A major component of the Riders of Rohan expansion for Lord of the Rings Online is the epic journey of the fellowship. In the latest video dev diary, developers discuss the game's return to the core of the Lord of the Rings story. It is this part of the adventure that the war in Middle-earth gains momentum and the fellowship falls to pieces. You can watch the dev diary after the break.

Turbine has also released a number of screenshots highlighting this year's Harvestmath Festival, which is going on now through October 14th. During the festival, players can explore the Haunted Burrow beneath the Party Tree, participate in games of skill, join the horse races, and even play tricks on various citizens of Middle-earth. New Harvestmath-themed housing items are available as well as a new Harvest-brew steed. Check out the Harvestmath images below.
[Source: Turbine press release]

Continue Reading

Continue Reading

Jagex has nuked them from orbit, and now, the MMO studio is going to put RuneScape's bots on trial.

Coming soon to RuneScape is a brand-new area called Botany Bay. It's here that players can be the judge, jury, and executioner for convicted bots, voting on their ultimate punishment. Jagex gives two warnings to botters, after which the player is ejected from the game and his or her avatar is sent to Botany Bay for final judgment. Botters' avatars may be smooshed by a dragon, vaporized, or pelted with rotten fruit.

Lead Designer Mark Ogilvie hopes this will deter players from naughty behavior: "We have wanted to do this for some time and we hope that by bringing the actions of those who cheat to the attention of the wider community, we can make a massive step towards eliminating botting from the game."

You can watch a trailer for the new Botany Bay area after the jump.

[Source: Jagex press release]

Continue Reading

Besides various tweaks and fixes, The Cat God offers two new missions, The Binding and Dogs of War. The Binding is an investigation mission that takes you to the City of the Sun God in Egypt, while Dogs of War focuses on the conflict between the vampires and their allies. For full details about the changes, check out the patch notes.

The Cat God, for whom the update is named, will make a personal appearance in October closer to the Halloween holiday. A special Halloween event will run through the end of October and the first week of November that will include the beginning of a new storyline and a new villain. We'll keep you updated as more information becomes available.

You're darn tootin' I'm going to end them! That's me, taking up arms against the hordes of zombies. Or more accurately, chopping them off, along with legs, heads, and anything else that gets in the way of my blade! If you have zero interest in fighting reanimated townsfolk with flesh dripping off of them, then The Secret World is probably not the MMO for you. However, if you don't mind dicing, slicing, slashing, shooting, chopping, blasting, or otherwise obliterating said undead, then Kingsmouth really is the place to be! If zombies were a cash crop, that little town would be swimming in the moolah Scrooge McDuck-style.

For the second act of our co-production, Choose My Adventure undertook a massive scenery change. Instead of the concrete jungle of NYC where we began, the story played out in the sleepy streets of a quiet new England town. Well, quiet if you don't count the lip-smacking of the zombies gnawing on everyone. Armed with my rifle, my sword, and of course, your directions, I set off to explore, ameliorate suffering, and eviscerate the hordes of evil in The Secret World.

Continue Reading

The City of Heroes community has been great in rallying to save the game, but I'm wondering whether that's enough.

If you missed it, this week has not been a good one for efforts to keep the game alive. I'm not going to reprint everything laid out in TonyV's recent post, but the short version is that there are currently no signs that things are changing. NCsoft has set up an email for players to send letters, one that I suspect is not read vigilantly, and there have been no signs that any of the various talks about the game's future have resulted in anything.

It's the email thing that really set me to wondering about whether or not City of Heroes fans are the right people to be protesting. While I love you guys -- beyond a shadow of a doubt -- there's a certain revolutionary spirit necessary for an effective protest. I'm not entirely certain that we've got that. And if there was ever a chance to save the game, we may just be unable to do what's necessary.

Continue Reading

There are two schools of thought when it comes to handling achievements in MMOs. The first is to keep it mostly private, the second is to herald it to the world entire. Private achievements are great ways to pat the player on the back while keeping him or her modest. Not everyone likes achievement spam, anyway.

Yet I've come to prefer games that do broadcast achievements guild-wide. Why? Because not all of us are so attention-seeking that we constantly write about what we're doing... but if the game's doing that for us, oh well. It's not me being egotistical, it's the game's doing. But if you happen to notice what I'm doing? So much the better.

I genuinely like seeing what my guildies are up to as well. It feels like we do come together for the typical "grats" after an achievement notice, or even the rare "holy crap, that's awesome!" for significant milestones. Of course, sometimes these games can get silly with the number of trivial achievements, so it can hurt the legitimacy of the real ones.

What do you think? Do you like having achievements broadcast guild-wide, or would you prefer it kept quiet (or even turned off)?

Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!

City of Heroes players have been rallying around the movement to save the game ever since the shutdown announcement was made. It's been nearly a month with no official response regarding the movement's requests from NCsoft aside from a special email address, and that's enough to make almost anyone start to despair. But a new fan-made video is meant to help inspire the protest, mixing machinima footage with narration, screenshots, and music to produce a tribute to the immense movement to avoid the game's demise.

Starting with the unexpected August 31st announcement, the video shows off excerpts from several of the news stories surrounding the announcement and the major in-game rally at Atlas Park, with footage by several notable fans. The narration is spliced together from a variety of sources, including some quotes from our own Massively Speaking. The video also contains links and information for anyone looking to take part in the Save CoH movement. You can see the full video just past the break.

Continue Reading

In what is most certainly a coincidence, Trion Worlds has announced a special promotion today to support pandas with the help of players who purchase a certain expansion. No, not that expansion.

Starting tomorrow, every copy of RIFT: Storm Legion pre-ordered will prompt Trion to donate a buck to Pandas International. Pandas International is an organization devoted to saving the Giant Panda, who probably would not need saving if they were martial arts monks (just saying). The pre-order has to take place through the game's website, and it ends after October 3rd.

If you're up for a laugh, make sure to read the small print on the official announcement. Maine is always the bane of any good panda party.

If you've had your fill of helping NPCs around the world and advancing your personal story in Guild Wars 2, you're probably going to head into one of the game's dungeons. You may have noticed some changes to the way that the dungeon rewarded your accomplishments if you've already done that today. These changes are the result of the game's newest patch, which has altered the reward structure for dungeon tokens and some of the encounter mechanics within individual dungeons.

Players now receive dungeon tokens by reaching the end of an explorable chain rather than via individual boss kills, which prevents players from farming the first boss that drops tokens. To help increase the overall rewards from a single run, the chains will offer 20 tokens on completion and an additional 40 the first time you clear one in a given day. Thus, clearing all three chains in a given dungeon in one day will reward you with 180 tokens in total. Read up on the full changes, along with some minor balance adjustments and bugfixes, in the full patch notes.

I've been playing MMOs for many years, and in that time, I've realized that the big thing they all have in common is that they get better with age. Unlike most single-player games, MMOs are in a constant state of flux. Besides the social interaction, the fact that I can leave a game for a couple of months then come back to find things have changed makes this gaming genre more interesting to me than your average RPG or FPS. Oftentimes, it's fun to come back to a game that I liked but maybe wasn't sticky enough to play all the time just to see what has changed, and maybe I'd like it more the next time around.

That's kind of what happened to me with Star Wars Galaxies. When the game launched, I thought it was great to explore the Star Wars universe I'd grown up with as a kid, but I couldn't latch on to the game because of the bugs and other minor issues. It wasn't until about six months after launch that I was actually able to grasp the game and play it long enough to find out why people were so smitten.

Perhaps Star Wars: The Old Republic will be the same kind of game. When it launched nine months ago, there were bugs, though not as big as SWG's bugs, mind you. The content needed a little tweaking. And certain systems like the Galactic Trade Network did not function well. But now with update 1.4 coming tomorrow and free-to-play on the horizon, it might be a good time to invite your friends to come back or even come back yourself. Let's examine some of the reasons to do so.

Continue Reading

Diablo III was arguably the biggest online game release of the year, but its predecessor's decade of consistent popularity left some pretty big shoes to fill. Despite being the most pre-ordered PC game in history and selling more than 6.3 million units in its first week, Diablo III has started to seriously wane in popularity. I've seen over a dozen friends stop playing completely in the last few months, and Xfire's usage stats for D3 have dropped by around 90% since June. Guild Wars 2's timely release accounts for some of the drop, but there's a lot more going on than just competition.

The Diablo III beta showed only the first few levels and part of the game's highly polished first act, and soon after release it became obvious that parts of the game weren't exactly finished. PvP was cut from release, the Auction House was a mess, and Inferno difficulty was a poor excuse for an endgame. Poor itemisation made the carrot on the end of the stick taste sour, and the runaway inflation on top-end items is crying out for some kind of ladder reset mechanic. But there is hope for improvement, with new legendary items, the Paragon level system, and the upcoming Uber boss mechanic taking a few steps in the right direction.

In this opinion piece, I look at some of the fundamental flaws in Diablo III's endgame and suggest a few improvements that would make a world of difference.

Continue Reading

With this week -- and this podcast -- Massively's Editor-in Chief Shawn Schuster departs from helming this barge of insane writers, and an era comes to an end. To mark this occasion, we invited him to join us for one last Massively Speaking with the ultimate goal of seeing whether we could get him to cry. That's easy: All you have to do is mention Tabula Rasa three or more times.

Have a comment for the podcasters? Shoot an email to podcast@massively.com. We may just read your email on the air!

Get the podcast:
[iTunes] Subscribe to Massively Speaking directly in iTunes.
[RSS] Add Massively Speaking to your RSS aggregator.
[MP3] Download the MP3 directly.
Listen here on the page:



Read below the cut for the full show notes.

Continue Reading

I figured that after the last column's focus on World of Warcraft, I might as well feature the other major November 2004 MMO release: EverQuest II. EverQuest II embraced high fantasy to its core, and the soundtrack for the original game certainly reflects this.

SOE tapped composer Laura Karpman for the project in the early 2000s. The four-time Emmy-winner spent time getting acquainted with the first EverQuest before creating the music for the sequel. Following EQII's completion, Karpman remained on staff at SOE from 2005 to 2006 as the resident composer. She would leave the team after doing the score for EQII's first expansion, Desert of Flames.

"This was one of the most rewarding opportunities I have ever had," Karpman said in 2003. "We had an amazing time recording the score in Prague, a wonderful city with equally great players."

The one-hour soundtrack came with the collector's edition of the game, and a friend mailed me his copy, which I deeply appreciated. There's a lot to enjoy about this score, so let's dig in!

Continue Reading

Blizzard bigwig Mike Morhaime gave an interview to GamesIndustry.biz today to coincide with the launch of World of Warcraft's latest expansion. "One of the things people will notice with Mists of Pandaria in comparison to our other expansions is the variety of things there are to do; it will feel like a bigger, meatier expansion compared to Cataclysm," Morhaime said.

He also talks about the ongoing post-launch plans for Diablo III as well as the e-sport community surrounding Blizzard's StarCraft franchise. Morhaime also offers a frank assessment of the reasons for Star Wars: The Old Republic's quick move to a free-to-play model. "Probably if they [BioWare] had to do it over again they might have held the game over and worked on the endgame content a bit more," he said.

Continue Reading

At the end of last month, Reakktor Media announced that the free-to-play space MMO Black Prophecy would be closing down for good on September 26th. Today, the studio posted a message on its Facebook page reminding players of the goodbye parties and inviting them to join with devs during the game's final hours to send it off into the sunset.

The parties will be held tonight, first on the two EU servers Shinava and Kemmura at 3:00 p.m. EDT (9:00 p.m. PM CEST), and then on the US server Altair at 9:00 p.m. EDT. The servers are scheduled to shut down permanently in the morning.

If age were determined by expansions, Luvinia Online would be four. In years, the free-to-play fantasy MMORPG is celebrating its first birthday. And from now through October 3rd, players can join in special in-game events and earn prizes during the celebration. Events include a scavenger hunt, slicing up a giant pastry, and new PvP guild wars; prizes include mounts, fashions, and gems.

All players can also take advantage of a daily XP buff and new players will get a free fast-travel teleportation book for joining the game. To download and play Luvinia Online for free, visit the official site.

[Source: Outspark press release]

Thanks to viral content, word-of-mouth praise, and a passionate, growing fan base, Arma II mod DayZ has become one of the most talked about games in the industry. We sat down with Bohemia Interactive's Matt Lightfoot to get an idea of how exactly this game came to be, why it has exploded in the way it has, and how he'd attempt to survive a real-life zombie apocalypse:

Massively: Could you give us some idea as to how DayZ came to be? What was the inspiration for the game?

Matt Lightfoot: DayZ was created by Dean Hall, a former soldier in the New Zealand Armed Forces. He originally came up with the inclination to make a survival game when he was doing survival training in Brunei. The zombies come from Dean's discussions with his brother Richard, who is a world expert on influenza. Dean created it in his spare time after moving to the Czech Republic to work for Bohemia.

Continue Reading

In the fifth episode of Command Center, PlanetSide 2 devs Tramell Isaac (Senior Art Director) and Matt Higby (Creative Director) discuss various aspects of the upcoming MMOFPS. At over 22 minutes, the video is full of information, including a beta update, a report on PAX 2012, information and a video on the Engineer, and a preview of SOE Live. They also highlighted fan-made movies and fan art.

Maggie Krohn, game designer, also joined the show to explain the new weekly livestream special, Friday Night Ops, that will have interviews, community spotlights, and more every Friday from 7:00 p.m. to 12:00 a.m.

PS2 is currently in closed beta. Players who want to get in and test can obtain guaranteed access by purchasing the Alpha Squad package for $39.99 USD, which also comes with 40 bucks worth of Station Cash, a six-month XP boost, a buddy key, and more.

Continue Reading