Warner Bros. Acquires Turbine

NNUfergs writes with news that Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group has acquired Turbine Inc., creators of Lord of the Rings Online, Asheron's Call, and Dungeons & Dragons Online. Terms were not disclosed, but the Boston Globe claims the price was somewhere around $160 million. "Warner Bros. Interactive has bought a number of game development houses in recent years, in a bid to become a major power in video gaming. In 2007, the company purchased TT Games, a British firm that develops family-friendly products like Lego Star Wars and Lego Batman. In 2009, Warner Bros. bought the assets of bankrupt Chicago game company Midway, maker of the popular Mortal Kombat games. And earlier this year, it acquired a majority stake in Rocksteady Studios, another British developer, which created the hit game Batman: Arkham Asylum. ... Acquiring Turbine will give Warner Bros. total control over all future video games based on author J.R.R. Tolkien's beloved Lord of the Rings novels. Turbine holds an exclusive license to make an Internet-based game based on the books, while last year, Warner Bros. won a license to make non-Internet-based Tolkien video games."

Re:that's all folks

[poena.dare]

Toontown was almost there.

Seriously, if you have kids, you should try it for a month. No PvP, but still - PvE where you actually can have a piano drop on a bad guy is pretty frikkin hilarious. Then one day the game becomes a grind like any other. But the first month is pretty damn fun.

Re:Meanwhile, Asheron's Call

[Nedry57]

I still play Asheron's Call casually and like it, especially with the new low level experience. AC is the only MMO world that feels like a real world to me, not just a bunch of different theme park zones put together. That said, I'm no fanboy; it has had (and I'm sure still has) a number of flaws. I hope that it sticks around, or that someday another MMO will come close to the experience of the AC world but with a modernized client.

I've played other games like WoW and LoTRO, and enjoyed them for different reasons (mostly the experience of group questing with friends, etc.) But they leave me feeling like I'm on some kind of guided tour. Even the class-based system feels far too rigid to me. I miss skill points. I'm not saying that AC did this perfectly either--far from it--but that doesn't mean it couldn't be done better in another game.