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German aerospace agency wants hypersonic flights by the 2030s
Germany's aerospace agency, the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR), is reviving a decade-old plan to develop hypersonic passenger flights aboard suborbital space planes. This rocket-propelled vehicle, dubbed the SpaceLiner, could carry up to 100 passengers and make the trek between Europe and Australia in under 90 minutes. This isn't the first time the DLR has hinted at making such a space plane, but now the company is ready to make the SpaceLiner a reality within the next two decades, as project lead Martin Sippel recently explained to Aviation Week.
Pathfinder Online opens up early enrollment
The hour has come at last! Yes, we said that yesterday, but this time we really mean it! Pathfinder Online has entered early enrollment as of today, allowing backers to jump in and play the game in its early state. There are even some new screenshots (exclusive to Massively!) to go along with this stage of the game's slow rollout; they're embedded in the gallery below. A new blog entry has also been posted, stating the game's design philosophy once again and explaining how the earliest stage of deployment will work out. If you really want to get in but aren't already a backer from the game's second Kickstarter, access will set you back $100 with three months of included game time. [Source: Goblinworks press release]
Choose My Adventure: World of Warcraft High
Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft launched on November 23rd, 2004. For anyone having a hard time putting that date into context, consider this: My sister, who's now in college, was eight years old when WoW's gates first opened. Some of our readers with nice jobs and adorable children were still in middle school or high school. I've personally been playing WoW off and on since 2005, giving me about nine years of history with the game. This month's Choose My Adventure was two parts adventure and one part nostalgia. And as it turns out, sometimes the past really does belong in the past.
Early enrollment comes to Pathfinder Online tomorrow
The hour has come at last! Almost. The hour of Pathfinder Online's early enrollment approaches swiftly with a scheduled start time of 1:00 p.m. EST on December 31st, assuming some horrible bug doesn't crop up between now and then. More posts will appear on the official site to detail how, exactly, one takes part in Early Enrollment if eligible; there will also be detailed information on how the game world moves and behaves so that no one is caught off-guard. The last day of the alpha servers won't be quiet either; testers will be given access to developer powers, allowing them to make whatever ludicrously overpowered superheroes they want for fun. This starts today at 1:00 p.m. EST and runs until the servers go down for the last time before early enrollment. So have some fun today, and get ready to start in on the real thing tomorrow.
Elite: Dangerous' launch-day roundup
Successfully Kickstarted just over two years ago, David Braben's space MMO Elite: Dangerous formally launched early this morning, a rare buy-to-play entry in the MMO market and one of the most high-profile Kickstarter MMOs to actually reach launch to date. If you're heading to the comments right now to inform us that Elite isn't an MMO because of its single-player mode, know that the tide's against you; even Frontier, in the midst of controversy over the cancelation of its originally promised offline mode, justified that decision because Elite is an MMO and "technically [...] always has been." Elite: Dangerous won Massively's Most Underrated MMO of the year by a hair just last week. Check out the launch trailer and our roundup of the best Elite news, streams, and hands-on articles by the Massively staff below!
Choose My Adventure: I am so confused in World of Warcraft
Last week's Choose My Adventure polls for World of Warcraft set me on a very unexpected path. Male Blood Elf? Really? If you had asked me to predict the result of the class/race/gender/faction polls, I would have been extremely super-wrong. I thought for sure Massively's readership was full of carebear Alliance sympathizers who spend their WoW hours hosting hug parties in Darnassus. Anyway. This week saw me creating our new character, using the included-with-Warlords of Draenor instant level 90 character boost, and diving through the Dark Portal to experience the starting moments of Blizzard Entertainment's latest bundle of WoW content. It was... something.
Choose My Adventure: Can't stop the World of Warcraft
It's been 10 years since Blizzard Entertainment launched World of Warcraft and ignited the great MMO gold rush of the aughts. In that time, World of Warcraft has grown into something more than a game; it's a cultural icon, an immensely valuable piece of intellectual property, and a brooding presence any new MMO has to consider before launch. WoW has gravity. Just when World of Warcraft's numbers start to slide and the naysayers start planning their "WoW is dead" parties, Blizzard finds a way to make WoW resurgent. Warlords of Draenor, WoW's fifth expansion, launched late last month, bringing three million subscribers back into the game's warm embrace. For those keeping score: That's more subscribers than most MMOs ever see at their peaks. Warlords of Draenor reworks some core World of Warcraft systems, changes up character models, implements a version of housing, and more. And with so many people returning to check it out, there's no better time for Choose My Adventure to join the fray.
Ubisoft's action-driving MMO The Crew launches today
Ubisoft's "action-driving MMO" The Crew launches worldwide on PC and multiple consoles today, but before you can drive your roadster across a virtual map of the USA, you'll first have to download the time-honored day-one patch. The patch flips on drivehub challenges and the faction war as well as fixes a slew of UI, PvP, and stability bugs. Ubisoft's Serkan Hasan assured reporters last week that game would be free of the turmoil that usually accompanies MMO launches. The studio had taken criticism from refusing to grant launch previews to media because MMOs are just too hard to review without all the players in place. The standard version of the game is available for around 60 bucks, depending on your platform and retailer of choice. The launch trailer is below.
Hyperspace Beacon: Previewing SWTOR's Shadow of Revan
When I was first introduced to the expansion for Star Wars: The Old Republic, there were two things I wanted to see: the continuation of the class story and Yavin 4. And I'm happy to say that this expansion delivered both of those in a satisfying way. When I spoke to studio game director James Ohlen and lead writer Charles Boyd about the expansion a few weeks ago, they told me that Shadow of Revan would close one major chapter and open a new book for SWTOR. After seeing the expansion, I have to agree that Shadow of Revan does put a great cap on a class stories and opens the door for an exciting future for the game. I don't want to give you the impression that everything in the expansion is exactly what I wanted, though. There is a surprising lack of exploration, the amount of content fell short, and parts of the maps felt slapped together. The screenshots depict beautiful scenes, but sometimes form outweighs function. Before I continue, I feel obligated to tell you that there are spoilers of previous content in this piece, but the important parts of the new content will remain unspoiled.
Ubisoft dismisses doubts about The Crew's launch, releases launch trailer
Are you worried about the launch of The Crew being plagued by server issues, instability, and other issues? Don't be! None of that's going to happen at launch! Who said that? Ubisoft, of course! It seems trustworthy. In the wake of Ubisoft's launch issues this year (Assassin's Creed: Unity), not to mention other high-profile online titles that have been plagued by server issues, lead designer Serkan Hasan has stated that The Crew's beta testing has adequately prepared the game for launch. He also promises that the game's console versions will perform well on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The Crew launches tomorrow, December 2nd. The studio has not shown any advanced previews to media on the basis that playing the game before launch would involve sub-optimal play conditions. [Update: We've included the launch trailer below.]
Living and dying in the Elite: Dangerous gamma build
When we last looked at Elite: Dangerous during August's Choose My Adventure, the game was in a barebones beta format with just a few of its promised eventual features. Frontier Developments' crowdfunded space-sim certainly brought a lot to the table with its pretty graphics, realistic flight physics, and down-to-the-details sim structure, but anyone not interested in running courier missions or blowing up other ships was probably left wanting. Now, however, Elite is a different beast. Just two weeks from final official launch, Elite is in what Frontier Developments is calling the "gamma" stage. It's as close to the finished version of the game anyone is going to get until launch on December 16th. So naturally, I took another dive in Elite to see what exactly has changed.
The Think Tank: Assessing Draenor's launch
World of Warcraft's Warlords of Draenor launch has come and gone, driven by the chaos we've come to expect from this year's MMO launches. Was it a bad launch... or the baddest launch ever?! In today's Think Tank, I asked the Massively writers, as players or industry watchers, how the launch and Blizzard's response stacked up next to those of 2014's other offerings.
World of Warcraft deals with downtime, bugs, DDoS attacks [Updated]
If you had been hoping to experience the launch of World of Warcraft's expansion without queues, well, that was never going to happen. If you had hoped to face the launch without issues like disconnecting from the servers as soon as your character moved or major Garrison bugs, well, that shouldn't be happening, but it apparently is. A number of hotfixes have already been applied to the game with more on the way, including several increased spawn rates for enemies in heavily congested zones. This comes on the heels of DDoS attacks that have made logging in and playing even more difficult and make it difficult to identify genuine bugs amidst server issues. Fans have compiled a list of the most common errors experienced on launch, some of which seem perfectly normal (long queue times after many server merges prior to launch) and some of which are not (server crashes from flying mounts). If you want to take a little time off from trying to get in and play, you can take a look at the recently posted glance at the creatures of Nagrand. Otherwise, there's not much to be done other than waiting for the latest round of hotfixes and hoping that corrects the major issues. [Massively's sister site WoW Insider has published a detailed editorial explaining the launch issues and who bears responsibility for which ones. Managing Editor Adam Holisky argues that while Blizzard is responsible for the quest bottlenecks, broken terrain, server funneling, and griefing toys, it can't do much about DDoS attacks and their resulting latency and lag and queues, and therefore the studio should not be blamed for them.]
World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor launch-day roundup
The fifth expansion to 2004's World of Warcraft MMO is now live. First announced at BlizzCon 2013, Warlords of Draenor opened its doors at 3 a.m. EST this morning, so you would be forgiven for having slept through the start. And what would a launch day be without rolling restarts, giant patch notes, and overloaded, bottlenecked entry zones? Wheee! In honor of the launch, we've rounded up the best WoW and Draenor stories from the past year for your perusal during today's inevitable downtimes. Who's playin'?
Trove enters open beta, ArcheAge deploys Auroria in the EU
Have you been looking for another pixel-polygon building game to call your home? After being in the test phase for so long that you could be forgiven for speculating that it would never be released, Trove has hit open beta, letting everyone log in and try the game for both bugs and just for the heck of it. There will be no more wipes of the database, so you could easily regard this as something of a soft launch for the game. If you're not feeling that particular sort of building and you're over in the EU, you can instead try your hand with the latest update for of ArcheAge, which mirrors the patch deployed earlier this week on the US servers. Hopefully the EU rollout will not include the same login issues that hit the US servers as well. The patch is scheduled to go live today at 5:00 p.m. GMT. [Source: Trion Worlds press release]
Star Trek Online: Delta Rising is live today
It's time to start boldly going all over again. Star Trek Online's second expansion, Delta Rising, is live today. That means that players can find their way into the Delta Quadrant, explore an expanded level cap, and take flight in a new set of starships as they take on familiar and yet novel enemies. The expansion also brings in several veteran Star Trek actors to reprise their roles: Robert Picardo (The Doctor), Garrett Wang (Harry Kim), Jeri Ryan (Seven of Nine), Tim Russ (Tuvok), and Ethan Phillips (Neelix). Delta Rising introduces captain specializations for leveling past the previous cap of 50, allowing players to reach the ranks of Fleet Admiral and Dahar Master while exploring new specialization trees and unlocking passive and active benefits. But there's no need to take our word for it, as the expansion is live now. Log in, patch up, and head out into the Delta Quadrant.
ArcheAge boasts two million registered players
ArcheAge's local launch has gone pretty well, according to producer Scott Hartsman. A recent letter to the players confirms last week's whispers that over two million players have registered for the game, which certainly goes a long way to explaining those launch queues. Between North America and Europe, the game currently has 21 active servers in total, and Hartsman stated that character creation restrictions are being rolled back as the populations begin to stabilize. The letter goes on to address the issue of bots, many of which have already been unceremoniously ejected from the game. The game's most recent patch restricts chatting in several channels (Faction, Trade, Nation, Shout, and Need Party) to characters who are level 15 or higher, and a learning anti-spam feature is on track to be integrated into the base game. There's also discussion about catching up with holiday content and the like, so those two million registered players should have plenty of stuff to do.
Massively interviews Trion's Scott Hartsman on ArcheAge's rocky launch
ArcheAge's server issues, endless queues, and housing woes are the subject of hot debate in comment sections across the MMO world this week as players wonder just how in the heck the sandbox's launch went so awry. Massively spoke to Trion Worlds' Scott Hartsman to ask him exactly what went wrong with the launch and what the studio is doing to fix it. Massively: Prior to the head start, Trion seemed to be aware of the huge interest in ArcheAge, citing a million signups for beta and knowing of the launch problems faced when the game launched in other countries. And yet Trion has seemed largely unprepared for the deluge of players for the head start and even for the F2P launch. Why? Were there really far more people trying to play than expected? Scott Hartsman: Yes. There's a lot of science that goes into forecasting how many people are going to show up for a new game, when they're going to show up, and how long they'll stick around. Beyond that, external factors such as what else is going on in online games can also have a huge impact.
Massively's ArcheAge launch diary: Day six - P2W and the early verdict
Is ArcheAge pay-to-win? That's a question I've been asked several times in recent days. Before I answer it, let's get something out of the way up front. And by "out of the way," I mean that this is the most important part of the article and needs to be emphasized in the intro. Pay-to-win is 100% subjective. There is no scientific or universally accepted definition of pay-to-win. Some things in this life are absolutes. Pay-to-win is not one of them.
Massively's ArcheAge launch diary: Day five - Random knowledge
Today's diary entry is going to skip around a bit, as I'm still dabbling all over ArcheAge and finding it nearly impossible to convey everything important inside of a few thousand words. If you're just joining us, this is day five of Massively's launch chronicle because even though the game "launched" yesterday, it really launched last Friday via the founder head start. I'm aware that some people had disconnect issues and nightmare two-hour login queues on the 16th. I did not have much trouble with either, presumably because of my Patron account status regarding the latter. Trion does have some work to do, though, as I noticed a lot of slow-down in high-traffic areas throughout much of my play session last night, and I also logged into a black screen more than once and had to re-queue as a result. In other words, it was a typical MMO launch day. I've seen better, but I've also seen far, far worse.
