First introduced to the world at ChinaJoy 2011 (link), Taiwan-developed action MMO Planet Legend Online is currently taking part in Taipei Game Show 2012, with the first Closed Beta phase looming over the horizon. As mentioned previously, Planet Legend Online is a 3D action side-scroller paying homage to classics such as Metal Slug, with its rare “up” arrow button being a directional one when aiming. I am actually surprised not many online side-scrollers are doing this. Can’t wait for Closed Beta to begin!

En Masse Entertainment has opened up pre-order sales on their website today for their upcoming MMORPG TERA, giving players three options to choose from, Standard $49.99, Collectors Editions Digital $59.99 and Collector’s Edition $69.99. Regardless of which you you select you’ll have access to all closed beta tests as well as a three day head start. The full beta schedule is below.

• Closed Beta Test 1: February 10 – 12
• Closed Beta Test 2: February 24 – 26
• Closed Beta Test 3: March 9 – 11
• Closed Beta Test 4: March 23 – 25
• Closed Beta Test 5: April 6 – 8
• Open Beta Test: April 19 – 22
• Head Start: April 28 – May 1

Players who pre-order will also received in-game items to help them get started, you can check out the details below.  I’m excited!  :)

Actually that several questions: Do the Chinese for example even know “Star Wars”, given that when the first films came out they were still behind an iron cultural curtain? And if “Star Wars” isn’t popular in China, would a game like Star Wars: The Old Republic sell over there? How much of the success of SWTOR in the West is based on “it’s Star Wars!!!”, and how much is due to other reasons?

I don’t think anybody has a complete answer to that, but if you know anything about the popularity of Star Wars in China or have some thoughts about the other questions, I would be interested in hearing them.

Tobold’s MMORPG Blog

The good thing about being a public company is that they have to release their subscription and sales numbers, so while we can only guess how many subscribers games like RIFT and LOTRO have, we only have to wait for a quarterly report for Star Wars: The Old Republic.

It seems SWTOR did better than EA expected, the numbers are below then some interesting Q&As during the conference call.

• 2,000,000+ copies sold – 40% sold through Origin
• 1,700,000+ active subscribers – 1 million concurrent

Q: Are these 1.7 subscribers paying?
A: Active subscribers means anyone paying or in their trial period. Most of those 1.7m are paying at this point

Q: You’ve previously said you need about a half million subscribers to be profitable, is that still the case?
A: At 500,000 subscribers, we’d break even. At a million, we’d be making a profit but nothing worth writing home about. As it scales up from there, we’re talking about a nice profit. At this point with the successful launch, we can take the worst case scenarios off the table.

With well over a million pre-orders, I have to say these numbers are not at all surprising. What will be interesting to see is which direction these numbers go next quarter and how many players they will retain. Then I’ll have something to write about.

Taipei Game Show, or TPGS, usually pales in comparison against G*Star, ChinaJoy and even Tokyo Game Show in terms of online games on display. 2012’s edition is no surprise as well, but Dragon’s Prophet (more info here) is relishing the lack of competition at the event. Developed by the Taiwanese studio behind Runes of Magic (RoM), the game is almost all about, well, dragons.

We have some exciting news for you today; no Blizzard didn’t announce the released date for Diablo 3 and no, neither did ArenaNet for GW2. MMOCrunch is moving to LoreHound.com!

It’s actually a reunion of sorts as the owner of LoreHound was one of our original staff writers here, iTZKooPA.  We are once again combining forces to form Voltron…I mean a new and improved LoreHound.com!

This will be our last update here on MMOCrunch and we will be shutting the site down permanently sometime early next week once LoreHound has been updated. So I invite all our readers to come over to LoreHound to continue to read our ramblings.

For example accepting a quest in World of Warcraft is done with 2 clicks. Reading the short quest description is more or less optional, as the essential summary of “kill 10 foozles” will be shown on your quest tracker and the location marked on your map. Accepting more or less the same quest in Star Wars: The Old Republic takes considerably more time. There is more description, and the cut scenes and voiceovers invite the player to stay a while and listen. The player also will have to make dialogue choices. In addition to that SWTOR on average has longer ways between combats. Add all that together, and on average a player of WoW might well kill twice as many mobs per hour as a player of SWTOR.

Of course there is no universal answer to what the optimum is. Some people hit the space bar often in SWTOR to skip most or all of the dialogue, others quite enjoy it. And to some extent the players have some choice of how much combat they want to have, because they can spend more or less time with optional non-combat activities like crafting.

I was thinking about that balance in the context of writing the Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition adventure I’m currently preparing. As I mentioned before, up to now we have been playing Warhammer FRP, which has a set of rules which supports role-playing very well, but isn’t all that combat-centric. Players can have character classes like merchant or boatman, which lend itself somewhat less to combat-heavy adventures. And thus lots of the premade adventures have plots of intrigue and murder mysteries to be solved by role-playing dialogues with NPCs, and not all that much combat. D&D 4E is leaning towards the other extreme, where all character classes are designed for combat, and the rules are heavy on how to run a combat with miniatures. As a result the premade adventures are often very combat-heavy, with typical plots leading the players in some monster-infested dungeon with lots of battles and little role-playing.

Fortunately a pen & paper RPG can be more easily adjusted than a MMORPG. If you enter a dungeon in WoW you don’t get the choice whether you want to fight or dialogue. If you prepare an adventure as DM for a pen & paper session, you have a much wider range of choices: You can invent an adventure by yourself and put in exactly the ratio of combat to other activities that you want, or you can take a premade adventure and modify it heavily. Remove half the monsters from that dungeon and play up the interaction with the NPCs leading to that dungeon, and you might get closer to the balance you want.

Hopefully what the DM prepares is what the players want. I am not quite sure what degree of combat my players will want in their game, I plan to start with something and then try to get some feedback whether that amount of combat is too much, too little, or just right. As we literally had no combat at all for several months, I hope the players will like a bit more of it. The trouble with long political intrigue and mystery adventures in a group that only meets one evening every two weeks is that the DM spends a lot of time reminding the players what has happened before. I am trying to structure my adventures in smaller chunks, having a sequence of combat encounters and non-combat encounters, with clear objectives to concentrate on at any given moment, and the larger story a bit more in the background. D&D 4E lends itself nicely to that approach. I guess that too is a modern development, taking into account that the role-players have gotten older, and often play less frequently now.

Which side of the game do you prefer in pen & paper roleplaying? Do you like campaigns with very little combat, with a lot, or what percentage in between?

Tobold’s MMORPG Blog

It is not common for me to post about gaming-related deaths and accidents, but the way this unfortunate gamer passed away is something I would really like to share and warn you gamer folks about.This Taiwanese man was playing League of Legends (LoL) for 23 hours straight in an internet cafe (or cybercafe), and no one was aware of his death till a couple of hours later.

As you can see, his whole body is frozen in a fixed position, with both hands apparently still holding on to the mouse and keyboard. There were around 30 other gamers around who were oblivious to his demise, each engrossed in their own games. Without pointing fingers at anyone, League of Legends Taiwan was having a 400% bonus IP event for a couple of days during the wee hours.

A pack of medicine related to heart attack was found in the deceased’s belongings. I urge everyone, be it you are healthy or currently suffering from some illness, to take appropriate breaks after a few room-based games or after a couple of hours of dungeon raiding.

Incoming search terms for mmorpg games:

• guy plays League of Legends 23 hours reddit
• man dies during rpg gaming
• Taiwan man dies in gaming room

(Beta signup) Just to be clear, GFACE is a separate entity itself but the company is being backed by Crytek, the famous game engine developer behind CryEngine. So what is GFACE? Well, for me it looks like a harmonious merge between Steam, EA Origins, Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus. Yes, all 4 of them combined. Excited yet?

For the gaming part,  it reminds me of Google Plus, adding contacts into “circles”, but now able to launch games straight from the browser. Basically, the game lobby is the browser (GFACE page) itself. And no, this function is not limited to just casual web games. Even Crytek’s upcoming CryEngine 3 online shooter, Warface (link), is available to be played on your browser without downloading the game client!

Like I mentioned, GFACE is really the ultimate combination of some of the most popular social media websites and programs now. Do take a closer read at some of its functions at the official website, given in the link above. And sign up for beta now!

I was planning on writing a full review for SWTOR, but Pherephassa did such a great write-up on her SWTOR reivew, that I figured I’d skip mine and get straight to my likes and grips. I’ll give you a hint, it’s going to be mostly grips.

Undoubtedly the best part of game is the journey to endgame, after all this is what BioWare does best. Having said that, as a MMORPG player I found myself beginning to skip dialog as early as the mid teen levels and before I hit level 30 I was skipping it all with the exception of the main storyline. Even that I began to partial skip or you can say fast forward by the time I hit the early 40′s.  It’s not that I didn’t find it interesting, I just wanted to get on with things.

As a player who has never seriously crafted before, I actually enjoyed the crafting system in SWTOR. I didn’t have to waste my time grinding it out looking for resources or spending hours killing the same mobs, however while I enjoyed the mechanic of crafting, the entire system is broken since only a few professions can actually make any money.

For one, crafting is way to easy and fast. One of the main reasons I never pursue crafting is because of how much time it takes to master. In SWTOR I hit the max in all three of my crew skills within 3 weeks without really trying. Now nothing is wrong with the system itself, they just need to make the crafting time much much longer. While it took me 3 weeks to master all my crew skills, if you take the actual crafting time, it was probably only 3-4 days.  It should take at least 1 month of “crew skill time” to master a skill.

Secondly, they need to make craftable items better, not the best, but close. There should only be a handful of items that are better then the best crafted items and those items should be harder to get. Right now you can spend a few days in PvP or grinding flashpoints and obtain some of the best gear out there making crafted gear worthless.

Moving on to PvP which we all know is broken across the board, from open PvP to the PvP planet Illum to Warzones, it’s a mess. While Warzones recently got a lot better with the separation of level 50 characters, they still need to introduce at least one more bracket to divide 1-49. Open PvP and Illum need a full overhaul to become worth while since  currently there’s zero reason to participate in open PvP and nearly none on Illum as you can obtain the same rewards from warzones at an unmatched rate.

That leaves Operations and Flashpoints. Flashpoints are instanced, so of course I hate them, but they’re fun the first one or two times you run them. Unfortunately if you want better gear and don’t like PvP you’ll be running them over and over and over.  I can’t comment on Operations since I still haven’t do one, but I’d image they’re the same thing with more people.

My favorite moment of the entire game was on Tatooine waiting on top of a sandcrawer with Empire and Republic players alike waiting for a balloon that would take us to a datacron on top of another sandcrawer. As the balloon approached tensions began to rise to see if anyone would attack. We all jumped on the balloon and as it began to pull away from the sandcrawler you could just sense something was about it happen and then it did. Someone attacked and all hell broke lose.  Lucky my faction (Empire) was able to push off all the Republic players and we floated away as they sat and cursed at us.

That’s was SWTOR and nearly all theme-park MMO are missing, there’s no surprises, no tension of not knowing what’s going to happen next . The only tension is knowing you have to run Black Talon 8 more times until you have enough point to get the item you want.

If you look at SWTOR as strictly a single-player RGP, then I’d say it’s a great game, but unfortunately for BioWare they made a MMORPG. With the exception of Flashpoints, I grouped exactly two times during my entire journey from level 1-50.  Now that I’m at 50, I’m stuck with either a broken PvP system, running Flashpoints and Ops all day or starting a new alt. No thanks.

It seems BioWare created a MMOPRG where their biggest replay value is in restarting with a new character and while many players will, not as many are willing to pay a monthly fee to play what is basically a co-op RPG.

In my mind SWTOR is a complete dud and failure in term of gameplay, but in a good way. This marks the end of the theme-park MMORPG shit-fest that has taken over the genre for the last decade.  If an IP like Star Wars cannot compete with WoW, no IP using a theme-park design can. The next great MMORPG might not be pure sandbox, but it sure as hell won’t be a theme-park either. I feel like this is the turning point in the industry and we’ll once again seen innovation in MMORPGs and I can’t wait.