Residents of Neverwinter might feel like a certain bow-tie wearing Time Lord has been at work, but that’s not the case. MMO beta Neverwinter has been rolled back by a few days to undo the damaged caused by an exploit found in the Auction House and Astral Diamond Exchange.
Planetside 2’s next set of changes to Game Update 08 is promised to be the biggest the game has seen since launch. That means an armoury full of new boomsticks and a sweet new ride, alongside a bunch of balancing tweaks, bug fixes and UI updates.
Open world MMO shooter Defiance has gathered over a million registered accounts since its launch last month. Developer Trion has celebrated by revealing the most popular activities in the game, and launching a contest for players to be featured on the accompanying TV show.
Marvel Heroes, the Diablo-style MMO based in the comic universe, is having an open beta this weekend, and you’re all invited. To commemorate the release of the third Iron Man film, players will also be able to play as shellhead himself: Tony Stark.
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Daedric God of Schemes Molag Bal is the chief bad in The Elder Scrolls Online: the latest video from the Bethesda Blog reveals his own little realm of Oblivion: Coldharbour. Take the tour in the video below.
Squeenix’s second ever stab at an in-house MMO stumbled embarrassingly out of their front door two years ago wearing its pants on its head, looking and smelling like an unmitigated disaster. But given everything we know about Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, there’s plenty to be optimistic about - between a new client, graphics engine, server and data structures, newly redesigned maps and a reassembled interface, this is an entirely new game, built by an almost entirely new team who know the genre, warts and all.
To say that FFXIV had a troublesome launch is an understatement. Upon release in 2010, every single aspect of Squeenix’s MMO was broken. It was a disaster. Since then, the original development team has been rehauled and now, after 3 years of rebuilding this sinking ship, FFXIV has emerged as A Realm Reborn. But how far do the improvements go?
I recently attended a hands-on session and returned to Eorzea to see for myself. I also interrogated new producer/director Naoki Yoshida as to just what the hell happened. Here’s what I found out.
The MMO Wildstar has just introduced its second playable faction, a powerful interstellar empire known as the Dominion. Developers Carbine Studios have put together a rather excellent introductory video which will tell you all about this faction’s glorious history, as well as its member races.
Alongside this announcement, the new Stalker class has also been revealed, dangerous fellows whose skills and equipment make them excellent assassins. Click through to see videos featuring both these, and I’d particularly recommend watching the Dominion introduce themselves.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been trying I’m trying to hoover up every detail I can about RaiderZ, MAIET Entertainment’s free-to-play and under-appreciated fantasy MMORPG.
RaiderZ's developers are trying to take a new approach to MMO development, emphasising direct control, crafting and outdoor boss fights. It’s a mad, weird and brilliant riposte to games like World of Warcraft: RaiderZ is action incarnate. Here’s the thing: it’s been in development since 2006. Six years is a very, very long time. You’d be forgiven for missing what the team are promising. So: here’s everything we know.
Chris Roberts is back.
He’s the man who created the legendary, ubercool sci-fi dogfighting series that was Wing Commander and, with it, helped to establish to PC as a gaming platform, pushing its hardware to the limit. He took players to the far reaches of the galaxy and gave them an original, epic space opera to lose themselves in, before becoming tired of the industry and becoming a Hollywood producer. Now, more than twenty years after the first Wing Commander game, he told me how he's going to do it all over again with Star Citizen, his new, massively multiplayer space combat game, and then he showed me something very, very pretty.
In the run up to become a free to play game, Star Wars: The Old Republic is making sure everything is neat and tidy for the incoming influx of new players by consolidating servers into one high density cluster, in a way that sounds a little like a black hole forming. A black hole of high population MMO fun.
When Star Wars: The Old Republic was announced as going Free to Play, Bioware decided that the best thing to do to reward their current subscribers was to let them pick the reward that they’ll get once the changeover happens. And that reward has been decided. It’s a Jawa. Just not your normal Jawa. This Jawa is a cool cat, a fly guy, the heart and soul of fun. 
Just over a week ago, ArenaNet turned off online sales of Guild Wars 2, in an effort to stave off their servers having a nervous breakdown and refusing to create any more dynamic events because there are just too many people demanding too much, and they were never built for this. They’ve now had a long chat with that server, given him a pay rise and an assistant, and online sales are now open once more.
Rumblings began a few days ago, the idea that there might be something from Chris Roberts, the creator of Wing Commander, Privateer and Freelancer. Something that may or may not be called Cloud Imperium. Then there was a countdown clock, ticking down to 3pm today. And then... 3pm happened. And now we know slightly more, but still have a lot more questions.
A French player in the War Legend guild has reached level 80 after just 32 hours of playing Guild Wars 2, before the game’s official launch, which would be today. That’s not only a pretty impressive feat, but almost an unbelievable one. And one that Mike O’Brien, President and Co-Founder of ArenaNet, found a little hard to parse for a moment, thinking that it might have been all part of an exploit. 
It’s only ten days before the Guild Wars 2 servers switch on, and all of those who’ve prepurchased the game can flood into the game, finally creating a character that’s not going to get wiped the second the beta is over. Because the beta is over. And Guild Wars 2 is about to be released. Not only that, but ArenaNet has announced the server names for both the US and the EU. Time to make a decision.
This is the way the universe ends: not with a bang, but with a short, deliberate snip of the creator’s garden shears. Such is the fate that awaits SWTOR’s underpopulated origin servers during BioWare’s planned server consolidation. In the inevitable panic, the developer has spoken to allay fears about where characters from pruned servers might end up.
RuneScape's just hit - yes that Runescape - has just hit 200 million registered players, which makes the eleven year old Cambridge-developed MMO the "most played online game in history, dwarfing the sales of FIFA and the Call of Duty series combined". Honestly yes, that RuneScape. The plucky pioneer of online fantasy clicks has been quietly amassing an impressively lengthy list of players. Jagex claim that in total, those 200 million players have racked up more than 443 billion minutes of gaming since RuneScape's launch in 2001 - that's one and a half days each.
The Asura (terrifying little sheep people) and the Sylvari (sinister giant plant people) aren’t the only things new to the final Beta Weekend that Guild Wars 2 is going to get before it heads into launch at the end of August. After this that’s it, that’s your lot, it’s all done. Over. Kaputt. So it’s a good thing there’s lots of stuff to keep you interested.
After the recent free weekend, EA and Bioware are hopefully celebrating a new influx of players, keeping their servers nice and teeming, and their coffers nice and filled. Still, with a troubled few months, plans are being set in motion to properly reinforce SWTOR’s core servers, while letting the unnecessary peripheral servers fall by the wayside. It sounds drastic, but it could be just the right move to keep the game hale and hearty.
