West Karana

Would I order the mainland European version of the game from Amazon Europe? And pay extra for the collector’s edition?

Maybe.

Costs less than US$60, so cheaper than a console game.

I hope they let me play it. Why wouldn’t they? It’s not even going to be out in the US for months. They can cut me off then, if they feel strongly about it.

Or, you know, invite me into the closed beta, but I don’t like those odds. I’ve been sitting in the queue for the European closed beta for a couple of years now.

And anyway, there won’t be a collector’s edition in the US (or any edition; download only, right?) so no matter how it turns out with the playing, I’ll have something to tide me over until next year.

I promise a complete “Unboxing Spellborn” post when it arrives somewhere between Dec 5 and 10.

Here’s the link for Chronicles of Spellborn, Premium Edition from Amazon Europe for 39,95 Euros. Here’s the link for Chronicles of Spellborn, just the game, for 14,95 Euros.

Just play on the European servers. As far as I know, English will be one of the Euro version’s supported languages. If they don’t take money from a US address, well, the Euro version of the game will supposedly have the same free starting zones, so:

For 39,95 Euros ($50.44 at today’s exchange rate) plus the cost of international shipping, you could get a collector’s edition that will probably not be available outside Europe, two free zones to play in assuming you don’t get into the Acclaim ‘closed beta’, and the likelihood you’ll be able to play in a far more active and vibrant community than will develop in the US.

Besides, playing as an American in a European game is fun. I’ve been in a couple of European guilds in EQ. You get caught up in soccer and Eurovision. You get to practice your German and French (and they get to practice their English, which is usually better than that of most native speakers, sadly). Huh? Could be fun, right?

I don’t think that anyone is really surprised by this, but Massively reports that the launch of Chronicles of Spellborn in North America, UK, Oz, NZ and South Africa has been pushed back to January.

However, the closed beta will now start on the 27th of this month.

Europe (aside from the UK) will still see the full, live game on the 27th.

So, if the game is LIVE, WTF do we need a CLOSED BETA for? The game will be LIVE. We can just head over to any of the Euro sites covering the game and read all about it. How you can have a closed beta for a live game that will ALREADY have an English version (along with their German and French versions).

It just staggers the imagination. “Open beta” I could understand, to keep people in the game as they bring up their servers and what-not. But the point of a closed beta? I dunno.

Still hoping to get in — to the closed beta, I guess — and it’s nice to hear anything at all about the game’s North American release, but such a big deal was made about delaying the game’s worldwide release so that Acclaim could roll out the NA release same day. And now they aren’t going to even be able to do that.

So what was the delay for, in the end?

Full details of the NA release are copied below:

—

Los Angeles, CA (November 18, 2008) – Acclaim Games officially updates the release schedule for The Chronicles of Spellborn MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game). With additional testing and ongoing game improvements, Acclaim’s release schedule has been updated with Closed Beta testing to begin on November 27 and a new release date scheduled for January 2009. Acclaim’s licensed territories for Spellborn will include North America, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and South America.

When the European countries go live on November 27, Acclaim will simultaneously start Close Beta testing in its territories and then go live in January 2009. Both launches will have the exact same product versions featuring identical Freemium models but with a different release date to accommodate additional testing for a smooth official release. Extensive testing of the game will ensure players receive the highest quality gaming experience at launch.

With players around the world eagerly anticipating the launch of Spellborn, the game has undergone some key upgrades to allow more players to participate and enjoy the various features of the online game. In all regions, Spellborn will be a “Freemium” game, with a Free to Play zone and a required premium subscription service in order to access the full game past the Free to Play zone.

The Spellborn game client will be completely free to download and install, and will feature the special Free to Play zone with no time restrictions (only level limit). Key features of this Free to Play zone include the following:

• Free players are limited to the starting zones Hawksmouth and Aldenvault.

• A gameplay limit occurs at Fame level 7, when free players have progressed approximately 90% towards Fame level 8.

• Upon reaching this limit, all character progression is blocked and the player will receive a pop-up informing them of this block and what is obtainable beyond this with a premium subscription.

The following elements will be explicitly blocked:

• Players will be unable to gain Fame in any way or form, frozen at a fixed amount.

• The player will be able to accept quests, but not able to complete any objectives/quests.

• Able to kill mobs, but the player will receive no kill credit. This means, no fame reward, no pep reward and no item reward.

• Unable to travel beyond the zones Hakwsmouth (sic) and Aldenvault.

Players who want the full game experience and wish to go past the zone restrictions must purchase a premium subscription option priced at $15 per month to open all game content. This Freemium model will allow many more players to experience the gameplay before choosing the premium subscription to access the full array of game features and content.

Initial feedback from the MMORPG player community has been excellent, and the development team is taking this feedback to make various improvements to the game.

Commenter Ardenya wrote up a fantastic description of how Spellborn will be published in Europe (aside from the UK and the other Commonwealth countries (Australia, NZ, South Africa), which seem to be lumped in with North America in this case). I’m copying it here because it’s the most concrete info I’ve heard so far about the game’s launch, anywhere.

Considering packages and payment, earlier tonight I have recieved an email with some details and amazon preorder links. Unfortunatly, Im not at my desktop atm and will be as early as tomorrow so bear with the little details I have preserved in the twists of my mind… =) I’ll verify the info as I get home.

There will be two boxes: a regular edition coming with the game client on DVD, a world map and 1 month subscription time for around 15 euro (dont nail me on that… yet) and a special edition with the previous content and additionally an art book, some special ingame item and 3 month of subscription time for 39,90 euro.

The monthly rates will depend on the billing model you choose and will lower the longer the cycle. Itll start at 12,99 euro using a 1 month cycle and goes down to 10,99 euro per month using a 6 month cycle. Additionally, there will be 60 days Game Cards availible for 26,99 euro.

So, does that mean that we here will get a box in two weeks from Amazon?

No, no box for us. No collector’s editions, no nothing. In fact, for a major MMO on the edge of a worldwide release, you’d hardly know they were publishing it at all.

This isn’t a game that is underhyped. This game has no hype whatsoever. Aeria Games’ Pi Story has more hype, and that’s a 2D scroller MMO. The only information we have about the game at all is what Frogster and Spellborn NV are releasing into the European market.

All we know about how the game will be operated outside Europe is contained in this very short FAQ, which was written by a fan, not an official Acclaim rep.

This is the entire section dealing with obtaining and subscribing to the game.

1. Will The Chronicles of Spellborn be Free 2 Play?
- Yes and No. TCOS will be free to download, and will have a free zone where you will have the chance to learn the game. Should you decide you wish to continue into some of the higher areas, there will be an option for you to subscribe monthly to the game.

2. Will there be an item mall?- No. Although TCOS has the F2P area, it is a predominately a P2P game, and thus will not have any sort of item mall in it whatsoever. In fact, there will not be any shops of any sort since there is also no item selling in TCOS.

3. How much is the monthly rate going to be?
- TBD

4. What is the official release date for Spellborn?
- November 27th, 2008

5. What countries will Acclaim be hosting for Spellborn?
- North America, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa

I am prepared to spend a lot of time in this game, but, this close to the game’s release, I’d like to know that Acclaim is prepared to promote this game. Maybe they feel it’s pointless to do much promotion when so many other MMOs are being released or expanded. Maybe they want to see how it does in Europe before trying to build an audience elsewhere.

I want this game to succeed, but, Acclaim, you HAVE to give us something. Your games are largely free to play; this one is not, so the regular Acclaim players likely won’t be that interested — they can’t even spend the Acclaim Coins they buy in the game. Your NA launch is probably the best kept secret in MMOs. Those of us who have been looking forward to this game for YEARS want info. You won’t be having an open beta, so word of mouth about the game will be virtually nil. We have no server lists or anything that would let us build a community before the game launches, aside from some anemic forums.

Frogster is adding community staff for the European launch; do we in NA even HAVE a community staff?

Seriously. Get in touch. Point us to your promo stuff. Give us an open beta, just a week or two, so we know it’s real.

Low hype is a refreshing change. NO hype is scary.

If everything is still on schedule, Spellborn NV’s “The Chronicle of Spellborn” should be out two weeks from yesterday, published in North American by Acclaim. I’ve heard nothing from Acclaim as to how to get the game; I imagine it will be a free-to-play download with a starting area, plus a massive full-game download if you choose to subscribe, but who knows?

It’s looking like there will be no open beta, so the first time we’ll be seeing it is when it’s released. I don’t know if they will be hosting the download themselves, or seeding it through FilePlanet.

Not a lot of info about the game itself, but there is new lore and new screenshots posted on the Spellborn website, dealing with two of the enemy factions. There’s also a previous post that I missed dealing with targeting opponents in a game with no target locking via The Reticule — basically a cursor that changes depending on the range to your target and your active skill.

I’ve been waiting for this game so long that I have to admit to feeling less excited about it. You can only anticipate something so long, after all.

Gorgeous looking world. The art style is colorful and pastel, reminds me of Pirates of the Burning Sea actually. Say what you like about the game, but the graphics were cool. from the interiors to the vast exteriors and the whole setting — every shard is a hollowed-out rock spinning in an interstellar tempest — the Deadspell Storm — that tore apart their planet. It’s lit by holes in the roof of the shards, the light from that storm.

Instead of some lame fantasy world which is just renamed Middle Earth where the elves are from the tree place and the dwarfs are from the mountain place and the evil guys are from the evil place — it’s a SETTING where you can tell stories.

Characters can be two races — humans and some humanoid critters with hooves that look like Draenai; and they can be of three archetypes — warrior, spellcaster or rogue — which have three disciplines each, so nine classes. That’s not that unusual.

What distinguishes a character is not its class, really… but its skills.

You don’t upgrade the skills you find — they level up as you level. You just get more of them. LOTS more. But you can only use five at a time, yet all are always available. The strategy is in putting your skills in the skilldeck, because each time you use an attack, the combat system chooses a different row of your skill deck — five new attacks scroll up into your bar whenever you use one.

There’s also no target ring — your attack hits whatever you are pointed at. And there’s no swapping of weapons. If you use a ranged attack, you use your ranged weapon. If you melee, you use your melee weapons.

Deck building — that’s what makes you different from every other player. Your particular build will depend entirely on what skills you use and how you put them together.

You don’t start out weak, you start out strong and get stronger.

You don’t start out with patchwork armor and rusty weapons, either. The character creator lets you make a character that looks however you want the character to look. Clothes and weapons with better looks might drop, but the stats aren’t part of your gear. They are contained in sigils, that add the uber stats to your stuff.

So you can always look like what you want, from day 1.

I haven’t even gotten into the High Houses, or the two kinds of experience you accrue.

It’s a whole new game by a European developer who isn’t trying to make a better WoW. Will it work? I have no idea. But I will definitely be giving it a try, because when MMOs try to be different, they deserve a look. This won’t be hyped to heck and back like AoC or WAR, and there’s a very real chance that the kind of people who might like a unique game will never hear of the Chronicles of Spellborn, especially since it comes out around the time of WoW’s expansion, which is all we’ll be hearing about for the next six months.

I’m not playing WoW (not yet, anyway…), but if Spellborn turns out to be fun, I’ll be exploring a world which hasn’t been pre-spoiled by dozens of tell-all gaming websites. Like EverQuest back in the beginning, when nobody knew anything about it and it was all new.

I LIVE for games like that.

Due to the new character joining Stout Henry in his further adventures, AND due to me using Vanguard to generate illustrations for the story, Stout Henry was delayed until I’d leveled up a gnome enough in VG so that he could pose for screen shots.

I finished that last night, and I think he came out pretty well :)

VG’s Isle of the Dawn was still really laggy on my computer, but the superior gear that comes from it makes it a bad idea to skip it.

I started off with a blood mage, but quickly re-rolled him as a rogue. Rogues are pretty awesome :)

Vanguard is so close to being a great game. If it ran well on my laptop, and had a better UI (especially the map), I might be more inclined to give it a real shot. But when moving a character feels like pushing it through a room full of honey, I’m thinking too much about the game itself than getting into the character and forgetting the game entirely.

I expect Spellborn’s character customization to be as good or better than Vanguard. That’s likely going to be the end of VG on my hard drive, unfortunately.

Anyway. Story tomorrow…

Maracas aren’t as good at warding off intergalactic invaders as I thought they would be.

While out gathering the day’s meals, my duckling tribespeople were startled by a huge contraption which WALKED on white, clanking legs down from the sky and sucked up the food animals that were being kept in the pen behind the main hut. It then buzzed the village twice and stalked back up into space.

It was Ogrebears‘ starship. Later, when my little ducklings had ascended to space, I was given a mission to suck up some of the Ogrebears creatures into *my* starship. Their terrified yelps couldn’t save them from the power of my abduction ray.

That was SPORE. As a game. it’s okay. As a way to get millions of people creating their own content and sharing it with their friends, of unleashing their creativity and playing games in a way that engaged people’s brains instead of numbed them, it was amazing.

In three weeks, LittleBigPlanet will play the same trick by giving kids and adults all the tools to make pretty much any arcade game they can imagine, along with all the awards and prizes, and share them with their friends (and anyone else).

Warhammer Online decided to vastly de-emphasize the scripted encounters common to older games in favor of boosting the PvP game. The PvP game — the part of the game where your opponents are other players and not computer-controlled automatons — is considered by Mythic to be very much more compelling than the part of the game where you find a clump of Wuzzits and press a key repeatedly until they are all gone.

It’s not that WoW is the only game that encourages repetitive and meaningless killing — its predecessor, EverQuest, was widely mocked for focusing on exactly that — but that it took such great delight in it. The Deadmines is a fantastic little story, but it always plays the exact same way. The fight against the dread dragon Onyxia was so scripted that a video where a raid leader berates his raid for not following the script exactly enough was one of the most widely circulated WoW videos I ever saw while I played reveals just how ingrained this has become.

The game devs have long assumed the path to big success was in leading the player to the rides, then letting them have their very tightly managed fun.

EverQuest 2 shares a lot of things with WoW. But, you can decorate your home limited only by your imagination. You can dress your character however you like (depending on your class). Lord of the Rings lets you also choose from among several outfits of your own design and build your own house. Likewise Vanguard. Star Wars Galaxies lets you design almost anything you like to your own specifications. Chronicles of Spellborn will let you from the start design your own look. City of Heroes will let you write your own missions — complete with a villain of your own design.

Yet in Warcraft, every character looks the same. There are no houses, no outlet for creativity. Only in the battlegrounds (and the upcoming open PvP zone) are the players set loose to be free.

There is a new generation of MMORPGs coming. It won’t be marked by super real graphics or ever-more elaborately scripted raid encounters. The new games will hand over some of the keys to the playground to the players. And, absolutely 100% guaranteed, what the players will do with them will astonish.

I’ve talked about this before, and people have said it’s impossible, but it’s not. It’s already happening. The days when you could log on to your MMO and depend upon a scripted experience, the same as everyone has, are nearly over. Within five years, the quests I run will be the quests YOU wrote. And FINALLY, a dozen years too late, 3D MMOs will be up to parity with the text-based MUDs that inspired them.

And once we’re up to date with the state of the art of a dozen years ago, we can move forward into something truly new.

WoW is a dinosaur, bigger than anything that came before it. A hundred feet long, tall as a tree, thundering footsteps and a trumpeting call proudly proclaiming it master of the prehistoric.

But we all know what happened to the dinosaurs.

They just couldn’t adapt.

Much anticipated Asian/European WoW-like Runes of Magic starts its closed beta August 28th. Even though no North American publisher is yet announced, they vow to have English servers for those who prefer that language, and they don’t care where you’re from. It’s all free, after all. They’ll also have French and German servers for the Gallicly and Teutonically inclined.

They will also be showing the game at the annual Games Convention in Leipzig, along with lots of other games we may never see here. Leipzig is pronounced “LIPE-zig”. I checked, this time.

Seriously? I’ll give Runes of Magic a try. Why not? Always on the lookout for good free-to-plays.

My constant trolling over on the Chronicles of Spellborn forums have as yet revealed no news about any North American release. They are supposed to be on the verge of open beta, and to have signed a letter of intent months ago with an unnamed US publisher (my guess, again: Aeria Games).

However, the Spellborn computer they collaborated with German PC makers Ultraforce on earlier this year, they are now releasing case-only, in case you’re not jazzed about the computer they had, but loved their case. 249 Euros, so US$384, probably closer to US$500 when all shipping and customs fees are paid, which is pretty expensive just for a case. Just not worth it to buy things from Europe when you live in the US any more.