If you didn’t catch the news elsewhere already: Spellborn Works went bankrupt. In short this means all of us who worked on the game are now without a job. But what does this mean for The Chronicles of Spellborn itself?

At the moment, it has little impact for the players. The game itself is owned by Spellborn NV, which is different from Spellborn Works. Spellborn NV actually ‘hired’ Spellborn Works to develop the game for them. All developers where in turn hired by Spellborn Works. Now that Spellborn Works is bankrupt, all the developers have been laid off.

However Spellborn NV is still in business and as such Acclaim and Frogster still have a game to run. So currently the servers are still up and you can still play the game without any problems.

Development of the MMO however has been shut down in the Netherlands and is now in the process of being moved to Frogster Asia in South-Korea. Here the game will be developed into a Free-to-Play MMO. Frogster intends to rerelease this new version somewhere in 2010.

That is all I know about the current situation. You can still play the game ‘as it is’. But at the same time it seems illogical to assume all involved parties will update the game up until the relaunch in 2010. Or at least, I wonder who would do so…

So, anyone looking for a game designer slash content writer give me call via LinkedIn or mail me at vincent at cyhwuhx.com. To the players: thank you for your support and enjoyment of the game. In the end, everything we did was for you and I speak for the entire team when I say that we are still proud at what we accomplished despite the many hardships.

Until the next Great Collapse!

“Should you be bombarded with one-hit-kills when you are playing a game on Easy?” That, in short, is the main question that got stuck in my head during the credits after my second playthrough of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune _{(Naughty Dog, 2007; PS3)}. I set the difficulty to Easy, as I already completed it once on Normal and was doing this to go treasure hunting and have a more relaxed time playing it. And for the majority of the game, that was exactly right. Then all hell broke loose.

It’s quite annoying how the grenade-launcher enemies can one-hit-kill you almost instantly. I’ve cursed them a lot the first time around, but now they seemed to be adding insult to injury. “Didn’t I set the difficulty to Easy,” I kept asking myself. As soon as the laser-guided snipers entered the fray, there wasn’t a real difference any more with Normal difficulty. Enemies were still bullet-sponges, and they could still instantly kill me. Sure, enemies weren’t quite the bullet-sponges as they were on Normal. But is that enough?

Especially in the latter part when an extra enemy-type gets thrown into the mix, it all seems to become rather difficult and I imagine a large part of the audience giving up here. If you don’t know how to make headshots, when to snipe or how to juggle multiple weapons, you’ll be dead within seconds. Never mind the finale.

It’s especially odd when you consider the very nature of the game. It’s a popcorn-game, it’s easy to understand and grasp for all audiences and is the closest you’ll probably get to an adventure-game for the masses. No wonder a film of the franchise is in the works. But so far, Easy still demands the same skill as any of the other difficulties, you just need less bullets. Which is quite absurd when you think about what ‘Easy’ signifies when you look at it in the menu.

If a popcorn-game is created, it should provide an equally popcorn experience. But at the very least, those one-hit-kills should have been taken out. Hopefully the sequel will fix that and more people will be able to see the credits roll.

Last week I was asked to join in on a podcast concerning narrative structures in games at my old writing home Bashers. I earned my seat on the podcast thanks to 1. me falling in for another person and 2. my work for The Chronicles of Spellborn as ‘lead content’.

The entire podcast is in Dutch, took more than two hours to record, and will take more than two hours to listen to! It’s filled with anecdotes and whatnot, but alas: there is no English version.

You can find the podcast at Bashers.