Apologies to Randall Munroe
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.
Enough of THAT particular kerfuffle. Onto what REAL bloggers are writing about!
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!
Beau loves his horsie. She comes when he calls, loves carrots, can stomp answers to simple math problems and most importantly, doesn’t vanish when he stops riding. In Mabinogi, your horse isn’t just +40% travel speed – it’s a friend and fighting companion.
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 review first 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.
Peter at Dragonchasers has seven things you may have missed about Free Realms. Count me in on that – there were a few things that were totally new to me.
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.
Via our friends at Eurogamer comes news that Hanbitsoft may be about to resurrect Mythos and possibly release it in the West. I loved Mythos. If it gets released in the US, I will play it. But I’ll secretly waiting for the game the ex-Mythos devs have got coming.
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 :)