Wednesday? Seriously? All these MMO companies, at the same time, said, we’re gonna have some big news, and it’s gonna come out on a Wednesday?
What’d I do to them? Last night, I was going to do a new one panel comic, and then sit down and game for awhile. That little test I linked to yesterday that where they wanted to know how MMOs were destroying your life? I wanted to pencil in, want time to play MORE.
I was logging in just to change the privs on my house so my interior decorator, Brightknife (the Arasai being confused by Ettie in my last one panel comic) could do what she needed to do in Dina’s home… when I got asked to a VP raid. But my night’s plans had already been shattered by the Free Realms NDA dropping, and then, just before bed, KingsIsle put Wizard 101 player housing live on their test servers, now I see that Acclaim has officially launched The Chronicles of Spellborn in the non-central European world.
So, seriously. On a Wednesday?
Along with the official launch, Acclaim has given every current Spellborn subscriber two free weeks, and has introduced industry standard, credit card billing instead of the confusingly arcane subscription via Acclaim Coins. At $14.99/month, it’s on par with other similar games, and there are discounts for subscribing for three or six months at once.
The endless speculation over the new EverQuest server type will soon come to an end, and it looks like the 51/50 server is the current favorite. That’s the one where new characters start off at level 51 with 50 AAs. This news hasn’t come without a little bit of controversy.
On the EverQuest 2 side of Norrath, Live Update 52 news begins to trickle. First on the feature list: Player writable books. I wasn’t all that thrilled, personally, but Stargrace had some really cool suggestions for the new books, and Copra suggested a Norrath-wide scavenger hunt with books as clues.
Copra, by the way, is slowly realizing that the achievements in Achiever games are empty fun as he reconsiders the World of Warcraft end game. Cheer up. We all eventually move on from achiever-based gameplay.
Green Armadillo of Player vs Developer wonders if the time constraints of the final boss in WoW’s new end-game dungeon are just a blatant attempt by Blizzard to keep people playing longer. Back in EverQuest’s Planes of Power, the boss of the Plane of Water, Coirnav, would despawn for three days – for everyone on the server – if you didn’t beat him in 14 minutes. Underwater. And by beat him, I mean beat three mini bosses, and a LOT OF TRASH, and him himself :) Also, we had to swim uphill both ways. Now if WoW didn’t instance Uldaur so that a failure on Algalon meant nobody on the entire server could try him again for a week, THEN… well, then it would be as challenging as old EverQuest. Ahem.
Responding to people who grip that Darkfall is nothing more than a “paid beta”, Syncaine writes that ALL MMOs are paid betas, and in a state of continual flux as they expand, or they are stagnant and dying. Greg Dean of Real Life Comics offers up his own views on Darkfall.
SOE announced their SOE Player of the Year contest. Even though the contest bars non-US citizens, I’m going to have to ignore that rule because there really is no other choice for player of the year than Stargrace of MMO Quests. She is a tireless promoter of EverQuest, EverQuest 2 and Vanguard. Her adventures have inspired countless people to subscribe to and play SOE MMOs. She writes about SOE games for Beckett’s MMO Magazine, is in the front at every player or GM event, and a wonderful person besides. Dozens of people would come to the Fan Faire this year just to meet her, if she were to win the contest and be able to attend.
Lastly, Syp of Bio Break has a list of 15 observations he’s made about Lord of the Rings Online since returning to the game. Hey, I used to play that game… back before all these MMOs started spitting news!
Okay, that’s all for today, and guys, get some sleep, okay?