Chronicles of Spellborn launches - sort of News

The intriguing independent MMO Chronicles of Spellborn is released today - if you happen to live in Germany, Austria or Switzerland.

Other European countries will need to wait until next week to get a copy, with the exception of the UK, which will be twiddling its thumbs until January.

In a bizarre move, developer Spellborn International has bundled publishing rights for the UK in with North America, Australia, New Zealand and South America, and licensed the lot to US operator Acclaim.

Acclaim announced last week that it would begin closed beta testing simultaneous with the European launch today, with a release date planned for January next year. It did mention in passing that it had picked up the British rights too, but we missed that at the time - sorry.

While most of Acclaim's territories do share the English language, they occupy three very different time zones, which could make these Spellborn servers rather strange places to be. The decision is all the stranger when you consider that the lingua franca for the 'International' (i.e. not German or French) European servers will almost certainly be English.

Additionally, the Spellborn website carries the news that the countries of Scandinavia, the Benelux regions and France won't be able to get their hands on copies of the game until next week - Friday 5th December, to be exact.

That's also the date when the free-to-play version of the game, which gives unlimited access to the early levels as a sampler, goes live. At this point all Europeans should be able to get involved - except those in the UK, because our IP addresses have been blocked by Acclaim.

We recently previewed Spellborn from the beta test, and thought it might be a "cult hit in the making" for its involving, physical combat and relatively advanced AI.