Guild Wars Tops Five Million  

Bellevue, WA. February 26, 2008-NCsoft^® and ArenaNet^® have announced that the Guild Wars^® franchise of online roleplaying games has surpassed five million units sold in North America, Europe, and Asia.

 

Published by NCsoft and developed by ArenaNet, the Guild Wars franchise consists of the original Guild Wars, Guild Wars Factions^®, Guild Wars Nightfall^®, and the recently released expansion, Guild Wars: Eye of the North^™. The Guild Wars games have been commercial and critical successes since the release of the original campaign in April of 2005. Its award-winning content and innovative subscription-free business model have created a large and loyal following that is highly anticipating Guild Wars 2^™.

 

"Guild Wars is a proven success and has set a new standard for online RPG games with its unique business model and superior playability," said NCsoft CEO Taek Jin Kim. "ArenaNet is dedicated to creating games that expand the market and provide great new content to our loyal player base. This success has built a great foundation from which the next generation of Guild Wars games will grow."

 

With the development of Guild Wars 2 underway, ArenaNet will continue to provide dedicated support to current Guild Wars games and its millions of customers.

 

"Reaching five million mark is extremely gratifying for us at ArenaNet because it shows the hard work and dedication we put into our games has resonated with the fans," said Mike O'Brien, co-founder of ArenaNet. "We are totally committed to supporting all of our Guild Wars players, and at the same time, we're extremely excited to work on the game's evolution. Certainly the future of Guild Wars is as bright as its past and present."

 

For more information on the Guild Wars franchise, visit the Guild Wars website at www.guildwars.com. The award-winning Guild Wars series, including the recently released Guild Wars: Eye of the North, can be purchased from retailers or downloaded from the PlayNC store at secure.plaync.com/cgi-bin/Store.pl.

BigWorld calls for talent  

(Sydney, Australia): BigWorld have announced that they are undertaking an intensive recruiting drive over the coming months to extend their research and development efforts. Following some recent significant licensee announcements, BigWorld are looking for a variety of staff across the development spectrum to add to their current team in Sydney.

BigWorld is an Australian based company which has a global focus with representative offices in Asia, Europe and the USA. Their continued global focus along with their research and development efforts will require the talents of a broad spectrum of development staff. From artists to programmers and QA staff, skilled and passionate people are encouraged to apply for the various roles and become integral members of this constantly evolving organisation.

The roles can be viewed on the BigWorld website in the recruiting section located under company information www.bigworldtech.com/recruitment/. The recruitment drive which is now officially launched, is expected to run well into 2008. BigWorld hope to attract talented enthusiasts who will become part of an innovative, exciting and fun environment.

About the BigWorld Technology Suite

Comprised of the BigWorld Server Software, Content Creation Pipeline, 3D Client Engine Package, Live Management Tools & Instrumentation, BigWorld Technology Suite is the only complete MMOG solution, providing all of the difficult technology required to produce an engaging next-generation MMOG or Virtual Worlds.

About BigWorld Pty Ltd

BigWorld Pty Ltd was formed in 2002 to commercialise years of intense R&D, which started in 1999 and continues to this day. BigWorld Pty Ltd is a privately held company based in Australia that licenses its BigWorld Technology Suite middleware platform to game studios and publishers around the world that are looking to produce successful next generation MMMOG and Virtual Worlds.

BigWorld Website

www.bigworldtech.com

Media Contact: Sarah Burns

Email: sarahb@bigworldtech.com

Office: Canberra, Australia

Elf Online Leveling Competition  

To celebrate the upcoming Elf Online Open beta. Happymmo will held a leveling competition.

Players are expected to jump into the game and experience the fun and excitement that Elf Online brings. Want to see who has the best pet and who is most skillful in battle, just be tested by leveling up competition

The event will lasts for 2 week from Est 8:00 PM Dec 21st 07 (the open beta time for Elf Online) to Jan 7th 08.

On Jan 7th 08. Elf Online team will announce the winner of the leveling competion.The top ten players with the hightest level character and the hightest pet trainning level will be rewarded.

Character Level
1st Place: 10 Lucky Box, 10,000 item mall points
2nd Place-4th Place: (for each one) 5 Lucky Box, 3,000 item mall points
5th Place-10th Place: (for each one) 3 Lucky Box, 1,000 item mall points

Pet Trainning Level
1st Place: 10 Lucky Box, 10,000 item mall points
2nd Place-4th Place: (for each one) 5 Lucky Box, 3,000 item mall points
5th Place-10th Place: (for each one) 3 Lucky Box, 1,000 item mall points

We will also pick ten lucky players form 11th to 100th players.
Lucky Prize: (for each one) 1 Lucky Box, 500 item mall points

For more details about leveling competition please visit our official site http://elf.happymmo.com
Official forum http://forum.happymmo.com
Do not hesitate, leveling with Elf Online now.

Q&A: Richard Garriott, Executive Producer Tabula Rasa™  

What do you feel are the key elements in a successful MMO?

MMO’s are long term investments for players and their creators. They are a dance between player interests and developer innovations. To be successful an MMO must succeed at an ever growing list of key features. Some of the basics are: Creating a play space worthy of visitation through the likes of graphics and sound; making a space interesting and diverse enough for long term enjoyment; providing players ownership in the word that they can grow and care about; providing the constant proper level of challenge and reward to sustain motivation for continued play.

What do you feel are the aspects of an MMO that might keep someone from playing? In other words, what is “wrong” with MMOs as a genre?

The vast majority of MMO’s are just reworks of the examples set 10+ years ago! Perhaps due to the enormous cost and time investments, most MMO’s have not strayed far form the pattern set by UO and EQ. That is unfortunate, because those games were very clearly hard core gamer games. Even the most contemporary games out today are largely in that mold. Games where you have complex UI’s to learn, that you must level grind in order to feel accomplished, that have nearly turn based combat systems where people focus on DOT (damage over time) , where it takes 30 minutes to an hour just to meet up with your friends to START playing, will never reach the market potential we have yet to meet.

Tell us how Tabula Rasa is going to break the mold of current MMOs. How will it address the concerns and complaints that MMO fans have?

Tabula Rasa breaks the mold (that this team helped make) in a number of important ways. Many of its innovations are so important, I believe, that many MMO’s of the future will adopt these standards. For example: Instead of the plodding DOT turn based combat, Tabula Rasa uses a real time fast action and tactical combat system, that remains an RPG (not an FPS) by giving players the immediacy of one click = fire your weapon, coupled with sticky targeting to avoid being an arcade game, coupled with the use of cover and position to modify the RPG probabilities of damage via the attributes and equipment of characters. This creates a real time tactical RPG game play that is fast paced, thoughtful and highly rewarding. TR also has dynamic play environments. NPC’s and players will take and hold territory, such that creature spawning and NPC availability change significantly over the hours and days of game play. TR allows players to Save and Clone their characters at any time, thus players can easily explore all the options of character development without starting over to try new classes and roles. Finally for this brief discussion TR has a far deeper and relevant story line, where decisions players make along their quests are more important and lead to more relevant wins than in previous MMO’s.

Many MMOs are seen as being very difficult for new players to join—there’s a learning curve for the genre that many consider too steep. Does Tabula Rasa address those concerns, and if so, how? What about it will appeal to players who don’t normally play MMOs?

I agree! TR starts very gently, and has features like instant travel, and a growing class tree that allow a much more gentle introduction to game play.

What did you learn from your previous projects that helped with the development of Tabula Rasa?

Wow, where do I begin? One of the most important lessons is what NOT to do. On UO we simulated a great deal of sand box reality, into the game, and huge swaths of it were never appreciated by the audience and eventually ripped out. Getting players in early, and seeing what works and what falls on deaf ears is an important aspect of developing a reality that we share WITH the players.

What do you see for the future of MMOs? How will the games or the audience change?

I believe MMO’s are in their infancy. Most MMO’s are still based on UO or EQ exclusively. While RTS MMO’s and FPS MMO’s have yet to be proven, the RPG MMO is still far from mastered. I believe Tabula Rasa will pave the way for the NEXT generation of MMO’s. But, there will still be plenty of work to be done after that! We are a far cry from the hypothetical Metaverse, with all its detail and diversity. Eventually, MMO’s will become highly immersive hyper real places, that are not just great Virtual Reality Simulations, but more importantly, provide the compelling reasons to escape into them, that are still untouched by the current state of the art.

Guild Wars: Eye of the North  

Guild Wars: Eye of the North
Prerelease Bonus Pack to Hit Shelves July 20

Bellevue, WA., July 17, 2007-NCsoft^® and ArenaNet^® announced today that the prerelease bonus pack for Guild Wars: Eye of the North^™ is set to arrive on retailer's shelves on July 20 and will include a host of compelling features, including exclusive in-game items and access to the Guild Wars: Eye of the North Sneak Peek Weekend set for later this summer.

The Guild Wars: Eye of the North prerelease bonus pack will be available from retailers in North America and Europe as well as at the NCsoft store at PlayNC.com and via the Official Guild Wars^® online store.

Guild Wars: Eye of the North is the first ever expansion to the subscription-free Guild Wars franchise of fantasy online roleplaying games, which will be released to the public on August 31, 2007. This expansion will provide new content accessible to players who have any of the previously released Guild Wars campaigns (Guild Wars, Guild Wars: Factions^™, or Guild Wars: Nightfall^™).

Players who pre-order Guild Wars: Eye of the North will gain access to the Sneak Peek Weekend, August 24-26, 2007, where they will be able to log into the game for a first look at Eye of the North. Players will be able to explore the Far Shiverpeaks region of the world, home of the barbaric Norn. Everything players obtain during the Sneak Peek Weekend, including items, XP, Heroes, and loot, will be permanent and available when the expansion goes live.

The Guild Wars: Eye of the North prerelease bonus pack also comes with exclusive weapons, including the Glacial Blade, the Hourglass Staff, and the Darksteel Longbow. These new weapons are based on the winning designs from the Guild Wars Design-a-Weapon Contest held earlier this year. In addition, the prerelease bonus pack includes a Guild Wars Trilogy Trial DVD that provides access to all three of the Guild Wars campaigns for a special trial promotion lasting 10 hours or 14 days, whichever comes first.

"We believe this feature-packed prerelease delivers real value to our players," said Mike O'Brien, co-founder of ArenaNet. "From past experience, we expect the Sneak Peek Weekend alone to be hugely popular, and players won't want to miss this chance to get a leg-up before the game goes live."

For more information on the Guild Wars franchise, visit the Guild Wars website at http://www.guildwars.com. The award-winning Guild Wars series of games can be purchased from retailers or downloaded from the PlayNC store at https://secure.plaync.com/cgi-bin/Store.pl.

BlizzCon 2007 Tickets: Sold Out!  

All available tickets for BlizzCon 2007 are now sold out! Set to take place on Friday and Saturday, August 3 to 4, at the Anaheim Convention Center, BlizzCon 2007 is shaping up to be even bigger and better than the first one in 2005. Check the BlizzCon 2007 website often for ticketholder updates, the latest news on the exhibits, panels, and showcased content, and other news on what to expect at the event.

EVERQUEST® CELEBRATES ITS 8TH BIRTHDAY  

SAN DIEGO, CA – March 16, 2007 – Sony Online Entertainment LLC (SOE), a global leader in the online games industry, today announced EverQuest® The Anniversary Edition, a new compilation collection for the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG), EverQuest. EverQuest The Anniversary Edition will only be available at participating retail locations and is scheduled for release on April 23, 2007, for the suggested retail price of US$19.99.

“After eight successful years of EverQuest, we wanted to celebrate with the release of a very special Anniversary Edition, which consists of all the expansions ever created for EverQuest, including the most recently released expansion: The Buried Sea,” said Clint Worley, Producer for EverQuest. “The Anniversary Edition is not only chock-full of content, but priced to allow players both old and new to join in the online experience known as EverQuest.”

Coinciding with the anniversary celebration, for a month starting on March 16th, EverQuest will be treating players to new in-game content including dozens of Luclin Fabled NPCs, a new scavenger hunt for players of all levels, and the return of the Fabled fiends of years past.

“EverQuest continues to provide players with a massive amount of content, more than any other MMO in the market, and is still continuing to grow, eight years later,” said Michael Lustenberger, Vice President of Marketing, Sony Online Entertainment.

ORCS & ELVES  

CITY OF HEROES/CITY OF VILLAINS PREVIEW  

Thursday 22nd February/...NCsoft presents an exclusive preview that gives the back story of the impending struggle between the forces of Good and Evil, as Heroes seek to unravel and disrupt the dastardly plans of Arachnos leader, Lord Recluse.

Statesman’s Task Force – Exclusive Preview
By Lead Designer Matt “Positron” Miller

Background
For those people unfamiliar with the City of Heroes universe, Task Forces (called Strike Forces for villains) are special sequences of missions, sort of like mega-issues of a comic book, which require dedicated teams of up to eight heroes (or villains) to confront challenging tasks and experience pivotal moments within the lore of our fictional universe. Of course these also yield great XP and great rewards.

The Lord Recluse Strike Force, which made it into Issue 7, was our way of getting Hamidon-level Enhancements into the hands of the Villains for City of Villains. We needed something that was difficult, and Hamidon-level difficult, but we didn’t want to just regurgitate Hamidon…we wanted something cool. We wanted something where you fought the signature Heroes of the City of Heroes franchise.

We accomplished that goal, but in the end some of the Archetypes felt left out, since they didn’t have the build to contribute to the huge Archvillain fights that the Lord Recluse Strike Force was built around (we took our learnings forward from this).

Fighting the signature characters was cool, but it was also something that was exclusively in the hands of the Villains. We really wanted something where the Heroes could have a chance at taking down the signature characters from the Rogue Isles. We wanted Heroes to see some of the cool things we did for the Villains since not every player is into playing “the dark side”.

About the Mission
The mission begins with Statesman telling you that Arachnos is up to something, something big. They are building something in Grandville of unknown power and use, but it is obvious that it’s more than a simple broadcast antenna that Lord Recluse claims it to be. Your orders are simple. Get to the factory near Grandville and shut it down.

Here we had a chance to have some “mayhem mission” type action, with your team of Heroes causing havoc in the WebFac, destroying vital pieces to the array in Grandville. This was something that players asked for when we introduced Safeguard missions. They wanted to go to the Rogue Isle and bust stuff up. Now they get to bust stuff up, but with a purpose.
I don’t want to spoil too many of the surprises, suffice it to say that players will be encountering, and engaging, many of the more powerful NPCs that Arachnos has to offer. Dr. Aeon plays a key role (several, actually), as does the Arachnos Flier. We also chose some prime locations for the mission maps, a lot of stuff that your average City of Heroes player wouldn’t normally get to see.

Oh, and the final battle isn’t simply “smash your most powerful attacks until Lord Recluse goes down”. We wanted there to be a reason to have Archetypes other than Blasters and Defenders on your team. Controllers will find themselves greatly desired in the final battle if the team wants to have any chance of winning. Our goal was to make sure that all the Archetypes had something to do that could mean the difference between success and defeat.

“Being a Hero” is the driving force behind Statesman’s Task Force. Every mission leads up to the ultimate confrontation where, upon success, players will be able to stand in Atlas Park and proudly display to all onlookers that they have Saved the World. Isn’t that what being a hero is all about?

New Game Director for Anarchy Online  

Previous Game Director to lead 'Age of Conan' Xbox 360 development team

Durham, USA – February 20th, 2007 – Funcom announces that ‘Anarchy Online’, the award-winning massively multiplayer online game set in a sprawling science fiction universe, is now under new leadership. Long-time ‘Anarchy Online’ devotee and Funcom Community Manager Craig Morrison has been appointed as the game’s new Game Director, picking up the torch passed on by previous Game Director Morten Byom who will occupy a new position at Funcom.

Morrison has been following ‘Anarchy Online’ for years. Besides playing the game since before launch in 2001, Morrison has written hundreds of guides and operated one of the game’s largest fan sites. For the past few years he has been employed at Funcom as a Community Manager, working closely with the players of ‘Anarchy Online’ and the potential players of ‘Age of Conan’, and he also been extensively involved in the planning and development of ‘Anarchy Online’ as part of the game’s management team.

“It is a true joy for me to be working on ‘Anarchy Online’, and I am very eager to begin the job building on the remarkable success that the game has had for the last five years,” said Craig Morrison. “The game is still a top priority for Funcom, and we aim to provide both new and existing players with an abundance of new and exciting content in the years to come.”

While Morrison picks up the reins on ‘Anarchy Online’, previous Game Director Morten Byom takes on the role as Assistant Game Director for ‘Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures’. Byom, who is tremendously experienced with developing online games, will be leading the team that is already well into the development of the Xbox 360 version of the game. Funcom is putting a considerable amount of focus on the console title, and is aiming to provide a completely new massively multiplayer experience for console players. The PC version is scheduled for release in October 2007, while the Xbox 360 release will happen later though no specific date is set.