Acclaim is hanging out their “Please Pardon Our Re-Development” signs on their MMO The Chronicles of Spellborn, transforming it into a free-to-play, transaction-based game by next year.
Apparently 7 free levels weren’t enough to entice players to pay up, as Acclaim raises the free-to-play level cap for The Chronicles of Spellborn to 9.9.
Acclaim Games officially launches their massively multiplayer online role-playing game The Chronicles of Spellborn in North America today, with free two-week subscriptions on offer for all newly registered players.
Acclaim has begun slowly letting people into the North American closed beta test for The Chronicles of Spellborn, with the beta client now available for those hoping to get in early.
With the European release of the ambitiously different MMORPG The Chronicles of Spellborn just around the corner, Acclaim Games has finally set a date for the North American release. While there isn’t yet a specific day, January 2009 is the target for the NA launch of the MMO, with closed beta testing kicking off on November 27th to coincide with the European launch.
For those curious about how subscriptions will work, TCoS will be utilising a “Freemium” model. The client will be completely free to download, with players allowed to play the game for free within the starting zones until just before they reach Fame level 8, at which point they will be blocked from progressing any further. An interesting choice. Hit the jump for further details.
There was a bit of confusion over the skilldeck feature of Chronicles of Spellborn when I posted my impressions of the game yesterday from the Games Convention in Leipzig, so I contacted the game creators to procure a few shots of the deck in order to better explain how it works. As you can now see, there are five rows, which you can fill with six different skills each. You select the row you want active using the 1 through 5 keys, and then left clicking (ideally in most cases with an opponent targeted) activates the current numbered skill, rotating the bar to ready the next. It’s up to you to fill the slots with skills that compliment each other, creating powerful skill combinations.
With the game being in development for so very long, I wasn’t sure what to expect when the nice gentlemen from Spellborn NV sat me down to give me a first hand look at their MMORPG The Chronicles of Spellborn. The game was being shown in publisher Frogster’s booth, the very same booth where I got my first look at Runes of Magic. In stark contrast to that game, which endeavours to combine elements of many successful RPGs into one game, The Chronicles of Spellborn team’s goal is to create an MMORPG like nothing we’ve ever seen before.
