Darkfall: Unholy Warshas been a long time coming.  Currently in closed beta testing, with a release date that is fast approaching, Aventurine S.A. has released a new dev diary in video form, detailing the newly revamped and exquisitely detailed world of Agon. They’ve gone through and redone the entire world, updating the graphics engine and retouching every area of the world to bring it new life.  In his diary, Nick Kasolos discusses many of the changes, including a redesign of guild holdings to promote more conflict and competition between the guilds. I’m not surprised they are seeking more conflict, given the inspiration behind the name of their world. In ancient Greek, ἀγών, or Agon, is a contest or a struggle.

Hit the jump for details on preordering Darkfall: Unholy Wars, and the video.

Continue Reading

No point in reinventing the wheel on this. The fine folks over at Massively have put together a list of all the various Black Friday deals for us MMO game players. We’re not talking just brick-and-mortar stores that have five copies of World of Warcraft on sale for $0.01 or something else that’s rather pointless.

The list includes everything from deals on expansions and full titles to deep discount across digital shops for F2P titles. For example, Guild Wars 2 and its Black Lion Trading Post is discounted up to 70%, all major Blizzard titles have been discounted, Lord of the Rings Online is featuring double bonus points of its shop currency, League of Legends has various champions and skins on sale and GamersFirst is offering a 50% bonus to credits purchased.

Don’t worry, there’s plenty more to look at on Massively’s informative post. If you play a popular MMOG, it’s probably listed.

Normally, Lore Hound doesn’t act as a PR siren. We strive to start discussions, highlight the highs and lows of the industry, ask tough questions, showcase upcoming escapist activities and entertain. Even posts on general MMOG news come with Op-Ed tropes. But what happened in Japan last week is anything but normal.

To that effect, we’re here to inform you that Hi-Rez Studios, the new owners of the Tribes intellectual property, is donating all of its sales for Global Agenda to the American Red Cross relief fund for the next few days. The charity goes both ways though, as Hi-Rez has slashed GA’s price by 66%, down to a paltry $9.99. This makes it a great time to buy the enjoyable shooter if you’ve neglected it so far, or purchase a copy for a friend. Or hell, just buy a second copy. It’s a more enjoyable alternative to texting ‘Japan’ to some faceless entity – Skynet – that runs our cellular networks.

The deal ends on Sunday, March 20 and applies to all regions where Global Agenda is available. Hit the link at the top of the page to purchase and then head to the official relief page for the full details.

The structure of the donation means you won’t have to have this conversation with your self-satisfying friends.

Update:

In related news, NCSoft, developer of Aion and Guild Wars (among others), also is donating a huge heap of cash to the relief efforts. NCsoft announced today that it will donate 500 million Yen (approx 4.5 million Euros/3.9 million GBP/6.3 million USD) to restoration of damages in the region. They’re definitely going all out — Even a tenth of that amount would be considered huge.

Let’s keep showing the world that gamers also can make a big difference — here’s hoping that other game companies who have the means to give, do, and that Hi-Rez’s special pricing drive is a huge success.

We don’t plan to document all the charitable efforts made by the companies we generally cover, but these two definitely stand out as a good start.

Anybody for some Rock 'Em, Sock 'Em Robots? Also, the yellow dude in the background is the Dune Commander.

There’s a wind of change blowing through the MMO community. Companies are shirking the old subscription model for Free-To-Play alternatives of one sort or another. Of course, this has its advantages and disadvantages depending on the nature and scope of each individual title, but looking at the sort of success that, say, Turbine has had with Eberron Unlimited? It certainly seems worth it.

So, even though it’s a bit of surprise that we didn’t hear anything about it at E3 (in fact, the literature at the time still suggested otherwise), it’s not entirely shocking to hear that Hi-Rez Studios’ Global Agenda is now dropping its subscription model before it even gets off the ground. The intention was to have everything open to players until the company finished deploying all of Patch 1.3, when, at that point, core features like Alliance vs. Alliance combat would fall under a monthly fee. Players could go ahead and pre-subscribe, earning extra tokens within the game until Phase 3 was released.

As I’ve already indicated, that’s evidently something that changed very quickly. The new model allows players access to all content as long as they purchase the core game. Though the remainder of Patch 1.3, “Sandstorm,” will be given out for free, monetization of the game falls on the shoulders of paid expansions and content patches released further in the future, somewhat similar to the way that Guild Wars operated (which is perfect for a PvP-focused game like this).

“But that’s not all!” to quote Ron Popeil. The awesomeness known as Steam is discounting Global Agenda as part of their Perils of Summer Sale, knocking off a cool 33%, for a final price of 26.79 USD. This offer lasts through July 4th. Thanks to the centralized servers, a game like this never feels completely empty, but it wouldn’t hurt to have a few more bodies wandering around Dome City.

Continue Reading