RaGEZONE is currently running a competition in which the winner will receive a copy of “Guild Wars – Game of the year edition”. To win simply visit the following thread.

Sales on Lifetime subscriptions are being thrown in by STO (Star Trek Online) for both Champions Online as well as Star Trek. Those who play should go and celebrate with them, get yourself a lifetime subscription before it ends!

To celebrate the launch of Champions Online: Free for All and the one year anniversary of Star Trek Online, we’ll be discounting the price of Lifetime Subscriptions for both games by 20%! The sale starts January 25 at 6 a.m. Pacific and ends February 4 at 10 a.m. Pacific. This means players will be able to purchase a Lifetime Subscription to Champions Online: Free for All or Star Trek Online for just $239.99!
Read more here!

RaGEZONE moderator Lucky40990 has kindly released the latest IRIS server files (dated version 1.18). To download the server files, visit the following thread.

With FFXIV’s v1.6 patch not to far away (March 3rd), players will be finding a number of new side quest and changes that will make questing smoother and easily grasped. Local level quests will also be updated in much the same way.

Sidequests are a new category of quests that are being added to the game. These will be made available through various NPCs located in each of the three cities, given that a player first fulfills certain class/rank prerequisites. The content of these endeavors vary greatly from one another, and we will continue to add further sidequests in future patches.

NPCs offering sidequests are easily distinguishable by the presence of an exclamation point (!) icon above their heads. The same icon is also displayed at sidequest NPC locations on the map and minimap. In the future, we plan to extend this feature to other quest NPCs, such as those offering class quests.

Read more here.

That’s right, it’s back. The MMO that was announced to be a ground shattering, genre crossing, thug life experience crafted by the creators of the ‘Crackdown’ series is coming back after it’s initial failure due to improper administration and billing systems that made little to no sense.

The game officially shut down September 16, 2010, and was purchased by K2 Network, for £1.5 million shortly after. With the new purchase came some changes, first and foremost is the change from pay to play, to free to play. It seems a lot of MMO’s are taking this route lately; A name change is also in session with the new name being “All Points Bulletin: Reloaded”.  K2 recently rolled out the closed beta for stress testing and  game testing. As of March 3rd they have 5000 CBT accounts, and there are talks of enabling another 5000 CBT accounts due to the large success of their initial results. There have been no official updates since if this has happened or not. They also plan to launch EU servers for the game shortly as shown in the quote from their official blog

Next week the goal is to work on the European data center (though it MAY not yet be able to handle the traffic for another 10 days or so, but we will update mid next week on the status).

Presuming the EU build-out goes according to plan, we would start the process of shifting people over to EU that “belong” in EU (since we are now permitting people to play in the US even from a long distance) once that datacenter is live sometime around March 15.

You can read more on the game and it’s beta progress on their official blog:
http://apbreloaded.blogspot.com/

World of Warcraft Patch 4.2, Rage of the Firelands is here! With a new raid, a legendary questline, all-new raid tier and PvP armor sets, the most diverse daily questing experience to date, major story developments, PvP Season 10, user interface enhancements, and much more, patch 4.2 has brought Azeroth a little something for everyone.

If you want to know what’s what before traversing the new content and features, we encourage you to wade through all of the patch 4.2 information we’ve released, watch the Rage of the Firelands patch trailer, and read the official patch notes. Be sure to check out the Customer & Technical Support Information section as well if you’re seeking information on known patch issues, the latest fixes, or need technical troubleshooting assistance.

For a list of patch notes, visit here.

With the announcement that Perfect World Entertainment shall be bringing RaiderZ to North America  , RaGEZONE members have kindly released complete server files for the what is sure to be a blockbuster hit. RaiderZ was recently featured at the world’s largest gaming expo E3. To visit the server development section and download the files visit HERE.

Arena.Net  recently posted cinematic from the upcoming MMORPG title ‘Guild Wars 2’.  Below contains the article and video posted.

Hey everyone, Horia Dociu here. As the Cinematic Department Lead, I’m very excited to share with you one of our team’s favorite dungeon cinematics – the Ascalonian Catacombs intro.

These cinematics play at the key moments of the story mode in each of the eight dungeons in Guild Wars 2, setting the mood and delivering valuable info. Stylistically, we’re pushing the concept of a visual storybook as a form of communicating to the player – we want the cinematics to feel like moving paintings.

There were a lot of technical challenges we had to overcome to achieve the deceptively simple and elegant look of our painterly, storybook cinematics. Our cut-scenes are rendered in real time and are formatted to allow us to layer both 2D and 3D elements into the mix. In addition to using 3D models to display our main characters and your customized characters, we also apply 3D animation rigs to add motion to 2D elements – anything from flags fluttering in the wind to actual drawn characters. We also make good use of our game’s particle system to animate stylized painted smoke, clouds, or birds in a realistic fashion.“…we want the cinematics to feel like moving paintings.”

These different tools, which were custom-built to our requirements, help us breathe life into all the cinematic sequences that appear throughout the game. This unique narrative approach not only lets us tell stories the way we want to, but it also ensures that our cinematics don’t look like any other game. Efforts like these, which require a massive collaboration between our art and technical teams, give Guild Wars 2 that hand crafted spirit we’re striving for.

We meet up with Rytlock Brimstone, our iconic charr character, in this cinematic. He gives us our mission in the Ascalonian Catacombs and warns us of the dangers that lie ahead while relaying a bit of the area’s history. Rytlock tells of the fall of the human kingdom of Ascalon, and we bear witness to that fateful day through a flashback. This is how we want to use cinematics in Guild Wars 2: showing what cannot be told with beautiful imagery.

In this particular cinematic, we actually get to see the charr laying siege to Ascalon, watch the walls of the human city crumble, and hear the mad King Adelbern damning the entire kingdom with his infamous cursed sword Magdaer. These types of cinematics are a fun way for us and the fans to get a glimpse into Tyria’s history, and actually show in the most dramatic way possible how history has come to pass.

We had a lot of fun (and honestly a lot of headaches) making these cinematics work both artistically, technically, and narratively. Seeing our storybook concept come to life is truly rewarding – we hope you enjoy it as much as we do!

 

IBTimes.com recently published an article (which you can find here) regarding new developments on how future role-playing video games may be made based on players’ behavior. Below is the article.

Researchers at North Carolina State University have designed a new procedure to correctly predict the behavior of players in online role-playing games. The new tool can be used by game developers to design new content, and can also help lead players to a certain part of the game they will enjoy the most. The team developed a data-driven analytical method by investigating the behavior of nearly 14,000 players in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft.

“We are able to predict what a player in a game will do based on his or her previous behavior, with up to 80 percent accuracy,” said Brent Harrison, a Ph.D. student at NC State and co-author of the paper which describes the research. “In a game like World of Warcraft, which is constantly developing new content, this could help guide content design decisions.”

Harrison added that the new tactic could also help game designers steer players to existing content that is matched to their gameplay style.

The researchers accumulated data from 14,000 players and the order in which they received their achievement badges. The team then acknowledged the degree to which each individual’s achievement was correlated to every other achievement.

The researchers used the data to identify groups of achievements, called cliques, which were closely related. The cliques were later used to predict the players’ future behavior. However, some of the cliques that the researchers identified consist of 80 or more different achievements.

“A good game stands on its own,” says Dr. David L. Roberts, assistant professor of computer science at NC State and co-author of the research paper. “If you want to improve it, you have to make sure players will like any changes you make. This research can help researchers get it right, because if you have a good idea of what players like, you can make informed decisions about the kind of storylines and mechanics those players would like in the future.”

The researchers developed the method by evaluating the task-based “achievement” badges that players in World of Warcraft earn. These achievements are awarded when a player successfully accomplishes a specific goal or a series of goals, the university’s official website reported.

Tom’s Hardware recently published an article (which you can find here) about Funcom’s Age of Conan MMORPG becoming free-to-play. Below is the article along with an awesome YouTube video.

Funcom has re-launched Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures as a free-to-play/subscription-based hybrid MMORPG called Age of Conan: Unchained. It’s reportedly naughtier too (and we like naughty).

Friday Funcom announced that its popular MMORPG Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures has officially taken on the free-to-play mantle and is now re-branded as Age of Conan: Unchained. The news follows the launch of Blizzard’s pseudo demo World of Warcraft Starter Edition and T3 Entertainments open beta of Hellgate, both of which also launched this week.

“After 1.4 million copies sold, having experienced fantastic critical acclaim, and still to this day going strong with a large active player base embarking on thousands of daily adventures, there is no doubt that ‘Age of Conan’ has made a significant impact on the online gaming genre,” said Senior Vice President of Sales & Marketing Morten Larssen. “The great potential provided by the hybrid business model, and with the ever growing interest for free-to-play games, bringing ‘Age of Conan’ into this market is undoubtedly the logical next step for the title.”

Age of Conan: Unchained now offers a “hybrid” business model: players can roam Conan’s backyard for free, or go old-school and cough up a monthly subscription fee. As seen with other free-to-play models, an in-game store will be inserted into the realm so that players can purchase exclusive content such as weaponry and mounts. But naturally there will be limitations placed on free accounts so that players get hooked to the point of going full-blown premium.

As seen here, several major differences divide the Free and Premium accounts. Those who don’t want to take the subscription route will be locked down to four available character classes. They’ll also have access to non-premium dungeons, two raids, two characters slots (although there’s a max of 18), and only basic mount training. Free players can’t partake in sieges, they only have 50-percent of the personal bank space available, they can’t level offline and they can’t earn veteran points.

“For the team working on the game, going free-to-play is great because it opens up this great fantasy world to an even larger audience,” said Creative Director and Executive Producer Craig Morrison. “Not only can players now enjoy the content for free, we will continue to add new gameplay features and new content and make improvements to the game. ‘Age of Conan: Unchained’ will offer a fantastic experience for both new customers and players who have already roamed the online world of Hyboria. An engrossing story, brutal combat and savage world is waiting for those who dare explore the lands of Hyboria.”

To jump in and explore the virtual world of Hyboria now, head here to grab the installer. The actual client is an extra 7.51 GB download.