MMReviews

People love to complain about MMOs and their faults. Well Warhammer Online provided in this month's newsletter what it really takes to make one character. The charcter has over 100 animations which really gives an idea of the magnitude of developing one of these games and why it takes three years on average to release one. You can view the video here.
You can view the newsletter here.

Saga new RTS MMO is now in open beta. Visit the site and join in!

The Sims Online is now FREE! It is now called EA Land and will compete against Second Life.

If you played The Sims Online before, we have played together and I would like you to rejoin us in the game: My avatar is MaxisLuc
(yes, I work for Maxis/EA). At the beginning of last year I assembled a
team to improve The Sims Online. After months of ongoing hard work, we
can say proudly that we have been successful and we have made this game
fun again!

• Former Members Of The Sims Online: You can come back for FREE right now by just downloading the game and REACTIVATING
  your account. If you do so before March 2008, you will get your earned
  'account based' privileges back (gifts, skill locks etc...) when we run
  our 'amnesty' program. So make sure you are in game before that event!
  
  
  
• New to EA-Land and The Sims Online:Sign up for free!

Coming in 2008, All Points Bulletin (APB) is an original MMOG for PC being developed in partnership with Webzen of Korea. APB is a city based community game where players choose between playing the criminals or those out to catch the criminals; carry out or thwart opposed crimes and build up areas of the city you control, all with unprecedented levels of character and vehicle customization.

LOS GATOS, CA – February 20, 2008 – Cryptic Studios™, one of the leading independent developers of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs), announced today Champions Online™, their first ever self-developed and self-published MMORPG. Champions Online, based on the popular pen-and-paper Champions RPG, will give players the power of total customization of their hero experience while they explore a vast universe of richly detailed 3D environments. Champions Online is slated for release in Spring 2009.

Edward Castronova had hit bottom. Three years ago, the thirty-eight-year-old
economist was, by his own account, an academic failure. He had chosen
an unpopular field—welfare research—and published only a handful of
papers that, as far as he could tell, “had never influenced anybody.”
He’d scraped together a professorship at the Fullerton campus of
California State University, a school that did not even grant Ph.D.s.
He lived in a lunar, vacant suburb. He’d once dreamed of being a major
economics thinker but now faced the grim sense that he might already
have hit his plateau. “I’m a schmo at a state school,” he thought. And
since his wife worked in another city, he was, on top of it all, lonely.

Read the rest here

Ultima Online (UO) is a popular online computer role-playing game created and maintained by Origin Systems (http://www.owo.com). Subscribers to UO
gather online and interact with one another in a medieval fantasy
world. One very interesting aspect of this game is the inter-player
economy which is analyzed in detail in this paper.

In many ways, the in-game economy is similar to a
real world economy – goods and services are traded to mutual advantage
and are mediated in currency or barter. In other ways, the economy is
very alien; for example, some commodity prices are determined by a
robotic simulation of business profit motivation. These quirky rules
will be described in Chapters 3 to ensure that the reader appreciates
the entire economic environment of the game.

Read the rest here

Game Design: In an MMO, how do you build an economy that will 'balance'
itself? Obviously, having solid inputs and outputs are one thing, and
balancing those inputs with the demand for the item, but what other
things need to be taken into account?

Join in on the conversation.

I encountered their payphones in San Francisco airport. When I entered a long distance number the phone said "$1 dollar for 3 minutes, please insert coins or use your card". When I ran out of quarters I used my debit card. When you use a credit card or debit card they charge you $10.40 (NCIC Operator Service) for 1 minute and it looks like they also get a third party to charge you for $15 (Network Communications). So I have around $100 charged to my card for around 10 minutes of call time.

The REBUTTAL by the company (which I have seen on this site) is a joke as they tell you what the call supposedly costs when you dial the number. Why would anyone think to call unless they told you that charges by using a card might be higher. 

“Marvel Universe Online“

Microsoft announced in September 2006 that “City of Heroes” makers Cryptic Studios would develop a massively multiplayer game set in the Marvel Comics universe. But last November, rumors swirled that development of the game had been shut down.

First, I asked if the game was truly canceled. He said: “I’ll confirm. Marvel and we have agreed to end development on the MMO. It was an amicable decision…. It’s just something that we felt that, for us and for them, it would be better if we ended development. Which is disappointing, because that had a lot of promise. But sometimes you have to make these decisions.”

Cue the natural follow-up: What went wrong?

“I don’t think it’s necessarily a case of what went wrong,” Kim told me. “I don’t know that that’s the right way to put it. For us we look at our priorities and all of the things we have to do. It’s a tough space. It’s a very competitive space. And it’s a space that’s changing quite a bit. …When we first entered into the development and agreement of the development of ‘Marvel Universe Online,’ we thought we would create another subscription-based MMO. And if you really look at the data there’s basically one that’s successful and everything else wouldn’t meet our level or definition of commercial success. And then you have to look [and say]: ‘Can we change the business model for that? Is that really viable given how far we are in development? And so forth. Does Marvel want to do that?’ There’s a whole bunch of factors.”

I asked if he meant that he would have wanted — but was too far in development — to consider other business models for the Marvel MMO such as an ad-supported version. “Item-based or transaction- based,” he chimed in, expanding the possibilities further. “Clearly there are emerging models that have come about. At the end of the day, all of those combined for us to say, look, it’s probably in the interest of both parties for us not to continue.”

Kim made it clear the Marvel project is done, but said that the cessation of development of two MMO’s during his tenure — the other being “True Fantasy Live Online” — wouldn’t discourage him from greenlighting a new one, “if the right opportunity came along.”

“Marvel Universe Online“

Microsoft announced in September 2006 that “City of Heroes” makers Cryptic Studios would develop a massively multiplayer game set in the Marvel Comics universe. But last November, rumors swirled that development of the game had been shut down.

First, I asked if the game was truly canceled. He said: “I’ll confirm. Marvel and we have agreed to end development on the MMO. It was an amicable decision…. It’s just something that we felt that, for us and for them, it would be better if we ended development. Which is disappointing, because that had a lot of promise. But sometimes you have to make these decisions.”

Cue the natural follow-up: What went wrong?

“I don’t think it’s necessarily a case of what went wrong,” Kim told me. “I don’t know that that’s the right way to put it. For us we look at our priorities and all of the things we have to do. It’s a tough space. It’s a very competitive space. And it’s a space that’s changing quite a bit. …When we first entered into the development and agreement of the development of ‘Marvel Universe Online,’ we thought we would create another subscription-based MMO. And if you really look at the data there’s basically one that’s successful and everything else wouldn’t meet our level or definition of commercial success. And then you have to look [and say]: ‘Can we change the business model for that? Is that really viable given how far we are in development? And so forth. Does Marvel want to do that?’ There’s a whole bunch of factors.”

I asked if he meant that he would have wanted — but was too far in development — to consider other business models for the Marvel MMO such as an ad-supported version. “Item-based or transaction- based,” he chimed in, expanding the possibilities further. “Clearly there are emerging models that have come about. At the end of the day, all of those combined for us to say, look, it’s probably in the interest of both parties for us not to continue.”

Kim made it clear the Marvel project is done, but said that the cessation of development of two MMO’s during his tenure — the other being “True Fantasy Live Online” — wouldn’t discourage him from greenlighting a new one, “if the right opportunity came along.”

Found here.