybe you were part of one (or more) of these moments or are simply curious what it was like. Either way, it's the end of the world as we know it. And we feel fine.
The Game Archaeologist: Steve Nichols' The Realm Online debriefing, part 2
This week we continue our interview with Steve Nichols, one of the original lead developers on The Realm Online. After his work on this pioneering title, Nichols expanded his MMO resume with projects such as the never-seen Middle-earth Online (MEO), the seminal Freelancer, the PvP-centric Shadowbane, and the cult classic Dungeon Runners. These days, Nichols is with Retired Astronaut Collective, continuing to create games for all of us nutty players to enjoy. In this riveting conclusion to our talk on The Realm Online, Nichols discusses the difficulties of the game's promotions, lessons learned from his time on the project, and the sundry secrets of hanky-panky in this early MMO.
Meet Heroes of Evermore, Dungeon Runners' spiritual successor
Almost three years ago, a quirky and charming MMO died. It was NCsoft's Dungeon Runners, a Diablo-like action title that had a wicked funny streak running through it. We were genuinely sad to see it go away, but perhaps not as sad as its producer, Steve Nichols. In fact, Dungeon Runners was such an influence on his life that when he moved on to a new studio, he brought with him the idea of creating another MMO in the same vein. Today we caught up with Nichols to talk about that project, called Heroes of Evermore. Heroes of Evermore is currently in pre-alpha but is pushing hard to make strides in 2013 toward release. What would the spiritual successor to Dungeon Runners look like? You're about to find out!
Leaderboard: MMO most worthy of resurrection
I had an interesting revelation this past week. While it seems that we've had so many MMOs shutting down over the year, when I look at the big picture of all of the major titles that have been released, the vast majority of them are still in operation. It made me realize just how resilient and strong this industry is. Yet there are those games that have seen their final days and exist now only in our memories and dusty screenshot folders. Some might be good riddance to us; others are still painful wounds. We've all harbored fantasies of MMOs coming back from the great beyond for a second lease on life, but if you had to choose just one, what would it be? That's the topic for today's poll, so look at the following list and think long and hard about your choice. Resurrection isn't something that happens every day in MMOs, after all.
The Perfect Ten: MMO Jukebox
Earlier this year, I got to expose my musically nerdy side to you all in a one-two shot of MMO theme song countdowns. The truth is that I'm just a huge sucker for video game music, and as such, I've collected a wide range of MMO scores to bolster my MP3 player. I know that we players tend to be pretty vocal about turning off MMO music at some point, usually due to extreme repetition. Unfortunately, that seems to leave a bad association with this music in our minds, and I don't feel that reputation is deserved. MMO scores can be just as good -- if not better -- than their counterparts in film or other video games. So I've decided that every so often I'm going to devote a full Perfect Ten to sharing my favorite MMO music. I'm always open to suggestions, of course, so if you know of a track that you feel really should be in the next list, send me an email or leave it in the comments!
The Daily Grind: Have you ever had a last-minute change of heart?
People who know me know I'm a planner when it comes to video games. I'm always planning what type of character I'm going to roll, how I'm going to level, what my goals will be, and so on. It's fun to plan, which sometimes carries with it the benefit of removing stress from making impromptu decisions that can affect your long-term gaming career. That said, I've certainly not been immune to making last-minute changes. Maybe I'm totally dedicated to rolling a certain class, but once that character creation screen is up there, I trust my gut and go with something different. Or I'll spend months saying that I have absolutely no urge to play an upcoming MMO, but at the 11th hour I break down and buy it. Has this ever happened to you with MMOs? Have you ever had a last-minute change of heart when it came to a major (or even minor) decision? How did it turn out? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
PAX East 2011: Hands-on with Nexon's Dragon Nest and Vindictus
Nexon spread its wings over much of PAX East's exhibit hall this year, with booths scattered about dedicated to it and its partners' various titles. At the center of the storm lay one of Nexon's hottest new properties, Dragon Nest, which was available for all manner of pokings and proddings. I sat down to play through a couple of Dragon Nest's dungeons with Dee Lee and Moon Kim, who provided commentary on the various game features we were seeing. At its core, Dragon Nest is a fast-paced dungeon crawler, a mash-up between Dungeon Runners, Diablo and Final Fantasy. Instead of spending time roaming around the world, players will primarily be jumping into multi-stage instances over and over again. Each dungeon, such as the Forest Sanctuary and the Valley of Mourning, can accommodate between one to four players (or up to eight for raids) as they try to battle their way to the end boss. It's colorful, heavy on clicking, and definitely arcade-like through and through. Hit the jump to hear the rest of our Dragon Nest impressions as well as a sneak peek at Vindictus' big update coming later this month!
The Light and How to Swing It: Gearing a new level 80 tankadin, part 2
With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and soon, an entire flight of black dragons. We're still talking about fresh, up-and-coming tanking paladins who have just hit level 80 and are looking for gear. After taking another look back at it, most of last week was concentrating on items from reputation vendors and craftable items that you could either make for yourself or nab off the auction house. I decided that I could have done a lot more with various tanking drops from dungeons and items from the emblem vendors. So, this week we'll take a look at just about everything a level 80 can nab from a dungeon for tanking, and next week we'll take a look at what you can do with all of those emblems you earned up running dungeons.
The Light and How to Swing It: Bad habits in dungeons
With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and soon, an entire flight of black dragons. If you've never seen the "How to Paladin" series by stoker2 ... don't. If you have seen it, my apologies and I will continue to attempt to stop Michael Gray from linking them in Moviewatch. However, I thought it would be a perfect example of things paladins shouldn't do for a lead into my article. We're going to talk a bit about bad habits. Some of these bad habits come from learning your class while soloing and the differences you have to make in your playstyle when questing versus when dungeon running. Some of these bad habits are born out of running mostly PvP content and then moving from there into PvE, where the same tricks are more harmful than helpful. Still other bad habits come from having extremely powerful gear. When you overgear content, you start to lose sight of what it's like to have to work at things. You forget that you used to do 1,800 DPS on a good day in your quest greens and what tricks you used to work through each pull. You also start to do stunts that would have wiped your party without question three tiers of content ago. After the break, we'll take a look at a variety of these bad habits and talk about why you might want to break those habits before the Cataclysm.
One Shots: Goodnight, sweet prince
With the change in the new year, we bid a fond farewell to Dungeon Runners, which shuffled off the Internets last night. It's always sad to see an MMO go, especially a wacky, fun, free-to-play title. Thankfully, Massively reader Ripper McGee was on-hand last night to capture this screenshot from the final moments. We'll turn it over to Ripper to explain: Dungeon Runners was shut down for good at midnight last night/this morning. Here [is a shot] from yesterday. [This] is me on my main character next to the bomb Steve Nichols planted in the middle of Townston. All of the players assumed the bomb would go off at midnight, but it was actually just decoration. At midnight, we were all simply disconnected from the server.... Prior to that, though, the server population was completely full (first time in a long time)!If you have any screenshots from the end of Dungeon Runners -- or indeed any sunsetted MMO -- we'd be glad to feature them here. All you have to do is to email them to us here at oneshots AT massively DOT com along with your name, the name of the game, and a quick description. We'll post it out here and give you the credit!%Gallery-9798%
NCsoft responds to City of Heroes speculation
A couple days ago, we had a post detailing some speculation on what City of Heroes: Going Rogue meant for NCsoft West, City of Heroes, and the future of the entire branch of the company. Ryan James, director of corporate communications for NCsoft, took the time to issue a direct response to us regarding that post. We also got an opportunity to ask him a few questions regarding NCsoft's current and future direction, which helps provide some context and some behind-the-scenes information to offset the speculative nature of the aforementioned post. The official response is as follows: "We wanted to respond to your post from November 2 on City of Heroes and clarify a few points for you and your readers. In short, the piece offers a rather sensationalist view of NCsoft West and our success thus far. We're very proud of what we've accomplished here in the West – we have several major MMO franchises, including City of Heroes, Lineage and Guild Wars. And our newest addition to the NCsoft portfolio, Aion, has just seen a very successful launch here in the West. As you point out, we have had to make some tough portfolio decisions, but this is very much par for the course for any major game publisher today. That being said, we remain extremely proud of the Paragon team's accomplishments with the City of Heroes franchise. City of Heroes is still the world's most popular super-powered hero MMO. Even with an increasingly crowded landscape, City of Heroes remains the gold standard for comic book-inspired MMOs – it has stood the test of time and we're excited to be bringing Going Rogue to players next year. As you note, the author of Vicarious Existence is indeed 'alarmist' in his assessment of NCsoft West and our future. We couldn't agree more. On the contrary, we're optimistic about our future." Following the statement, Mr. James took the opportunity to answer a few questions about the company's game portfolio and future plans. Take a look at the questions and responses after the break.
Unraveling the mystery of John Deere Online
Scott "Lum the Mad" Jennings, well-known blogosphere participant and game designer, has recently been working on a game that is now sadly canceled. This is bad both for the natural sadness of a game having been canceled and the voyeuristic MMO fan impulse to ask, "Well, what was it going to be?" We don't know. The only reference made was to the cryptic in-joke name of John Deere Online. In his own words: "As a condition of my severance I can't discuss a great deal, and anything I say here will most likely be picked up by the MMO news sites (wave, wave!)." Well, he's right about that last part. But neither waiting for him to change his mind nor camping outside his front door has yielded any new information, so perhaps we can take a look at more pieces of information and speculate? After all, we know of at least two of his co-workers. From them and from the little which Scott Jennings himself has said, we can derive the following bits of information: that they were working for 2K Games, developing an MMO based on an existing franchise, that the game would have been strategy-based, and that it might possibly have had something to do with tractors. Considering that Jon Jones mentions on his LinkedIn page that he "created a series of low polygon highly optimized building models with a small set of textures that can be reused across that nation's entire series of buildings appropriate to that age," it's difficult to argue with the conclusion that the team was working on a Civilization MMO. But 2K Games also could mean Elder Scrolls projects... which might be pertinent, as both Jon Jones and Matthew Weigel have been working on Dungeon Runners. It's all idle speculation, sadly, and for all we know the game really would have been a massively multiplayer tractor simulator. (In which case it might even be for the best - lawnmowers would probably have been totally overpowered against seeders in PvP.)
NCSoft flushing Dungeon Runners on January 1
NCSoft will close down the servers for its free-to-play MMO Dungeon Runners on January 1. Producer and lead programmer Stephen Nichols, delivered the news in the form of a "crap sandwich." No, really. "You know ... you say something nice, drop the bad news bomb, then say something else nice."This particular crap sandwich consisted of "The game just isn't profitable" on a bun of "Awesome players for an awesome game! Kudos!" and "You'll be getting a 30-day game time serial code and digital copies of City of Heroes Architect Edition and Guild Wars Prophecies."Nichols topped the crap sandwich, which we're sure he didn't expect us to describe in such detail, with a few bonuses for players for the game's "End Time," including boosted XP and loot drop rates. Of course, this is a game with "TURDs" for currency and "Bling Gnomes" that poop out items, so our dwelling on Nichols' metaphor is simply in the spirit of the game.[Via Massively]
Dungeon Runners shutting down in January
In the No-Surpise-to-Anyone category, we have news that NCsoft's Dungeon Runners will be closing its doors on January 1, 2010. We only say no surprise because of the fact that the game has been running on a handful of devs for quite a long time now, which is a shame, because Dungeon Runners is actually a fun little game.Staying true to their wonderful sense of humor, Stephen Nichols, DR's Producer and Lead Programmer, released a statement yesterday detailing the closure. He certainly doesn't butter it up at all as he explains that the game just isn't turning a profit, regardless of their efforts over the last year. They're now down to a 3-man team, which is near impossible for any studio to use in maintaining a game.Luckily, for those currently subscribed to the game, some treats are coming your way, including free City of Heroes Architect Edition and Guild Wars Chapter 1: Prophecies. So if you've never played Dungeon Runners before, you have a little over three months to jump in for free and check it out before the game shuts down for good.
Dungeon Runners updates to Build 162, plans ahead for TURDs
It's certainly been quite a while since we last checked in on Dungeon Runners, but it has grabbed our attention once again after updating to Build 162 earlier this week. The humorous free-to-play dungeon-crawler went many months without updates to the live servers, so fans should be happy with this latest addition. Here are some of the patch headlines: No more ads Lots of graphical updates and optimizations Shadows were added A bunch of new items went in PvP is now allowed on all worlds Placeholder artwork was added for the TURD vendors that will go live in (or after) October. Yep, TURD vendors... we could leave it there without any further explanation, but the truth is just as funny. TURD stands for Townston Universally Recognized Dollars and they will be used as Dungeon Runners' version of NCcoins for an item mall. Hit up the full patch notes to see what else has changed in DR.[Thanks, Ripper!]
Anti-Aliased: Five free to play MMOs that are ahead of the class
Times are tough, the wallet is tight, and you still need a game to play. But what free games can you wrap your hands around that just don't suck, right? That seems to be the trouble with free to play games -- many selections all with very low quality.But the market is not as bad as you might think. There are certainly some gems out there in the free to play market, just waiting for you to wrap your hands around them and play. Finding them however, hasn't always been easy, until now.With the recommendations of my colleagues here at Massively, and my own personal experience, I've complied a list of 5 free to play games that are worthy of your play time. In advance, however, I wish to apologize to Chronicles of Spellborn, Wizard 101, and FusionFall. All three of these games made our favorites list, but I'm skipping them as their focus is more of a "freemium" experience, where massive areas of the games are locked out until a subscription is purchased. This column is only going to concentrate on the free to play, item mall driven games, just to clarify for all of you readers out there.So which games made the best of the free to play list? Continue reading and you'll find out.
Dungeon Runners releases Build 153
Wow, it turns out Dungeon Runners is still alive and kicking. We haven't heard anything from them since the news that the game's staff was cut dramatically, yet it's good to hear something new out of the team over there. Apparently the game is still going strong, as the patch notes for Build 153 have just been released.With Build 153, players get quite a few new changes. Aside from bug fixes and graphical improvements, PvP rated match have been changed and six new skills have been added to the game: Shadow Words, Fire Shot, Dungeon Inferno, Gosh's Glorious Shower of Gold, Cold Snap and Oh Snap! Check out the complete patch notes for more information.
.jpg.cf.jpg)
First Impressions returns!
At last check we had identified and indexed well over 250 MMOs of just about every shape, size and color available for gamers from 8 to 80 - and up! Unfortunately, there just aren't enough hours in the day to cover every single game out there as in-depth as we'd like. That said, we are pretty insanely dedicated to MMOs and love to play them... So what's a blog to do? After kicking the idea around, we've decided to bring back First Impressions for those readers who want to know about more games than just the mainstream. For now, we'll give you a brief look back at some of the staff's favorite past Impressions, as a taste of the fun to come. Be sure to come back next Wednesday and join me as we start a new journey through strange and fantastic worlds of First Impressions! First Impressions: Dungeon RunnersDungeon Runners is a game by NCsoft that trades off of the popularity of Blizzard titles WoW and Diablo II, but does it with a sense of humor. More properly, we should really say it does it with a healthy dose of snark and silliness. That's okay, we like it that way. First Impressions: Jumpgate EvolutionSometimes we get a ridiculously early look at a game in development. Wondering what Jumpgate Evolution was like in earlier beta days, or perhaps still waiting on your invite? Take a peek behind the scenes with Jennie.
