Well, seems like the digital download servers for the European Beta of Warhammer Online are exploding, so here’s where I’m going to download the client I paid money to play early.
Peer to peer FTW!
Oh and BTW nice move EA, you screwed up, again. A file server for a hugely popular online game. That’s so 1999ish!
Damn, those Burnout Paradise updates are so cool that I’m resilient to play the game just now.
Being a completist, I’m worried that when the next Motorbikes add-on (with night & day cicle, too!) will be released I will be so burned out (pun intended) that I will skip it regardless of its quality.
Oh, to have limited time and lots of games to play!
After several weeks of absence (mostly due to RoK burnout, man that expansion was as big as boring, leveling-wise), I’m back to EQ2 to prepare for the November expansion.
Behold the portal to the Shard of Fear, a monument to Innoruk!
I found the game in really good shape, with lots of new players and additions from the Living Legacy promotion and events, a complete reitemization for levels 1-59 to keep old contents viable even with the new level branch of RoK (70-80). Once RoK got live, the chance your old raid gear would be useful in the new continent was very very slim. Now the item progression is more organic and there aren’t dramatic changes between old legendaries and new uncommons-rares.
How i’d like to see something similar in WOW, to get the seam between classic and TBC more organic.
As soon I logged, I was instantly invited to a Shard of Fear group. I needed about an hour to readjust to the game with my Defiler!
Since some days ago he realized that the free to play model is really working, he’s so excited by his own deductive genius (he will ask for a mere 20% of your incomes to let you use it!) that now he decided that the PS3 is an unrecoverable failure (citing made-up wrong data and ignoring that there are public-disclosed Sony forecasts that disprove his assumptions, despite he’s a self-professed Games Industry super-consultant). I wonder what he will say once he’ll discover that the Xbox line forecasted passive balances for almost ten years? Rewrite the rules of finance itself?
BTW check his own corporate site. It’s as much pretentious as hilarious!
Killing purple demons, a matter of pride!
Well, sometimes it just feels so odd: an heroic paladin sent to kill demons, that are pink, violet or purple.
It’s a matter of justice or… fashion?
Speaking about Diablo 3, developers are eager to say it won’t be categorized as an MMO:
While Battle.net can certainly support that many players at one time, the lack of a persistent world and restrictions on how many players can be within each “world” (game) would keep Diablo III from being categorized as an MMO.
Now, let’s think about the last persistent online world you saw… Mmm none? That’s the myth of MMO worlds: they are persistent.
Aside for Ultima and a few other cases, most of today’s MMOs are barely persistent, unmodifiable worlds that acts as hubs for restricted instanced contents. Unless having a common marketplace it’s your idea of persistent world, of course! Cutting trees, modifying geography and landscapes, even leaving things on the ground are gameplay elements no longer considered during MMOG design. They were the expensive part of MMOs operation in 1997, wonder why in 2008 most MMOs are free? Yes, that’s because the world you see don’t even exist in the way you experience it on their servers, it’s just a glorified chatroom background, at some extent…
Now I’m sad and nostalgic!
To be honest, I doubt I will ever spend all the necessary money to personally grab the whole European Rock Band Scam Set. Said so, I will never been more grateful to my pal Gianluca to have spent all that money by yourself, just to let us friends play.
Rock Band is an astonishing game because everything it lacks in innovation (like the whole *Star/*Hero/*Band/etc product line), was gained back from a social point of view, making the video games a get together event again, something we stopped to do as soon as massive games started to wheel their gears in the late 90s.
It’s also safe to mention that Rock Band did the online support with tracks and events millions times better than Guitar Hero. Too bad for the European screw-up.
Last night, me and Morhan decided to try to sort out the Book 1, Chapter 11 of Lord Of The Rings Online with a party of two. Needless to say, confronting the Witch King with such a small party was a suicide. The trip let me appreciate more the cure of details level and quest designers put in the game, even if the Lord Of The Rings is not my favourite fantasy setting.
At the end of the dungeon, there are a lots of Elite Wights, most of them completely dismembered, just like the Deadly Tomb Wight depicted here. The Wight was accompained by its own dismembered arm, that was flailing aimlessy during combat.
That’s the right touch of realism you can’t safely expect by today quest-design standards on other MMOGs, but when it happens, it’s always more than appreciated since it increases the realism and coherence of the quest set-ups.
From now on, I’ll try to test Gengo and Wordpress 2.5.1 to post in both english and Italian. Older relevant articles will be (slowly) translated. If something’s will start to act fishy, it’s just me trying to sort things out.
Seems like the suggestion box for the cancel subscription in the Age of Conan account manager is bugged as well: it simply cut your comment up to a point, even if it let you write ad infinitum, without any warning. That’s odd, because after the first month is almost passed, server population decreased critically (in some high-level zones now you see at most an handful of instances, when before they were about 20), and judging to the forums, lots of people are stress testing the account management page, especially the “cancel” one.
Wonder why their real-time, very small, instanced, game servers are hitching, crashing and burning with bugs? They still have to learn how to do web forms, give them some time (and definitely meaningful suggestions when your account will be cancelled).
Oh, back on topic, Eurogamer made a really strange review of AOC. Basically they say the game is perfect, well written and had the best launch ever in an MMO. The problem, is some features they give for working don’t. Like Keep-Based PVP. In fact until now there were only one Keep-Based PVP battle and was a mess, so much that developers apologized to all the gaming community in the AoC launcher!
Even if they played only the Tortage bit (admittedliy several spans better of all the other quests, but still pretty mediocre and disjointed (why the single player nonsense?), even for an MMOG) how they can justify quests masterfully written (and accompained by broken cutscenes) like that?:
You are asked to surrender to a squad of ten guards, the same guards you slayed coninously for the most part of your Destiny quests. You do that (surrender, not slaying). Fade to black, you are carried away. Fade to back. Inside the Admiral Strom stronghold, a torturer addresses to you, explaining where you are, what are their plans, the standard bad guy stereotype. Then he says: “Oh my! Nobody disarmed you!”. You massacre him, the countless guard inside the keep (”No, you can’t beat us, surrender for your best!”, they said) and exit the keep. To do what? Looking for an NPC that tasks you to kill an escaping Strom (which is the whole nut of your Destiniy Quest from the start), the same guy that was in the keep when they brought you there.
Masterfully written, for a retarded ten years old, maybe. I’ve seen Mighty Morphing Power Rangers episodes with a better plot and sequence of events.