Ladies and gentlemen, I come before you an honest individual prefacing this examination for the closed beta of PlanetSide 2 on the PlayStation 4: I'm biased. Years of playing different games on a range of consoles have led me to prefer a particular setup when I run first-person shooters. I'm not going to touch PC/console wars by any stretch, but I'll admit when I play on console, genre of preference is definitely not first-person shooter.
I'll admit I was skeptical of how an MMO would work on a phone. Nightmares of aged and horrendous UI designs from failed MMOs circled my dreams the night before I tried out Legion of Heroes, and I wasn't sure what I would face the next morning. The fears were put to rest upon starting this game from Nexon M, and I'll admit there were more surprises than expectations met.
It's a place that not many triple-A titles are hitting: sandbox games are left out of the Cool Kid’s Club, often times due to their limited nature. ArcheAge is the antithesis of limited--in a world plagued by too much choice, can a game offering the same truly be successful? Trion Worlds CEO Scott Hartsman took some time out of his busy schedule to talk about ArcheAge's first upcoming Closed Beta session and what makes the game so incredibly different.
If you play TERA in Europe you may have read yesterday's free-to play news and asked "hey, what about us?!". Well, today is your day.
Gameforge, which publishes TERA in Europe, announced today that it's following in the footsteps of the Korean, Japanese and North American markets:
"We are very pleased to be able to in future offer the game content of TERA to its fans for free and in addition, to offer all who are interested the opportunity to see the quality of the game for themselves”, said Eva Schmitt, Product Director of TERA."
At the end of December, we learned that En Masse intended to take their action-based MMORPG free-to-play in Korea an Japan. This of course raised speculation on the future of the model in other TERA-tories. Today we learned TERA: Rising will be launching free-to-play this February.
For Star Wars: The Old Republic, the upcoming transition to a free-to-play game has given BioWare plenty of reason to stand atop the tallest skyscraper on Coruscant and shout about the changes players can expect to see this fall. Yesterday, Executive Producer Jeff Hickman took an opportunity to address fans with his first "state of the game" in that role.
