Soldiers of the Wasteland

Just in case you couldn’t decipher the string of acronyms thrown in the post title, the Left 4 Dead ‘Survival Pack’ was released yesterday on PC as free downloadable content for owners of the game. This update introduces the new game mode known as Survival Mode where players must try to survive a continuous onslaught of zombies for as long as possible, as well as also including 16 new maps and 7 new achievements.

Judging by the spawn-graph released by Valve, Survival Mode looks like it will appeal to the hardcore gamers inside of us all. If your team manages to survive for 12 minutes, then you will be getting a new Tank spawn every 30 seconds! It’s going to be tough to survive for 12 minutes, and basically impossible to go over 14 with the Tank spawning every 20 seconds or less, but I’m sure SotW is up for the challenge.

To find people who are ready for that challenge, be sure to head to the L4D section of the forums.

Our home page has been redesigned! If you have any problems viewing this page, or have any comments on the redesign please let me know in the comment section below, or on the forums.

To clarify how much trouble Ascaron are actually in, thegreatcthulhu has kindly provided some information about the German legal proceedings of Insolvency and the phase of Administration.

The German legal proceeding of “Insolvency” is the same as the US legal proceeding known as Chapter 11 Bankruptcy.

When you go into Bankruptcy/Insolvency, your companies leaders have to ceed their power over to a court appointed “administrator”. This person oversees your company for a specific amount of time (in Germany, 3 months) to evaluate the situation and then afterwards, they decide whether or not to have the company fold or restructure.

The legal phase of Insolvency/Bankruptcy where the court appointed administrator takes over is, as you probably guessed, “Administration”.

The only optimistic part about this is that the court actually approved they could claim insolvency… otherwise they would’ve been told they’re SOL. So they must have at least somewhat of a snowball’s chance in… you know where.

So it looks like Ascaron’s situation is a little worse then they are actually letting on. Thanks again to Cthulhu for the clarification.

And if you feel like doing some further reading on the subject, here are some helpful links:

• http://www.mayerbrown.com/publications/article.asp?id=2572&nid=6
• http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m4130/is_n3_v25/ai_19161963/

Things aren’t looking too good for Ascaron right now. While administration doesn’t seem to be quite as final as bankruptcy, it is still not the best of situations for a company to be in.

The official announcement made by Ascaron stated that they are already in discussions with several parties regarding a friendly takeover. Assuming that all goes well, Sacred 2 might not be disappearing from our computers just yet.

Ascaron also said that their developers were currently working on the expansion to Sacred 2 as well as the next installment of the game, Sacred 3, so perhaps there is still a good chance that development and support for the game will continue.

While we wait for further news on the matter, feel free to read the official announcement below and share your thoughts on the forums.

17th april 2009: Ascaron Entertainment GmbH announces the finalization of the sacred 2 console versions and also presents itself under the protection of insolvency law.

“On tuesday, the 14th april 2009, the Ascaron Entertainment GmbH went into administration at the regional court in Bielefeld, Germany.
Because of this Ascaron is now protected by german administration right.
Ascaron Entertainment GmbH wants to use this chance to save the company and of course the jobs involved.

The famous action roleplaying game sacred2 has a huge potential on all international platforms.
Sacred 2 pc-version hold place 1 in the german gamecharts for five weeks during october 2008 and was granted several awards. By the end of 2008 over 100.000 copies were sold in germany, as well as over 400.000 copies worldwide, along with several top places in international pc charts.
The development of the sacred 2 playstation3 and xbox 360 versions were finished a few days ago. The necessary approvals have been given by sony and microsoft.
Both versions of sacred 2 Fallen Angel will hit the shelf by the end of may 2009.
At the moment the developers are working on a Sacred 2 PC Addon and on the development of the followup product Sacred3.

After four years of developing Sacred 2 Fallen Angel, Ascaron had to go into administration because further delays in development made it necessary .
Even with very high personal commitment of all Ascaron employees it was not possible to make up for this delay.
Ascaron Management already started negotiations with several well-known interested parties to discuss a friendly takeover.

Our hosting provider has got in contact with me to let me know there will be some scheduled downtime this weekend, as they physically move our server (Mason) to a new location.

2 of our major servers, Sphinx & Mason are scheduled to be moved on the public holiday weekend of 11th and 12th of April, 2009

The server will be shut down and physically moved to the new location. We expect a downtime of roughly 10-15 minutes for the physical move.

It is likely that the servers will do a filesystem check when it is booted up. This may take anywhere between 15 minutes and a few hours depending on the size of the filesystem and it is almost impossible to gauge an actual timeframe on this process.

During this period the website and forums will be unavailable.

If I receive any additional information between now and then, I will update this post as well as the related thread on the forums.