Games – Page 12 – Ciaran Laval

March 21, 2014

EverQuest Next Landmark Announces Closed Beta

EverQuest Next Landmark has announced that closed beta will start on March 26th. EverQuest Next Landmark, for those who don’t know, is a hotly anticipated online social building game linked to EverQuest Next. For example, from the blurb :

This is your chance to help build a game! Build alone or in groups to create Landmarks. Join massive construction contests and your creations could last forever. The best buildings players create will become permanent fixtures in the EverQuest Next world.

It’s a sandbox game, you can build with their tools and people have been happily building away during the Alpha process, now it’s getting close to Beta time.

There will also be opportunities for people to sell their wares for real cash via the Sony Online Entertainment Player Studio, although this will initially be restricted to those in the United States the plan is to extend this to other countries, it should also be noted that sales via the Player Studio will be for multiple games, so content creators may see plenty of opportunities.

There’s a rather epic forum post discussing the business of EverQuest Next Landmark, it’s a free to play title so selling items and encouraging people to purchase items and subscriptions will be important. The opening post, from an official bod, also discusses players selling items :

Phase 4: We launch Player Studio. At that point, all of our players can start submitting templates to the store and letting other players buy them. This should occur early during Closed Beta.

Hopefully that means people from outside the United States will be able to sell items. However it should be pointed out there’s a rather hefty commission fee for selling goods this way:

SOE will share 40% of the net amount it receives from the sale of the item with the player that created the item.

Plenty of content creators will baulk at that, but opportunity knocks for those who think it’s a reasonable trade off between reach and sales. Time will tell whether it’s a success but it’s encouraging to see other products offering content creators the option to sell their own wares.

There are a couple of ways of getting into closed beta, you can purchase a Founder’s Packs, which gives you unlimited access to the Landmark Closed Beta or you can apply to acquire a Time-Limited Closed Beta Key, which is a free method of getting into the Closed Beta, but is far more limited than the Founder’s Packs options.

Founder’s Packs come in three varieties, priced at $19.99, $59.99 and $99.99. All three varieties will allow you full closed beta access. The packs are:

Settler Pack – $19.99

Unlimited Closed Beta Access
Settler Flag ItemPlant your flag in EQ/EQII
Founder’s Pickaxe
Title: Founder
Forum Title: Founder

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March 16, 2014

Versu’s Emily Short Extends Gratitude To Rod Humble And Linden Lab

New World Notes has recently published a couple of articles about Linden Lab’s decision to end Versu. The first by Iris Ophelia entitled Versu’s Epilogue: How an Interactive Fiction Pioneer’s 15 Year Project Ended Up in Limbo at Linden Lab laments the loss of the title. This is a very good read and I agree with much of what Iris has to say.

The second deals with feedback to that article, Limbo Status of Emily Short’s Long-in-Development Interactive Fiction Project at Linden Lab Goes Viral and highlights a tweet from Gamastura’s Leigh Alexander:

I have always been interested in Emily Short’s work, especially the Versu stuff. This is awful news about its future http://t.co/TJo4WldkLy

— Leigh Alexander (@leighalexander) March 14, 2014

From there we can go to Gamasutra itself and find an article by Chritsian Nutt : The end of Versu: Emily Short looks back. This article includes commentary from Emily Short and highlights points Emily has made on her own blog, Emily is extremely grateful to Rod Humble and Linden Lab for supporting Versu in the first place. I’ve seen Emily make this point more than once, if it wasn’t for Linden Lab’s support, Versu would not have reached the stage it did.

This is a point that could easily be lost amidst all the disappointment over how things turned out but it remains a very important point. Emily is quoted in the gamasutra article as saying :

I want to stress this because some of the people I’ve talked to about the closure of Versu don’t seem to understand this point: I remain hugely grateful to Rod Humble and to Linden for picking us up when they did, and for giving us the run they gave us. There are so few opportunities to do this kind of research within existing companies, and if Richard Evans and I had taken venture capital, we would have had to spend a lot more of our time trying to learn to run a business and a lot less writing stories and code.

And that doesn’t begin to count the other resources besides financial support that Linden put at our disposal, such as a hugely devoted and enthusiastic QA team, or the opportunity to work with other experienced interactive-story authors like Deirdra Kiai and Jake Forbes. Both of them not only wrote content but contributed useful thinking about how to develop the system as a whole.

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March 12, 2014

Linden Lab Announce Limited Beta For Second Life Oculus Rift Intergration

Linden Lab have blogged regarding a limited beta for Oculus Rift intergration in Second Life : Second Life’s Oculus Rift Integration is Ready for Beta Testers. This of course suggests that Linden Lab are well into their Oculus Rift intergration. However it should be noted that the beta is a limited beta and to take part, you will need access to the Oculus Rift development hardware.

The point there being that Oculus Rift isn’t yet at the consumer stage, you can’t buy it in the shops. However you can order the development kit, it’s currently priced at USD$300.00. However that’s aimed at developers, such as Linden Lab, rather than consumers so don’t go buying it if you’re not a developer!!!!

The blog post announces:

The Oculus Rift offers exciting possibilities for Second Life – the stereoscopic virtual reality headset brings a new level of immersion to our 3D world, making Second Life a more compelling experience than ever before.

Though a consumer version of the headset isn’t available yet, we’ve been working with the development kit to integrate the Oculus Rift with the Second Life Viewer. We now have a Viewer ready for beta testers, and if you have an Oculus Rift headset, we’d love to get your feedback.

If you have the Oculus Rift development hardware and would like to help us with feedback on the Viewer integration, please write to sl_oculus_beta@lindenlab.com to apply for the limited beta.

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March 10, 2014

Linden Lab Followed The Rule Rather Than The Exception With Versu

Although many of us are disappointed with Linden Lab’s refusal to sell the IP and codebase of Versu to Emily Short it should be pointed out that Linden Lab are following a well trodden path. When titles shut down there is often a clamour for it to be saved or for the code to be made Open Source but this does not happen very often. There is no Open Source version of Cloud Party for example, it just vanished without much of a trace.

When City Of Heroes closed down there were campaigns to keep it alive and calls for it to be open sourced, but alas those calls fell on deaf ears. However Open Sourcing a project isn’t as straight forward as some may think, as Shava Suntzu points out in the comments of a previous post of mine about Versu :

There are lots of reasons applications can’t be open sourced. They may include proprietary libraries, or work by people who won’t release rights.

On top of this Linden Lab most definitely spent money on Versu, as Emily herself explained :

To be clear, Versu benefitted a lot from Linden’s early support, and I’m grateful for that. Without external support, what we would have now is not a well-developed open source project; what we would have is nothing in particular, because I would have needed to get a job doing something else.

Emily was of course a paid employee of Linden Lab so it’s not as if Linden Lab have taken her work away without recompense. In situations like this it’s all too easy to paint the company as the baddie … much too easy and whereas it does seem silly to spend money on a project and then shelve it when others are willing to take it off a company’s hands, this is generally the norm, rather than the exception.

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March 8, 2014

Report Compares Second Life, World Of Warcraft And Eve-Online To Real Life

GamesBeat have published a very intersting article : Comparing the virtual worlds of Warcraft, Second Life, and Eve Online to our own yields some surprising stats. The article itself links to a funky report by digital marketing agency Epiphany with a blurb of :

The online world is very different to our own, with new rules, new races, and new ways of living. There are, however, some similarities – take a look at our breakdown of the internet’s biggest virtual worlds to find out how they measure up against real life.

This isn’t the most detailed report in the world but the site does provide some interesting stats. Introducing Second Life they say:

Second Life is seen as an online marketplace as well as a game, and many players have been able to earn serious cash thanks to the easy way in-game currency can be sold for real-world money. More casual players use the game to build, customise and create, developing a literal second life in which their character can live out the player’s desires and fantasies – whether that’s a mansion and a helipad or the romance of a lifetime!

The website has a series of icons which lead to other little gems of information when clicked, I’m not going to cover them all but I’ll mention a few. In terms of Second Life they point out that English is the most popular language with 54% of users speaking that language, which compares to 18% in the real world.

In terms of user growth we’re told :

Between 2006 and 2011, global internet usage doubled in growth – in the same timeframe, Second Life saw a 4000% increase in users.

That’s rather impressive. Another interesting point is made with regards to financial institutions and economies, although I’m not sure things happened exactly as they seem to suggest :

In 2007, Second Life saw a huge financial incident which mirrored the bank crises we’ve seen in the real world since the start of the recession. When the developers announced that gambling in-game would be officially banned, thousands of users rushed to Ginko Financial, an in-game bank offering astronomical interest rates, to retrieve and sell the currency from their accounts. This caused a run on the bank which eventually resulted in a complete shut-down – wiping out around $750,000 (£457,736) in real world money. The incident has since been used by financial experts across the web as an example of what happens when banks fail to self-regulate.

The part where I disagree with them is regarding the rush of people to Ginko. I don’t remember that happening, I do remember the Ginko scandal but I don’t recall a rush due to the gambling ban. I can recall arguing with people that if real life banks faced a close down in the manner that Second Life banks did that there would be a rush on the banks that they wouldn’t be able to handle.

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