BioWare Mondays
Well, if you were a) someone who has never played Star Wars: The Old Republic player and b) were paying particular attention to BioWare’s marketing last week, you were probably aware that they put on another “free-to-play” weekend over what was, in at least the Commonwealth, a long weekend. It’s over by now, of course, but…well…if you were one of those who partook of it, why not let us know your thoughts?
(Which reminds me…I need to post the remainder of my screenshots from my time playing the game.)
Also, the game will soon be patched to version 1.3, and some of the details of said upcoming patch were recently revealed.
Meanwhile, on the Dragon Age front, there was a retrospective of Dragon Age 2 posted at Digitally Downloaded, and For the Lore sat down with writer David Gaider to talk about the game as well.
Meanwhile, as noted last week, BioWare are crowdsourcing development of Dragon Age 3 to some extent, taking suggestions for what to include in the game.
And, of course, Dawn of the Seeker is about to be released. I actually noticed today that there was a showtime posted for it at a local cinema; I might try and grab tickets.
There’s more multiplayer DLC coming up for Mass Effect 3; the Rebellion DLC may or may not add new combat arenas and weapons to the game. Meanwhile, on the single-player side, the “alternate ending” DLC is getting closer, and several characters have been confirmed to be returning therein.
G4TV has also posted a short video about the new ending as well. And over at the BioWare Blog, producer Mike Gamble takes on a big pile of questions about…various things.
On the business side, the question of launch day DLC has been raised again, with EA’s Peter Moore opining that the day-one DLC phenomenon is likely to become a more prevalent thing in the future. And at GDC just recently, BioWare had more to say about DLC.
On the Apple front, Knights of the Old Republic is now available in the OS X App Store (not to be confused with the App Store for iOS!). And this Minecrafty take on Mass Effect 3 is, frankly, something to behold.
Dawn of the Seeker. If the CD Projekt team has problems with tastefully handling stereotypes then I suspect it’s rampant throughout the industry (or perhaps all industries and humanity as a whole), as I ran across this frightfully un-PC stuff here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zw5FOrLvQfU
@0:47/3:10 And Nevarra of course is…is situated a little further towards the equator, everybody’s a bit darker toned in skin, they tend to have black hair, so we…we understand where people from different countries have different looks. And then, obviously, we wanted to make sure that she was hot.
So the darkies are all near the equator, and of course, all female leads should be “hot”. Right on man.
Mine Effect 3 is awesome, wow. Isn’t it at least partially open source? Or maybe it offers a free API. Just speculating how they got the animation and camera so spiffy for the video.
Also, what’s the deal with the Star Wars MMO falling on its sword? Maybe the rumors are exaggerated. Seems making an MMO these days is playing Quixotic.
The Old Republic is fine. It’s just that some people consider that “not having 10 millions subs like WoW”=Failing.
It’s just that some people consider that “not having 10 millions subs like WoW”=Failing.
Does “some people” include executives, industry figures and shareholders?
I doubt it includes the players
Oh I don’t doubt there must have been some executives at EA/Bioware crazy enough to think the game would have 10 millions subs like WoW.
But nobody with any amount of sense would have expected it, since anybody with some amount of sense knows that WoW is an abnormality of the MMO Market which is unlikely to ever happen again.
So my point still stand.
The number of MMOs that ever had over one millions subs, you can count on your fingertips… and if you remove the Asian MMOs from the equation (which can have millions but mostly just in the Asian Market), that leaves just… WoW.
So yeah, no, anyone thinking SWTOR having 1.3 millions subs is a sign of failure is just deluded and lives in bizarro-land. Now of course if the game lose a couple hundred thousands player every month over the year and goes under 500 000 there’d be cause to be concerned, but definitly not at this point.
I’m rather amused by how much people want SWTOR to Fail really, especially since it seems the majority of people who want it to fail, just want it to fail because they hope the game will go Free 2 Play so that they’ll get to play it.
Yeah good luck with that. Methinks people waiting for SWTOR to go Free2Play are in for a long wait.
(Nevermind the fact that turning P2P MMOs intro F2P Games just doesn’t seem to be EA’s policy – Warhammer turned to be a big failure after launch losing most of its subcriber in the span of a month, and yet it’s still there, still subscrition based, which means… that it’s still turning a profit.)