CItadel of Sorcery - Guild Halls/Housing

Although they are still early in development and no official forums up yet, Citadel of Sorcery does update the developer's blog on occasion. The Memorial Day weekend update included this juicy bit of info:

Our Art Department has been busy with upgrading the in game User Interface art. Our goal is to add this new art to the game within the next month. In addition our modelers have been building castles, lots of castles, big castles, massive fortresses and tall fantasy castles. With a world as massive as CoS we wanted to make sure that the castles were equally impressive. I know you would like to see some screenshots of these castles, but we are holding off on those until the new terrain system is far enough along. Be patient, it will be worth the wait.

Design has been working on our Guild system. This is very important to the game and the designers have been revisiting the Guild system to make sure that it has everything we want. Guilds will have a physical Guild Hall that Players build out in the Reflected Worlds. They can build them, improve them, add new halls and ramparts and they can keep improving their Guild Hall over time. In addition Players may purchase land around their Guild Hall (from the Guild) and construct their own house and business. Eventually they will construct their own village or town around their Guild Hall. Only Guild members may enter the actual Hall, but other players (non-guild members) can visit the village / town and make use of the various player run businesses.

There can be a whole economy setup and run by the Guild in these locations and we are trying to give the Guilds many options on how they want to run their Guild.


First, I can't wait to see those fantasy castles. But I love the guild hall system where members can build houses and businesses around the hall and construct their own villages. Reminds me a bit of SWG's guild towns. And last I heard, there's no forced PvP or even any sort of PvP-focus, so another "yay!" from me.

They have stated the world will be the size of Earth, so that you could play for over a year and still not have seen everything. This also guarantees there will always be real estate available to guilds.

And equally interesting was this comment, "CoS is a new kind of Quest world, not a PVP mmo or typical cheesy PVE game. It contains no time sinks, no farming zones, no typical crafting. In fact, it has very little to do with any MMO game you or anyone else has played in the past. This is an entirely new system of game play, not another rehash of the same old system. Citadel of Sorcery is about quests, but not like what you may have seen in other PVE MMO games. The depth and quality of our Quests are what set this game apart from other MMORPGs. Each quest in CoS is the equivalent of a multi novel fantasy book series. It is about involved game play content with no time sinks, grinds, repetitive play or any of the other methods MMOs have traditionally used to keep from adding rich content."

Random Stuff

PotBS - NDA is lifted and lots of reviews to be found. Not a bad game at all and definitely a change of pace from current offerings, but not everyone's cup of tea. And that is how it turned out for me. I didn't enjoy flying ships in SWG and even less so enjoyed the ship combat here. Guess I'm a landlubber at heart. Unfortunately, the land options weren't fun for me either, so I'll be passing on this one.

STO - "I personally think that MMOs need to be a better deal. Paying $200/year is a good deal for some but I don't think that is sustainable for the category and certainly rules out a lot of people who don't have the time to get enough value out of that expense." Ok I see where this is heading now. Removed this game from my radar.

Zuroth Online - This was the game that sounded very much like pre-NGE SWG and had many vets excited. That is, until they released this statement a couple weeks ago:

"One of the main things that plague an indie developer is time, money, and developers. Currently our goals are set very high (which isn't always a bad thing) but what we currently have planned is a very, very, very big undertaking (infact though any mmo is a big undertaking, what we're going for is even bigger). This leads to not enough time and it scares away potential developers.

What we're going to do to alleviate this problem is pretty simple - scale it down. Scaling it down will require many sacrifices that you all are probably here for and are expecting (all the prior SWG people especially).

So what are a few of the changes?

- Sandbox status is gone. We're moving to a more stream lined game.
- Move to a Leveling System

Some other features are getting changed to fit with the above. But... This doesn't mean we're going to become a carbon copy of what's already out there - we're pretty sure we're going to have some unique, and fun features that todays MMO's seem to have forgotten about..

Also I'd like to apologize to all the people out there expecting another SWG Pre-CU. It's just not possible with an Indie team... But you have my word if we ever get into a position where we can make a Pre-CU like game we WILL in a heart beat. But, right now we're going to work on the game, and hopefully make a game a few people would enjoy playing."

Citadel of Sorcery - Another MMO in very early stages. Will be keeping an eye on this one to see how it progresses.