Earlier today we heard Perpetual Entertainment was being liquidated and aquired by a major indy game developer, only to later learn new investors were coming on board instead. As of about 8PM CST Chris McKibbin, Co-Founder of Perpetual released a statement and updated the official Gods & Heroes website with the following announcement.

Loyal and faithful community members and Beta testers, thank you for your support, help, and understanding during the Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising development process.

The development team established some very lofty and ambitious goals when the initial work was started on Gods & Heroes. Recently, we took a step back to evaluate the competitive landscape, the game’s current state, and the overall goals for our organization. And while we are truly proud of and pleased with what we have created in Gods & Heroes, we also realize that achieving the level of quality and polish that we are committed to will take a significant investment.

The Perpetual team is faced with a unique challenge of simultaneously developing both Gods & Heroes and Star Trek Online in addition to growing our Online Game Platform business. After assessing all of Perpetual’s opportunities, we have made the decision to put the development of Gods & Heroes on indefinite hold.

I want to express my overwhelming gratitude to the community, engineers, designers, artists, animators, and the game services team for the support and effort that has gone into Gods & Heroes.

Moving forward, we’re shifting our collective focus, resources and development efforts to Perpetual’s Platform Services division and Star Trek Online, thereby ensuring that the game lives up to the high level of expectation set by the dedicated Star Trek fan base.

Again, I would personally like to thank all of the Gods & Heroes supporters who have been with us from the beginning. Hopefully, your continued support will be as valuable to our future endeavors as it was with Gods & Heroes..

Vade in pace,
Chris McKibbin

In non-PR speak “indefinite hold” means CANCELLED, and never to see the light of day again. Frankly after seeing and playing the latest build of Gods & Heroes I can’t fault them or their investors for writing the game off, at worst they’ll have a nice tax deduction.

What does this mean for Perpetual Entertainment and Star Trek Online? Well the company will continue to exist with its current executive management and they’ll continue developing the Star Trek Online IP. What remains to be seen is whether the Star Trek Curse will rear its head and claim yet another game title or if they’ll pull off a miracle and be the 2nd Star Trek game title that didn’t suck.

If they weren’t already under enough pressure before to do STO justice with a very skeptical gaming community, the cancellation of their debut MMO and company reshuffling only casts even more doubt on their ability to pull Star Trek Online off as a company.

Flying Labs has finally announced the official launch date for their highly antipicated swashbuckling MMORPG as January 22nd 2008.

They’ve also let loose with the skinny on pre-order pack bonuses which will be:

• Exclusive in-game weapons
• In-game parrot that sits on your shoulder (No respectable pirate should leave port without it)
• Soundtrack CD
• 2-week head-start

Anyone that picks up the pre-order will also get an early 2-week head start in the game starting on January 7th. The pre-order box will be available from retailers on October 23rd.

The Producer John Scott Tynes dropped the last bit of info:

Yes, we will be doing a very large-scale beta when we’re closer to launch. Far more people will get a chance to play than ever have before. The NDA will go away and the world will get a real look at what we’ve been making. We aren’t ready to announce the details of this mega beta period, but look for more news later this fall.

Issue 11 for City of Heroes has been announced as the next free expansion to the super hero MMO. This upcoming expansion features time travel allowing players to go back in time to experience new or old missions and story arcs. It also adds the much awaited ability to dual wield swords, a new willpower set for melee classes, new inventions, and weapon customization for select powers.

Features include:

Ouroboros System:
Through the mysterious Menders of Ouroboros, players gain the ability to “Flashback”, that is to travel through time and relive major events from the history of Paragon City and the Rogue Isles.

Weapon Customization:
Sometimes an assault rifle just isn’t the right tool for the job, or character, especially when he or she should be using a sniper rifle instead. Players can now change their weapons in the same way that they change their costume parts! From within the costume creator and tailor screen players select the new “Weapons” region. A number of new options are now available for appropriate power sets. Current power sets that benefit from this upgrade include Assault Rifle, Mercenaries/Assault Rifle, Bow, Broadsword, Claws, Villain Claws, Dual Blades (see below), Katana, Ninja Blade, Mace, Robotics/Pulse Rifle, and Thugs/Dual Pistols.

Dual Blades:
With a flashing blade in each hand, the Stalker made quick work of the Coralax hybrids guarding the shipwreck.

Now Heroes and Villains can wield paired weapons to devastating effect! Use the new Weapon Customization interface to choose from several types of weapons. Dual Blades also uses a brutal new Combo system, where the order of your strikes can create new advantages for you to take down your foes! Dual Blades is available to Brutes, Scrappers, Stalkers and Tankers!

New Inventions:
Issue 11 brings with it new invention sets including “Very Rare” Purple sets, as well as brand new invention sets for Taunt, Buff and Debuff powers, among others.

For the 2nd time in its history the Ryzom MMORPG is having financial difficulties yet again and is facing closure within weeks unless a buyer steps up again to purchase the floundering MMO.

What went wrong with this unique French MMO title? Frankly the most recent developer to buy it did jack & squat short of bug fixes and updating the home page. Last we checked MMO’s are not a case of you build or buy it with zero advertising or improvements and “they will come”. This isn’t Field of Dreams folks!

As with the previous auction there was a group of players that pooled over 170 K€ together in a bid to make Ryzom an open-source community run MMO. Given another chance they may be able to pull it off this time around.

Ryzom is going to pass through a few uncertain days/weeks, a second time. Our efforts to move Ryzom forward didn’t get the expected repercussions and today as I speak, while the game continues to run and to be supported, the company behind its development - Gameforge France SARL, located in Paris - is lacking the funds to keep going. For those who’ve known the Nevrax times and went through the transitory period in last December, the same legal procedure of “liquidation judiciaire” has been put in place yesterday. This means that while the appointed liquidator will do what it takes to close the company, potential buyers may show up to take over the game Ryzom. If nobody shows up, the servers will be shut down in less than 3 weeks at liquidator’s request.

Source: Official Ryzom Forums

Probably the best news we’ve heard for the upcoming Sci-Fi MMORPG Tabula Rasa. Starr Long has posted on the official TR site saying they need the extra time to polish the game. This delay pushes back the original October 19th launch date to October 30th for pre-order customers. Not exactly a lot of time, but hopefully it helps.

However if we do have to nitpick, it’s how they’re going about polishing the “Stable, & Fast” part while neglecting the “Fun” that really deserves the attention at the mid and end-game. Which means they’re only have about 2 months after launch to tack in some elements to satiate gamers hitting their level caps and keeping them playing before they start getting flamed on their forums by the very fan bois that latched onto the actiony shoot em’ up MMO in the first place.

As the TR dev team goes into crunch mode, it’s a good to know Richard Garriot is taking the title that bears his name on the box so serious, he’s prepping to leave Earth on a promotional space flight for Tabula Rasa where he’ll stay aboard the International Space Station.

Many of you have heard my mantra for game development: “Stable, Fast, Fun. In that order.” We need a little more time to make that happen.

To this end we are moving our Pre-Order headstart date to 10/30/07 and our commercial service start date to 11/2/07. This short but critical amount of time will give us time to address several issues including stability and balance as well as allowing our players to test the continent of Ligo (L38+) and our major changes to crafting for a few weeks rather than a few days. Our entire development staff feels this extra time is needed as does our beta community. We feel confident that this extra time will make a difference on launch day.

That said we are excited about launching the game and moving into a “live” environment where the entire future of the AFS is ahead of us. Expect more posts from Richard Garriott, Paul Sage, and other dev staff over the next few days as they discuss plans for elder content and content updates both long and short term. One of us will also be posting to the website every Friday in order to directly address your feedback, which you can submit via the Feedback Form found here on the RGTR.com website.

See you in game as we wrap up this final leg of testing and get ready for the end-of-beta blow out!

Starr Long
Producer