Tag: MMO

The new MMO from NCSoft will arrive in the West very soon

Not long ago, it seemed like MMOs were dead. Or if not dead, at least they had become something completely niche. Something we remembered from the 00s, which had its peak at the end of that decade and the beginning of the next, but gradually faded away. It became something that didn’t know how to evolve with the times and technology at the pace that players expected.

The reality is that the world is much bigger than what our small bubble allows us to see. World of Warcraft has never stopped being huge. MMOs have always been successful in Asia. In recent years, they have made a strong comeback, with many titles that have performed very well reaching our shores, and now comes the latest sensation from Korea that is highly anticipated by the MMO gaming community in Europe and the US.

Throne and Liberty is the upcoming MMORPG from South Korea. Developed and published by NCSoft, known for being the creators of great titles like Guild Wars or Lineage, it was initially conceived as a new installment of the Lineage series, but ended up becoming a new IP.

This is a free-to-play fantasy game that has been enjoyed in South Korea since December 2023, and it is sweeping the Asian country. Very good news, as it is probably the most competitive country when it comes to MMOs.

The game will feature both PvP and PvE modes and will also allow crossplay between all platforms. NCSoft has promised massive-scale battles with thousands of players at the same time in the game’s universe, Solisium, which is one of the game’s main attractions. If fulfilled, this could truly revolutionize the genre—especially if it can without causing the game servers and user connections to crash.

If you’re curious to try Throne and Liberty, an open beta will be available in Europe, America, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan from July 18th to July 23rd. The full game will be released on September 17th for PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S.

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4.6
Throne And Liberty is an action and role-playing game.

Ubisoft cancels another free-to-play game that they had been working on for over three years, before its release

Eh, why don’t we do the same? A free MMO where we make money through the season pass and selling various cosmetic upgrades

The problem with trailing in the industry is that you always arrive when the party is about to end. It was the case for those who saw, after ‘Avatar’, that they could make movies in 3D like crazy, or those who believed that if Netflix could have a decent streaming, they could too, giving rise to the bubble that we all know now. The latest to join the bandwagon of “things that could have gone well a couple of years ago, but not now” has been Ubisoft. Yes, once again.

Tom Clancy's The Division DOWNLOAD

Free to cancel

It’s normal to see the success of ‘Fortnite’ or ‘Fall guys’ and think “Hey, why don’t we do the same? A free MMO where we earn money through the season pass and selling different cosmetic upgrades”. The problem is that you’re not the only one thinking that, of course, and with the market flooded with free MMOs that no one is playing, companies are starting to backtrack.

Ubisoft, in particular, has canceled ‘The Division Heartland’, a game that was based on the famous video game saga which in turn is based on Tom Clancy’s literary franchise. The game was announced on May 6, 2021, so it has been blown up after at least three years of development. In fact, the production was so advanced that they even set up closed-door test matches.

But, as Naughty Dog did with ‘The last of us online’ or Microsoft with ‘Redfall’ (which, at least, was released), the studio has decided that it is better to throw away the money and effort of so many months rather than making a fool of themselves and trying their luck in the current free-to-play MMO chaos. If you are fans of the saga, don’t worry, because there are already two other ‘The division’ games in preparation that, hopefully, will have better luck.

Let it serve as a lesson: following the one who is in first place by copying their strategy usually doesn’t yield good results… and people realize it right away.

Tom Clancy's The Division DOWNLOAD

The number of subscribers that World of Warcraft has today has been revealed, and it is surprising

Blizzard is an extremely secretive company about its figures, but a YouTuber has managed to find out how many subscribers WOW has.

In the video game industry, they love to show off numbers. There is not a week that goes by without a company boasting about the numbers they have achieved with their latest game, or with a franchise that is celebrating some kind of anniversary. It serves to fuel investor interest, but also to create a sense of success among players. That everything is going well and that it doesn’t matter what impression it gives in another sense: the business is thriving.

Very few companies break with this narrative clearly. Microsoft is one of the most famous, as it hardly ever gives numbers. But there is another one that is even more secretive about these matters. And that is Blizzard.

World of Warcraft DOWNLOAD

World of Warcraft was released in 2004 and, twenty years later, not only is it still running, but it seems far from closing its doors. However, even though it is easy to analyze its historical and ludic importance, it is not so easy to talk about specific figures if we want to talk about its success. Blizzard has always been very secretive about the numbers behind their games, and World of Warcraft is no exception. That’s why a very attentive youtuber had to come along to make an approximation of what they might be.

During the past GDC 2024, a specialized event for video game developers, John Hight, executive producer of the Warcraft franchise, gave a postmortem of World of Warcraft. In the technological field, a postmortem is a talk where the development, launch, and success or failure of a particular software application are explained. Something that didn’t provide numbers, but did provide a graph that allowed for the necessary trick.

As Bellular Warcraft explains in a dedicated video, a particular graph shows the number of subscribers in each specific period in World of Warcraft’s history. Knowing that shortly after the release of World of Warcraft Legion the game had 5.8 million subscribers, he has been able to extrapolate that the game has around 7.2 million subscribers between the original version, Season of Discovery, WOTLK Classic, Classic, and Hardcore. An astonishing number for a game that is 20 years old.

Of course, it is necessary to take these figures with a grain of salt. We have no official confirmation and the scale of the graph does not have to be remotely perfect. But it does give us an impression of the importance that World of Warcraft has, and how even today it remains a relevant game in the world of MMOs.

World of Warcraft DOWNLOAD

A group of fans resurrect a dead MMO… And the developer does something absolutely unprecedented with it.

It had 23 free updates before, eight years after its arrival, it closed its doors, leaving its fans in the lurch. Well, maybe not. They are fans for a reason, and it’s not to turn the page without a fight.

On April 28, 2004, ‘City of Heroes’ was born in the United States, a new superhero MMORPG by the company NCSoft. It had 23 free updates before, eight years after its release, it closed its doors, leaving its fans stranded. Well, maybe not. They are fans for a reason, and it’s not to move on without a fight.

Steam DOWNLOAD

I Ostentatiously Love It

When the game ended and the servers closed, there was still a group of people playing it daily. But how was it possible? Well, thanks to private servers that operated in a gray area between legality and illegality. In fact, in 2019 it was revealed that a huge unofficial server, Homecoming, was still running… and was in contact with the company.

But of course, what did the owners of the intellectual property think about this, considering that it could force them to stop? After all, they could be hindering the future of the franchise. However, the company is doing very well with games like ‘Guild wars’ or ‘Aion’, and they didn’t seem overly bothered by this revival of ‘City of heroes’.

But what no one expected is that they were so unbothered that on January 4th, NCSoft not only stated that they have no plans to shut down the server, but also gave the developers an official license to maintain it. This means that they will be able to develop the game (with certain limitations, of course) knowing that the intellectual property still belongs to the company.

A happy ending, which we don’t have many of lately: the accounts will remain intact, access will continue to be free and the fans control the game, something that doesn’t usually happen. Is it time for the resurgence of a MMORPG from twenty years ago? And, above all, what does NCSoft gain from this move? There is still much to ponder.

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This game promised to be the revolution of open worlds; now players have torn it apart

This game promised to be the revolution of open worlds, now players have destroyed it considering it to be a scam

In the world of video games, it’s particularly challenging to prove that something is a scam. In an industry filled with complex developments, where transparency is nearly a sin and companies tend to promise even what they know is impossible, figuring out when someone is deceiving you and who’s trying to scam you is difficult. Which is quite sad. It means that many companies have standards just slightly above scammers. Even if it’s still possible to tell them apart.

The Day Before DOWNLOAD

The Day Before, a zombie MMO that came out on December 7 in early access, promised players a revolutionary experience. It claimed to be a groundbreaking open-world experience like never seen before, stating that upon launch, nothing comparable would have ever been seen. However, when it was released on December 7, it wasn’t just an exaggeration. They had actively been lying.

After five years of development, the game launched in early access and within just four days garnered over 18,000 reviews. Shockingly, 80% of these reviews were negative. This places it among the most scorned games in Steam’s history, even though it still falls short of the abyss of being extremely negative, as was the case with the disaster that was NBA 2K24.

Why is this happening? Basically, the game is nothing like what they promised. The world is empty, the combat is very basic, the enemy AI is very simple, and the game itself is full of bugs. That, coupled with graphics that are not even remotely close to what was promised, along with the use of AI-generated art they never mentioned before, has led to the game being universally condemned. It’s considered a scam by practically everyone who has played it so far.

The future of The Day Before and its developers, Mytona Fntastic, seems uncertain. Even in an industry with highly questionable standards, the difference between a scam and a development disaster remains evident. Because if something is evident, it’s that this is not simply a development disaster.

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NetEase is developing the new World of Warcraft

NetEase Games have decided that they want to make the next World of Warcraft and to do so they have a classic name from the franchise.

When it seemed that MMOs were no longer fashionable, first, World of Warcraft arrived to remind us that it was still as alive as ever, and then Korea showed us that it could be the new powerhouse in the genre. Against all odds, the genre remains alive, thriving, and with little desire to go anywhere. Especially now that it appears a studio is ready to challenge all the genre’s giants.

World of Warcraft DOWNLOAD

This is because NetEase Games has announced the creation of Fantastic Pixel Castle. This is a studio primarily designed for remote work, led by Greg Street, who is already working on an AAA massively multiplayer online game codenamed Ghost.

But speaking of names, here the key is Greg Street. Not for nothing, he is the man who served as the chief systems designer for World of Warcraft for years, earning legendary fame as someone capable of balancing everything. He has also been an executive producer on League of Legends, when he made the leap to Riot Games, having that closer experience with relatively modern design approaches. This not only makes him a legend but also the perfect person to lead the project of a new massively multiplayer online game.

According to Street, as stated in a press release, his intention is to keep the team small to iterate quickly and showcase the results to players as soon as possible. In this way, they aim to maintain constant communication with the audience, incorporating the feedback they receive from players to improve the game based on the opinions they gather over time.

While we still don’t have any game trailers, we do have some conceptual images and additional information on their website. This gives us a glimpse that Ghost will be some kind of medieval fantasy game featuring floating land masses, reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. To know more, we’ll still have to wait, but with Street at the helm, it’s expected that they won’t take long. When we do see something, it could potentially be revolutionary.

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