Today E3 brings us the newest Black Prohecy trailer, which offers a glimpse into the PvP system, clan battles and shows off some of the various mission types.  Black Prophecy is the sci-fi space combat MMO from Reakktor Media.  While the trailer is impressive, it really doesn’t show anything that we haven’t already seen.

For more MMO E3 coverage, please be sure to check back often.

Trees, mountains, more trees, more mountains and more trees

Normally when I say I’m lost in a game I’m referring to the games atmosphere and gameplay, but this time I literally mean I’m lost.  I’ve wandered out from one of the game’s cities into the wilderness and have been lost for about an hour or so.  I have no idea where in the game I am or how to get back to where I came from.  I haven’t seen a single player, NPC or Mob the entire time other then a few pigs or rabbits, which are scarce at that.   For those of you who haven’t played Mortal Online yet, there is no in-game map, so you never really know where you are or where any city is.  There are no sign posts on trails or at outposts pointing to a cities direction, or at least I haven’t found any.  Considering Mortal Online is set to release this month, within 2 weeks, I’m shocked at the lack of content outside the cities.

I found the end of the world

A few weeks ago I wrote how the Mortal Online open beta was a dud due to the lack of content, however one reader replied back with “I’ve killed minotaurs, lizard men, terror birds, been in giant battles, wear full plate and have steel weapons. Plenty to do in the beta.”  My question to this reader is, where?  I’ve been walking around in all directions for over an hr and I haven’t seen one mob, not one.  I did find two outposts, but they were completely empty.

I now have about 6-8 hrs worth of gameplay in the Mortal Online open beta and while the games mechanics such as fighting, stealing, crafting and other systems are all working very well, I don’t really have anything to do.  I think the main issue I’m having is not having a map.  I don’t know where I am in relation to other cities and I don’t know where any thing is.  Just finding NPCs to buy and sell items takes forever because you have to search the entire city to find where they’re located.  I’m not saying I need a map with NPC icons everywhere, but a map that shows where the market is or where the smiths are located would be helpful.

Mortal Online does have some big content issues, but the game mechanics and rules are a breath of fresh air.  This is the first game where I’ve been able to steal items directly from a players loot bag, yes I’m playing as a thief and love it.  But aside from stealing items from people, I can’t seem to find anything else to do.

Update: I was not offline or desynced, after around 2 hrs I finally ran into a group of people and they pointed me in the direction of  a city.  This is also not a review, we do not review games in beta.

Today we received some new screenshots of EmpireCraft 2.0, which are posted below. For those of you not familiar with EmpireCraft, it is a browser based MMORTS game similar to Evony.  You have a town, created an army and try to take over other peoples towns.  There’s obviously more to it, but that’s the gist of it.

If you take a look that new screens, the top three, for Empire Craft 2, you can see that it is a major graphical update from the old school 16 bit graphics.  It’s actually looks pretty good.

In a surprise announcement, the largest free virtual market for buying, selling and trading MMO accounts, MarkeeDragon.com, has announced they are getting out of the virtual marketplace business, sort of.  MMOBay.net, a leading auction site for virtual goods has acquired the MD forums, which are in the process of being transfered over.  No mention was made at what price the forums were sold for, but my guess is it was a lot.

In MD’s announcement Youtube video, he explains the move was so that they could try to legitimize the market over the next few years in the hopes that they could eventually make buying and selling MMO accounts not against the TOS agreements that most MMOs have today.  Quite a lofty goal if you ask me.

So what will become of MD?  Nothing has been announced yet, but they did say the new site will be launched sometime this week.  As for MMOBay.net, it seems that this will catapult them to the top of the account selling market as the combination of the MD forums and their own member base will make them one of the largest, if not the largest virtual market place online.

Crisp, the foremost expert on behavioral analysis technology for online communities, today announced NetModerator for MMOs.  NetModerator promises to finally put an end to cheaters, spammers, farmers, botters, powerleveling and griefing.  Quite a list.

NetModerator will allow MMO companies to use real-time profiling to identify and deal with these naughty activities.

Crisp’s new control system gives moderators real-time management control of online interactions by reading, analyzing, reporting and intervening on abusive in-game activities and communications.  Installations of the system are customized to analyze the specific activities each customer wishes to monitor.  These include any or all of the MMO modules developed by Crisp as well as behaviors specific to a particular game.

This level of automation reduces the need for live moderation/customer service for low-level issues by up to 80 percent. The resources formerly dedicated to those activities can be directed to high instances that need high level human decisions.

“Gold farmers, cheaters and griefers are huge threats to the long-term success of any MMO.  Yet, the industry has had to adopt a passive model — waiting for players to report the problems after their experience has been ruined,” said Adam Hildreth, CEO of Crisp.  “NetModerator for MMOs gives companies a weapon that lets them actively detect and deal with problems before most players even have a chance to notice.”

Quite a lofty goal if you ask me, but definitely a welcomed one.  My question would be what is the percentage of false positives? I mean we all farm a little, powerlevel from time to time and if we get mad we might say some inappropriate things in chat.  I would be interested to see how this works while people are actually playing.

To find out more about NetModerator, check out the Crisp website here.

Normally when a MMO game reaches the open beta phase of its development cycle, it is pretty close to the version that will be released, minus a few changes and bug fixes.  However it seems that Star Vault, the developers behind Moral Online, have decided to go into open beta while the game is no where near a complete product.  Mortal Online entered the open beta phase a month ago today on Feb 1st 2010.

To me an open beta is that final extra push to get gamers excited about their game, to create buzz and to start lining up pre-order sales.  But when it comes to Mortal Online, not only am I not excited about the game, it completely crushed all my expectations.   Mortal Online was one of the top three games I was looking forward to in 2010, but after about an hr or so in open beta, I don’t think there is a chance in hell this game will even be released this year.

Almost nothing in the game is complete and in the 60-90 mins I spent in game, I couldn’t find one NPC that had any quests. [edit: there are no quests in Mortal Online, which I actually love, so don't flame me for this comment]  The game looks great, but to be in open beta just seems silly to me at this stage of the games development.  I can list all the incomplete features I found just in the short time I played, but even that would be a monster list.

Currently the games release date is stated as the first quarter of 2010 and with only a month left, I seriously hope they push that date way way back to maybe Q1 2011.

This might be a little late, but I’m sure there are some that have not been keeping up with Lego Universe news, so I wanted to post it anyway. This is the second Lego Universe trailer that was released and shows us the bad guys in the game, although no new in-game footage.

It’s been a long time since we heard the latest numbers for Funcom’s Age of Conan, however with the release of update 6 and their guild ranking system, we can now guesstimate how many subscribers AoC really has.   As I did last week with CrimeCraft when I guesstimated there numbers were below 10,000, I went to Age of Conan’s guild ranking system, imported all the guild member numbers from each server and added up the totals.  Surprisingly it seems that Age of Conan is well above the 100,000 subscriber count which many people though it was below.

Adding up the guild member numbers came out to 97,167 players.  As I did with Crimecraft’s estimate I’ll double this number as many people do not join guilds and like to solo.  So then the number of active AoC players comes to 194,334 players. I would bet that is an over estimate, I would seriously doubt that 50% of AoC players are soloing without a guild.  So maybe it’s closer to 150,000.

This estimate should obviously be taken with a grain of salt as I am unsure what guild member numbers really means. Do guild members equal active subscribers?  Or is Funcom adding inactive accounts into the guild count?

Regardless, I think it is safe to say that Age of Conan is above the 100,000 subscribers mark.  It might very well be that Age of Conan is seeing its member base grow now that they have had some time to iron out the kinks.   No official word from Funcom.

Gala-net has announced that Allods Online open beta will begin for North America on Feb 16th.  Back in Nov 09 when we had our Allods Online closed beta key giveaway, we received an overwhelming response for keys, in fact we still receive requests for keys, so I’m sure this is welcomed news for many of you.  To signup for the Allods open beta just head over to the official site and signup.

Below is the full press release.

February 9th, 2010 Gala-Net, Inc., a leading free-to-play online game publisher, has announced today their Open Beta Test (OBT) for Allods Online in the North American market.  The Open Beta Test will go live on February 16^th and will allow players access to the entire game.  All players are welcome to join the world of Allods, and there will be no restrictions to join!

Gala-Net today announced that the new expansion to their free to play MMORPG, Rappelz, will launch on February 24th.  The expansion titled, Rappelz Epic VI: Resurrection, will be available to all players for free and will revive the main storyline of the evil Witch and introduce new pets to Rappelz.

In Epic VI: Resurrection, the most sinister villain in Rappelz makes her triumphant return: the Witch.  Players are introduced to the humble beginnings of the Witch’s saga with rumors of a girl with mysterious powers.  Those rumors will bring players into an epic continent-spanning journey to discover the truth of the Witch.

Resurrection also introduces 3 new pets to tame: the Unicorn, the Nightmare, and the Ifrit.  The Unicorn is a calm, pure, and holy steed that provides a variety of buffs to its owner.  The Nightmare is a wild beast that is difficult to tame, and its formidable armor makes it a fearsome companion in battle as it will often absorb blows targeted at its master.  The Ifrit is a powerful magical creature that can heal its allies and unleash destruction on its enemies.

More information about the Rappelz expansion can be found on Gpotato’s website.