Wow, June already. The year seems to be flying by so quickly. I saw “Up” over the weekend, kind of dark for a Disney/Pixar film, but I liked it quite a lot. Gaming-wise, it was largely Free Realms along with some trips into EVE and Vanguard. I hope to make it to Antonia Bayle’s Festival of Unity sometime this week.
Kasul at Shattered was at the opening ceremonies to the Festival of Unity, conveniently held at a place where evil characters would be slaughtered by good-aligned guards oops. Okay. For 2010, a Festival of Dis-unity, to be kicked off in the Crossroads in the Commonlands, okay? Naturally, this one would have to be held on the Lucan D’Lere server….
Back in EverQuest, er, Shards of Dalaya, Ramon has gotten to the point where it’s getting tough to find groups in this F2P EverQuest remix. As Ramon remembers the hours spent catching up on his reading while LFG in EQ, he rethinks whether EQ’s group-only mechanic really works anymore.
Tobold writes about the amazing case of Ferraro, the blogger who wrote at Paladin Schmaladin, and worked as a tester at Blizzard, who suddenly turned out to not be a cute Blizzard tester (personal pictures lifted from TechDarling) but seven people, who suddenly turned out to be just one person, and the lies probably don’t end there. Would this person’s blog had been as successful if it had been written by some ordinary guy instead of a cute, tech-savvy, fictional Blizzard tester?
The fakery doesn’t stop there. Spinks writes about a WoW addon that lets people link fake achievements, so when a group demands you have the achievement that proves you have experience with a demanding instance, you can fake-link it and get in that group. I’m not gonna try and analyze why someone would do this, but it bugs me when I hear people in EQ2 demand things like this, for example, Mythical epics, when the content they are doing doesn’t come close to requiring that sort of gear.
Speaking of EQ2, Gordon at We Fly Spitfires isn’t liking the Qeynos-to-Freeport betrayal quest much, especially where you have to, at great length, train a cute puppy and get him to trust you, only to have to kill it at the end. He calls it bad quest design, but I feel it does what it’s supposed to – give you some history with the animal, so you feel something when you’re asked to kill it. Even if it’s boring history.
Warhammermer of War Like Worlds has been spending a bit of time in Free Realms lately. There’s a concert by the band that did the FR theme song in Free Realms tomorrow at 4PM PDT/7PM EDT (I didn’t know that!), and while this will draw a bunch of people for sure, Warhammermer talks furthr about the difficulty of meeting people in the game and the potential addition of guilds to the game (yes, please!)
Lazaretto at Complete Heal, who’s been blogging quite a lot recently about his adventures in Vanguard, takes issue with Openedge1’s dismissal of VG’s latest “come back to Vanguard” campaign as the game’s “last hurrah”. Since SOE is about to close Matrix Online, it’s not surprising that people will start wondering about other poorly received games like Planetside and, yes, Vanguard. Does anyone really think Star Wars: Galaxies will survive Bioware’s competing Star Wars MMO? I logged into Vanguard yesterday for the first time in months and though it runs fine on my new computer, it was still too much like pretty much every other quest-heavy Fantasy MMO out there.
Beau feels that Vanguard will be gone within a couple of years ANYWAY, caught in the general demise of most subscription-based games as the world moves toward a F2P with micro-transactions model. Ixobelle has the opposite opinion, feeling that players HATE micro-transactions, and that any game featuring RMT is doomed to fail. Beau is in the subscription-dominated North America, and Ixobelle is in the F2P mecca of Japan, and both are prophesying the failure of their regions’ respective business model.
Well, I guess we’re all doomed, then. Better leave it here and see what comes up in the blogosphere tomorrow!
Keep safe, keep cool and keep gaming!