Grando Espada, the new MMORPG that rocks the non-WoW players, has gone P2P (Pay to Play).
The 2006 Korean Game of the Year, came to Singapore as well as other South-East Asia countries just few months ago. If you guys are one of the fanatics, this is a bad news for the non-willing-to-pay gamers.
Yes, IAHgames has announced the new business model for the popular Grando Espada. The game will go on a “hybrid P2P (Pay to Play) business model”.
The minimum cost to play this game is much lower than World of Warcraft. With SGD$9.90/P300/RM$20/USD$5.60, you can play for a month. However, if you buy a much longer gameplay time, the subscription per month will be significant lesser.
For example, if you buy the 1 year unlimited GVC/Box at USD$40.00, the subscription per month is USD$3.33, which is 40.5% lower.
The game went P2P for these reasons:
- Influx of players who have no real interest in playing the game in a proper way.
- Overloading of servers, causing high latencies and frequent disconnections to all players
- Ineffcient Customer Service due to high volumes of queries
- As usual, gold farmers are one of the spoilers in any MMORPG.
The BlizzCon is a huge event for the Blizzard staffs and games fans, but only a minority get to attend this conference, which is held in the US. Gamers from other nations only get to read the information posted on websites and forums.
I chanced upon the BlizzCon Northrend Panel on youtube, it is the entire length of the presentation, and most of the part of the Q&A session. The panel took around 60 minutes, so if you have the time to watch and wanted feel the awe with the fans out there, watch this.
If you do not want to watch the whole presentation, you can read this report I did. It is a summarised version of the presentation in text format.
Continue reading ‘BlizzCon ‘07 : Northrend Panel (summary)’
I hope many of the World of Warcraft fans are very excited by the upcoming expansion, Wrath of the Lich King.
One of the main features in this expansion is the introduction of Hero Classes.
The first Hero Classes to be introduced in Wrath of the Lich King is the Death Knight. As we know that the death knight is a powerful user of necromantic skills. One of the famous Death Knight in the Warcraft universe is Arthas. Arthas was a paladin who became a death knight and terrorised Azeroth and Northrend, eventually fused with the spirit of Nel’zhul and became the Lich King.
So you might be wondering how to we play the Death Knight? Detailed information have not been released by Blizzard yet, but you will need to meet certain criteria before this Hero Class is unlocked. Once unlocked, you are able to create a new character under the Death Knight class.
As the name suggested, it sounds like a Warrior class, but definitely more cool.
These are some characteristics of the Death Knight class:
- It can fulfill either the DPS build or the tanking build.
- Able to dual-weld weapons or handle a single 2H weapon. Shield is not necessary. =)
- Plate armour (how to tank with a mail armour?)
- Different from Warriors as Death Knights are more casting oriented, with summoning spells, etc.
- Unlocked through specified quests and interaction with Arthas.
- Start off at relatively high level, 55 to 70 (unconfirmed yet)
- Use the Rune Resource System, which runes are carved on the weapons.
- Runes belongs to the following 3 schools, Blood, Frost and Unholy.
Currently, details of classes that are able to unlock the Death Knight is unavailable, but both Horde and Alliance are able to unlock this class.
As expected, Wrath of the Lich King is announced in BlizzCon. Whenever Blizzard announces new stuffs, it gets the gaming world in awe. Starcraft II was announced weeks ago, and here comes the World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King.
World of Warcraft : Wrath of the Lich King is the second expansion to the popular MMORPG World of Warcraft. Since its release in November 2004, the subscriber base has reached more than 9 millions to date, making it the most popular MMORPG.
New features to Wrath of the Lich King
- Level cap rised to Level 80
- More talents, skills and items
- Customise your character, including new hairstyles, dances and etc.
- New continent to explore, Northrend, the home of the Lich King.
- New profession which allows you enhance your skills, “Inscription“.
- New battlegrounds and arenas.
- New 5-man dungeons, 10-man and 25-man raids.
- New epic siege warfare for your deployment for destruction of buildings.
- New Hero Class, Death Knight
Watch the Wrath of the Lich King trailer here!
The expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, is already available for public testing during the BlizzCon. Hence it is already at a playable stage where tweaks and balances need to be sorted out before releasing it to the public with a boom. The release date of Wrath of the Lich King has not been announced, but the earliest we can deduced might be early next year.
It will be an exciting year 2008, with Starcraft II and Wrath of the Lich King imminent for release. Check out GameBlog for more update on Wrath of the Lich King.
