Now that Morten has quit Funcom, I’m the last programmer left that still knows the code for The Longest Journey enough to poke around in it. For about a year, I’ve been the maintainer, and that’s not a curse at all, it’s fun. I really like the old game, and there hasn’t been much new in the adventure genre, so it’s still one of the best adventures you can buy, if you ask me. I guess that’s why we still get requests from publishers to make re-releases.

Two years ago I took the English release and compressed it all down to just two CDs (instead of four) because if you’re making budget releases theat earn you only about a dollar on each game sold, then the cost of the media acually makes a big impact. The major reason his was possible is that we have far better sound compression these days, and PCs can spend more CPU time decompressing it. the original game used ADPCM sounds and was specced to run on a 485/25. The new release uses .ogg sounds and needs a slightly better CPU. I picked ogg because it’s royalty-free, and was supported by audiere, a LGPL-licensed sound library that even I could use. I’d never done any sound coding before.

That version is the one now on sale, and not only is it smaller, it also runs on Windows XP without any compatibility mode settings. The old game had some issues with certain onboard soundcards, the new one works with any kind of modern hardware.

With the Dreamfall release date getting closer, there’s been more and more interest in the old game. Some weeks ago, a romanian computer magazine asked us if they could use it for a cover-mount, something we couldn’t have done with the 4 CD release. And when our french publishers wanted to re-release the game in france, I recompressed the french sounds, so now we’ve got the 2 CD version in two languages. Right now, I’m working on a new german release and a scandinavian DVD that’ll contain the swedish, norwegian and english versions all in one. And on op of all that, there’s been an offer from one publisher to do an entirely new synchronization, bringing the total number of localizations for the game to a whooping ten!

We’ve all compared MMORPG subscriptions to phone subscriptions at one point, and now it’s becoming even more so. We have decided to give Anarchy Online away for free, no charge, no monthly cost, no nothing.

Check out the details here. Free Crack.

Why are we doing that? For free, you get the game that launched 2 years ago, with all the bugfixes, improvements and freebies we added over the years, but without the expansions. We’re hoping that some of the people who play for free will say “uh, this is fun, now I want that expansion thing”, and become paying customers. But if they don’t, well, they still get an MMORPG.

This is for you if
– you can’t afford two MMORPGs at a time
– you have no credit card (we don’t require one for free accounts)
– you want to check out AO at your own time, without being forced to pay after two weeks.

I’m expecting people to say “yeah, desperate attempt at getting customers after WoW and EQ2 launched”. The truth is, we’ve been thinking about this for a very long time, because like the cellphone market, we think there’s room for more than one business model. Requiring a credit card has been a major obstacle in many markets, for example. We probably lost some customers to them, but not dramatically. And we don’t know if they’ll stay lost – after SWG, which is a much more direct competitor in the SciFi genre, we saw a drop, but a pretty fast recovery when people found that they the depth of the game, their friends or whatever drew them to AO particularly.

I think that like UO, Anarchy is here to stay. We’ll continue to be creative, both in-game and sales-wise.

And now go play!

The opinions in this posting are my own, not those of Funcom. And if I get the facts wrong, you can’t sue either me or them.

We have opened the download offer for Shadowlands.You can now download the game instead of buying it.

The download from funcom isn’t always extremely fast, so I’ve put the client out through bittorrent. If you want to get the game (it’s a whooping 1.2 GB), do the following:

1. Download and Install bittorrent.

2. Click here to start the download.

If this form of download doesn’t work, you can always get it from the official pages. And remember that you need to pay with either a credit card or german giro account to play.

“Shadowlands not only meets its rivals head on in terms of content for players of all levels, but in many ways saunters past them without breaking sweat. There is just so much to see and do that even the most established players will still be making discoveries for months to come.” — IGN.com, Editor’s Choice Award

It’s outright scary. The launch was delayed, but when it came, it happened almost without a hitch. The last night before was frantic, and I’m a bit sad that I couldn’t be a part of the last-minute panic. I do miss the pressure on the Anarchy Team occasionally…

And then, nothing happened. No server crashes. No big screwups. Nothing. The forums have been extremely peaceful, too. Not even complaints about the patch size, which I had expected.

So what do others say?
Our pre-order numbers have been great. We are currently number 1 on the Top Sellers list at play.com, ahead of GTA and SWG, and even ahead of the BF 1942 expanson. There was a lot of anticipation for the game.
Our first review is up on tothegame.com. And not bad, either: it’s a straight 9 out of 10.

It’s time to slap the Shadowlands team on the back and tell them what a great job they’ve done. Today was a real good day at Funcom.

I’ve been waiting and working a long time for this day. Funcom has announced our plans to finally make a sequel to The Longest Journey, the world’s best adventure game ever made. I can safely say that without selfpraise, because I didn’t work on it. But I loved playing it, and I’m looking forward to working on it – I hope I will. We’re looking at making this for a number of platforms, unlike the original TLJ, which was purely a PC game.

The second new game that we’ve been workin on for a while now is a massive multiplayer online game. This one is a very exciting title, and we’re putting all the experience gained from Anarchy Online into it, to make it a killer title.

We’re also producing an Expansion and a Booster Pack for Anarchy Online, but I won’t be having to do much with those, because I’m working on the new stuff.

Good news indeed, don’t you think?