Our live radio broadcasts are currently on hiatus while we work on improvements to Sanitarium.FM's core services. For further information, visit our Discord.
MMO Rift went free-to-play in 2011, opening its gates to more players but also ushering in loot boxes and a store packed with items you could buy with real money to make the game a lot easier. After a long think (and no doubt influenced by player pushback against microtransactions), developer Trion Worlds is going back to its roots by introducing a paid subscription model for a server free of loot boxes.
The Rift Prime server will launch in Spring. We don’t yet know how much it’ll cost to join, but we do know that the in-game store will be “significantly reduced, with more of the current store-based items obtained through gameplay or removed entirely”. Sounds good to me.
Not all of Rift’s content will be available on the Prime server from the start—instead, players will start afresh and Trion Worlds will drip-feed existing content as players progress, almost like a new MMO, albeit with everything introduced at a much faster pace. The developer promises this progression will come “to an end in spectacular fashion”, too.
Prime servers will progress through content at a more rapid pace than that of the original launch
“dynamically matching characters to their current zone’s level”
“dungeons dropping loot specific to your character’s true level”
profession caps available to a single character
participation awards that are unlocked across your account, even to characters on other servers
PvP will also be undergoing some changes in 2018 after the launch of the Prime server. This will include a new game mode and allowing servers to go “full PvP”.
For PvE, players can look forward to the revamp of a classic raid and the 7th anniversary will feature some new activities for players.
As more info comes out about the new sub services, we’ll be sure to keep you upto date!
For now, check out the latest trailer for the game and follow the link to check it out!
Finally Star Trek Online is coming to console! For someone who doesn’t have a gaming PC, this is great news. I have wanted to play this game for years. With how much I love Neverwinter, I am looking forward to Star Trek Online by Cryptic, due Fall of 2016.
The console version will have new features, new missions, controller support and improved graphics. Your story will begin from the faction you choose from, Federation, Romulans or Klingon. But this will include 32 species for customisation, to create your captain. The video below is the official developer walkthrough.
The console version will release with new content. As quoted by Arc’s website, there is exclusive content for console.
‘Players on the Xbox One console version of STO will receive a free Tier 1 Blockade Runner Escort Steamrunner-class Starship. On the PlayStation 4 console version, players will receive a free Tier 1 Andorian Light Escort. Note that these items will be available for free for two weeks after launch!’
This game has currently been running for six years on the PC, and I for one am looking forward to finally being able to play it, on my own or with my friends.
Today Jesse Cox hosted a live one on one with Assistant Game Director Ion “Watcher” Hazzikostas about LEGION and we had some big announcements.
The main announcement:
Development of the World of Warcraft: Legion expansion is well underway, and we’d like to take some time to update everyone on how things are progressing.
Assistant Game Director Ion “Watcher” Hazzikostas will be joined by online gaming personality Jesse Cox to discuss a number of topics, including Class Halls, max-level content, the Demon Hunter, and a status update on what our next priorities are for Legion development.
We’ll be going live at 9:00 AM Pacific/12:00 PM Eastern time on the official World of Warcraft Twitch channel at twitch.tv/Warcraft. We’ll see you then!
Yep, Alpha is over… Beta is Thursday!
WOOHOO!!! and even better folks, loads of beta keys will be going out AND a load more will be offered from bigger sites, including our friends over at wowhead. So keep an eye here for news on that!
Talking about WoWhead, Perculia did a great job of live blogging (saved me a ton of writing) and here’s the full run down of points from the live chat:
Beta Information
– At BlizzCon, many people remember that beta would “start in a couple of weeks.” However, when they thought about it more, beta in the industry is a polished demo. The WoW beta would be pretty unpolished (like 2/3rds of specs unimplemented.) So an alpha happened instead with invite waves over the course of a few months.
– Finally at a point now where all specs, artifacts, dungeons etc are implemented. Legion right now is in the last stretch where it still needs to be polished.
– Ready to move into a formal beta! Current plan is to take alpha down over course of next day and send out big beta invite wave. 2pm Pacific on Thursday is when the formal beta for Legion begins. Characters will be wiped.
– Plan for only one character wipe, so they can get solid feedback from leveling up again.
– In the beta, you will start by completing the Broken Shore scenario, and then move into Legion content in new Dalaran. New Legion content starts with the artifact acquisition questline for your spec.
Class Order Halls
– Class Orders. Garrison 2.0? Not really. The Garrison was a personal private space. Fantasy was raising up an army. The Class Order Hall is a shared social space, a clubhouse for your class. There’s a different sort of customization and interactions. You are a paragon of your class and shape how your hall grows. The Order Hall serves the other core world content, while the Garrison felt like a standalone feature. The Order Hall has content that leads you out into the world.
– There are personalized class-specific quests in the Order Hall, you can recruit great champions. There are missions but they are very pared down–not dozens like Warlords. The missions have greater impact and are much less frequent. We know some people are scarred by the mission table!
– One problem with the Warlords mission system was that it competed with other content. It became a way to easily get anything–crafting stuff, items, currency, gold. When faced with a choice of going out or doing a mission for same reward…pushing the button was a compelling choice.
– There are dungeon and raid missions in Legion, but the reward will be a quest item to send you into the instance to get an item, not a cache that has an item.
– Order Resources – get them out in the world. At the start, you’ll likely send resources on your Order Hall tech tree.
– Order Hall customization – you could customize Garrison (guards, music, buildings). Order Halls have less visual customization but you can customize the gameplay. Order Halls are iconic locations that have been around long before you–you wouldn’t totally redecorate it. However, the Artifact Weapons have visual customization.
– Order Hall fantasy – you are a champion but also part of a group of famous peers. Think King Arthur and Knights of the Round Table.
Legion Questing
– There are several quest systems in Legion. There is a one-time epic storyline that unfolds over course of leveling which you unlock at your own pace (tracking down conspiracy as a Mage, raise new set of Four Horsemen as Death Knight, etc).
– Complementing that is a World Quest system – at a given time, everyone in your region can do those quests. The genesis for that idea was Garrison Missions for players–open up a map and see whole array of things for you to do with various objectives.
– What if you have limited playtime? The more rewarding quests will be around for a few days (chance of a mount, cool item drop). You won’t miss it because you were at work. The quests that have a short timeframe (eg 4 hours) will have generic rewards like gold.
– Every day when you log in, there is an emissary that asks you to do specific sets of world quests to aid a faction (eg all Dreamweaver faction quests in Val’sharah). Do four quests for the emissary and get an awesome chest. These emissary quests kind of work like Hearthstone dailies – they pile up for a few days, so you can catch up on ones you missed.
Legacy/Pristine Servers
– Heated topic with lots of feedback from fans.
– The developers on the Warcraft team are not directly involved in meetings – they’re focused on Legion.
– Response to Pristine Servers – the pros and cons. A big con against it, which is valid, is that it’s still the same, fast, leveling experience where you end up in your Garrison in a few days.
Leveling Experience
– The leveling-up experience in classic zones is pretty broken right now and not well tuned. It’s way too easy and it was neglected for a bit. Due to ability changes over the years, you basically feel invincible (even before heirlooms). You’re running around more vs actually fighting. The pacing of the game isn’t what it should be. They’ve been looking to fix this (even via hotfixes now).
– Barriers of entry to new players – Blizz realized around the time of Cataclysm/Mists of Pandaria that it was a daunting experience for new players who wanted to play with their max-level friends. To help this, they made leveling through past expansions faster and faster…but now leveling isn’t paced correctly. With the addition of max-level boosts, there is less of a need to rush people through leveling, it can be a satisfying well-paced experience. You shouldn’t be out-leveling zones before you finish a story.
– Potentially able to add flexible zone tech to old zones. They’d have a wider level range so you could stay in the zone without skipping the story.
Demon Hunters and Classes
– Demon Hunter double jump is awesome – you could probably double jump/Glide from Highmountain to Azsuna.
– Ion partially picked a Shaman because he wanted to tank!
– There will be 3 in-game cinematics just for Demon Hunters which you won’t see in the beta. You’ll have to play one on live!
– Demon Hunters: very flashy, high-mobility, a lot of fun to play.
– What about other races for Demon Hunters in the future? Anything is possible. The lore dictates that only Elves can be Demon Hunters and they went back and forth on it for a while. For anyone who had a picture of a – Demon Hunter in your mind, you think of Illidan. So they wanted to deliver on that fantasy. For the future…Demon Hunters could instruct other races in their rituals…but that would be something to consider for the future.
– Other race/class combos? Gnomes can be Hunters in Legion with awesome Mechanical pet family. However some don’t work, like Tauren Rogues. (Although Dagg the Subtlety Rogue Ogre is awesome.)
Artifact Weapons
– The concept of Artifact Weapons: incredible weapon of power and lore. You can level up and customize a weapon for your spec. From an art perspective, they worked closely with the art team. The Ashbringer was the first artifact weapon created since they had a solid idea about the fantasy. However they didn’t want everyone to have exactly the same powerful weapon. So they had the idea from the outset for radical visual customization. Challenge was to keep weapons distinctive while maintaining silhouette.
Some appearances are easy to unlock but others reflect significant accomplishment like killing a Mythic Raid boss or PvP. There are even secret appearances that you need to figure out how to unlock!
Dungeons and Raids
– “Done a disservice” to dungeon gameplay. Right now, dungeons are fun for the first month – run a few each night, find people in guild. Then…raids open and that dungeon loot becomes obsolete. That’s been the story for the past many years.
– Mythic Dungeons in 6.2 were a trial for how to keep dungeons relevant in Legion. In Legion, when you beat Mythic Dungeon, you get a keystone that lets you run them at a higher level.
– Definitely some inspiration from Greater Rifts, but some key differences. If players run dungeons for longer period of times this expansion, they need more variation. Mythic dungeons will have affix modifiers that appear at different threshholds/levels. Affixes do things like “massively reduce tank threat,” “when you kill a non-boss enemy, it explodes to buff other enemies.” The affixes are fixed for the entire world for a given week, so there isn’t heavy RNG where one group has it easy and the others do not.
– These affixes will change how you approach the dungeon week to week. They will also create group variation–there won’t be one set group of specs that is best for every set of affixes.
– Dungeons are being set up as an alternative path, or a complement, to raiding.
– You can keep leveling up your keystone by completing the dungeon in a certain timeframe. These are less hectic than Warlords Challenge Mode times. If you handle the difficulty comfortably, you can move up to the next one. For the highest level dungeon you clear in one week, the next week you’ll have an awesome chest in your Order Hall with loot, as well as a new keystone that’s around 70% of your past best, so you don’t need to grind from Level 1 again. Similar to when a new season starts in Hearthstone – you lose some ranks, but you don’t go back down to Level 25.
Transmogrification
– You will be collecting and permanently learning new appearances in Legion. It will be easier to customize your character’s look.
– Artifacts: visually, you’ll be sorting through dozens of potential appearances. But you can also transmog over your artifact.
World Quests
– World quests are evolution of system. In Mists of Pandaria, there were a lot of daily quests. However the negatives were the reward structure (Valor Gear behind reputation), and limitation of daily quest system (you were behind everyone else if you missed a day). There was also a lot of repetition. If you did the quests diligently, you rescued the same panda dozens of times.
– World Quests improve upon daily quest structure. There is far more variety with hundreds of world quests and variety of quest rewards. You won’t see same quests over and over again.
– There are Legion factions with cool rewards when you hit different levels, but it’s not like the MoP system where you had to do dailies for reputation for Valor Gear.
– Ion admitted to feeling daily quest fatigue in Mists of Pandaria. The moment the game feels like a chore, the moment its less what we want it to be.
– What about the people that liked familiarity/getting dailies done quickly? The map is very user-friendly, it’s easy to see what the rewards are at a glance and where all the quests are.
– In Legion, outdoor world quests have story component. Giving people variety (can meet objectives 6 ways) is good but you need context behind it, not just raw mechanics to kill and loot things. Story is essential, which was lost sight of a bit in Warlords.
– “Gameplay first” doesn’t mean “gameplay only.”
We have a release date for World of Warcraft: Legion–August 30th, 2016.
Legion includes powerful world-drop Legendary items, a new transmog system, the new Demon Hunter class, Class Halls, and a major profession revamp.
You can prepurchase Legion for $49.99 (£34.99) for a Level 100 Character Boost and early access to Demon Hunters, or prepurchase the Digital Deluxe Collectors Edition for $69.99 (£49.99) to get Reins of the Illidari Felstalker and Nibbles, as well as some perks for other Blizzard games.
Defenders of the Alliance and the Horde—a great and ancient enemy has set its sights on Azeroth once more, and soon the land will be consumed in a storm of fel fire. On August 30, kingdoms will burn, heroes will fall, and the world will stand on the precipice of destruction with the launch of World of Warcraft: Legion!
All hellfire is about to break loose, so steel yourself for the return of the Burning Legion by pre-purchasing World of Warcraft: Legion digitally at www.wowlegion.com. Players who pre-purchase will receive an instant level-100 character boost, as well as unlock early access to the new Demon Hunter hero class prior to the expansion’s release.
The Warlords digital deluxe items ( Reins of the Dread Raven and Dread Hatchling) will not be available to purchase when the prepatch hits. These items are currently available for $20 (£15) on the Blizzard Shop.
Almost three years after its announcement, development has stopped on the next iteration of the long-lived MMO franchise.
Daybreak Studios’ president Russ Shanks announced the news on the game’s official site:
I’m writing today to let you know that, after much review and consideration, Daybreak is discontinuing development of EverQuest Next.
For the past 20 years EverQuest has been a labor of love. What started as a deep passion of ours, as game creators, grew into a much larger passion shared by you, millions of players and Daybreakers alike. Watching EverQuest’s ability to entertain and bring people together has inspired and humbled us. It’s shaped our culture and has emboldened us to take aggressive risks with our game ideas and products. When we decided to create the next chapter in the EverQuest journey, we didn’t aim low. We set out to make something revolutionary.
For those familiar with the internals of game development, you know that cancellations are a reality we must face from time to time. Inherent to the creative process are dreaming big, pushing hard and being brutally honest with where you land. In the case of EverQuest Next, we accomplished incredible feats that astonished industry insiders. Unfortunately, as we put together the pieces, we found that it wasn’t fun. We know you have high standards when it comes to Norrath and we do too. In final review, we had to face the fact that EverQuest Nextwould not meet the expectations we – and all of you – have for the worlds of Norrath.
The future of the EverQuest franchise as a whole is important to us here at Daybreak. EverQuest in all its forms is near and dear to our hearts. EverQuest and EverQuest II are going strong. Rest assured that our passion to grow the world of EverQuest remains undiminished.
EverQuest Next was an ambitious attempt to evolve the franchise. The first phase of that evolution was EverQuest Next Landmark, which was released as a beta in 2013. Landmark was focused on player creation, letting users craft huge structures and then sell the blueprints to each other.
EverQuest Next began development at Sony Online Entertainment, a corporate cousin to the PlayStation brand that was sold off last year to investment firm Columbus Nova and rebranded as Daybreak Studios.
In an interview with MMORPG, Shanks says that EverQuest and EverQuest II are still in active development. He also says that Daybreak will continue to explore ways to modernize EverQuest and notes the company’s current priorities:
The future of the EverQuest franchise is important to our company and you have not seen the last of Norrath by any means. It’s just as engrained in our hearts as it is for our players. We helped usher in the era of MMOs because we loved the idea of bringing gamers together within the game worlds in massive numbers, and we’ve continued to build on that over our 20-year history. The adventures within the worlds of EQ and EQII continue unabated today, and there is plenty of room for more.
Right now, we are focused on launching Landmark, advancing H1Z1: Just Survive, bringing DC Universe Online to Xbox One players, and launching H1Z1: King of the Kill on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
