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Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning closed down this Wednesday (18th Dec 2013), when the licensing agreement Electronic Arts had with Games Workshop ended. A developer who worked on the game says there is a way to preserve its world in a kind of museum-exhibit way, should EA choose to release it.
Andrew Meggs, who was the lead client engineer for Warhammer Online when he was at Mythic Entertainment, says there was an option to run the game without a server in an unreleased, developer-only build of the Warhammer Online client. If EA released this, then fans could run around in the virtual world, explore it and remember the good times.
“There were no login or character selection screens,” Meggs wrote on his blog. “There were no NPCs or other players. There was no gameplay of any kind. It was just you and the entire world spread out before you. You could fly around like Superman, or teleport anywhere at will.”
An MMO without other players or quests is not an MMO, and Meggs isn’t pretending this would be one. He’s more suggesting it as a memorial to Warhammer Online’s five year run. “It’s a double-clickable museum exhibiting much of what WAR was, so it won’t be forgotten completely. It’s an effort by all of us, as developers, to preserve a living record as our transient medium is created and destroyed. I can’t do this; I left behind the code when I left EA. But there are people inside EA who can easily make this happen.”
It’s a nice thought but it leaves me feeling like the mere suggestion creates a no-win situation to crap all over EA, as if that’s not a forum pastime already. First, they’d have to release it for free, because otherwise, the story becomes “EA Wants Warhammer Fans to Pay for an MMO with No Quests or NPCs.” Secondly, this is a licensed game, which means the licensor would have to consent to all of this, and the agreement has expired. I’m guessing that contract is pretty absolute on proscribing EA from continuing this game in any form past the expiration date.
Closing an MMO is always painful to those who played it. Sometimes it’s best to just say goodbye and move on, rather than dredge up another reason to be disappointed by the company shutting things down.
All players of My Free Zoo will receive an extraordinary log-in bonus
Bamberg, December 19th 2013. German developer and publisher of free-to-play browser games Upjers is delighted about 8 million registered players in My Free Zoo. This highly positive number confirms the developer team’s efforts to implement new content into the game on a weekly basis. By way of thanks for their loyalty, all players of My Free Zoo (www.myfreezoo.com) will receive a unique log-in present.
My Free Zoo is celebrating its 8 millionth registered player. This success is due to enthusiastic zoo directors all the world over, and of course to the hardworking developers of My Free Zoo. Since its release not even two years ago, more than 100 animals have been added to the zoo simulator. Among these are several extraordinary specimen, such as the white lion or the Western Crowned Pigeon.
Almost weekly, new animals and new features are implemented into the game. Besides the possibility to breed animals, organizations have been introduced to the game. In these organizations, the players can help out their fellow organization members in their virtual zoos as veterinarians, mechanics, shippers and as environmental officers.
Upjers would like to say thanks to all 8 million players in My Free Zoo. That’s why all of them will receive a unique log-in present with their next log-in into the game. In accordance with this cold season, every player who logs into the game up until January 9th will receive an Ice Castle.
My Free Zoo can be played for free on https://en.upjers.com/my-free-zoo.
For those without a key to Hearthstone’s closed Beta are probably frantically waiting right now for the game’s open Beta stage to begin. At Blizzcon it was announced that it would probably begin sometime this month. If you’re one of these people, you’re probably going to be mildly disappointed by the latest update on the game’s open Beta…
“We hoped to get the game into a state where it’s ready for open beta this month, but we’re just not quite there yet” Jason Chayes says in his update to Blizzard’s Hearthstone news page. He states that the latest patch to the game (which made Freeze a little less powerful by bumping up the cost of many spells with the effect) involved some code changes which might yet break the game and that Blizzard would rather make sure the game is as bug-free as possible rather than rushing it out before year’s end to meet the expectation.
If you signed up with the opt-in on the site though, there is good news: Blizzard is now in the process of sending EVERYONE who opted-in keys for Closed Beta, at least if you signed up before the 16th of this month. The closing date for opting-in has been set now as the 7th of January with the company planning to make sure everyone who signs up by that date will get access to the closed Beta at some time before the gates are opened. People sent their keys who don’t claim them will also have their accounts flagged to get access during the first few weeks of January too.
So the game’s open stage has been pushed back, but if you opted-in… go check your e-mails now. And don’t forget the spam folder!
Redstone has always been one of the trickiest elements of the game of Minecraft, there’s a reason people who are good with it are known as ‘redstone wizards’ and there’s recently been a redstone handbook released physically. However there’s being good with redstone… and then there’s being insanely talented with the stuff.
Player ItsJustJumby has achieved the latter with his impressive build: an actual working 3D printer made in Vanilla Minecraft. No mods, no alterations, just the vanilla game. The device makes use of 846 repeaters, 1124 hoppers, 9181 comparators, 10,539 pieces of redstone dust, and 20,103 command blocks and uses your typical standard chest as a blueprint for each individual layer.
Once the button is pressed it takes around a minute and a decent amount of lag before the creeper model is finished. While not perfect it is never the less, bloody impressive. I admire Jumby’s patience!
Last night the person in charge of Starbound’s development team released an entry on the game’s website setting out a list of the upcoming changes the team at Chucklefish are hoping to make to the game through its Beta development and potentially even after release.
Tiy explains that the list was made by a fan called Xealaz on the Starbound Reddit had made a nice list and that though there are plenty of other things they are working on that it was a pretty nice way of listing everything players can expect from later updates.
The full post is linked at the bottom of the article but among the expected changes are the implementation of ‘spaceship dungeons’ and spaceship combat (including boarding, pirates in spaaaaace!), biome hazards, NPC spawners and NPCs with better AI (they’ll know if you’re stealing their stuff!), story-missions with bosses at the end and the ability to drastically alter a planet’s surface from your spaceship.
