The first time I played the original Realtime Worlds beta of All Points Bulletin I never really got past the first few tutorial missions due to a faulty graphics card. After spending some time with the free-to-play revival of this game, I’m starting to think I may have missed out on a fun experience.

Taking place in the fictional city of San Paro, APB pits criminals vs enforcers in a virtual game of cops & robbers. Featuring no classes, levels or stats, your skill with a gun will largely dictate your success, or failure in this game.

I say there are no classes but that’s not entirely true. Players can purchase equipment and character modifications that grant various buffs in the form of extra health, quicker health regen, ammo regeneration for team mates, and various other goodies I’ve not yet had the chance to play with. This enables players to specialise in various areas, perhaps equipping modifications beneficial to a sniper, or a close quarter shotgun wielder in effect creating your own custom class similar to the perks/specialisation features of modern FPS shooter titles.

Character customisation features some of the most varied options and choices you will likely ever see in an MMO, and will probably suck up a large amount of time when creating your first character. I was able to knock up a hockey masked enforcer tribute to Casey Jones fairly easily. Another childhood fantasy achieved if only in video game form.

Continued…

So you hit level 10 and you feel like you could take on the whole Empire (or Republic) yourself? Star Wars: The Old Republic allows you to take the fight to the opposite faction via PvP battlegrounds called warzones. There are currently three warzones in the game, all with varying objectives required for victory.

Not only are warzones a fun experience, they also provide good rewards in the form of commendations which can be used to purchase equipment, weapons and consumables. Of course, if you want to get your hands on these goodies you’ll need to get amongst some blaster fire and earn your keep!

Here to assist you on your path to galactic domination and help you and your team to victory is a brief guide to each warzone and some basic strategies.

Continued…

EA announced today that Star Wars: The Old Republic has officially become the fastest growing subscription MMO in history, with over one million players registering since the Dec 20th launch.  EA also released some other stats which are listed below.

• Logged 28 million in-game hours – roughly equivalent to watching all sixStar Wars movies, two million times
• Averaged well over five hours a day playing the game
• Created more than 3.8 million characters; 510,000 Jedi Knights and 550,000 Sith Warriors
• Killed more than two billion non-player characters in the eight days since Early Game Access began

The third stat is pretty interesting and reveals something about players class choice . The stat tells us that out of the 3.8 million characters, about 28% are Jedi Knights or Sith Warriors, slightly more than the 25% if we were to divide the classes evenly. I’d be interested to see the numbers for the remains 6 classes especially the Bounty Hunter and Smuggler classes.

In an interview with Eurogamer, RIFT executive producer Scott Hartsman mentioned that Trion has no plans for turning RIFT into a free-to-play title stating, “Right now, absolutely no plans whatsoever“.

Not a big surprise to hear given that the overall consensus is that RIFT is doing pretty well, however when asked for subscription numbers, Hartsman declined to provide any. Although he did mention that the game is “absolutely profitable“.

Not only is Trion making money from RIFT, but Hartsman stated they are licensing the technical platform of all three games (RIFT, End of Nations and Defiance) in which they were built on. So it doesn’t seem like money is an issue for Trion currently.

That being said, it’s almost never a good thing when a publisher doesn’t release any numbers, especially after being release for as long as RIFT has. The only number we’ve seen so far is the 1 million registered accounts that were created during the pre-launch. Had RIFT actually hit 1 million subscribers, I’m sure they would have gladly released that number by now.

This is an open letter to the gaming industry.

Dear Gaming Industry,

Please stop calling every online game you make a MMO. I’m not sure if you know what that means so allow me to tell you. It stands for Massive Multiplayer Online with the keyword being “massive”, that’s very important. You see when someone sees a game being advertised as massive, that person gets the impression that thousands of players will be able to game and interact together in one world or place. Now listen carefully because this is the most important part, it has to be at the same time.

I know this must come as quite a shock to you, but it’s true.  You’re probably saying to yourself, “wow, that’s a lot of people!” and you’re right, but this is why they’re called massive multiplayer online games, because they are indeed massive.

Now, I want to make sure you’re clear as to what that means, so below I’ve listed a few important rules that can be used as checkpoints so you can correctly determine if your game is a MMO or not.

• If your game has a limit to the number of players that can enter at one time and that number is less than a thousand. Your game is not a MMO.

MMOFPSs tend to be the primary abuser of this rule, but it also happens with other genres as well. You see if only 8, 16, 32 or even 100 players can join a game at one time, then it is not massive. Remember, around a thousand players is the magic number. This is more commonly called an online multiplayer game.

• If the whole game is instanced and the only place where players can see each other or interact with are within towns, then your game is not a MMO.

Since the only place where people can see each other, chat and interact with are in towns, then these towns act as a hub or chat room. The actually game is played in small groups or solo, which again means your game is not massive. Think of it this way, if you log onto BattleNet to play Diablo, you can chat with tens of thousands of players, but when you go into the actual game, only a dozen or so can enter due to the fact that every game is instanced. Your game is the same thing, except your using a “town” as the chat room.

I hope this letter has better explained to you what a MMO game is and hopefully in the future you will start to label your games correctly.

Sincerely,
Mike @ MMOCrunch

Today Reto-Moto, the independent gaming studio created by the guys that brought us the Hitman series, released their deput teaser trailer for their upcoming World War II MMO game. Heroes & Generals is a MMOFPS that also offers a strategic campaign management system, which is all based on a massive-scale online world.

Heroes & Generals will feature a persistent online war that is fought by thousands of players on the battlefield and through a tactical war map where some players will make the big decisions that can effect the outcome of the whole war. From the trailer, we can see tanks and airplanes, although it is unclear whether those will be playable units or if they are called it for support.

Currently the game is in alpha testing and Reto-Moto is taking signups, so if you want to check it out, head over to the official site.

Check out the Heroes & Generals teaser trailer below.

Continued…

Speaking to IndustryGamers, BioWare heads Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk, stated that the possibility of a Mass Effect MMO game is very much alive. Dr. Zeschuk said the following when asked about a Mass Effect MMO,

You never know.  I think once The Old Republic is done, we’ll take a fresh look at the market. And we’ll have learned a lot. While making it, you learn an enormous amount. It’s one of the nice things about having these properties in our back pocket… If we want to use something we own as a source for a game, it’s easy to do. So yeah, you never know. We’ve got this giant product to launch, but once that’s done we’ll consider next steps.

Muzyka added,

We’re focused very much on The Old Republic, Mass Effect 3 and [our free-to-play game] Wrath of Heroes, and all the other things we’ve announced, and haven’t announced, but we also have the opportunity to look at our franchises in a way we haven’t ever before. There are lots of new platforms and lots of new business models.

It seems BioWare is taking the wait and see approach with Star Wars: The Old Republic to see how it does before making any decisions about another MMO game. But if the hype surrounding SWTOR is any indication of its success, I’m sure BioWare will jump at the chance to create another MMORPG out of a beloved series like Mass Effect.

Fans of Blizzard who had hoped to learn more about Blizzard’s unannounced MMO, Titan, will be disappointed as a Blizzard representative today announced that Titan would not be present at the convention.

Titan is the codename for Blizzard’s unannounced MMO game which was leaked a year ago via a product release schedule. Set to be released in the fourth quarter of 2014, it seems it’s still to early to reveal just what Titan is. After all with all the hype surrounding GW2, SWTOR and it’s own Diablo 3, Blizzard might be worried the announcement might not get as much attention as it deserves.

Looks like we’ll have to wait for next years Blizzcon for the big reveal.

Class balance is a key aspect to any MMO game that expects to be successful whether it be in PvE or PvP combat, however should classes be limited for no other reason than for the sake of balance?

In a recent interview at RockPaperShotgun, Matt Higby the Creative Director for PlanetSide 2 said something that got me thinking about what the role of developers should be in terms of balancing classes. When talking about distinctive gameplay roles in PlanetSide 2, Higby stated the following,

Like a dude with a sniper rifle AND jump jets, who can now get to a place where no-one can take him out; that’s too strong.

My questions to Mr. Higby would then be, why not allow every class to use jump jets? What is the reason, other than the developers not allowing it, that other classes cannot use them? And not just jump jets, any weapon/utility combination. Set classes and weapons are fine for FPS where the action takes place on an instanced map that never changes, but for MMOFPSs that are trying to give gamers a more dynamic battlefield, why give them static classes?

Why not allow any class to use any weapon or skill combination and allow the players themselves to find a natural balance. Games like MW2 allow players to equip any weapons, skills and utility items they want to combine and create their own custom class and while MW2 is still simplistic when compared to some MMO games, I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t be introduced into MMOFPS.

One can argue that even with complete freedom in class customization a natural balance will eventually form where players figure out the best combinations of weapons and skills to combine to create the best classes.  So the developers are removing that guess work and providing players with those best classes upfront. While I can see that point, I would much rather prefer the freedom to create my own class tailored to my specific play style than any premade class. What do you think? Should there be more class freedom in MMO games today?

During a press conference today, Square Enix announced Dragon Quest X Online, the first MMO title for the Wii as well as a first for the Dragon Quest series. What’s more is that it’ll be released on both the Wii and Nintendo’s upcoming Wii U console and will allow players on both to game with each other.

This will also be the first time that a Dragon Quest game will be developed internally by Square Enix instead of another studio.

Square Enix also revealed that there will be additional connectivity with the 3DS, possibly allowing players to transfer their characters to the 3DS for doing Spot Pass data exchanged while on the go.

DQX will be released sometime in 2012 with beta details being released soon.