Steampunk MMO Gatheryn enters closed beta

After the disappointment of finding out that Atlus’ NeoSteam wasn’t actually very (if at all) Steampunk, it was wonderful to come home today to find that somewhat more authentically Steampunk MMO Gatheryn has entered closed beta! Full details below, but be warned: They are going to ask you about your favorite Steampunk books…! Greetings! Some … Read more

Free Realms goes live Tuesday, April 28

The servers are coming down this morning, all beta characters are being deleted (answering a question of mine), and tomorrow, you’ll be able to start cooking, racing, shooting, mining and everything else. Here’s the full announcement: Some of you have seen the signs. The NDA being lifted. Cryptic twitters from developers. Unexpected fan site announcements. … Read more

Spellborn on the cheap, new armors, dev chat

Just finished listening in on the Spellborn dev chat/’webinar’. Lots of interesting discussion, some of which is after the break.
While the devs were talking, I was programming. I went through everything on the Acclaim website, trying to figure out what combination of memberships, terms of subscription, and quantities of coin bought would combine to form the cheapest monthly cost?
They will be, at some point, adding a set price of $15/month (for now, possibly rising to $18/month when they end the introductory price), but I thought we could get it cheaper.
I’ve plugged all the numbers into the equations, exhaustively tried all the combinations, and the cheapest (in the long run) way to get coins is to buy a Silver membership for $10. This gives you a 30% discount on Coins purchases for a month, but you only need it for one purchase. Buy 10050 coins for $70 (with the 30% discount). This nets you 11555 coins with the bonus coins, or 13060 coins with double bonus coins when they run that promotion.
A 180 day premium Spellborn subscription costs 7800 coins (for now). That will cost you $13.33/month if you play for that term and then never play again. You’ll have enough coins left over for two more months (at 1500 coins/month). So 180 days plus two times 30 day premium subscriptions — eight months total — comes to $10/month on the nose. If you bought your coin during a Double Bonus Coin weekend, you can squeeze an extra month out for $8.89/month — and that’s not bad.
Or, you could just pay the $15/month when they offer that option.
The Webinar software let us see El (Spellborn Lead Designer) Drijver’s computer, and he casually dragged several sets of new armor onto it for us. I was pretty darn quick on the Print Screen button, and got pictures of them all to share. All of them are, I believe, High House specific armors. The black set is for House Shroud, and I don’t know about the silver and the red sets. Click on the pictures for a slightly larger look.

armor1 armor2 mysteryarmor
shroudarmor shroudarmorback shroudarmorhelmet


Full dev chat transcript (the typed portion, anyway) after the break.

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