Star Trek Online launched back in 2010 as a paid box with an ongoing monthly subscription, but nowadays it’s a free download with no additional fees required. The game has a cash shop but also offers a monthly gold membership as well as a lifetime subscription. Gold members pay $12.99 a month and get an… [more]

There was a recent thread at TMS asking if MUDs need to be brought into the 21st century. A few years ago my answer would have been a resounding “Yes!” and I’d have gone on about accessibility and web clients and user interfaces and blah blah blah. Nowadays I tend to think that there’s not… [more]

Albion Online is a new free to play sandbox MMO with a rather odd business model. Here’s some copy from their website: Imagine the following situation: Someone is spending real money to get in-game currency. Next, he buys a crafted sword from another player with the in-game currency. Afterwards, the guy who bought the sword… [more]

I guess I just don’t get Kickstarter. On the one hand you have people with significant industry experience who actually have a working prototype, and on the other you have these guys. I think if Eric has another go he should concentrate more on selling the overall game experience to potential players rather than shining a spotlight on… [more]

One of the cool things I like in Maiden Desmodus is how you can recruit and train troops and then assemble them into squads before marching them around the game world to take control of different areas. The troops can’t be attacked like regular NPCs but can be battled with other military units in a… [more]

Nothing particularly revolutionary here, but I wanted to set out a bare outline for the kind of skill system I’d like to see in a multiplayer virtual world RPG. Skills Skills would be mostly non-magical and reflect a single verb. Once learned skills could be improved over time or through use (I’m still undecided on… [more]

Bigpoint publish over 70 online games including quite a few MMO titles, most notably Dark Orbit, Battlestar Galactica Online and the upcoming Game of Thrones MMO. As a company they get quite a lot of stick from players over their “free to play” charging model which relies heavily on the sale of virtual items. Despite this… [more]

A quick recap; in 2010 38 Studios relocated to Rhode Island in order to take advantage of a $75 million loan backed by the State economic development fund and this month defaulted on the repayments amid reports that staff hadn’t been paid. It’s since been reported that the loan payment has now been made but the studio… [more]

I was wondering how long before the Kickstarter bubble bursts and now we have the less than edifying spectacle of a studio with AAA pretensions scrabbling around for funding for a tech demo. Yep that’s right, it’s not the actual game they want funding for, just the demo. Goblinworks was formed in 2011 and has an… [more]

The game is provisionally titled Arturem Online and it’s going to be an online multiplayer 3D graphical virtual world. I’m deliberately not calling it an MMO because the concept is more multiplayer than massively multiplayer. What I want to do is focus on some of the more niche gameplay areas like role-playing, politics and PvP… [more]