Aion posts

The Steam PC game download site continues its annual and massive holiday sale into its second day today. While there are a ton of price breaks for individual games, publisher bundles and other game collections, the following games are on sale for just one day only, until 1 pm Eastern time on Wednesday.

Defense Grid: The Awakening - $2
Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light - $5.10 or $3.60 if you own any Tomb Raider game
Burnout Paradise The Ultimate Box - $5
Gothic Bundle (all games in the Gothic series) - $34.99
Disciples III Renaissance - $7.50
Men of War Gold Edition - $8.75
The Witcher - $5
Resident Evil 5 - $10.50
BioShock 2 - $9.99
Aion - $10
Puzzle Quest - $1.50
The Polynomial - $2.50

Aion is still going strong, and the expansion is coming soon. This launch trailer shows off some of the new enemies and zones that Balaur has to offer to both races of Aion, and its certainly a pretty sight. There's also reams of gameplay footage, so if you wanna know what playing Aion looks like, have a go! Otherwise, there's nothing here that you haven't seen in previous Aion trailers. Same old Korean fantasy style, same old MMO monster killing.

Download HD Aion: Assault on Balaurea Launch Trailer
Check out all Aion: Assault on Balaurea downloads

With the first full week of September now with us we begin the busiest time of the year for new PC game release. In addition to the games mentioned here, NCsoft is relaunching its MMO Aion to retail stores with a new expansion pack.

R.U.S.E. - Developer Eugen Systems and publisher Ubisoft try out something different in the RTS genre with this World War II themed game that uses things like dummy units and other features to keep his or her opponent guessing about its next move. This game is also one of the first to natively support Microsoft's Windows 7 multi-platform touch-screen features in order to control your units.

Download R.U.S.E. Demo (1.54 GB)

Aion may not be the World of Warcraft killer some wish it was, but it's still a solid experience. The new expansion may be coming to stores, repackaged with the original game, but that doesn't mean it doesn't deserve trailers. This new trailer is fairly standard MMO fair: heavy usage of choir music, fly-through of a new zone, and the showing of new enemies in said zone. There's no narration, just a simple examination of the environment players will be enjoying soon. We can't say we are impressed too much, but when you've seen one MMO trailer, you've seen them all. Can't help but become a cynic!

In September 2009, NCsoft launched its long awaited fantasy MMO Aion to the US and European territories (it had previously launched at NCsoft native Korea). While the game sold well out of the box it has apparently lost much of its subscriber base since then. NCsoft plans to re-release Aion to retail stores in September in a new edition that will include content from an upcoming expansion pack.

The expansion is called Aion: Assault on Balaurea and will feature new and updated zones along with new skills, weapons and items, an increase in the game's level cap and more. The expansion pack will be released for free to current Aion subscribers. The new retail version of the game with the expansion willl be released in the US on September 7 and in Europe on September 10. The retail version will include some exclusive in-game pets.

Summer may have just officially started just a few days ago but the Steam PC game download site has already launched its big summer sales period. From now until July 4 you can get some big savings on a ton of games including 25 percent off all Rockstar Games and 2K Games titles, 33 percent off all Ubisoft games, and 75 percent of all 1C Company games (just to name a few).

In addition to all of the "regular" sales, Valve will put a number of games and game packs on the price chopping block for one day only. From now until 1 pm Eastern time Friday you can get the games listed below at these prices:

• Killing Floor - $5
• Trine - $4
• Counter-Strike Source- $6.80
• Dirt 2 - $10
• Overlord Complete Pack (3 Game Bundle) - $4.50
• Aion Standard Edition - $19.99
• Unreal Deak Pack (5 Game Bundle) - $13.50
• BioShock 2 - $14.99

How secure is your MMO account? According to a recent post on the Symantec blog site your account could be part of a massive database of 44 million stolen MMO accounts that were found on a server (the location of the server was unnamed). That's a whopping 17GB of account info. The numbers included over 210,000 accounts from World of Warcraft and 60,000 from Aion.

The server seems tied into a Trojan program that Symantec has identifed as Trojan.Loginck. The program "logs on to gaming websites to check if stolen gaming credentials are valid." The blog suggests this database could be used by whomever is running to sell the accounts for cash. Symantec suggests, quite correctly, that MMO gamers should perhaps change their password to avoid having their accounts stolen.

[Via Blue's News]

Last fall, NCsoft was praising the US and European launch of its Korean-developed fantasy MMO Aion. The publisher said the game sold a total of close to 1 million copies in both regions. However it looks like the game has failed to keep a number of its players after the launch last September.

This week NCsoft announced that the Aion development team took a look at the game's player count and concluded, "most of our servers didn't have ideal populations." The decision has been made to merge (i. e. shut down) a number of Aion's servers to increase the population of the remaining servers. There's no word yet on how many servers will be affected or when it will happen but details are promised "in the coming weeks." In the meantime a major new patch for the game will be released on June 2 while a large content patch (2.0) is planned for release in the US sometime this fall.

[Via Massively]

The MMO game space just got a new developer/publisher today with the official announcement of En Masse Entertainment. Based in Seattle the company is a subsidiary of South Korean-based publisher Bluehole Studio and are planning to bring Bluehole's fantasy themed MMO game Tera to North America and Europe.

En Masse's co-founders include Patrick Wyatt as its Chief Operating Officer. Wyatt had previously co-founded ArenaNet and helped to launch their title Guild Wars. Another co-founder is Senior Producer Brian Knox who previously worked as Producer for NCsoft's latest MMO launch Aion.

As far as Tera itself, it's described as a game with lots of player-controlled action in "a world where six races try to work together for the common good." It's scheduled to launch in Korea later this year but no definitive launch date has been announced for the US and Europe. The game's official web site has already launched with lots of video and screenshots from the game.

MMO publisher NCsoft is the latest to offer up its financial results for its last fiscal quarter and it looks like business is good at the company. For the quarter that ended on December 31, 2009 the Korean-based NCsoft recorded 71.22 billion won in net profits. That's 11 times the profit the company generated in the same period a year ago when it had only 6.424 billion won.

Revenues came in at 197 billion won for the quarter, which compares to 99.219 billion won for the same period a year ago. NCsoft said the increase was due in part to solid sales of its newest MMO Aion along with a resurgence of interest in its Lineage and Lineage II games.