Tagged News: video game

You have to give Flying Lab Software credit for their dusk shots in Pirates of the Burning Sea. These two images show ships in the purple hue of the day's end.

The latest batch of exclusive images from Flying Lab Software's Pirates of the Burning Sea are here. This time we get a shot of a female pirate in a sticky situation with some English soldiers and a ship as it sails away from a scenic island out to sea.

Today we have a brand new pair of screenshots as we resumes the bi-weekly Age of Conan screenshot series. This time we have an image of a character and a demon, as well as a shot from character creation that shows just how broken a nose can be.

Fury launched their "Age of the Chosen" expansion earlier this week and it includes a lot of new things to the PvP MMO. Most notably, the game is now free to download and play.

Read more after the leap.

Jumpgate Evolution is a new MMORPG based off the classic Jumpgate MMO from NetDevil. The original game shows its age, but confident in the design, NetDevil has decided to rebuild and expand it into a modern MMO. Today we have three screenshots of a Solrain Fighter.

WarCry recently attended an event in San Francisco held by Eidos and Funcom. There we played Age of Conan and came back with a trove of art assets. Some of these are new, some not so much, but we have it all here for you today.

Here is a sample:

• Screenshots
• Renders
• Concept Art

Auran's ex-game designer and producer, David Gillespie, made a post on his personal blog, Wide Open Spaces, about the whole Fury and Auran debacle. Gillespie expressed his sorrow for the studio he dedicated more than two years of his life for:

I remember hearing a long time ago (couldn't possibly remember the source) that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. You can see it play out with major corporations who don't alter their strategies with changing markets, flying in the face of all the evidence presented to them, watching their consumer bases shrink in slow motion before them, unable or unwilling to make the turn before the iceberg collides.

I've just finished watching it play out at a company I used to work at, Auran, a game developer based in Brisbane, Australia. Those who played strategy games in the mid-90's probably came across their biggest hit, Dark Reign, which set the company up and garnered worldwide acclaim. Of course then the publisher Activision bank-rolled a start-up and took pretty much the entire development team away; it's safe to say things never really quite got back on track...

Read the rest at David Gillespie's Wide Open Spaces.

This week's images show off a very important sword fight and an image that clearly is part of one of those interactive world elements they've discussed. At AGDC, the FLS team told a story about a monkey who could be convinced to throw a tomato at a guy in the stocks. Man in stocks? Check. Monkey? Check. Tomatoes? Check.

Auran Developments was a company set up to employ all the developers who worked at Auran on Fury and their other title Trainz. It has closed and with it, all the developers on both games let go. That said, in release, CEO Tony Hilliam described how they would retain a small core of developers to continue both products.

Age of the Chosen is still on track to launch tomorrow.

The Directors of Auran Developments, the company that employs all the Auran staff, have today called in a Voluntary Administrator (like Chapter 11 in the US). All the staff were dismissed today. Despite earlier reports, staff will be paid for all their work to date, their annual leave entitlements, redundancy payments and long service leave.

Whilst this is the end of Auran Developments, it is far from the end of FURY and Trainz.

Read it all here.

This gets a bit confusing, so brace yourselves. Australian developer Auran announced yesterday that Fury would be free-to-play forever as of the December 14th expansion pack. Within hours of the announcement though, Kotaku Australia posted a quote from CEO Tony Hilliam that said: "We will then have some bad news to follow (unless a miracle occurs), but there will be a very positive end to the week."

This follows a report from Angry-Gamer.net that claimed, "Auran out of steam" and predicted a dire future, which Hilliam later refused as "categorically false" back on Kotaku. That Angry-Gamer article ran on the same day that Kotaku had this report that spoke of downsizing, a more agile development team and the absorption of some people into a new Tantalus studio next door to the Auran studio. Just for fun, GamesIndustry.biz chimed in with a report that seems to mirror a report from Kotaku five days earlier.

So, if that's as clear as mud, here is the deal: Fury is going free-to-play, there will be layoffs, some people are moving to a new Brisebane studio unrelated to Fury run by Tantalus and bad news is likely to follow.

Click below for the free-to-play press release.