Crafting

Ho hum, fishing in MMOs. Who cares, right? Wrong! XLGAMES cares, and the company apparently thinks enough of its ArcheAge angling mechanics to make a gameplay trailer out of them.

MMO Culture has uploaded the trailer to YouTube, and in it you'll see over a minute's worth of deep sea fishing plus the transporting of the day's catch back to land, presumably to sell or cook. ArcheAge is gearing up for its Chinese closed beta phase, a date for which will be announced later this month. The game has already released in its native Korea and will be published in the west by Trion, though no date has been forthcoming.

You can view the trailer after the break.

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If the post-apocalyptic wastelands of Grimlands caught your eye but you didn't think you could play on Linux or Mac systems, think again; DRAGO Entertainment has just announced that the shooter will be developed on both platforms. And players needn't worry about which version they are playing from, as everyone will be on the same servers together. The studio doesn't intend to stop there either: DRAGO's Lucjan Mikociak added, "And there are even more versions planned down the road."

Along with this announcement, DRAGO has released the second installment of the three-part Making Of series. In the video, Wiktoryn Zerebecki details the importance of crafting and the player-driven economy and Krystian Kofin expounds on vehicles. Watch the full video after the break.

[Source: DRAGO press release]

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In a recent interview, Mark Jacobs stated that unlike some other big titles, Camelot Unchained will be financially successful with fewer paid subscribers. "We don't need one million subs to make money," he said. "If we get 50K paying subscribers a month it will justify the $5 million development budget." Of course, he admitted that they'd certainly be happy with more.

Jacobs also touched on other topics, including crafting and the absence of PvE. Players who want to both fight and craft extensively will need to rely on alts. as fighters will have limited crafting options. And don't think the world will be empty just because there will be no traditional PvE; Jacobs assured that there will be NPCs, noting "You can skin them, get materials off them, salvage their weapons, armor, etc. but you cannot level your RvR skills by doing that."

[Thanks to Mikkel for the tip!]

Sometimes my plans coincide perfectly with real-world events. Last time I wrote this column, I planned to talk about crafting, and then on Friday WildStar gave us a look at some of what we can expect in the system. Admittedly, we don't yet know how the whole circuit board system plays into crafting or what "one of two systems" means, but we can speculate, can't we?

Before anyone asks, let me say that no, I had no forewarning or advance preview. I'm just pleased that everything came together by coincidence.

So right now we know that the circuit board interface is the basis of one of the crafting systems in the game, and we know how the circuit boards in general work. That's enough to make some reasonable guesses. Let's start by guessing at a system in which you sidestep the entire process of finding the best stats on the best items by just making it from scratch.

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Post-apocalyptic shooter Grimlands may have been canceled by publisher gamigo, but development studio DRAGO isn't giving up on the title just yet. The firm has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise the funds necessary to finish the project and keep it "true to its original vision."

A press release says that Grimlands was canceled because of gamigo's "strategy shift from development to distribution" in spite of the title's five-year development cycle. DRAGO's Lucjan Mikociak says that Kickstarter is necessary to save the game.

"There is no way around it: Big games need big money. Since gamigo stopped funding us in January, we have survived thanks to friends and family support," Mikociak explains. "However, in order to properly finish the game by year's end, we need further funding of $650,000. After talking to several publishers and investors we feel only Kickstarter allows this without compromising our vision."

Grimlands marries shooter gameplay with stealth and cover mechanics as well as character progression and customization. It also features an extensive crafting system wherein nearly every in-game item is made by players. Gameplay includes an open world, dungeons, PvE and PVP options, and upgradeable vehicles.

For those who love cracking open a good piece of gear to fiddle and fine-tune the insides, then WildStar is proud to present the so-called Circuit Board Crafting System. A new dev blog over at Carbine Studios explains how gear modding (and later, crafting) will take place on a special CBC interface that breaks down the item into connected components.

Each piece of gear has several slots for microchips and a power budget that is used to limit what can be put into the item. These microchips come in different varieties, from power amplifiers to attribute boosters to special ability chips.

Many, but not all, microchips can be extracted from the gear to put somewhere else or to mod directly. However, the team is preparing a number of random stat and locked microchips that will make creating the perfect item a challenging proposition. The team wants players to have to make "really interesting decisions" in their gear modding, promising more information later on as to how CBC will work with crafting.

You know what? Defiance's PvP is pretty enjoyable. Most of that enjoyment stems from my ability to actually kill people, contrary to typical MMO themeparks where I stand no chance against gear grinders and theorycrafters who have bested me before I even manage to tab target them.

Here you have to aim, dodge, roll, reload, and do all that crazy skill-based stuff that shooters make you do, and while my K/D ratio is reminding me of the fact that I'm getting old and slow, it's still been a blast. Last night I dipped my toes into something called Shadow War, which is Defiance's answer to open world PvP.

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Cryptic and Perfect World are throwing open Neverwinter's beta doors on April 30th. A joint press release states that there will be no character wipes or play restrictions after the open beta period begins.

If you can't wait until the end of the month to get your free-to-play Forgotten Realms MMO fix, you can become a Neverwinter Founder and take part in the 60-hour Beta Weekend 4 that starts on April 12th. Founders will get first crack at the game's profession system and may opt to pursue leatherworking, platesmithing, mailsmithing, or leadership.

[Source: Perfect World press release]

If you've got a serious craving for ArcheAge and you don't mind cutesy graphics, you might want to check out XLGAMES' ArcheVille. Oh yeah, you'll also need an iOS device (an Android version is in the works).

What exactly is ArcheVille? It's a farming- and minipet-based mobile game that ties into XL's upcoming sandpark title. MMO Culture reports that gift exchanges are possible between ArcheVille and ArcheAge, though we're not sure if that functionality will work for English-speakers just yet due to the latter's Korean-only client.

In any event, ArcheVille is currently available in English and viewable in the App Store. You can view a gameplay video after the break.

[Thanks Dengar!]

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Ever since its successful Kickstarter campaign, The Repopulation has been progressing along at an impressive pace. And if PAX East was any indication, the game shows no signs of slowing down as it approaches beta and zeroes in on a launch date.

This weekend, I had a chance to speak with lead developer Joshua Halls, who took the time to walk me through the sandbox MMO and give me an update on what's new and what's still in the works.

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If there's one pastime that MMO fans share, it's making predictions. Which games will succeed, and which ones will struggle? Which will go free-to-play, merge servers, or even shut down? And will there ever be an MMO that's crowned as the WoW-killer?

But what about the bigger picture of online gaming in general? We've seen it come a long way over the past decades, and it's not always easy to see where it's headed. SOE's director of development of the EverQuest franchise, Dave Georgeson, sat down with Massively at PAX East this year to prognosticate on the future of online gaming. And of course, part of that future includes EQ Next, and while he still can't talk specifics, he did shed some light on the philosophy behind the game's design, with some hints about what players might see when it's revealed at SOE Live this summer.

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I don't know what it is about steam engines, brass goggles, and copious amounts of clockwork mechanisms that excites me so much, but the steampunk genre has a special place in my heart. With that in mind, it should be no surprise that when I discovered that Mechanist Games, the
studio behind upcoming F2P browser MMO City of Steam, was going to be at PAX East, I immediately claimed the assignment.

For the uninitiated, City of Steam is a title that mixes the traditional fantasy flavors of magic, elves, and goblins with steampunk staples of industrialism, clockwork automatons, and airships to create what is described as "industrial age fantasy in a fallen world." During my time at PAX East, I got to spend just under an hour exploring the world of City of Steam and chatting with the game's developers who were milling about the booth. It's a fairly ambitious title that's aiming to bring a high-quality, modern MMO experience to players' browsers, but will it run like clockwork or go up in a cloud of steam?

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Earlier this week The Repopulation's dev team released a combat-focused trailer on the eve of its trip to PAX East. Today, Above & Beyond Technologies has another clip to share, this one a 21-minute dive into the game's crafting mechanics.

Lead dev Joshua Halls walks us through crafting events, resource attributes and refinement, and shows off the general complexity of the tradeskill mechanics. There's a brief mention of the game's crafting achievement system as well, so be sure to check out the video after the cut. If you're heading to Boston for PAX East, you can see The Repopulation at booth 581 on Friday and Saturday.

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During my hands-on play session with The Elder Scrolls Online at the media event last week, I got a glimpse of the early game experience, and it was delicious. But most MMOs are judged on what awaits players at the max-level endgame, so I sat down with ZeniMax Online Studios creative director Paul Sage to ask about those areas of the game that I didn't get to see.

Specifically, I asked Sage to describe ZeniMax's strategy for keeping players occupied once they hit the level cap at 50. His reply included four main activities: questing in enemy alliance zones, four-player dungeons, adventure zones, and the PvP alliance war in Cyrodiil. Read on for all of the details I gleaned from the interview!

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The other week I posted a Leaderboard inviting people to vote for their favorite Star Wars MMO. The comments featured a number of both predictable and surprising insights, but one line of thought in particular stood out to me. There are apparently some folks out there who think that Star Wars is nothing more than laser pistols and lightsabers, just as there are some folks who think that MMOs are nothing more than combat lobbies.

While I'll stop short of labeling these people because of a difference in opinion, it's clear that they haven't really thought this through.

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