It seems that Marvel has teamed up with Gazillion Entertainmen, I’ve never heard of them either, to give the MMO Marvel Universe a second chance at life.  MU was originally going to be developed by Cryptic Studios, creator’s of City of Heros/Villains, but was canceled about a year ago.

No date has been given to when Marvel Universe will be released, but we can only assume that both Champions Online and DC Universe will have already been out for a least a yr or two. There are definite advantages to releasing later then the other two games.  For one they’ll be able to see what they did right and wrong then adapt their game for the better.  However if either game or both become successful, players might not want to switch over to another super hero MMO.  Either way it’s a good thing for gamers.

Turbine has just released a batch of screenshots for the upcoming Volume II: Book 7: Leaves of Lόrien, the first free content update for The Lord of the Rings Online since the expansion, Mines of Moria, was released last fall.

The new screenshots illustrate changes to the new player experience that will take effect with the launch of Book 7. Turbine has revamped the new player experience for elves, dwarves and the race of man.

Yesterday Mythic announced further character transfers from servers that will be eventually closed.  Since Warhammer Online was released in Sept 2008, there has been a steady exodus of gamers causing Mythic to close down servers.  Below is a month by month list of how many servers have been announced to close since the game launched.

October 2008 – 19 servers
November – 8 servers
January 2009 – 1 server
February – 4 servers
March – 11 servers

After this latest character transfer announcement, it leaves Warhammer Online with 15 servers.  Even though 15 servers is a decent amount, losing 2/3′s of your players base is not good news for Mythic.  Having left Warhammer myself about a month ago, I can’t say I’m suprised.   Can Mythic turn this around?  I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Whether you’re a fan of PvE or PvP we can all agree that for most of us the endgame is when the real fun starts.  For PvE players this is when you start hitting up the big dungeons and raids.  PvP players can start fighting on a much larger scale, massive guild vs guild battles or keep sieges depending on what game your playing.  But before we can reach endgame content we are forced to play through a lengthy campaign whos main purpose is to level your character.

As a MMO publisher one of the reasons to do this is to get gamers to play as long as possible.  If you can get to the endgame content in a few hrs, you might only end up playing for a month or two before quiting, unless you actually like the game.  However if it takes 100-200 hrs it’ll take you a few months just to get to the level cap, then maybe another month or two before you get board.  Which is basically what happend to me with Warhammer Online, 3 months to reach the level cap, then another 6 weeks before I got bored with the PvP endgame.  That 5 months payment they got out of me instead of what probably would have been one or two, since its PvP endgame wasn’t very good.

From the developers perspective, I’d think not having to create thousands of quests would allow for more time to work on endgame content.  Perhaps the problems Age of Conan and Warhammer Online had with its endgame could have been averted.  But instead, developers are creating pointless quests that no one really wants to do.  I’m not saying all quests are boring, but most are.  Kill x monters, collect x bear skins or deliver this or that aren’t quests that anyone wants to do.  They’re easy, boring and only a time-sink.

As a gamer I do want something before reaching the endgame, but not 100-200 hrs worth of something.  A 10-20 hr storyline that takes you through the maps, teaches you how to use your character and gets you some decent gear is what I’d like before being able to partake in endgame content, especially for MMORPGs that concentrate on PvP. Playing through 100+ hrs of lame quests only to realize that the endgame PvP sucks, sucks.

A fantasy-style MMORPG for the PC, Priston Tale 2: The Second Enigma is Yedang Online’s sequel to the wildly popular Priston Tale. This fantasy-style MMORPG boasts high-quality graphics realized through a combination of realistic backgrounds, fantastical characters, and spectacular combat effects–all made possible by the Unreal 2.5 Engine. The game has experienced huge success in South Korea where within three days of its open beta launch, Priston Tale 2 reached 40,000 concurrent online players. The game will launch in the North America later this year. Priston Tale 2 is part of the Subagames library of free MMOs. http://www.subagames.com

With the movie just a day away from release what better time to announce a new game, “Watchmen: Justice is Coming” to the Iphone sometime in March.

 The game world is a real-time, 3D- rendered environment, comprised of different themed areas of New York City inspired by the Watchmen movie. The environments will support up to 1000 players at a time, moving dynamically and simultaneously around the city. Players can interact with one another, progress the story, explore the world and fight against each other.

The graphics are decent for the Iphone, I’m just not sure of whether I want to play a MMO on it.  I guess if you have a long commute it would be a nice game to have, but I’m more of a 5 min gamer when it comes to Iphone games.

Since having let my subscription to Warhammer Online lapse, I’ve moved on to Atlantica Online, a free turned based MMORPG in the style of Final Fantasy games.  Currently I have a level 28 character, but I’m not sure how much longer I plan to say with Atlantica.  The game has an extremely weak story line and so far I’ve only seen 3 types of quests, but we’ll get into that later.   The game does have a ton of features and options to keep you busy, but from my point of view it seems like it’s just one big grind.

Questing – Having reached level 28 I would have thought I would be doing more than just 3 types of quests by now.  So far the only quests I’ve seen are tutorial, fetch and kill quests.  Tutorial quests are actually very good and I’m glad they have them, some are extremely easy and should never have been created, but for the most part there useful.  As I said earlier there are a ton of features and options in the game so it’s good to have these tutorial quests to help you learn the game and yes even at lev 28 I still get many tutorial quests.  Fetch quest are exactly that, deliver this or go talk to that person and you’re done.  Then there are kill quests which either tell you to go kill x number of these monsters or kill a boss.  That’s it.  I’m not sure if there are other type of quests later on, but having played to lev 28 at this point it’s pretty sad those are the only types of quests I’ve seen.

Traveling with Auto-Move/Teleports - One of the features that you’ll uses pretty much the entire time you’re playing is auto-move.  Basically when you get a quest you don’t have to do anything except click the auto-move button, then you can go make yourself something to eat or watch TV.  The auto-move feature will take you exactly to where you need to go, so when you come back all you have to do is talk to the person or kill the monster then click auto-move again and it will take you back to turn-in the quest.  Honestly Atlantica is unplayable unless you have a TV in the same room because a good portion of your time you’re not even playing, you’re just waiting for auto-move to take you to where you need to go.  Later on in the game you’ll get Teleportation Licenses, basically these allow you for 1 day (in game time) to teleport anywhere you have already been, which is great cause it saves you a ton of time, however they’re expensive so you won’t be using it all the time.

Above is a screenshot of one of my auto-move runs.  I had to go to Rome to use the warehouse so I could store some of my items, since I don’t have enough money to buy a teleportation license I had to run back to where I was questing.  As you can see it took about 27 mins, 27 mins!  While a bit on the high end it’s nothing unusually to have 10-15 min auto-move times.  While I like having auto-run cause I’d rather the computer run for me than having to waste my own time, it makes me wonder why they even have a 3D game world to begin with.  Why not just make it a top down map where you move from locaton to locaton similar to Mythos.  There’s no monster agro so unless your character runs directly into a monster your fine.

Combat PvE - Combat is the best part of the game, if you like eastern style RPGs like Final Fantasy you’ll feel right at home. Atlantica allows you to have up to 18 mercenaries in your group which I actually feel is way to much.  Right now I only have 6 and feel like that’s enough, so I couldn’t imagine worrying about 18 units.  The problem with Atlantica is that it makes PvE combat extremely boring, the monster you fight are way to easy unless you go way past your level then you die.  The only time I feel like I have a challenge is when I’m fighting a boss, but the great majority of you’re time you’ll be grinding monsters.

Combat PvP - PvP combat is a lot more fun than PvE.  The game gives you many options to participate in PvP, you can challenge someone that’s near you,  go to the challenge board to find an open challenge or participate in the battle arenas which start every 2 hrs or so.  Winning a battle you’ll be awarded items and XP, there’s no looting so you don’t need to worry about losing your items.  Free leagues are battles that take place in the Rome arena where players of similar rankings fight over a 1 hr 40 mins time span to determine a winner.  I’ve participate in a few of these although I haven’t done well yet.  One of my biggest grips is that even though they put users of similar rankings together that doesn’t mean there similar levels.  I was lev 28 with 6 merc and I had to fight a lev 33 char with 7 mercs.  Not only did the user have an extra merc to fight with, but they were all 5 levels higher than my guys, so obviously I got my ass kicked.   This seems to be a very common occurrence as most of my PvP battles have been one sided.  On another note once the League ends your stuck in Rome, so for me that means I have a 27 min auto-run back to where I was questing.

Crafting – While I haven’t done much crafting so far, it basically works the same way as most crafting systems with one exception.  Once you have gathered your ingredients, you need to build up work-load points to actually craft the items. The way to build work-load points is to either fight monsters or get work-load scrolls for winning PvP fights.  I honestly hate crafting in MMOs, just a huge grind fest, so I tend to not do it.

Basically I’m not seeing the potential in this game, it seems like all you do is quest grinding.  Since Darkfall seems to be having 1001 problems, I’ll probably continue playing Atlantica from time to time when I’m extremely bored.  I really hate quest grinding so unless the game starts offering other things to do I don’t see myself lasting.

Darkfall: Guild Functionality

Those of you who are familiar with my some of my articles may know that one aspect of MMO’s that is important to me as a guild leader is guild functionality.  In my recent review of the Darkfall Beta, I didn’t really have a chance to delve into this side of the game.  The few guildmates I had in the beta with me were more focused about gathering general information about the game, but now that Darkfall has gone live, my guild has been able to take a look at what is a surprisingly deep guild user interface.

Main Menu

This is the main menu of the guild interface. Right away we can see that there are a wide variety of features that you won’t find in many other MMOs.  The interface has a built in message board system in the game for your guild, and a separate officer’s forum.  While I am sure most guilds that are remotely serious already have their own website with these, it is definitely an interesting addition.

Aside from the forums, we can see some other standard features like the general roster and guild bank management.  Depending on the nature of your guild, there is actually a built in KOS (Kill on Sight) list that some might want to utilize to make a note of who is at the top of your shit list.  If your guild is involved in the conquest side of the game, there is an interface to show your status with other guilds, and another to keep track of your guild’s conquest history.

Roster

This is the bread and butter screen of pretty much every guild interface in every MMO.  The roster in Darkfall contains a lot of the general information listing all of the members, their clan rank, race, gender, and online status.  Unique to Darkfall on this screen however is a listing of each members alignment, so that everyone can monitor how close to going red or blue each member is.

Across the top of the roster there are several tabs that provide even more information.  The “Fighting” tab shows a list of all kills that members of your guild have done to people who are on your KOS list or in guild which has been declared as enemy status.  We also see the “Support” tab which keeps tracks of players who have been revived (helping up an incapacitated player) by the guild members during a time of war.  Conversely, the “Ganking” tab tracks the ganks (final blows to incapacitated players) that members have performed to those on the KOS and enemy guild list.

KOS List

The kill on sight list is the tool in which to declare a specific player an enemy of your guild.  I am sure we all have heard other players threatening other players with KOS lists in other games, but Darkfall actually has it built right into the game.  So if you were one of those people who kept the list next to the computer or had the list on your forums, you can put away the pen and paper.

With this addition, now all of the members of your guild will have access to the individuals on your shit list.  The list will display data on the KOS individual including their name, guild, rank in that guild, and gender.  This makes for a useful tool to target a specific member of a certain guild without declaring war an their entire roster.  Although one would have to imagine that singling out and killing a certain member of a guild could lead to an escalation, but that is left up to the players to decide.

Guild Bank

This is the tool in the guild interface that allows the guild to track and monitor activity of member interaction with the guild bank.  The main screen can be sorted out between deposits and withdraws, and lists the item and the quantity in each transaction.

The amount of data listed can be sorted by time. You can decide to only see today’s transactions, or you can opt take see all the transactions digging back to a week, month, or all time.  Across the top we first see the “Resource” tab, which consolidates the transactions.  For example, instead of seeing 10 transactions from members adding 50 gold each, the resource tab simply consolidates it to 500 gold for easier viewing.  The “Current Items” tab is a complete inventory list of all the items that in the guild bank vault.

Diplomacy

The diplomacy tab is a tool in the interface that displays your relationships with clans as defined by the guild.  Given how guild oriented the game can become, this tool helps you assign a value to guilds so that members can see the policy towards other guilds.  I like to think of this window much like the diplomacy adviser from Civ 4 in that it helps you untangle the web of relationships between your guild and the various others that you are bound to cross paths with as you play the game.

Clan Empire

This is the tool in the interface that tracks activity relating to guild conquest.  Think of this an as event log that keeps track of various aspects and events during your wars with other clans.

Down the side of the tool, we can see that members are able to filter the list by wins, losses, treaties, and active conflicts.  Across the top of the screen, first we see the “Cities” tab.  This enables guild members to view all information regarding the cities the guild controls and destroyed.  The “Structures” tab lists all structures that the guild has either disabled or destroyed.

The Verdict

The Darkfall guild UI is definitely one of the most intricate my guild has seen in an MMO, and is the first we have seen in a while to give the Everquest 2 guild UI a run for its money.  The only issue is that it seems that opening it up can take a few seconds for it to load because it uses some form of HTML.  Hopefully this should give other guild leaders and future members an idea of the tools that we have at our disposal.  I mentioned in my beta review that to really experience all of what Darkfall has to offer, you should consider playing with friends or joining up with a guild.  I hope that this has provided you with some insight on that experience.  Aventurine has clearly spent a lot of time working on this side of the game, and as time goes on we will hopefully get a better idea of how all of this will come together.

Paragus
Co-Leader of Inquisition
www.inqguild.com