By now you've seen all of the news announcement's regarding Paradox Interactive's new "Salem" (working title) MMORPG.

You know, the "OMG! A permanent death MMORPG! Inconceivable!" stuff.

It sounds very cool and I'm looking forwards to trying it out. But, what these news articles currently lack are what the people really want: SCREENSHOTS AND GAMEPLAY VIDEOS! =]

So, I'll try to help out as best as possible.

Here's a screenshot of the current work in progress:


Here's a gameplay video of Salem Alpha in action:



There was just that one screenshot available for now, but if you wanted more insight into what the game will be about, look no further than the game Haven & Hearth. Salem has been quietly worked on by the The Seatribe development team for the past 4 months, so you can imagine that Salem will be taking a lot of inspiration (concepts, skill names, gameplay, etc) from their existing H&H game.

Here's a gameplay video from their current Haven & Hearth MMORPG:



If you're intrigued by Salem, check out Seatribe's latest post regarding the Paradox announcement on their forums. (That's where I snagged the Salem screenshot.) Screenshots of Haven & Hearth can be found here too.

While I was looking up some old Blizzard news announcements, I came across this old article from IGN. It's always interesting to see these old posts detailing the future of games. =]

It talked about various things that Blizzard had planned before beta testing began.. so, unfortunately, I can't really add these items to that WoW Nostalgia post.

Anyways, check it out:

- Warriors had defense skills that were limited buffs (no stances).
- Warriors had an ability called "Slice and Dice" that granted additional damage when using swords.
- Shamans had an armor spell called Rockskin and could cast grasping roots (which grows roots from the ground to snare enemies).
- Shamans had a spell called "Immolation" for setting enemies on fire and burning slowly.
- Mages had a spell called "Fire Shield" that did damage to attacking players. (Although this never made it, the similar Molten Armor was later introduced in TBC.)
- There were core skills, secondary skills, and trade abilities. Secondary skills allowed Warriors, for example, to have first-aid, sneaking, thief abilities, etc. I wonder what other secondary skills they had considered?
- Core skills was basically weapon training (and possibly spells or certain skills like "Taming") by the way.
- This was interesting: "We do know there will be two continents however, Azeroth and Calendor." They even italicized "do", meaning that Blizzard confirmed to them that the two continents would be called Azeroth and Calendor. They might have misheard Kalimdor as Calendor (or maybe that was the original spelling?). Eastern Kingdoms was once known as Azotha, but in the Warcraft 3 manual Azeroth is a continent, not the planet.

Very interesting indeed. =]

Here are some other interesting details collected during that time (From E3 2002 Previews, the June 2003 issue of GMR, and forum posts).

- There will be over 100 dungeons in World of Warcraft. (Also confirmed by gamesdomain.com who had a private preview by Blizzard.)
- World of Warcraft ended up having 36 total dungeons by the way. BC had 26 dungeons by the end and WOTLK 29. Cataclysm launched with 10 new dungeons (and there are 2 new ones to be released later this year).
- Gnolls were changed to Gnomes as the playable race. (Textures were re-purposed for NPCs.)
- Entertainment on public transportation, like gambling.
- Mounts provide a bonus to armor when travelling, but could "not be used in combat yet". That feature was supposed to be implemented in the future.
- There were supposed to be hundreds of secondary skills (the only ones known at the time were First Aid, Thief (aka Pickpocketing), Lockpicking, and Sneaking which could be obtained by any class.)
- Players accumulate Special Points (SP) to unlock secondary skills.
- Druids could shapeshift into "unobtrusive animals" that are native to the area, such as a small rabbit. Basically, they could become "Critters" to stay hidden in plain sight. =]
- Mages could summon Fire and/or Air elementals.
- Blizzard stated that servers could support 2000-4000 players.
- World of Warcraft budget was about $40-50 million, was being worked on by 60 people over a 3 year period. (Good to know information to separate development costs from all other costs.)

And finally: when asked about possible new races: "There will be playable evil races, very evil races in fact".

I'm not sure what they had planned. Maybe they were just referring to the Undead race, or Horde in general? It's hard to say.. I wouldn't really consider the Horde evil, considering the amount of lore painting them as honorable and misunderstood warriors. If any race was considered evil, it would have to be the Human race considering all of their actions (and how they followed the order's of Azeroth's most evil villain for years). But that's a debate for another day. =]

* UPDATES:

- Confirmation from Warcry that "Calendor" was a typo - they meant to write Kalimdor. Azeroth was still called a continent however.
- Apparently, the Cathedral in Stormwind was to be used for virtual weddings, and Blizzard had plans to rent the space and to buy/send out invitations for players. (Early plans for paid services perhaps?) =]
- Another old mention of monthly content updates "created by an ongoing live development team that continuously designs new lands, quests, and monsters."
- Blizzard planned to have dynamic quests assigned to NPCs on the fly.
- Another funny one: "Every drop can be either used, worn, or used in crafting. Of course some things will be better than others, but there won't be any junk."
- Oh, and of course: Player Housing. =]

Blizzard has been pretty quiet about subscription counts from each country, but there was a time when they officially released subscriber figures. These numbers are based on Blizzard's definition of a "subscriber" by the way and are quite interesting to say the least.

In January 2007, when subscription counts totaled 8 million worldwide (Source):

China: 3.5 million
North America: 2.0 million
Europe: 1.5 million
Remaining Territories: 1.0 million

In January 2008, when subscription counts totaled 10 million worldwide (Source):

China: 4.5 million
North America: 2.5 million
Europe: 2.0 million
Remaining Territories: 1.0 million

You can find other posts on Gamasutra with earlier subscription figures too, but it appears that Blizzard stopped revealing extra subscription count information in 2008.

Based on their growth trends, I think it's safe to say that these estimated projections are fairly accurate for Blizzard's latest (October 2010) 12 million subscriber count:

China: 5.5 million
North America: 3.0 million
Europe: 2.5 million
Remaining Territories: 1.0 million

That's pretty interesting. Keep in mind though that "subscriber" counts don't necessarily mean active players. In China, for example, most players have multiple prepaid cards and accounts (since the game itself is free).

Did you want to hear something really spooky?

Six months ago, I worked on estimating the number of subscribers in China versus worldwide figures. I had previously estimated that "At a rate of $15 per month, that means that there are 6.0 million players" outside of China.

So, out of 11.5 million worldwide, it's about 5.5 million Chinese subscriptions and 6.0 million in NA/EU/Other.

And based on official figures provided by Blizzard, it's about 5.5 million Chinese subscriptions and 6.0 million in NA/EU/Other.

Nice.

It appears that my estimated subscription information has been confirmed by Blizzard themselves. =]

What's even more cool is that I can use the information from their 8 and 10 million subscriber figures to calculate even more interesting stuff about Blizzard's financials. More on that to come later though.

The President of Sony Online Entertainment (John Smedley) has just announced that DCUO users will be getting content updates every month.

President of Sony Online Entertainment John Smedley said that if you decide to play DC Universe Online, you won't have to worry about any additional costs besides your regular monthly fee. Smedley told Eurogamer that they will be offering free monthly upgrades of additional content and weekly patches if things need to be fixed right away, instead of big DLC packages you have to purchase additionally. The new content for PC and PS3 will launch within a day or two of each other, even though it takes longer for updates to be approved on the PS3 platform. (They'll hold all the PC upgrades until the equivalent one is ready.)

"But the plans are about a month out you can start expecting major pieces of content and major new features to come in," he said. "We'll be adding all kinds of cool stuff. We're not quite ready to reveal what our after-launch plans are yet. Needless to say we have a lot of content we're in QA on that players haven't seen yet."

This echoes what DCUO Game Director Chris Cao's told Techland about seeing tons more feats and other weapons in the near future. Smedley said that the monthly fee made the company feel obligated to provide free constant upgrades and new features.

There will be "major pieces of content" and "major new features" (in addition to standard patches/fixes) implemented every month apparently.

EVERY MONTH? Where have we heard THAT before? Oh right.. Blizzard Entertainment said the same thing about World of Warcraft (except add "major content updates", "new weapons" and "new quests".)

Sony mentioned that they already have a "lot of content" currently in QA (considering the current state of the game, I fully expect so), which is all well and good.. but do they have enough content to last the next "five, ten years" that they want to run the game? Doubtful.

There's no way they'll be able to keep up with the game's demands. This is just another example of a company getting really excited about something.. but they never properly planned ahead and simply lack the foresight. Well, the management team anyways - I suspect that they didn't consult the development team before making this announcement. =]

Once Blizzard realized their mistake back in 2004-2005, they quietly removed all instances of the "major content updates every month" statement from their webpage and forums. That was actually one of the big selling points for me at the time too. Shortly after though (when they ran out of content), the updates came once every 3 months, then every 6 months, and then they became paid Expansion Packs. How very disappointing.. =[

I can see the same problem happening with DCUO.

The other problem is that once the novelty of the game wears off, Sony will be reducing their support staff which in turn effects development time of said content. They haven't released any sales figures yet (which is interesting in itself), but I'm not really interested in that anyways - what does interest me is retention rate. And based on what I've seen (it's not a very deep MMO), retention rate will probably be around 1-3 months on average.

(Note: Back in 2008 before DC Universe Online was announced, John Smedley believed that this PS3 MMO game would be the WoW killer.)

* UPDATE (01/21/11):

Worldwide sales figures estimates have been released courtesy of vgchartz.com.

During the first week: PS3 sold 150,764 copies and the PC version sold 45,267 copies.

No wonder Sony didn't release their sales figures! SOE President John Smedley stated that "The game is sold out in a lot of stores." Well, yeah.. the stores that only carried 3 copies.

They did, however, take a good piece of advice from the Blizzard Bible: "We're adding more servers to keep up with the growth." Even though there was no growth or need for extra servers.

By comparison, first week sales of Age of Conan were more than 500,000 units, AION sold somewhere between 400,000 and 700,000 copies during their first week, and Warhammer Online sold more than 500,000 units. It seems that 500k is the magic number for newly hyped MMORPG's.

* UPDATE (01/25/11):

Another confirmation that significant content will be released every month. Sony is also defending their high subscription fee.

Apparently, this "monthly content paid service" is really being pushed hard. The rest of the article didn't sound very good though.. it's only been a week, and Sony is already trying to defend the game.

We understand we're asking a lot and the equation I always give to people is that it's similar to DLC - if you were getting DLC from Red Dead Redemption every month, I'd probably sign up for that because I buy every piece of DLC they throw at me.

We haven't had an opportunity to prove ourselves to the players on that content delivery.

There was also mention that F2P is very unlikely.

* UPDATE (02/03/11):

FYI - if you're interested in latest maintenance announcements, server restarts and patch notes, they can all be found HERE.

No word on when the next content patch will hit, so far it's just been maintenance and bug fixes. But Sony promised once a month, so there _should_ be new stuff (dungeons, quests, gear) by the end of February. "Should" being the operative word.

* UPDATE (02/19/11):

Sony has set the first benchmark for their promised monthly content updates. Here's what they've implemented, and you should be expecting the same level of content each and every month:

New Batcave Raid – 8 players will have the opportunity to infiltrate and retake Batman's Inner Sanctum, which has been overrun by OMAC and the Dark Knight's own corrupted technology. Fight along side Batman against Brother Eye!
New Appearance Items – Earn a Harlequin Clown suit or a Cherub disguise through a variety of holiday activities.
Goddess of Love Alert – Join up with three others to decide the epic battle between Devotion and Scorn once and for all.
New Races – Can you catch Catwoman as she leaps across buildings in Gotham City?
New Collections - All new collection sets will allow players to continue finding these hidden items.
New Themed Missions – Enjoy various missions that will challenge the player in combat, jumping, and much more.
A New Bane Duo – Another Duo has been added for your enjoyment! Pair up with another player and take on Bane for a chance at great loot.
New PvP Ring Event – Available on both PvP and PvE servers, Heroes and villains race to either save or steal valuable bags of diamonds from armored vans.
An Auction House - Players may now buy and sell tradeable items on a Broker in The Watchtower and Hall of Doom.
New Armor – Make your way to the Gotham Museum and help Catwoman to receive pieces of brand new Mayan armor!

So basically: new raids, new races, new collections, new missions, new events, and new items/gear/appearances... every month. We'll see.