MMO News Wrap-Up

Welcome back to our weekly MMO news wrap-up, where we recap on the biggest news in the genre from the last seven days. This time we talk about Star Trek Online, Aion, the upcoming new Korean MMO that’s set to make waves ‘TERA’, Guild Wars 2, The Secret World, Global Agenda and World of Warcraft.

Cryptic Studios is still working hard on Star Trek Online after its launch earlier this month. Details on no less than five new raids were given yesterday, along with a new trailer giving players a glimpse of what’s in store. Four of the raids will revolve around the Borg, while the other one will feature a descendant of the infamous Khan.

The improvements to STO don’t stop there though; Developers have asked players to submit questions for the latest Ask Cryptic, which will focus on Klingon gameplay. Feel free to ask anything about current or future Klingon content or game mechanics, as Cryptic seem keen to give their paying customers what they want from the game – there’s also a survey which has been offered to all STO players, asking what they want to see in the game and how they think it could be improved. Have anything to say about STO? Check out the survey here.

We had a few questions of our own to put to STO’s executive producer Craig Zinkievich recently, during our recent interview. Among the things we spoke about were Cryptic’s immediate plans for the game, the possibility of opening up our ships so we could visit the holodeck, sick bay and personal quarters, and the lack of any distinct death penalty. Drop by and see what he had to say.

Those of you who play Aion will be glad to see that you can earn double XP from later today right through until Monday morning. The double XP weekends will continue until NCsoft can come up with a better way to combat the level grind that players hit soon after the early zones. In the latest producer’s letter, Chris “Kinslon” Hager says that many players’ major concerns, the XP grind being one of them, will be addressed over the next few updates, and the first one will be coming in Q2, so it’ll be another couple of months at the very least until we see this resolved. Better make the most of these double XP weekends then folks.

An upcoming Korean MMO, TERA, has been the talk of the town over the last few days. The eastern-style fantasy game will debut in South Korea during the next few months and hit Europe and North America later this year. Most MMOs don’t fare too well in the transition from East to West, however, things seems to be changing. Aion was only introduced over here after almost a full successful year in Asia, and it seems to be doing very well. Like Aion, a special team will be in charge of adapting TERA for western audiences, and these guys have been hand-picked from some of the best gaming companies out there including Blizzard and ArenaNet.

The game itself has more of an eastern look to it than Aion does, but we’ve yet to see a localised version. Anyway, the third closed beta test is under way in Korea so expect more news on it soon. In the mean time, see the awesome ‘Making Of‘ trailer over on IGTV.

Our interview with several of the Guild Wars 2 designers went down well this week. We were among the first sites to be able to ask ArenaNet some questions on the upcoming Guild Wars sequel, questions which mainly came from our massive GW community. There were a few lore topics in there on things like the Gold Legion’s relationship with other Charr, the Norn and their Gods, as well as questions on high level PvP and which weapons different classes will be able to equip. Be sure to drop in and check it out if you haven’t already.

Funcom unveiled another teaser website for its upcoming MMO The Secret World this week, in its typical “Oh, what’s this website about?” fashion. A Funcom twitter post highlighting the ‘blog’ asks if the monsters could be real but, on closer inspection, the images of the beasties are screenshots and/or concept art from the game, and the link to “Kingsmouth official website”, which is another of Funcom’s faux websites for the game, eliminates all remaining doubt. So far, TSW is shaping up to be quite the atmospheric thriller, lets hope its not too long before we get some beta news.

Blizzard released the patch notes for World of Warcraft’s patch 3.3.3, revealing some big changes to a couple of long-standing game features such as the action house and battleground queuing. When putting items up for auction, players will now get the option to specify how many stacks they wish to sell, as well as the size of the stacks. Also in 3.3.3, players who wish to queue for battlegrounds will find a system much like the random instance finder feature, doing away with the daily battleground quest in favour of joining a random battleground. Long overdue, in my opinion!

While on the topic of patches, Hi-Rez Studio rolled out Global Agenda’s first update to the test server this week. The developers have been listening to player feedback, and have added a friends list, the ability to pick which PvP map you’d like to queue for and repairable upgrades to the game, along with a long list of other tweaks and improvements.

That’s all for this week, be sure to listen to our latest podcast where we talk about a couple of the topics mentioned above, along with lots of other gaming news from the past week.