MMORPG News: Aion 2, Reign of Darkness, Life Beyond, Lineage 2: Remastered, Project V4

First and foremost, Happy Thanksgiving! I was at Mrs Stix’s parents’ place over the last week and I had a lotta fun hanging out with her family.
Hopefully you all got plenty fat on Turkey, Ham or whatever else you opted to eat in place of traditional Thanksgiving food.. I know I definitely gained a few pounds.
But now I’m home and have plenty to talk about so I hope you guys are ready for another Weekly Byte of MMORPG News!
So sit back, pull out whatever leftovers you have and let’s jump right in.

Hot off the success of Lineage 2: Classic and Lineage 2M, NCSoft have announced yet another iteration of Lineage 2 – and no, before some of you jump to the conclusion that it’s going to be a mobile title, it isn’t.
Instead, like they teased with Blade & Soul’s upgrade to Unreal Engine 4, Lineage 2 will be receiving an entire engine overhaul. NCSoft is currently on the lookout for a technical artist – familiar with Unreal Engine 4.
The overhaul in specific is being titled “L2: Remastered” or Lineage 2: Remastered. The overhaul in question is going to be quite a daunting task as the game was originally released back in 2003, and upgrading the game to Unreal Engine 4 isn’t going to be easy.
Do note that while this is a work in progress, it isn’t expected for quite a while with no estimated time of completion, or even estimated trailer release any time soon.

There’s been plenty of controversy surrounding ArcheAge: Unchained since it launched.
Issues have ranged from the ArchePass allowing players to gain an advantage over other players, to the inane amount of dailies all but required to get through if you’re to remain competitive in any capacity.
But people have held on to the fact that Gamigo have been fairly transparent and fast-acting in terms of fixing player concerns.
They disabled the ArchePass, with the damage having still been done to the economy, and they- well, actually they announced during their latest livestream that the new version of the ArchePass will be hitting the PTS this week.
The new iteration of the ArchePass will apparently focus on completing.. dailies. So for those of you that love doing dailies, you’re gonna enjoy this! Additionally, they closed down the Ayanad Library because it was causing unnecessary amounts of lag for players.

For those of you that have been following Might and Delight’s new MMO Book of Travels – you’ll be happy to know that it just finished its Kickstarter campaign.
It ended up with over $260 thousand dollars funding – crushing its original goals over the weekend with over 7,000 backers.
Might and Delight have stated that the game will be going into beta testing next year, while also claiming that the funding campaign was “transformational.”
They provided a small look at the game – while also promising to maintain communication with its playerbase along the game’s development process.
This game is absolutely beautiful, to me, it looks like a much more artsy version of Dofus or Wakfu.

I know you guys aren’t really fans of Nexon or the games they either develop or publish, but recently they opted to release Project V4 – also known as just V4 or Victory 4 in South Korea for mobile devices.
Then out of nowhere, they announced that they were also developing a PC version of the game, and that it would be releasing next month in December. Yeah. It was completely out of the blue with not a single person anticipating this at all.
While V4 looks damn good – the game is unable to run at max settings on an emulator and most phones, meaning the game is heavily unoptimized.
Nevertheless, with NCSoft recently announcing the new Purple Platform that would allow players to play Lineage 2M on both mobile devices and PC together without an external emulator required, it’s unusual for Nexon to announce a game like this with cross-play in mind.
Especially so soon after NCSoft announced Purple. Regardless of their reasoning behind the game and its release cross-platform, it doesn’t have a global release yet, but previous games developed by NAT Games have released overseas so the same is expected.

A little while back I did a video on Project C. It’s a SpatialOS powered open-world sandbox MMO that has been in development for a few years now.
The video in question was a little more negative than I normally do due to the fact that they were selling pre-orders for the game when A.) The game didn’t have a name yet and B.) They announced they would sell in-game currency for real-money.
To me this was a giant red flag. Nevertheless, they’ve continued development and several months later, have finally decided on a name for the game: Life Beyond.
According to Darewise, the developer behind the game, they are creating a “unique experience in open world gaming.” Because we haven’t heard that from every other developer ever.

Man, I’d all but forgotten about this for the longest time. Who here remembers Pumpkin Online?
Years ago the game was announced on Kickstarter as an MMO farming simulator but further through development they decided that it would be a smarter move to transition to a smaller-scale multiplayer farming sim instead.
Well, regardless, the day of Steam Early Access has finally arrived as Pumpkin Online- or, Pumpkin Days as it’s now titled is now playable via Steam.
The game has a lot of awesome features – multiple towns, farming, animal breeding, love interests to pursue, and best of all.. if you have a significant other, you can play with them as well.
Additional towns, NPCs, and additional features are planned over the course of Early Access so if this is something you’re interested in playing or seeing developed further, you might wanna go and support them!
It’s honestly still a little rough around the edges as is evident if you watch the trailer, but nevertheless it’s another alternative to Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley if you’re bored with them!

I know a lotta you guys are excited for Genshin Impact. My last video on it is sitting at almost 150,000 views after all. And it’s for good reason – the game looks really, really damn good.
So you can bet that I was excited when it was revealed that another game just like Genshin Impact was announced – Gran Saga. Although whereas Genshin Impact is an open-world multiplayer RPG, Gran Saga is an actual MMO, or so they say.
The game is being built with cross-play between both PC and Mobile in mind allowing for a significantly larger portion of players to play with one another.
While we haven’t really seen anything in the way of actual gameplay yet, we have promises that the game is going to be something much better than your average mobile game since it’ll have to cater to PC players as well.
So I’m hoping it’s as good as Genshin Impact because that game looks and plays like a console game for PC.

There are plenty of Aion fans out there – whether you’re still an active player or not. I played Aion recently and got into my 60s for fun.
While the game has changed quite significantly over time, the combat has always and likely will always remain one of the best tab-target combat systems in an MMO.
Now, a couple years ago I did a video on Aion 2 – since NCSoft had announced that they were planning on making a sequel to the PC MMORPG after their failed Aion Vision game. People were ecstatic, and rightfully so. The game is in desperate need of an upgrade.
However not like this.
Aion 2 was announced by NCSoft to be a mobile prequel to the game with various features removed such as no more opposing Elyos vs Asmodian faction conflict, a drastic change to flight and gliding, creating a “three-dimensional battle system,” and.. well, I did a video on MMOByte Mobile detailing everything so if you’re interested in learning more, head on over to my mobile channel.
Suffice it to say, the game sounds interesting. It sounds like a solid game. But how does it work as an Aion game? I’m not sure.
The changes are disconcerting, definitely, but at the same time if it didn’t have the Aion name attached I feel like it could very well be a potentially good game. Iunno, we’ll have to wait and see.
Unlike NCSoft’s other upcoming Mobile MMORPG Lineage 2M, this is not going to be cross-play compatible.

I’m sure anyone that stays up to date with Black Desert Online already knows about the new Guardian class, but for those of you that don’t.. well now you do.
It was announced that Black Desert will be getting another brand new class – the Guardian in the near future. Thus far we barely know anything about the class other than the fact that it’s a girl.. that wants to kill gods? Or something. I dunno.
She is a close-range melee fighter that utilizes an axe to mow down enemies much like a Berserker.
While there’s no official trailer showcasing the class nor any confirmation on a release date, with the frequency of updates the game pushes out, it’s likely we won’t have to wait all that long before we can jump right in and take her for a ride.

For those of you that have been anticipating Mad World.. you may have noticed their recent silence.
Fans have been messaging them via their official forums, Twitter, and other forms of social media pertaining to the release of the game – or updates on progress in any capacity.
While they’ve been fairly silent, a team member did reach out via their forum earlier this week to answer the question of where they’ve been.
According to Jandi_Mike, after Netmarble announced they would be publishing the game world-wide, the team behind Mad World began to transfer everything over, including social media accounts, and a brand new set of forums run by Netmarble themselves.
Thus while this transition is currently ongoing, there likely won’t be much, if any interaction from the team. There is currently no ETA on when the transfer will be finalized.

This one might be of interest to some of you but at the same time I know there are quite a significant amount of you that’re going to hear “one-man indie developer” and skip right over.
Regardless, Reign of Darkness is a brand new hardcore 3D Grimdark MMORPG taking inspiration from Dungeons and Dragons.
It’s a tab-target theory-crafting dungeon-running MMORPG that has players actually play the game to figure out how features work as opposed to having your hand held the entire playthrough.
Reign of Darkness has been in development for over 6 years by this point but it’s finally in a playable state and thus has launched into Early Access on Steam for anyone interested in trying it out.
The game is currently $20 on Steam right now and is expected to be in Early Access for approximately one year, with additional content being added over the course of the Early Access.

I know there are plenty of you guys that love Guild Wars 2. I’m currently in the process of doing a 1 to endgame video detailing Mrs Stix and my journey through the game and we’re having fun.
However, just because we’re having fun in the game doesn’t mean we aren’t aware of what’s going in with both Guild Wars 2 and ArenaNet right now.
I’ve reported on NCSoft laying off ArenaNet employees and various developers leaving the team over the last year but we have yet another dev packing up – Jason Reynolds, the lead designer for the Living World content.
With all of these departures, the community is left wondering exactly what the future of the game is going to look like, especially with content updates slowing down. New PvE content is expected to come in roughly 6 months.

Are you guys still waiting to play Ascent: Infinite Realm? Ah, what am I saying, that’s a stupid question. Of course you are. This might be news worth listening to, then.
While there’s no confirmation on the North American or European release this moment, PlayPark, the South East Asian publisher of A:IR seem to be eyeballing a December 2019 to February 2020 release window.
Their 3rd quarter profits were significantly down this year and they’re hoping the release of A:IR within the South East Asian region helps even things out. Their future essentially hangs on whether or not A:IR does well for them or not.
I know there are a lotta players playing MMOs from the SEA region, so here’s hoping they don’t rush the game for your sake.
Regardless, the game will be playable for everyone when it launches into Open Beta in South East Asia, so if you can’t wait for a Western release, then this release will be more than adequate I’d believe.