meticmeta

What sets Crowfall apart for me though isn't the people. We've seen popular names from gaming history come back to varying levels of success on Kickstarter. It isn't the snappy video or the disappointment I may be harboring over 2014s AAA releases... It is the look forward.

This leads me to my weekend Kickstarter discovery. While doing my weekly browse through Kickstarter I came across a hardcore sci-fi space MMORPG that has raised $10,000CAD. The game is called Nebula Online.

If life were an MMO that MMO would be called Identity. For those who don’t know it may seem like the creators of Identity, Asylum Entertainment came out of nowhere, but in fact they have a lot of experience with the modern sandbox game. Asylum Entertainment is to this point best known for their Arma III mod Asylum’s Altis Life.

What defines an indie game? This is a question that has many answers depending on who you ask. To some it’s indie if it has a tiny budget and non-traditional funding source. To others a game can be considered indie if the studio that made it was put together specifically to make that game. While others will disqualify a game from being indie simply because it has a major industry veteran at the helm. What indie means is different for every person.

While going on my weekly browse through Kickstarter I noticed an area of the video games subdivision that I had never noticed before. A section that boasts there are over 100 games on Steam that were once on Kickstarter. This is a great thing for Kickstarter to brag about! Kickstarter has made some amazing games possible. Of course most of them aren’t MMOs. Kickstarter has been a great platform for non-MMO indie games.

Back in 2012 there was this little MMO darling that was loved by many, one that I personally wanted to try out but never got the chance to. That gem of a game was called Glitch. MMO bloggers that I follow spoke nothing but praise and the announcement of the shutdown hit fans hard. Thankfully, unlike many MMOs that shut down Tiny Speck was able to put the art and code from Glitch into the public domain.

The first time I logged into Trove I didn’t get it. After getting through character creation I quickly found myself going into a lowbie area meant for levels 1-3. As soon as I got there I was lost. There were no instructions, people were scattered all over the map and I had no idea where to start. I ran around the map for a few hours trying to work out what to and mining anything that looked interesting that was in my path. Needless to say I didn’t accomplish much that first time.

In the ashes of City of Heroes the seeds of three spiritual successors were planted. The Phoenix Project now known as City of Titans, Heroes and Villains, and Valiance Online. Two years on and all three are barely little sprouts poking their heads out of the dirt, MMOs do take a long time to develop after all. But it is that time of year where they’re pushed into our thoughts once more. How are they doing you may be asking? That’s a very good question…

Much of The Secret World is the same no matter which faction you chose to go with. The open world where nearly all of the game takes place is identical no matter which group you pick. If you’re a Dragon you can even team up with an Illuminati and a Templar at the same time. So the question becomes, if most of the game is the same no matter which side you join, does it really matter? I would say that yes, it very much matters and not for the reason you might be thinking.

Last night I sat down at my computer to finally get my chance to dive into the Halloween story. Nevermind that it’s past Halloween now, it’s always Halloween in The Secret World. Or at least it feels that way. So I logged Penny in and hit the button to get it started. Wow do I regret that.

There really is no better MMO to play during Halloween than The Secret World. I’m even lucky enough right now to be playing in Kingsmouth thanks to Murphy’s Lawbreakers. Kingsmouth is of course forever stuck in Halloween. Not only is it actually Halloween there, see the pumpkins sitting on porches and a roadside stand as evidence of this. But the entire setting screams Halloween horror.

This weekend saw the first meeting of Murphy’s Lawbreakers, the official MMORPG Illuminati cabal. We had a fantastic turnout that had all of Kingsmouth talking. The first twenty minutes of the meetup were spent getting to know each other and inviting people to the cabal. By the end there were 17 of us, which had a few consequences that hadn’t been considered when the whole idea was thought up.

Item Stores are a funny thing. Some people love them, some people hate them. They offer a players the opportunity to get new items, and often even new content. They help keep the world of the MMO you’re in looking fresh. Or they can give you a boost to heal faster, or gain experience more quickly. The item store for The Secret World does all of this and more, and yet…there’s something missing.

Now that convention season is coming to an end MMORPG is slowly getting back to the normal routine. This means we’re back to our every other week schedule! And just in case you missed it I got to interview Joel Bylos about all things related to The Secret World. This of course happened before he released his August Game Director’s letter which came out at the end of last week.

I’ve never been a fan of MOBAs. I can’t roleplay in them, they aren’t really known for being big on customization either. So that’s two of my favorite things in games taken out from the start. I never really bothered to give them the time of day. But after I met the Dawngate development team all of that changed. I’m actually giving Dawngate a try. You could say that they made a believer out of me.