SandBoxer.Org

Origins of Malu facebook page.

The developers creating Origins of Malu recently released a new screenshot to hold us over until the alpha preview.

Dust514.com/beta

Today CCP Games is proud to announce that players can register for beta access to its upcoming free-to-play first person shooter, DUST 514, set to launch later this year exclusively on PlayStation® 3. The registration page is now live and players can register at www.dust514.com/beta.

DUST 514 is one of the most anticipated titles of 2012, and CCP is ready to accept sign ups from fans and gamers eagerly awaiting their chance to try out the revolutionary shooter. If accepted, beta registrants will be notified with an email invitation and instructions on how to access the beta. Thousands of players have already been able to experience DUST 514 during its closed beta, and CCP is beginning to let limited numbers of players join the action. Select players from CCP’s MMO EVE Online will gain entry into the DUST 514 beta this week, as well as all those who attended the EVE Fanfest convention in Iceland this past March. The beta will continue to expand throughout the summer, and CCP will discuss more details at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3).

Link

Fallen Earth has finally added Global Territory Control.

The new Embers of Caerus website is out and as an added bonus they released a world map.

EmbersofCaerus.Com

Embers of Caerus is a highly anticipated sandbox MMO. The developers are veterans of UO, Darkfall, and Mortal Online. Disappointed at what they saw in those games they decided to band together to create the perfect sandbox.

This post is in reply to The Daily Grind: Must MMO housing be open-world to be good? on massively.com

Of course MMO housing needs to be open-world to be good! A player house is more then just fluff, it’s a status symbol. It’s something in game that says “I’m an accomplished gamer”. Hiding your player house in a private instance is like owning a Lamborghini and never taking it out of the garage.

Nothing beats rewarding yourself with a player house after countless hours of gameplay, but what’s the point if your creation doesn’t impact the game world?

Sandbox MMO’s have always had the best player housing systems. Back in my day, if you had a lake house in Ultima Online, that meant something. In Star Wars Galaxies we would place our player houses together forming entire player towns and Guilds and Alliances formed into entire in game player communities with everything you needed, so you rarely had to go to the NPC cities. You just don’t get this when your house is in an instance.

Open world housing lets players have a real impact on the landscape and since most sandboxes have very large playable maps houses rarely clutter the landscape. I can see if everyone in Azeroth had a house in game somewhere that it could have a negative impact on the typical kill 10 pigs quests, but with sandbox games this isn’t the case.

I can’t wait for games like Arche Age and The Repopulation, with true real open world housing to be released. We will see just how necessary open world housing will be for a great game when these MMOs break the 100k subscription mark.

I don’t know why anyone would want to take down the awesome indy sandbox MMO Wurm Onlines website, but someone did.

Here’s what they said on their official webpage.
WurmOnline.com

Wurm Online moving around

We are changing the way we deliver Wurm Online

The game works perfectly well and the client and payment systems are safe to use but we had some issues with our website during a few hectic hours on the 11th of May.

Our website was the target of an sql injection attack via PHP resulting in a vulnerability known as the Blackhole Exploit.
As a result some web pages we hosted contained malicious code and we are moving away from PHP to web development strategies less prone to these vulnerabilities. Those pages are removed now.

In the meantime, we are going to make sure that what we deliver is clean, safe and not infected so that you can play Wurm safely.

Our wiki, forum and blog all used php.

We suggest you start using the forum at mmorpg.com for now.
Where and how the wiki will be hosted will probably be decided next week so it will probably be unavailable until then.
The blog is hosted at tumblr now.

As we all know Zenimax Online Studios announced that it would release an Elderscrolls MMO in this months edition of Game Informer magazine. Sadly after reviewing the article and subsequent reports on the internet Sandboxer.Org has determined that the new Elderscrolls MMO will not be a Sandbox game.

Here’s what we know so far.

There will not be a player housing system.

It’s going to be a 3 player faction system. You are forced to be in one of these factions.
-Ebonheart Pact: The Nords, Dunmer, and Argoninans
-Aldmeri Dominion: Altmer, Bosmer, and Khajit
-Daggerfall Covenant: Bretons, Redguard, and Orcs

There will be “instanced” dungeons.

There will be a level grind that will last roughly 120 hours to max level.

There will be a system in place were “anchors” fall from the sky creating PVE hot points much in the same way as rifts in the themepark game Rift. This in itself is not a bad thing, but as I remember from rift after doing a few hundred rifts you realize that they always spawn in the same designated locations, spawning the same mobs. This gets very repetitive.

You can not be a werewolf or a vampire.

There will be fast travel.

You can not interact with the environment like you could with Oblivion or Skyrim. For example, a rogue can put oil on the ground that a mage can set on fire, but a mage can not ignite oil that an enemy rogue put on the ground. You can not put buckets on npcs heads blocking there vision.

There will not be Radiant AI like we saw with other Elderscrolls games. “Recreateing the freedom Elder Scrolls players expect within the World of Warcraft-style mechanics Zenimax Online is using for this MMO would be impossible without changing the way that players interact with the world.”

With what we know it sounds like Zenimax sacrificed traditional Elderscrolls sandbox gameplay to appeal to traditional themepark MMO gamers. For this reason we can not call The Elderscrolls MMO a sandbox, however with that stated it does have some redeeming qualities that sandbox gamers may enjoy.

The game world is very large relative to Skyrim. (but not as large as the combined game worlds of Skyrim, Oblivion, and Morrowind like we would have imagined.)

You can explore almost anything you can see. If you see a mountain in the distance, you can ride your mount there or scale the mountain on foot.

There will be 100versus100 pvp battles.

Not all dungeons are instanced. There will be “open world” dungeons.

All in all if your looking for a sandboxxy Elderscrolls MMO I would wait for the Skyrim multiplayer modificationto become more polished, and since Elderscrolls online won’t be released for at least another year I suspect more sandbox gamers would prefer this Skyrim mod over the official Elderscrolls MMO when it goes live.

Long rumored and much anticipated, The Elder Scrolls Online is finally being unveiled in the June issue of Game Informer. In this month’s cover story we journey across the entire land of Tamriel, from Elsweyr to Skyrim and everywhere in between.

Developed by the team at Zenimax Online Studios, The Elder Scrolls Online merges the unmatched exploration of rich worlds that the franchise is known for with the scale and social aspects of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Players will discover an entirely new chapter of Elder Scrolls history in this ambitious world, set a millennium before the events of Skyrim as the daedric prince Molag Bal tries to pull all of Tamriel into his demonic realm.

“It will be extremely rewarding finally to unveil what we have been developing the last several years,” said game director and MMO veteran Matt Firor, whose previous work includes Mythic’s well-received Dark Age of Camelot. “The entire team is committed to creating the best MMO ever made – and one that is worthy of The Elder Scrolls franchise.”

An in-depth look at everything from solo questing to public dungeons awaits in our enormous June cover story – as well as a peek at the player-driven PvP conflict that pits the three player factions against each other in open-world warfare over the province of Cyrodiil and the Emperor’s throne itself.

Read more at gameinformer.com