We’re heading now towards the last few gaming conventions of the summer season. PAX was this week, and so expect to see more articles imminently in the gaming press about various demos. The Escapist’s article on the Torchlight 2 demo caught my eye (in a ‘when can I play this’ kind of a way.) The most fun trailer out of PAX so far has been the SWTOR/ KOTOR one – a little unexpected information there about what happened to Revan for any fans of him/ her/ it. And HK-47 who was the real star of the game.
EQ2X continues through open beta and SOE are evidently paying attention to feedback because they have now opened up the ability for bronze (ie. free to play) customers to buy access to the various different races and classes which had hitherto been locked to subscribers. They’re selling races in packs of three, and classes as single items. I think selling classes in matched pairs would have made more sense – what happens now if someone wants to defect to a class they don’t have access to? Arkenor takes a look at the marketplace (cash shop) to see what else is on offer –- bear in mind the game is in beta so these could change.
LOTRO opens up its doors to Free to Play customers next week also, so expect to hear more about that too.
Another story which caught my eye this week: Jason Kapalka, one of the co-founders of Popcap, gave a talk at GDC Europe on the ethics of social gaming. He thinks social games are “kind of evil right now,” and although Popcap isn’t 100% evil free, they’re trying to put fun above monetisation. If I ever get bored of Plants vs Zombies or Bejewelled, I’ll let them know.
And if anyone is curious, SC2 sold 3 million copies in its first month. Not bad, but Cataclysm can beat it – come on WoW fans, don’t let the RTS players win!
Final Fantasy 14 has a rocky open beta
Square Enix opened their doors to the muddy hordes of open beta testers for Final Fantasy 14 this week, and may wish that they hadn’t. Everyone agrees that the game is beautiful – well, everyone who was able to download the files and play the game – but I’ve also seen a lot of feedback to the effect that it looks and feels like a console game.
Pete@Dragonchasers likes the beta and shares some tips.
The Final Fantast XIV Core crew have a really good post on how to figure out if it is the game for you.
Elemental has a rocky launch too, Stardock lays off employees
Anyone been playing Elemental? It’s a 4X fantasy themed game that was released recently by Stardock, and has been plagued by reports of being severely bug ridden to the point of large parts of the game being unplayable.
A lot of people were looking forwards to the game, a lot of people have been disappointed. The Stardock CEO even published a statement acknowledging that the launch had been disastrous, taking personal responsibility and promising to do better in future.
Darren@Common Sense Gamer picks up on news from the forums that because of the poor launch and poor sales, Stardock are now laying people off.
It’s all very unfortunate – at the end of the day if you sell a faulty product then this is what happens. But he’s lucky people aren’t suing and asking for their money back.
Red5 finally announce their new project
Another project featuring ex-WoW developers, Firefall is going to be a team based online shooter in a futuristic setting and is due out towards the end of 2011. And naturally, it’ll be free to play.
Duke Nukem Forever
2K have announced that Duke Nukem Forever is due out in 2011, courtesy of Borderlines studio Gearbox Software.
I personally doubt many people still care about Duke Nukem Forever (but I expect all of them will reply to this post 🙂 ). The game is mostly notorious for how long it has been ‘in development.’ Whilst you can just about get away with this if you are Blizzard, I’m not so sure it applies here.
$100 pa for xbox platinum live? analyst predicts yes.
I wish people would pay me to predict that prices will go up. Michael Pachter thinks that $100 is the next big price point for xbox live. This of course followed Microsoft’s announcement this week that the console online service would be increased by $10.
He thinks they will reinvest some of the money in providing new services. Although I agree that any notion of a tie up between the xbox and itunes is very far fetched – I don’t think Apple operate that way. But who knows. I’m mostly amused by the phrase, “the next evolutionary step in subscription options.”
And it seems odd to me that in an era of free to play pricing models, Microsoft is so attached to bundling services which players may or may not want.
Welcome to Spinksville! 
I did a post on FFXIV…but, looking at it from the perspective of someone who IS a Final Fantasy fanatic, yet is an MMO player at heart.
Dragonchaser got it right calling it an adventure game…but, that needs to be understood by those who are use to MMO conventions. Also, if anything, it makes it NOT an MMO to me.
Cheers and Happy Weekend.
Thanks for the link. I’m a big fan of Final Fantasy and my feeling here is, “Wait for the PS3 version.”
“that Duke Nukem Forever is due out in 2011”
Heh.
Heheheheh.
HAHAHEEHOOHOOHAHEEHOOHAHAHEEHOOH!!!!
Now, pull the other one. Is got bells on it.
I’ll believe it when I see it regarding DN:F I have very fond memories of DN 3D and expect that half the gamers these days have no idea who the Duke is or why he is so awesome. However, if somehow it does see the light of day I hope it’s uncensored and not a steaming pile of whatever they made me pick up from the fields of Nagrand!
Calling it a multiplayer online adventure game is pretty accurate.
The hardest aspect of the game is definitely the controls. You can force yourself to get used to it but it takes some doing. The only thing that kept me going at that stage was that I wanted to play the game for the sake of a friend who was a 3 year vet of FFXI. But it can be done. You eventually memorize what keys or controller buttons do what. They keyboard scheme is simply an almost straight across button for button port from a modern game controller. I still think they one thing they could add that would go the furthest toward saving the mouse players would simply to allow a mouse click on inert environment to move the toon to that location. Just like with L2,PWI and Aion. Very simple. nothing else would have to be changed as mouse clicks on non objects currently do nothing. Oh well, maybe someday.
As for there being no jump, it is because there wasn’t enough buttons on the controller. basically the enter key is used to confirm an action instead of opening the chat bar so they moved the open chat to the space bar and then move jumping to nowhere because they didn’t want to give up the other functions. Simply, a controller has 12 button clicks and 3 directionals. They actually did a pretty good job of cramming what they did into that. So really the only things they could add to the UI for the mouse to do would have to be duplicatable somehow on the game pad. Movement is done with a directional stick so duplicating that in a mouse click shouldn’t have been a problem. Jumping on the other hand would probably take an emote that could be put in a macro.
But I digress, you can learn new controls. The real question is do you want to bother. That is the sticking point. It does a very good job getting you into the story. Great graphics has been repeated about a million times. The audio is great too. Every NPC has something unique to say. Some more or less important but it does make the world seem more real. The down side is that they simply drop you at the door of one of the cities after some great cut scenes and then simply let you figure out what is up. That is a little disconcerting. People who are used to FF games understood that you have to talk to everyone and discover the world. Kind cool when you get past the shock but somewhat unexpected to the average MMO player. The other problem I see is that you are left to completely figure out how to do things like combat, interacting with objects and how to work the crafting and gathering mini games. Hopefully they are planning to add some tutorial elements but it may also be that they are again expecting people to “discover” how to do things. I have remarked elsewhere that FFXIV does, in fact, have a very detailed tutorial. It is called FFXI and it takes a few months to get though. The game really is designed from both style of play to the control scheme to appeal to those who have played the other game.
The slow updates have been fixed but it still crashes a bit too much. It appears to lack content but I understand that SE normally disables things for betas since “discovering the world” is really the point of all their games.
All in all, I would say that if you like discovering new worlds, it is a very good game. Very engaging. Something keeps drawing you back in. But you have to be willing to force yourself to learn a new control scheme and you have to be willing to rething what to expect from the content.