It’s been a pretty slow summer on the MMO front. The two biggest pieces of news that I’ve found have been the Secret World launching and Guild Wars 2 getting a release date. Let’s unravel those now, shall we?
The Secret World launch
Funcom’s modern-day, secret society-focused MMO is already in full swing (the game launched on July 3rd). Players can chose to join one of three secret societies (the Dragon, Illuminati, or Templars) and custom-tailor their character builds. I’ll be skipping this game, as it’s not really my preferred type of setting, but to all of you who are playing the game (or planning on jumping into it), I hope the first few weeks are going well for you! Our own Mike “pheriannath” Katsufrakis received a review copy of the game and has offered to do a guest column for MMO Co-Opportunities (perhaps next month), so look forward to that!
The Secret World is a standard MMO where you pay the box price (which includes 30 days of play) then pay the normal ~$15/month subscription.
Guild Wars 2 releases August 28th
Recently, ArenaNet announced that their highly anticipated MMO will launch August 28th. This was a bit of a shock to me, because I honestly wasn’t expecting it to release any earlier than winter. ArenaNet had previously given no indication of their expected release date up to this announcement, and while the beta weekends have been going well, there is still much content that is closed off to the beta testers. Regardless, this is certainly good news to anyone who’s looking forward to the game.
Guild Wars 2 features a similar marketing plan to its predecessor, with a one-time box price and free-to-play from there with no content being withheld. The game will support microtransactions for cosmetic items and similar items which will reportedly have low impact on gameplay.
The lazy days of summer aren’t exactly packed full of MMO news. Are there any exciting changes going on in your MMO of choice?