MMO

World of Warcraft to add “connected realms,” Blizzard’s solution to low population servers

World of Warcraft’s subscription numbers may be in decline, but it still has a population that’s bigger than Bulgaria. Even so, the nature of lapsed players, roaming adventurers and server emigrants means some of the MMO’s servers feel particularly sparse. Now Blizzard have revealed Connected Realms – due to be introduced in Patch 5.4 – which they hope will boost world sizes without the need for server merging.

Planetside 2 trailer introduces the swamp continent of Hossin

Planetside 2 already has the ice world, the desert world, and the kind of bland greenery world. What’s next on the video game bingo card of potential environments? Water world? Too soggy. Lava world? Too deadly. Dinosaur world? Too… awesome? Instead, they’ve gone with the slightly less common swamp world, introducing the boggy fourth continent of Hossin during last weekend’s SOE Live event.

EverQuest Next interview: no grinding, no leveling, and a maybe on Frogloks

Forget about smashing voxel castles for a second—that’s crazy, but EverQuest Next is also kicking down the pillars of its own D&D foundation. SOE is changing fantasy MMO tropes it helped define and which its fans are used to—we’re talking getting rid of traditional leveling and introducing a multiclassing system, as well as handling expansions with Rallying Calls, which are grand scale, multistage storylines that permanently change a server’s world. These aren’t totally new RPG ideas, but they sure are for EQ.

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn gets benchmark and character creation tools before launch

Final Fantasy XIV has had a rough ride. After launching to poor critical reception and dismal sales, Square Enix ended up erasing the world from existence with a meteor shower and spent the next three years building A Realm Reborn from the ground up. It was a bold endeavor, and now the developers want to make everyone’s rebirth as smooth as possible by offering a benchmark and character creation tool almost a month before the game comes out.

EverQuest Next Landmark, a free-to-play voxel building game, coming this winter

EverQuest Next’s entire environment—hills, forests, deserts, and cities—will be made of voxels, little bits of matter which can be smashed apart by explosive spells and giant Golems. Before we start breaking things, though, SOE wants us to start building—the developer is announcing today that it will be sharing its voxel building tools in EverQuest Next Landmark, a separate free-to-play MMO going into beta before the end of the year.

EverQuest Next revealed: build, destroy, and change the world in an MMO like no other

A wizard blasts away a hunk of hillside with an explosive spell. “Did you see what just happened?” asks David Georgeson, EverQuest Next Director of Development.

Until now we’ve been talking about races, classes, and weapons. You know, fantasy MMORPG stuff. Georgeson loops the animation and I raise my eyebrows as chunks of hillside fly and tumble out of the explosion. So, deformable terrain?

Blizzard’s Project Titan now “unlikely” to be a subscription MMO

Last night, Activision Blizzard reported their second quarter financial earnings. The majority of the conference call focused on the publisher’s ongoing split with Vivendi, and just how rich the Call of Duties have made everyone. But, during the Blizzard section, Mike Morhaime revealed some brief information about their still-unannounced project, codenamed Project Titan. He also gave a fuller picture of World of Warcraft’s recent subscriber decline.

Neverwinter is home to two million unique players

Perfect World today released an infographic celebrating Neverwinter‘s crossing of the two million player mark with various impressive stats and figures, by way of comparison to some fairly random achievements. Those two million players, for instance, can fill Brazil’s Olympic stadium 33 times over. You’ve gotta hand it to them; the strange comparisons amid these stats are as impressive as the stats themselves.

Guild Wars 2: Queen’s Jubilee update brings hot air balloons and bonus dungeon rewards

The citizens of Tyria are always celebrating. Dragons being jerks? Throw a party. Skyship shows up? Break out the bunting. Computer games are invented? Well, that one’s understandable. Guild Wars 2′s next update will centre around a more obvious cause for a shindig – if you’re a royalist at least. Queen’s Jubilee marks the ten year anniversary of Divinity Reach’zzzz… Sorry, I started to fall asleep there, halfway through that lore heavy sentence. Maybe the planned events, rewards and updates will prove more interesting.