I love the feeling of peace and serenity EVE Online gives. And then sometimes weird, exciting stuff happens. A corps-mate and I were testing weapons fire and tank abilities last night when a battle broke out behind us as rival corps met outside a station. It was great, and for some reason reminded me of the very first story I ever read about EVE Online, about The Great Scam which put the game on everyone’s long range scanners. ...
Yesterday, EverQuest launched its new 51/50 server to rave reviews, and this morning, Wizard 101 launches its latest expansion, Grizzleheim. So many cool things happening, but who has the time to play them all? Inspired by the Star Wars: Galaxies news out of SOE’s Fan Faire last weekend, Werit jumped into the game after some time away and found a lot to like with the new battlegrounds, player-created content and factions wars. He even has some video! ...
Only 178 days till Christmas! With 2009 halfway gone now, I thought you’d want to know. I predicted this year would be one of the best ever for MMOs, with some high-profile releases and expansions, but with many titles delayed and some now not due until next year (like Star Trek Online and EQ2’s Sentinel’s Fate expansion), 2009 just might lose the “best year ever” crown to 2010. My being bad at predicting was harshly lit when I predicted last year that the expansion that would turn out to be Shadow Odyssey would be Odus, and this year, when I predicted Velious, it really WAS Odus… and what’s worse is that it really is about what you’d expect from a generic expansion. ...
Yes, we’re back to the Daily Blogroll. Another allergy attack has left me asleep by 9PM, which really shortens the nights for me. Is Aion too derivative to be successful? Tobold thinks so. In fact he wonders why people would pay full price (US$15/month) for a WoW-like like Aion when they can get the real thing for the same price, or a free WoW-like in Runes of Magic. He also doesn’t hold out much hope for Fallen Earth, calling it too much like failed MMO Tabula Rasa “just working less well, being less fun, and having less good graphics”. So that’s that. ...
Between allergies and traveling, hasn’t been a lot of writing being done. When I got back home Sunday, there were nearly 200 messages in the my feed readers. Ugh. Lots happened! <– You’ll see over on the left that we now have a guild on Free Realms. Let me know if you want to join ;) On to the blogs! ...
A few days ago, the MMO blogging world burned with the news that rock star MMO developer turned lonely exile, Brad McQuaid, had returned from his lonely, sparse existence of playing video games, racing cars and sports bikes and feeling sorry about the harsh hand life dealt him to urge people to play more Vanguard. Some people were skeptical, but have come to believe. Others forgive him for his sins. ...
Hudson wanted a look at the Aion UI – and that’s fair. I found out that Aion was built on the Crytek engine, and that implies it won’t “run on a toaster”, the famous boast Blizzard made about WoW. Just before I took this screen shot, it started raining in game. My character looked with disgust at the sky, and since it looked like I wasn’t going to be running her anywhere right then, pulled out a broad leaf to shield her head from the rain and sulked. The game is full of cute little animations like that. Your character has a life when you’re not at the keyboard, and will always be reacting to the environment in some way if you haven’t got anything else going on. Above her head are her health and power bars. Resting works wonders, but there are potions et al to get you back into the fight. Standard stuff. ...
Aion is not an innovative MMO. Anybody will tell you that. You have your quest hubs with quest givers who task you with killing everything in the vicinity. Classes start off with four archetypes (scout, mage, priest, and warrior) and split at level 10 into eight subclasses (ranger, assassin, chanter[shaman], cleric, gladiator[berserker], templar[paladin], spiritmaster[mage pet class], and sorceror[wizard]). And these work exactly as you might expect, in essence. Sure, there’s a whole combo tree where you can buy and equip skills to make devastating combos, but since they kindly have made a one button combo system – you hit the start combo ability, and then hit it again for the next ability in the combo, and so on – you usually aren’t pressing more than a couple of buttons. You never actually stop pressing buttons. ...
The “Amaryllis” edition stuff? Well, here it is, a warm Spring night, just started writing, and “ ” comes up on the playlist, and it just seemed to fit the mood so well… And re: the banner, well, Atlus’ newly revamped MMO import NeoSteam closed its Open Beta today to relaunch soon as a real live game. Rumor has it that characters from both the closed and open betas will carry through to the live game, so if you’ve a yen to play a fairly standard fantasy grinder with PvP and a light industrial flair, give it a shot. ...
The NDA for Aion prevents me from saying anything specific about the game; press doesn’t face these same limitations, so you can read some impressions at Massively and other places, and I’ll give my own impressions when I can. Having an NDA when there’s a million people playing is kinda weird, but I’ll stand by the agreement I clicked upon. But there’s no NDA that tells me I can’t talk about the players. ...