An investigation into The Chronicles of Spellborn server outages by Games.com has revealed that Playdom is ending the massive multiplayer online game in September, 2010. Supposedly, the problems that occurred August 2, 2010 and plagued players were unrelated to the imminent ending, but helped bring it to light…

Frogster Interactive has just announced that it is working with Runewaker Entertainment on a new, free massive multiplayer online (MMO) game, Runes of Magic, which will supposedly change the way people look at free MMOs. So far open and closed beta periods have not been announced, but the press release states that the German language version of the game will be released before the end of 2008, with the English language version of the game for European and North American users released shortly after.

So far I’m not seeing any real revolutionary ideas when I look at the press release. The idea of having two classes for the character, a primary and secondary class, picked from six different options is new – I’ll give them that. But most of the other features from the game have appeared in other MMOs before. Some of the highlights from the features list are the 600-odd quests, skills and spells to learn (of course), armor sets with special abilities, runes that can be added to items, a crafting system, teleportation, the ability to own homes or guild houses, an in-game auction house, ridable animals, a system that gauges your reputation based on actions and the ability to control the game with the mouse or keyboard. Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen most, if not all, of those features in other MMORPGs.