From the Warhammer site today:
Today we have important news to share with the community. EA is restructuring its RPG and MMO games development into a new group that includes both Mythic and BioWare. This newly formed team will be led by Ray Muzyka, co-founder and General Manager of BioWare. With this change, Ray becomes Group General Manager of the new RPG/MMO studio group. BioWare’s other co-founder, Greg Zeschuk will become Group Creative Officer for the new RPG/MMO studio group. Rob Denton will step up as General Manager of Mythic and report to Ray. BioWare’s studios remain unchanged and continue to report to Ray.
Mark Jacobs, co-founder and current General Manager of Mythic, will leave EA on June 23, 2009. We thank Mark for his contributions at Mythic and wish him the very best going forward. Mark played a major part in the success of Mythic with his contribution as General Manager and Lead Designer of WAR.
Mythic retains a strong team led by Rob who co-founded Mythic in 1995. Rob played a critical role in the development of Dark Age of Camelot. In his previous role as COO, he was responsible for all day-to-day management of the studio including all development, operations and support.
Please join us in celebrating the union of these two award-winning studios.
Thankyou, but no. I shall lament the end of a fine MMO company, as it is (entirely predictably) finally absorbed into the Electronic Arts borg. The individual cultures within developer groups matter, and it will not do Bioware or Mythic any great service to be fused together like some lumpen piece of fleshcraft.
I wish Mark Jacobs all the best in whatever he decides to do next. He’s a good lad, and I hope he starts anew with a fresh company, and keeps it out of the hands of the Goliaths of the industry a little longer this time.
I also wish the Bioware staff well. They have yet to build up any immunity to Paul Barnett, so I suspect it’s going to be quite a shock to the system!
Update! From Mythic’s Andy Belford over on the Warhammer Alliance forums:
For clarity:
Mythic is not “merging” with Bioware.
Mythic and Bioware remain independent EA studios within a larger MMO/RPG group.
Thanks!
Ah, well, now I feel silly. Never mind, I can always reuse this post when EA does finally squish them together. I suspect that Mythic is going to be bled of its best talent to fuel Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic, but we shall see.
I don’t see me joining a guild in Free Realms, but it is still the feature that marks yesterdays patch as one to notice.
Mysterious incidents are happening across the land. Help out any of these people, and jump in the middle of the adventure:
* A Royal Courier is in trouble in Greenwood Forest
* Impress Sal Monella at Blackspore, and see where the next adventure takes you
* Henry Farnum has trouble with the local hooligans
* If you rescue Starshine’s child, she will have another task for a hero like you
* Help Sorin out near the Bat Caves, and see where he’ll send you to, or
* Complete Ceard Bauchlog’s task for further instructions
* (If you have already helped them out, return to them for another task!)
Quests & Collections & New Content
* Guilds! Gather your friends and be one of the first to start a guild! Talk to players in your guild using /gu
Pets
* Watch how your Pets react to wandering encounters differently based on their disposition
Marketplace
* When viewing Pets in the Marketplace you’ll be able to read about their personality before you purchase them
* Check out the new tool tips in the Claim Window of the Marketplace
Fresh news from the depths of the Free Realms twitter feed. The first iteration of guilds will be arriving “very very soon”. Not much information at the moment, beyond a 32 character limit for guild names. It’s a pretty big deal though, as it is a basic MMO feature that Free Realms has been sorely missing.
In the picture below, we can see a guild tab has been added to the chat window, and there is a guild panel on the far right.
My extreme quester, Maltheas, is a ways off being able to tackle the 80 new Kunark Overland quests that arrive today, but I’m happy to know they’re there waiting for him. That is the (considerable!) extent of the content additions for my own playstyle, but raiders will be happy to see a couple of new instances to delve into. The return of Kurn’s Tower, a popular dungeon from Everquest, is quite exciting for an old lore junkie like myself, though it is unlikely I shall ever see the inside of it myself.
When last we checked in with Maltheas, Ratonga Templar of the Celestial Watch, about four months ago, the leaderboard looked like this:
Now, in all honesty, he’s not been out and about much since then, except for during the various spring events. He’d never done any of the Brell’s Day and Bristlebane’s day events before, so that scored him a fair few. In addition, the only Erollisi day event he had taken part in was the very first. For whatever reason, my EQ2 account has always been a bit on the dormant side in the Spring. Burnout after Frostfell is probably part of that. I should have posted about this years new Erollisi event at the time, as I thought it was fairly superb, at least on the Team Good version of the events. Any day you get to have a pleasant conversation with one of your patron gods (In this case Mithaniel Marr, the Truthbringer), is a good day for a Templar. True, Maltheas did meet Brell and Bristlebane on their festival days, but neither of them exactly behaved in a particularly admirable way.
So, lets see the current leaderboard. Once again, I’m using the original level cap of 50. Maltheas turns up at 10th place if I nudge the level limit up to 53, but seeing as the poor chap is still only level 35, I’ll stick with 50 for now as what I’m comparing him with.
Maltheas’ work for the gods has paid off, as he has crept up to 4th place. I did decide to let him gain a level during that period, as he has been venturing into rather more dangerous areas than he has previously needed to. Nanthera too, has been busy, and climbed to the top spot. The annoyingly named Everxxxxxxxyxxx has made a little progress too, though is clearly not terribly active. Eligh has stayed put on questcount, so is probably out of the competition in the long term. Everyone else from the old table has levelled out of the 1-50 range, which is unsurprising considering how many 50s there were in the previous leaderboard, and we have a bunch of new competition. They, of course, mostly have no idea that anyone is the slightest bit interested in how many quests they have done for their level. The average level for the table is actually a little lower than last time, so it would appear Mal may be at a bit more risk than previously!
I’m still not very active in EQ2 at the moment. Free Realms, and a run through Kingdom Hearts 2 are mostly devouring my playtime, which is a bit limited at the moment anyway due to my having something that slightly resembles employment. So for now, Maltheas mostly stands around on the docks of Mara, dithering about what evil to vanquish next.
Ahh yes. you’re probably here for the patch notes, rather than the adventures of a small brown ratonga. GU52 update notes continue below the fold.
Continue reading Everquest 2 Game Update 52 Patch Notes, and a Maltheas Extreeeeme Quester Update
Only got highlights info so far. I’ll update when and if full patch notes appear.
With patches coming on a weekly basis at the moment, I’ve been very satisfied with the amount of goodness in them. Of course, we are in the early phase of a game wherein the new content is mostly stuff that ideally would have been in at release, but wasn’t quite finished in time. Thus it is hard to judge accurately what the future flow of new things will be like, once the reserve of goodies is exhausted. Time, as they say, will tell. For now, I’m off to go play the Tower Defence quests in Snowhill, so I can dress up like a penguin!
Members Only – Quests
* * Four Tower Defense Strategists are offering special rewards for those that can master their favorite minigame!
* * Find Napoleon in Sanctuary, Houston at Farnum’s Farm, General Spattonug in Bristlewood, and Arci Joan in Snowhill for the different challenges
Items – Marketplace
* * Sprint Concert ’09 t-shirts now available in the marketplace for a limited time
User Interface
* * Chat channels have been added! Player area, trade and “LFG†(looking for group) are now available (Note – Chat range of standard chat has been reduced to allow for area chat)
* * Pet wearables can now be previewed in the Merchant window
* * Players can now view the duration of a spell in the tool tip icon of the player portrait
* * Collection categories have been added to help organize collection.
Pets
* * Added more pet names to the name wheel
Free Realms is targeted at children. That being the case it needs to be extremely robust in dealing with anti-social behaviour.
In the most recent patch, the radius within which you can hear other people talking was greatly increased. Where previously, chat only extended perhaps the equivalent of 100 meters, now you can hear people half the world away. It is unclear at this time whether or not it was intended, but there have so far been no admissions that it was unintended. The consequences are not good.
There have been people asking for, and being given phone numbers, from people they’ve just met. Asking for personal details such as age and sex, and all manner of stuff that would not be anywhere near as disturbing in a game marketed for adults. Then we have the general meanness that we all know from other MMOs, but that is a little harder to legislate against. A lot of us adult types like Free Realms for the very reason that we did not, until the chat-range changes, have to put up with the sort of nastiness that is epidemic in the global chats of other MMO. As Lum would say, “People are broken.”. Free Realms is our happy place.
I’ve had quite a few people come up to me and ask me to be their boyfriend. Of course I politely decline, but it seems a bit of a weird thing to do, and makes me think that they are probably rather less than 13 years old. In fact you hear people giving out personal details all the time, and age is a common one, and if half of them were telling the truth, there are a LOT of people under the age of 13 who have access to chat. Whether that’s because they lied about their age when they signed up, or because their parents have chosen to not use the security features, I don’t know. Obviously parental responsibility is incredibly important when you let your kids on the internet, but SOE has to be able to provide a safe environment even to kids whose parents don’t give a damn. For some kids, it might be the only safe environment they have. Gods, that’s a depressing thought, but it is true.
I’ve also heard a lot of sexual talk, some of the worst I captured below.
 Free Realms Cybersex Needless to say I tried to report Brad and Kimiko (Two of the pre-generated first name offerings. There are a lot of Brads and Kimikos, so anonymity is preserved in the above log.), but guess what? The /report function does not work, and I am not the only person who says that. If Free Realms is going to really succeed, it needs to convince parents that it is a safe place to let their kids have fun. Now, I do not have children, but I am truly unimpressed with how seriously SOE seem to be taking this. The chat-range is pretty much world-wide at the moment, so you plant a referee in Sanctuary on every server , and start hitting the ban button. Pretty simple.
There IS a profanity filter, but as you can see, no profanity filter can prevent people managing to be completely disgusting. To ensure a pleasant environment, SOE needs many more referees than currently appears to be the case. I am beginning to wonder if an MMO that allows open chat can EVER be child-safe, but for sure, it can’t be done without making the effort. With 2 million players, and growing, you need at least several hundred staff to maintain the safe and pleasant community. Some people will come to Free Realms with the express purpose of ruining it, and even more than in other MMO, they need to be stopped.
p.s. I am available for hire.
8 pm. 1st of June. I updated with a few extra thoughts culled from an brief email discussion I had on the subject. I should also add that today I was able to get the /report function to work (or at least it did not give an error message. Instead there was no response at all.). I did not do anything different to all the other times I have tried.
This is a huge update, with a lot to offer both PvPers and PvEers. So much so that I am a little tempted to go back and see how things are in the Old World now. The Land of the Dead is here! With shades of the old Dark Ages of Camelot dungeon, the awesome Darkness Falls, this looks to be a great addition to the game.
Also, finally, we are able to choose to opt out of receiving a roll on the reward chests from public quests and keeps. The various issues (and dishonest handling of them) with chest contribution and looting were one of the main things that caused me to leave WAR in the first place. To me it is a terrible waste that fixing such a major source of unhappiness has taken until now, but at least it is done.
The Warhammer Online 1.3 Patch Notes can be found below the fold.
Continue reading Warhammer Online 1.3 Update Notes.
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