Aside from just being a shout-out to John Landis fans, I will be away on family business all weekend, returning Tuesday. I don’t know if I’ll bring my laptop, but I won’t be gaming in any event.
The banner picture is of a raid dying in EQ2’s Wrath of the Elements x2 raid instance. It’s a guild raid, and the guild is Twilight Disciples, and it’s a PST raiding guild with a full roster of raiding nights, but the WoE raid was fun enough that, warning them I’d likely be missing most weeknight raids due to being asleep, I accepted their offer to join. I even won some T3 gloves from the raid, but I don’t have enough shards to finish them. If you’re not an EQ2 player, most of this paragraph was gibberish.
But you want to know my number one, takeaway thing about EQ2? I notice that stupid ESRB notice every. single. time I log in, now. (Nods go to Ysharros, Pete, Wiqd, Stropp, and all the other EQ2 fans that weighed in on the pitfalls of directly comparing two games as different as EQ2 and WoW).
My favorite EverQuest comic of all time, WTF, finally has a new strip. How long has that fight against Venril been going on? WTF artist Straha won a laptop from Allakhazam and came in second in the EQ tenth anniversary art contest. He drew an amazing entry, showing his Iksar fighter’s career from being a newbie on the Fields of Bone to standing in the Void in the Seeds of Destruction expansion.
Naamah of Aionic Thoughts has some screenshots from the Aion instance, Dark Poeta. Want to know what high level PvE looks like in Aion? Check it out.
Tateru at Dwell On It posts a study that reveals that most PC gamers… are women. It won’t be long now before we start asking male avatars if they are MIRLs – Men In Real Life.
Wiqd of iMMOvation would like the EVE Online devs to look into perhaps selling skill training. Would being able to bypass the months and years of training by being able to enter a credit card number destroy EVE, or finally make it safe for casual players? I can just imagine a bunch of low mileage battleships sitting wrecked on the far side of the first 0.0 gate nearest the starting systems…
Via Scott Jennings, looks like WoW is set to reopen in China. I kinda thought the whole “let’s close down WoW” thing was a ruse to get more money from Blizzard, and if so, that money has been gotten and it’s business as usual. Asia is also getting the Ultima Online sequel we’ve been waiting on for a dozen years. So yay to Chinese gamers ;)
Werit notes that those MMOs that started development well after WoW showed that there was real money to be made in the massively multiplaying genre – sparking a lot of investor interest in WoW-like games – are in many cases all due to launch at around the same time. Can the player base support so many new MMOs? Werit thinks not, and anticipates a much colder climate for new MMO development after the weakest of the new titles crashes and burns.
And lastly, on news that Apple controls 91% of the overpriced laptop market, Scopique notes that the Amish control 91% of the horse-drawn buggy market, too.