Quick Comment: With more and more players crowded into Chuangshi OL, the publisher decided to add 3 new game servers. Now these 3 new servers are all online to welcome players.
In what appears to be some significant licensing to-ing and fro-ing, we may be able to shortly confirm the following :
1) Netease (NTES) is publishing the BigWorld-powered ‘Tianxia 2′ in Taiwan through BigWorld licensee, Userjoy. 2) Userjoy themselves are publishing BigWorld-powered Kingdom Heroes II in mainland China through The9.
All of this is assumption and inference at the moment – stay tuned for confirmations.
TX2 reached 245K PCU during first week of open beta. NetEase’s 3D game Tian Xia II (TX2) reached 245000 Peak Concurrent Users (PCU) on September 26, according to my tracking in the chart below. This represents a 32% increase from 185000 on September 19, the day before TX2’s open beta. During this 7-day period, TX2’s server capacity expanded 36% to 53 server groups. These two data points (32% and 36%) show that TX2’s usage level has increased at a similar pace to server additions, and indicate the game’s strong ability to attract new users.
BigWorld principal R&D is based in normally sunny Sydney, though we also have offices in the US, Japan, China and Europe. If Sydney-siders at the office are a bit weirded out today, it may be because a massive roiling cloud of red dust has spread across the NSW capital -
Gamasutra has some AGDC coverage of Steve Danuser from 38 Studios, one of the writers for Curt Schilling’s upcoming BigWorld powered title, talks about some of the difficulties in writing for online :
“No one wants to read in MMOs. As much as writers want to think their quest prose is for the ages, reading is not a popular activity in online gaming. The genre is a bad fit for classic storytelling. The strength of the MMO genre is that it is a social medium, a communal experience with a shared narrative.
Giving players the tools to create their own story experiences within that narrative is what keeps them coming back to a game. Both directors firmly believe that MMO writers should be leveraging the strengths of both the medium and the playerbase far more than they do right now.” – Gamasutra
