Yes, I really do believe you can’t honestly review an MMO without investing yourself in it for a fairly substantial bit of time, so that any oddities with controls and stuff become second nature and you can understand the core of what the game developers were striving for. A 1999 EverQuest review could have written all about the low polygons and stiffness of the character models, the laughably sharp-cornered world and so on, and missed the forest for the trees. You have to play a MMO long enough to see and appreciate the forest before you stamp a score on a review.
Saylah from Mystic Worlds, one of my absolute favorite bloggers, is taking a break from gaming to work on a screenplay. That’s pretty cool, but I’ll miss her thoughts on game design and her adventures in Runes of Magic!
What else does Beau like? He likes playing MMOs a la carte. This game does this thing nicely, while this game is strong here. And with Free to Play games, he can choose among them for the kind of gaming he wants to do at the moment, and it costs nothing.
Hudson at Saving the World explains a little more how upcoming superhero MMO Champions Online will deal with duplicate hero names in its shardless universe. While I agree that it’s a REAL PAIN to be on different servers than your friends, I like the different ways server communities can grow. So I guess I don’t know if shardlessness is a good thing or a bad thing.
In the same vein, Syp at Bio Break, newly given permission to discuss Champions Online on his blog, weighs in with his official reviewfirst impressions (sorry) :) His verdict? Champions Online improves upon City of Heroes in many ways, but is still essentially the same sort of game. Evolutionary, not revolutionary — but better.
Wiqd of iMMOvation writes extensively about his ten year love affair with Norrath. He strayed, sometimes for years, but Norrath always kept calling him back, and now he’s tearing things up in EQ2. Woot :)
Wilhelm at The Ancient Gaming Noob takes his own look through EverQuest’s long history, talks about the nostalgia for “classic” EverQuest and wonders if World of Warcraft will be airmailing rose-colored glasses to all its original players when IT turns ten.
Abalieno at Cesspit notes that according to EA and CCP’s published subscription numbers, indie hardcore space sim EVE Online now has more subscribers than Triple A, super expensive, saturation-hyped PvP fantasy game Warhammer Online. It’s easy to draw negative comparisons between an indie MMO with modest expectations and a game with all the resources of one of the largest game companies in the entire world behind it, but I think the situation is even easier to figure out. EVE Online isn’t trying to lure WoW players, and Warhammer is. It’s pointless to market to WoW players. They are never going to stay with your game. WoW players, by and large, play WoW.
And that’s it for today! Tonight, I’m going to see Star Trek. I got my new computer yesterday and am loading it up with LOTS AND LOTS OF GAMES. My frame rate in LotRO’s Bree has gone from 1-5 with occasional lengthy freezes to over 145fps! OMG! So I’ll be back playing LotRO again :)
It’s a gray, rainy day today, perfect time to stay home and game a little.
Could be a perfect time to level up a few alts in City of Heroes. Zubon of Kill Ten Rats uses the new Architect system to design the perfect opponents for his new characters and bring them to level 20 in a single mission.
Ogrebears has some issues with SOE’s partnership with ZAM.com to give that third party website more access to the game data than any other website, ever. It’s not so much that they have been set above EQ2i, LootDB, EQTraders and such, but because that it seems poorly designed and incomplete.
Syncaine tells how even with a lesser force and poor planning, picking the wrong battlefield can still lead to a crushing loss in Darkfall. Though I really haven’t any interest in PvP, aside from games like Legends of Zork that force me into it, I love reading about these fights and would be first in line for the movie :)
Taymar posted another incredibly helpful guide to using macros in EQ2. Check out the one for combining spells and combat arts in a single keypress. Handy!
Gamasutra has Yet Another Interview with Runic Games’ Max Schaefer about their upcoming Diablo II/Mythos-esque Action RPG, Torchlight. This time they talk a bit about the monetization model; not that different from Mythos, it turns out. (Via Runic Games Insider)
io9 has the latest video from EA/Maxis’ Spore Galactic Adventures. I liked Spore, but I didn’t really enjoy the rather mundane 4X space game at the end. You spend all this time growing a critter and it all means nothing at the end? In Galactic Adventures, you’re out of the space ship and working on duels and missions!
Kyle Horner of Massively has about a zillion exclusive peeks into Cryptic’s Champions Online. You know who doesn’t? Bio Break’s Syp. I guess we bloggers really aren’t press, after all :(
Hey, not much news yesterday but probably be lots more for tomorrow, so keep dry and keep gaming!
Welcome to the weekend! It’s fantastic weather, so gonna keep this short.
More news about the ex-Mythos developers’ new game, Torchlight? The Runic Games Fansite has a FAQ complete with everything they know about the fantasy Action RPG and its followup MMO, and Runic Games Insider’s Taylor Balbi has really long interviews with a few of the devs with the nittiest, grittiest details.
A simple trading mission in EVE Online in high security space went bad, and suddenly Enforcer was podkilled and out a billion ISK. Scopique at Cedarstreet figures some research or scouting the route ahead of time might have saved Enforcer the death, and wonders how much research should developers expect from an MMO gamer before they play the game?
Psyq at Dalaran Diary talks about Shards of Dalaya’s House of Portals, the possibly deadly but always treacherous mansion used for long distance travel as opposed to EverQuest’s spires or knowledge portals. I liked the Nexus spires introduced with Luclin. It made travel somewhat easier without making it trivial, provided a place for people to meet and gather and trade, and was a good improvement over the boats. The Plane of Knowledge removed most travel times, and Norrath grew smaller as a result. I’d love to try that House of Portals sometime!
Penny Arcade starts off Freeday Friday with a little bit of snark about the Chronicles of Spellborn payment plan. While it’s true that you can now use a credit card like for every other game… I think trying to figure out their Coins-based plan is a fun game all on its own, don’t you?
Reported everywhere is Lord of the Rings Online’s second anniversary promotion. Free to try again, 25% experience bonus on kills that stacks with all other bonuses, tokens you can trade in for cool stuff, etc etc. The xp boost is very nice, anyway. I haven’t seen what the tokens trade in for, but I have my suspicions I have a lot of Blueberry Tart recipes in my future.
Tobold talks about the new Free Realms trading card game and why Free Realms can never come close to challenging WoW. Is there anyone who really thinks ANY game will challenge WoW? I mean, when you have WoW itself becoming a minigame portal with Peggle now joining Bejeweled as super casual games you now need not leave WoW to play… WoW, like Facebook, isn’t a game so much as it is a platform.
The Original Runic Games Fansite has a pretty good summary of Taylor Balbi’s GDC impressions of Torchlight, Runic Studios’ first Diablo II/Mythos-esque single player Action RPG and seed for their future MMO. Torchlight is said to be released this year, which will keep it out of the path of the Diablo 3 juggernaut expected within the next two years. I want to play them both!
Syncaine of Hardcore Casual has a little bit of fun with the braggarts and whiners of the Darkfall Forums. A little more respect for the fellow fans of hardcore impact PvP? These are the elite killers, you know.
Since Planetside and Tabula Rasa blazed the Shooter MMO trail and showed just how profitable the unholy fusion of first person shooters and a level grind could be, MTV Multiplayer went out and asked massive shooter devs from The Agency, APB, Earthrise, Combat Arms and CrimeCraft how they planned to put this relatively new sub-genre back on its feet.
Syp from Bio Break takes time out from not sleeping to marvel at how Mythic is taking more and more ideas from its previous MMO, Dark Age of Camelot, to patch perceived flaws in its current MMO, Warhammer Online. Three sides? Yes, please. FOUR sides? OMG awesome! Bringing the RvR dungeon of Darkness Falls forward is a good first step. I had loads of fun there in DAoC.
OMG, is that an Elric Melnibone/Michael Moorcock/Blue Oyster Cult reference? Yes. Yes, it was. Watch the video as E(l)ric Bloom talks about the plot of Moorcock’s Elric series, then BOC swings into Black Blade…
I just wanna be a lover, not a red-eyed screaming ghoul? Hey, Beau, this song is ABOUT YOUR POST!
Lars from MMOment of Zen thinks that writable books in EQ2 are a good start, but they could do so much more. Commenter Tholal points out that Ultima Online has had these features for years, going on centuries now. Hey, where are the friggin ULTIMA ONLINE BLOGS? How are we supposed to KNOW these things?
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