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Chronicles of Spellborn launches outside Europe, with hidden payment system
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Tough guy!
Their tagline is "What Lies Hidden Must Be Found." That also applies to figuring out how you're going to pay for the game.
The new post-apocalyptic fantasy MMO, Chronicles of Spellborn, has officially launched in North America as of yesterday. (The development team is Dutch, and the game launched last fall in parts of Europe.) I try to avoid using Wikipedia if the official site has a FAQ, but I don't have a choice - there is no clearly marked Game FAQ on the Acclaim website. So, if you want the simplest and fastest explanation of the game, go here. If you want the longer version, the left sidebar of the official site has lots of material, if not a simple and fast overview. The Eurogamer review is also a good source for information.
The developer is maintaining a blog here for the non-Acclaim version, if you're the sort of person who likes to see what the original team is doing. (Or you can just play that version - there is supposedly going to be no attempts at blocking people from playing whatever version they want, wherever they happen to live. Hooray! A game that recognizes the utter futility of creating walls on the internet!)
I'm looking at a press release announcing a Two! Week! Free! promotion to celebrate the launch. My reaction was "So what? Don't we MMO people usually get a month to play for free? Where are my other two weeks?" I assumed that I was missing something important, so I went to the official site to find out more. I knew Acclaim MMOs are usually microtransaction games. They sell "Acclaim coins" that are usable currency in all of their products. But I'd gathered from the prerelease information that Chronicles would be using a subscription model.
The Acclaim TCOS website isn't a bit clear. You can use coins, or a credit card? Free to download, but subscriptions were required?
After digging around, I finally found a link explaining that this is a "Freemium" game. Free to download, and free to play in two zones up to fame level seven (possibly changing to ten at some point). After that, you'll be charged a monthly subscription of 14.99 in order to progress, or to gain access to other zones. The "two free weeks" promotion is actually two weeks of exploring the areas you can't normally get to without subscribing.
The combat system sounds completely different from the usual hotbar fights, and the PVP sounds intriguing. With a free download and two weeks to level up past the starting zones, it seems like a good time to give this puppy a try. And if you've been feeling like no one is innovating, well, the only way to get innovation is to reward the developers who try it - with your eyeballs.
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