Ubisoft has announced the closure of two free to play titles – Ghost Recon Phantoms and The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot – in the coming months.

Ghost Recon Phantoms will be shut down on December 1st with Ubisoft Singapore thanking fans for their support. The developer noted that audience outreach simply wasn’t strong enough. “Unfortunately, GRP was not as successful as we had hoped for, so we had to make the decision to close the game. This decision wasn’t easy for us and we tried to find other ways. But in the end we decided to close the game and focus on other projects.”

As for The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot, the reasons were fairly similar – the game wasn’t as popular as the publisher Ubisoft wanted. Subsequently, it will be shutting down in October. “Unfortunately, Mighty Quest for Epic Loot was not as successful as we had hoped for, so we had to make the decision to close the game. This decision wasn’t easy for us and we tried to find other ways. But in the end we decided to close the game and focus on other projects.”

Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be refunds for Ghost Recon Phantoms’ micro-transactions. What are your thoughts on both games’ closures? Let us know in the comments.

Ubisoft’s co-operative action RPG/hack and slash game, The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot, their free to play and whimsical take on the genre that Diablo created, with a dash of custom bases and tower defense thrown in, has been a mainstay of PC gaming for a good while now; but it has constantly been in a pre-release state, since the game never officially launched. Well, that changes today- much like Minecraft and Gmail before it, The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot today loses its pretty much meaningless ‘beta’ tag and ‘officially’ releases on PC.

“For us the Beta phases served as a way to continue iterating and forging the direction of the game,” said Quentin Gallet, executive producer. “Now that the core gameplay and tone are locked in, we’re focused on continuing to collaborate with our community to build upon this direction and refine what we have created. The Mighty Quest will receive regular updates with new features and with our community’s help it will continue to grow and improve.”

Of course, nothing will really change- the good thing about PC games is how they continue to change and evolve with time, even after release, so functionally, you shouldn’t notice any difference at all. But if you were loath to count or play The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot so far because it had not officially launched (whatever that means), well then, I guess this comes as good news to you, doesn’t it?

Ubisoft has announced a new in game event that lets players of their free to play hack and slash dungeon crawler The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot for free. The event is titled Opulencia’s Hero Draft, where players are offered the chance for players to test out each of Opulencia’s four heroes to determine who players want to draft onto their looting team. 

The four heroes- the archer, the knight, the mage, and the runaway- will be put up on a rotational basis for players to check out over the next four weekends, with them being featured over one weekend in that order.

If players like the heroes they are playing with, they can also earn a discount of over 60% of in-game currency price of the heroes by leveling them up during their free weekends. The higher they level the character, the larger the discount.

Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more coverage.

Ubisoft’s The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot, their take on the hack and slash action RPG genre, with its goofy humor, and its short and snappy approach to gameplay, is going to get a Free Hero Weekend, Ubisoft announced today.

The game, which is currently available in Open Beta on Steam, will allow more players to get familiar with its zaniness. The first weekend will start today and runs until April 22 at 8am UK time. It will allow players to play as the boisterous Knight a.k.a Sir Painhammer, the surly Archer a.k.a Blackeye Bowgart and the aspiring world dominator, the Mage a.k.a The Earl of Evilosity.

During the weekend, several half off packs will be unlocked that will allow players unlimited access to the heroes, even after the weekend. Additionally heroes and pets will be bundled as well, so it’s just a weekend of good deals all around for fans of this game.

Despite being a new IP and available in open beta for two weeks, Ubisoft’s The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot has amnaged to garner more than 1.5 million registrations.

Statistics released by the publisher indicated that 29 billion pieces of gold had been looted, with 790,000 player created castles and 28 million hours of collective play time thus far from players in over 240 countries worldwide. Fans who streamed on Twitch provided more than 3,360 hours of footage with the Knight being the most popular character for players. Check out Sir Painhammer’s arrogant yet altogether hypnotizing profile above.

It’ll be a while before a final release date is attached to The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot but with Ubisoft Montreal behind it, the open beta will be a blast in the meantime. Stay tuned for more updates in the coming weeks and let us know your own personal stories from the beta in the comments below.

This differs from the currently closed beta since you’ll be able to access different tiers each offering the main game along with content that you’d normally have to pick up via microtransactions. So hit up other players’ citadels and try not to rob your friends in the process.

There are currently four packs you can purchase for early access: the Chunk of Change Knight Pack and Chunk of Change Archer Packs, each for $19.99; the Mage Legit Fan Pack which retails for $39.99; and the so-called “champion of packs”, the High Roller Pack which retails for $99.99. What are your thoughts on the game and will you be picking it up via Early Access? Let us know in the comments.

The newest trailer for Ubisoft’s The Mighty Quest For Epic Loot, a whimsical free to play Diablo lite that gives players creation tools as well, shows us the sheer amount of customization options afforded to players in the game.

Players get to have new castle themes (which let them make their castle stand out from all the other castles), as well as new hats (thanks for that, Valve), both of which are available to players directly from the Castle Heart (meaning the entire process should be considerably streamlined).

These will be a part of the game’s monthly update (which goes live October 22). Other new features for the game include new gear abilities – the best loot now comes with devastating magical side effects, the possibility for players to deactivate their shields, more than 20 new castle rooms and much, much more.

Stay tuned for more coverage on this whimsical and relentlessly fun title.

Ubisoft is one of those rare publishers that is making a push towards free to play games, but is not compromising on game design at all, and is instead providing us with quality free to play game experiences. Anno Online, released earlier this year, was a great example of this development, and now, their upcoming, wonderful The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot, their own whimsical take on the free to play genre, is another.

The above developer diary takes us behind the scenes on the title’s development, and tells us about the challenges faced by the development team in crafting a free to play title while also keeping balance so that the game would not be broken or exploitative. They also talked about the game’s dialog, its artstyle, and its delightful, whimsical sense of humor.

The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot is a free to play dungeon crawling loot based game; it’s a very different take on the formula established by Diablo, and it works for a very different style of play. Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more coverage.

The open houses allow just about anyone the chance to sign up for a sneak peek at The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot that is still in closed beta. The “Loot-O-Thon” allows players to challenge each other to see who can garner the most loot.

The success of the open houses has been pretty good, with the first open house seeing 71 million gold coins plundered, with more than 498 million gold coins plundered in the second open house. Ubisoft has thus challenged players to garner 1 billion gold coins and to take on Lord Marleybone of the castles in level 20 to 24 in the third open house.

Of course, gamers can also check out 2014-bound titles such as The Crew and The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot. The lineup will be present at booth #612, with PAX Prime taking part in Washington, Seattle from August 30th to September 2nd. Theater showings, pre-order incentives and companion apps (especially the ctOS Mobile app for Watch_Dogs) are all on the card.

Games like Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and The Crew will be available for hands-on time, with LAN games also planned for The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot and Might & Magic Duel of Champions.