Runic Games recently Twittered that they uhhh, well you see Runic doesn’t actually know what they twittered and neither does anyone else.  Their latest post reads “Things have been so busy lately, we have not been able to figure out what this is… any ideas?”  Within that posted sentence was the word “this”, which ended up being a link that lead to a mysterious picture.  Whatever this image is, we don’t know.  Hopefully things relating to this mysterious picture will come to light in the near future.  Perhaps new details on the possible Torchlight MMO?  You be the judge and click here to see the strange drawing for yourself.

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Former professional pitcher Curt Schilling and his team at 38 Studios are moving. With their first project in the works, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, Schilling is taking his team from its Maynard, MA home to Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

Apparently, not everyone is happy with the move. Developers Demiurge Studios expressed their concern in a strange open letter addressed to Schilling and company.

“I write to you today to address the announcement yesterday that you are moving your company away from Massachusetts to Rhode Island.” Begins the letter written by Chief Executive Officer at Demiurge William D. Reed.

Reed’s letter expressed his concern over Schilling moving the Studio from its MA base to Rhode Island. Reed goes on to express how much 38 Studios will be leaving behind if it leaves MA and more or less begs Schilling and his team to stay.

Reed ended the letter with this statement, perhaps making the letter a ploy to lure Curt and his team away from 38 Studios or possibly merge? “Curt, we love our home state of Massachusetts. In the end, if you really move your company down to Pawtucket, it will be a loss for the Boston game community. If anyone on the talented 38 Studios team wants to stay in Massachusetts, where we play major-league ball, they’re more than welcome to join the team at Demiurge Studios, the state’s soon-to-be largest independent game studio.”

The entire letter is an odd sentiment. MMOCrunch dug deeper into the Internets to try and find out what this weird little communication was all about. It seems that 38 Studios will be getting $75 million in loan guarantees by moving the studio to RI, but is obligated to generate some 450 jobs by the end of 2012 for this service.

The open letter to Schilling and company is definitely out of the norm in terms of usual business practices – perhaps its just a letter to express care and concern between friends, maybe it’s the first move in trying to get Schilling to reneg on his move and partner up with Demiurge? Fans will have to wait and see what the potential move brings and how 38 Studios reacts to the letter.

For the full open letter, click here.

Sources at Massively.com have reported a recent rumor that developers Twisted Pixel Games have partnered with Turbine and finished development on a console-based MMO.

Nothing is really known about the project right now, other than Turbine made the announcement shown above. Twisted Pixel Games helped on the project and its job at Turbine is complete.

Twisted Pixel Games is best known for XBOX Live Arcade games such as Blitz: The League II. Turbine is the designer behind such titles as Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online.

Read the full statement about Turbine’s New Console MMO in the graphic above! Check back to MMOCrunch.com as the story develops.

As mentioned in a Topnews.us article, EA has recently approved dropping a lot more coin into Star Wars: The Old Republic predicting that it will spend the most money EA has ever put into one of its games.

Chief Financial Officer, Eric Brown at Janney Capital Markets’ 2010 Consumer Conference confirmed that it is EA’s biggest splurg in terms of anticipated spending to get a game on the market, looking for a launch of March 2011. Although EA didn’t release specific information regarding how much has been spent so far, or how much they plan to spend in the future, this announcement means that EA has put a lot of trust in their latest MMO.

For the original article on Star Wars: The Old Republic: Predicted to be EA’s Most Expensive Title to Date, click here.

The Saga of Ryzom, more commonly known as “Ryzom” has made MMO history by becoming the first commercial MMORPG to become completely open source. The Ryzom source code consists of  ”over 2 million lines of code, over 20,000 textures and thousands of 3D objects.”

While anyone can now use anything they wish from the source code it has been mentioned on the Ryzom Forums that the game will still be carrying on as it is with its pay-to-play subscription.

For you as a Ryzom player, nothing changes. The game continues to be pay-to-play to help pay for the cost of development and running of Ryzom.

One can only wonder how, if at all, this will help the game as the inevitable free copy-cats start to show.

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.

Not too long ago I speculated that CrimeCraft might be in trouble when they announced back in Oct 09 they would start to offer an free subscription option. Today, I was browsing around CrimeCraft’s website and noticed they had a leaderboard setup for individual players and gangs.   So I decided to add up the numbers to see if I could guesstimate how many active players CrimeCraft currently has.

From an initial look, it seems that the individual leaderboard maxes out at 2,500 players, so it didn’t really help.  But when looking at the Gang Leaderboard, it only went up to 15 pages, less than the 125 pages for individual characters.  On top of that, the 15th page shows gangs mostly made up of 2-5 members, so from what I can tell it appears to be the bottom of the barrel.

Adding up the Members column, it came to 4704 players that are in gangs.  As with any MMO, there are always players that like to solo, so I decided to double the player number bringing my guesstimate to 9,408 active players.

Again, I’d like to stress this is only a guess, but I’d be very surprised to learn if I was off by more than a few thousand.

Edit: The Twilight MMO isn’t a confirmed project (yet), it merely is a video game created by a game design student of the Westwood College Online.

Ok we can breathe now. I may have jumped the gun on this one!

Reported today on Massively.com, revealing a website  for a video game created around the Twilight Saga. You too can be the dashingly handsome vampire, werewolf or just a plain human being.

Ok, I’ll let you finish ROFLING … feel better now. Alright, it does sound a bit fluffy and I have never been a fan of the ‘tween’ centered saga.  But you have to take a look at some interesting demographics concerning the amount of women who play online games.  Women exceed the amount of men online by about 2 to 1.

According to a Neilsen survey, over 400,000 women are playing Blizzard’s overwhelmingly popular World of Warcraft in the US of A. So with World of Warcraft being the most popular online game amongst the ladies. I believe that this isn’t the worst business idea I have heard so far.

I realize that the MMORPG market is now experiencing incredible amount of growth, but is there really a need for a MMO based the the Twilight series?

Play safe,

Ink

Hacker Buster

As I sit here and take my pen to parchment, I want to discuss account security. Recently a few people I know in game have had their accounts hacked. One of these fine people has no idea about secure passwords or virus scanners or anything related to computer security. He was probably a victim of a key logger. The other person was extremely security concerned person, didn’t even run in admin mode on his gaming rig, yet he was still hacked. These issues affect all demography of people, regardless of knowledge or background. They do have one thing in common, a love for gaming.

They both submitted tickets to Blizzard and are in the process of getting their stuff back. It takes time. Blizzard has to investigate the issue to make sure you were hacked and conclude their investigation before they get back to you or return your hard earned gold and equipment.

I really have a strong dislike of these scumbags who hack accounts. Their sole purpose is to ruin someone else’s game. They sit there with their grubby little paws sweating over a keyboard in their mom’s basement or some factory in china creating key loggers, and rain destruction on their unsuspecting victims. It’s hard to believe that gold farming and account hacking has become so profitable. Well don’t be a victim. There is something you can do.

Some time ago I decided to order a Blizzard Authenticator. For the most part I no longer worry about account security. It costs $6.50 from the blizzard store. Once you receive it, log in to the account management page add the authenticator to your account. Every time you log into your account you will still need to type in your password, then type in the code that appears on your authenticator after pressing the button. Yes it’s that simple, that easy.

I love the peace of mind that $6.50 brings. Why are you still reading this? Go get one. Still there? Fine go here  Blizzard Authenticator Chop Chop!! and get one.

Let’s face it, single player RPGs are a dying breed.  Even games like Diablo that have online game play are still a single player game at heart.  Sure you can join a instance with a few other people to run through quests, farm for item drops or trade, but there is no persistant world.    There is nothing that binds players together except for the BattleNet chat channels and it certainly is not a “Massive Multiplayer” game, emphasis on massive.

While it seems most RPGs are taking the MMO route there have been some within the last few years that remain as single player games.  Fallout 3, Mass Effect, Kingdom Hearts series, Zelda, Final Fantasy to name a few.  However others like Star Wars: Kotor have been announced as MMOs.  The Elder Scroll series has also been rumored to make the jump to MMO as well as the next Fallout game.  The Final Fantasy series went MMO back in 2002, although single player FF games continue to be made.  Other RPGs such as Baldur’s Gate and Ultima  just seems to have disappeared.

With the Diablo series only a very small percentage of players choose to play offline, the rest of us play online through Bnet.  The way the game is currently setup Blizzard has to limit how many people join an instance.  If you never played Diablo basically the more users that join an instance the more the monsters get scaled up in power and health.  So if you have 100 people in one instance it would just become a mess.   I’m a little rusty since I haven’t played D2 in a few yrs, but I think the limit was 10 or 12, I could be wrong.

The only thing stopping Diablo from becoming a MMO is a persistant world, all the other elements are already there.  With the success Blizzard has had with WoW, I just don’t see them releasing Diablo 4 as another single player online RPG.

We all know Blizzard is already working on a new-gen MMO.  Whether it’s going to be Starcraft, Diablo or a new IP is anyone guess, but I doubt we’ll be seeing a D3 and Diablo MMO that soon together.  My money is still on a SC MMO.

On a side note, didn’t I do a nice job editing the D3 logo