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WildStar launches the Protogames Initiative
WildStar players have fought off the machinations of the Entity, the depravities of their enemy faction, and the vicious wildlife of Nexus. Yet they've never had to face the centerpiece of the newest patch, the Protostar Corporation. Admittedly, taking part in the all-new Protogames isn't quite the same as taking on an ancient evil, but the two new dungeons added with this patch are both meant to test player abilities, with a low-level run through Protogames Academy conveying gameplay concepts while the Ultimate Protogames provide an assortment of new challenges. Not that there aren't plenty of other things for players to experience as well. The patch also contains new housing options, allowing you to edit the terrain of your home, and the character chop shop to let you re-edit facial details and the like. Players can also take on a brand-new Shiphand mission or run the Veteran difficulties of existing Shiphand missions, earning valuable Renown to take to the new Renown vendor. There's plenty to be done with the latest patch, so get in there and enjoy the games.
WildStar outlines its plans for the future of PvP
Do you want to smash faces on Nexus? Do you not give the smallest toss about being able to unravel ancient mysteries so long as you can find the opposite faction and crack their collective skulls? Then good news, cupcake: WildStar still has PvP on its docket. A new post outlines the game's plans for PvP in 2015, starting with new daily and weekly PvP quests in the next major patch to the game. What else is coming in 2015? How about gear sets that can be purchased with gold, a removal of rating from higher-tier PvP sets, the end of season 1, and same-faction battlegrounds? Because those are all in the pipeline, along with bigger improvements for later in the year. If you just can't get enough of that factional warfare, check out the full post and get ready to carve up the other side. [Thanks to Cap for the tip!]
New ArcheAge producer promises communication, game improvements
There's someone new at the head of ArcheAge, producer Marv Lee Kwai. Kwai posted a lengthy letter to the players on the forums recently outlining the major standing issues that the team still sees in the game along with several of the changes and additions set for the game over the next year. He stresses that the developers are well aware of unusual market fluctuations, sieges being too costly and difficult, and the balance of top-end rewards; moving forward, the team means to see them all tweaked and improved. The letter goes on to mention that the team is planning to add a global trade channel to reduce faction chat spam. Also en route is The Diamond Shores, a new area in southern Auroria that accompanies a bump in the level cap to level 55. It's a little past the start of the new year, but Kwai's tone is hopeful that the game can rise above its somewhat buggy and controversial launch.
Pathfinder details corpse looting and more
GoblinWorks CEO Ryan Dancey has published a new blog post touching on today's Pathfinder early enrollment release. Version two of the fantasy sandbox adds player husks, which is another way of saying lootable corpses. "The extent of your losses will be related to how quickly you are able to return to the site of your husk and if you are able to recover the inventory that remains on the husk before others are able to take all of its contents or its timer expires," Dancey writes. There's a bit more to the update, but you'll need to click through to the GoblinWorks website to read it!
WildStar explores the design of Veteran Shiphand missions
Veteran Shiphand missions are coming to WildStar, and that's great, but their design also posed a lot of unique challenges to the design team. Those challenges are outlined in the game's most recent development diary, starting with a core set of assumptions that had to be true for these missions: They had to remain scalable, they had to still be soloable, and they had to offer appropriate rewards. This meant making challenging combat that could scale up or down for party sizes and didn't require tanks, healers, or pre-made groups. To settle nicely into the gap between other solo content and Veteran Adventures, the Shiphand missions reward Renown even for solo play, as well as various appropriate bells and whistles for higher medal performance. Renown vendors will soon sell variety of gear as well as social items to ensure that playing through feels rewarding. Veteran difficulty will also offer remixed elements of the missions to give players a taste of something novel even if they've been through the base mission before. If you've been looking for more scaling content in the game, this one's for you.
ArcheAge patches in Divine Gifts and land expansion certs today
Following today's ArcheAge patch you'll want to keep a close eye on the bottom left of the game's UI. You'll see a little icon light up to indicate that you have a new gift awaiting you, and then... you get free stuff. That's it. That's all you have to do. The newest patch will offer these Divine Gifts to players regularly, allowing you to open as many as 10 in a given day for rewards like Lunarites, bonus food, and Hereafter Stones. Players will also be able to craft land expansion certificates (which will also be available from the Marketplace in a future update) and larger storage chests. That's in addition to new rewards for maxing skill trees and new portals leading directly to Serpentis and the Sea of Drowned Love. Whatever your focus is in ArcheAge, you'll have plenty of opportunity to take part in it when today's patch goes live.
Das Tal boasts that it will 'do things better' than ArcheAge
Consider the gauntlet thrown down from one sandbox to another. Das Tal Head of Communications David Wells posted a new essay today in which he says that his title will best ArcheAge: "Unfortunately I, like a lot of others, have come to the conclusion that ArcheAge is probably one of the worst MMOs to come out recently -- but the reasons why are not straight forward. I am going to go over the good and bad, as well as shamelessly point out how our game will do things better." Wells says that ArcheAge stumbled with a messy housing system, bad monetization, cultural differences, hacking, heavy grind, lackluster PvE, no solid PvP, shaky server tech, and a lack of good communication by Trion. He goes on to provide a counterpoint for each these items, explaining how Das Tal will succeed where ArcheAge has failed. Or, if you're looking for a TL;DR version, "How we do it better: To put it simply, we give a s**t."
The usual suspects dominate December's Raptr rankings
Do you quote Raptr data when having unscientific discussions about MMO playerbase numbers? If so, rejoice, because here are some more numbers based on a sample size of dubious value! As you might expect, League of Legends, Dota 2, and World of Warcraft continue to dominate Raptr users' attention spans, while ArcheAge, Final Fantasy XIV, and Guild Wars 2 all dropped from their position in November's rankings. Click past the cut to see the full list. [Source: Raptr press release]
WildStar will reduce grind, focus on 'a multitude of playstyles' in 2015
Where does WildStar go from here? That's the question that director Mike Donatelli seeks to answer with his latest address to the community. Donatelli says this morning that while he's thankful for the praise the game received toward the end of 2014, there are several areas where the game needs to improve, and thus the team is working on making a better game experience for everyone moving forward. He lays out three chief foci for the team over the next year: listen to feedback to make the game more fun and "less grindy"; support "a multitude of playstyles," group sizes, and levels; and invest, expand, and improve the existing game. Donatelli targets for these plans the first half of 2015, which will contain better-tuned endgame reward systems to fight fatigue along with a wider breadth of content for solo and small-group players. Over the rest of the year, the team plans to introduce a new Contract system to support different playstyles, continue tuning the rewards, and greatly expand the game's customization options. It's a lot of changes, but the Carbine team seems dedicated to making them work.
Pathfinder Online outlines its update and test patterns
The early enrollment stage of Pathfinder Online has started, and that means it's time to start setting a regular update schedule. A new development blog establishes that the game is currently slated to put out a new major build every other week, with the acknowledgement that the first few weeks will be something less than reliable due to the growing pains of turning the servers on. Players can look forward to the War of Towers kicking off tomorrow, January 14th, at 1:00 p.m. EST. A bunch of the game's moving pieces are being either reopened or renamed. The alpha accounts are being renamed platinum accounts, since the game is no longer in its alpha testing phase. The test server is coming back online as a way to double-check all of the new adjustments to the game before they go live. Worth noting is that account perks used on the test server will still count as consumed on the live server, meaning that an account entitlement you use on a test will be gone as surely if you used it in the core game. Check out the full update for more specifics and the mechanics of taking part in update testing.
Pathfinder Online's Ryan Dancey on early adopter experience bonuses
On yesterday's Massively Speaking podcast, Justin and I discussed Pathfinder Online's plans for granting its earliest and most loyal players what seems to be the ultimate character bonus: an experience edge over everyone else, forever. I'll let the Pathfinder Online dev post Hard is Fun! explain verbatim: Our game uses a unique real-time based XP system. Characters gain XP through the passage of time, not through being logged in. So the characters that are created in the first month will be the characters with the most XP for all time. A special perk will be in effect that backdates XP to the start of Early Enrollment for the first month so no matter when you purchase an account, if you create a character in Month 1, you'll have that maximum XP. Usually games with offline experience systems also have either a hard cap or a diminishing returns mechanic to avoid the core "sandbox problem" -- that those who get to the sandbox first perpetually have the most power because they claim all the best toys (and so on). But as written, the Pathfinder Online system seems to exacerbate rather than fix that problem by promising "pioneers" more power in the form of permanently more experience. Suspecting there was more to the plan, we asked Goblinworks' Ryan Scott Dancey to explain just how it plans to balance its concessions to early backers with its presumed desire to attract newbie players in the more distant future. He's done so, in detail, for us today.
ArcheAge tosses its end-of-holiday update on the test server
Testing out an update that's mostly meant to just turn off the holiday event might seem to be overkill, but ArcheAge has seen such problems with bugs that the team behind the game is apparently taking no chances. A small patch is currently available on the test server and will go live later this week; it contains the shut-off for all of the holiday events (so players with gifts or stockings should use them before the deadline). This build also contains adjustments to the MTX Pet Healing Potion; the potion will now heal pets for 100% of their health, and a future build will add a resurrection effect. A Marketplace addition is also slated to go live on the test servers within the next few days. If you want to make sure that everything's working fine after the event gets turned off, you can hop on the test server today.
One Shots: Midnight sun
Reader Sid is out for a midnight fishing expedition in this ArcheAge screenshot, and I have to envy him of the breathtaking view. Although, why not fish during the day? Less kraken that way, my granny always said. So this wraps up our two-week series of daily One Shots! Tomorrow we'll be back to normal with the weekly column. I hope you got inspired to send in your own screenshots and stories to oneshots@massively.com, because I'd love to feature them! Want to be featured in a future edition of One Shots? Send your favorite MMO screenshots to oneshots@massively.com, and don't forget to include your name, the name of the game, and a description of the scene. Large, colorful, UI-free shots that tell a story and really show off the game make for the best images. Look ma, we brought back One Shots!
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]
The Nexus Telegraph: WildStar's past year and future
A year ago, I was excited for WildStar's future. Now I'm sitting here wondering how things went so very, very wrong. That's not true, though; I know exactly how things went wrong. I don't like thinking about it, but I do know. And so here I am, with a game I was hugely excited to play out and in the wild, and so much has gone wrong. It's easy to think that I've pretty much clocked out altogether. But that's also not true. I'll be the first to point out that I've said some decidedly unkind things about the state of the game and the choices that have been made thus far in terms of fixing them. The last column I wrote even posited that it might be too late for several of the changes being proposed to make any sort of impact when it comes to the game's image. This is why I really want the game to prove me wrong.
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.
Pathfinder Online ends its stress test and preps for early enrollment
The bad news is that if you had hoped to do nothing but strain the Pathfinder Online servers over your holiday, you were denied that option. The good news is that the test ended because the servers passed the stress test with flying colors, and that means it's time for the development team to move on to the next phase of access. Yes, early enrollment is just around the corner. Of course it hasn't kicked off just yet, as the developers behind the game are human beings who would like to actually spend some holiday time with their families. But it's coming soon. The change will mean that players who have alpha access via friends & family options or are normally slated to enter during open enrollment can no longer log in; so if you want to keep jumping into the game you may wish to upgrade your account. For those already happily waiting for early enrollment, nothing else remains to be done other than continuing to wait. Not much longer now.
WildStar eyes Chinese release
WildStar may have a new audience for its sci-fi western ways, as 2P.com reports that the game will be headed to China somewhere between late 2015 and early 2016. The MMO will be operated by Giant Interactive, which also handles ZT Online. However, NCsoft and Carbine have yet to officially announce the partnership. A new market for WildStar may be just what the beleaguered title needs to shore up its financials. The Q3 2014 earnings report from NCsoft showed that the new MMO had dropped sales dramatically compared to the previous quarter. [Thanks to Mason for the tip!]
WildStar's next big update and holiday surprise
The first major WildStar update of 2015 is available on the test servers now. Yes, there's a little time before it actually goes live for everyone. Creative Director Chad Moore took the opportunity today to explain to the community everything contained within the new update, starting with the addition of two new dungeons (the Protostar Academy and the Ultimate Protogames), a new Shiphand mission, and the addition of veteran-level Shiphand missions that can still be cleared solo or in a group as you'd like. This update also includes new housing options, cosmetic options for characters (including the ability to edit your appearance post-character creation), and the addition of the new Glory currency for completing dungeons and raids, which can be exchanged for high-end equipment. Last but not least, it's the update that includes the long-discussed drop of the Datascape raid down to 20 players, making it less of a challenge to assemble a roster for this content. While it remains to be seen how well the update actually plays, it looks to be filled with a number of positive changes for the game. In other WildStar news today, the studio is running holiday promotion during December. "Carbine wanted to wish everyone a Happy Holiday and spread some cheer by giving out 12 Days of Boom Boxes," wrote Community Manager Tony Rey yesterday. "Everyone that has logged into WildStar during the month of December (12/1-12/15) will receive these sweet little bundles of potential."
ArcheAge Korea adding second-story housing upgrades, treehouse
When update 1.8 hits in Korea, ArcheAge housing will reach new heights -- literally. Two different models of houses, the thatched farmhouse and the medium house, are getting a special upgrade that will elevate them to two-story dwellings. Available in the cash shop, this upgrade item is applied to existing homes; there's no need to tear down and build anew. In addition, there are new models of houses being developed for release in Korea, including a house nestled high in a tree. Yes, folks, there's an outline of a genuine treehouse to tantalize housing aficionados! There's also talk of an exclusive housing district, but the details of the translated notes are fuzzy. Whether the Western market gets this update, however, remains to be seen; if it does, it's likely a long way off.
