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.
Beau Turkey of Spouse Aggro writes about how MMOs begin to understand that there is more to gaming than a desire to wade through gore.
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…
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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?
And lastly, it’s Bio Break’s Syp again with six ways to leave a bad pickup group. I’ve tried them all, but #6 is by far my favorite.
See you Monday!