Okay, THAT was a day of good discussion, so thanks, Wolfshead :) Why did I feel your “first impressions” article needed rebutting? Well, SOMEONE had to stand up (and thanks to Hudson, who did!). I couldn’t say that stuff about WoW and expect to come away without comment. In grand blogging tradition, Wolfshead now has a rebuttal to my rebuttal :) ...
The weekend went by too fast, as it always does. Rock, Paper, Shotguns Kieron Gillen had the perilous job of re-reviewing Darkfall for Eurogamer. Eurogamer’s original review score, 2/10, was savaged by the Darkfall developers and players. In Darkfallout, Kieron talks about the perils of being the clean-up crew for a disaster, and why he was shocked at the reaction by some other game journalists to the first review. Following up on last week’s discussion about how MMOs are like men, women, dogs, or kitchen cleansers, Green Armadillo notices that his dog is a lot like an MMO player. Except we have to go get our OWN food. ...
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. ...
Next on Closed Beta Confidential: Bear takes a look at Blizzard’s new MMO. (Blizzard: could you send that beta link to direbear@westkarana.com? Thanks!)
Long weekend for us in the US, Memorial Day weekend. Though meant to honor Americans who have died in wars, I remember it mainly as the beginning of school’s summer session – those last few weeks of school where the teachers pretty much relaxed and let you do whatever you liked. As a trumpet player in the school band, I always had the hope that I would be selected to be the lone trumpet that stood apart in the cemetery that also ended the Memorial Day parade and play taps as we all stood silent in prayer. ...
In EVE Online, at my new home at the Sisters of EVE base in the Arnon system, with Mining IV, Refining III, and two Miner II mining lasers and purely selling in-system, I make about 27.5K ISK per minute of mining. If I processed the ore at my current level and sold it in the best market within seven jumps, I would make about 26K ISK/minute of mining, not including travel time. The question is, how many sessions of mining would it take to pay for the skills and equipment necessary to make refining more profitable than just selling the ore straight with no additional skills going toward mining? EVEMon has me at about ten days to having the skills necessary to fly a ORE Retriever mining barge… EVE is the first game I have HAD to play with a spreadsheet open. ...
I saw Star Trek Friday night – and it was great. Kinda made me wonder if someone could do the same for Star Wars… like if, somehow, Jarjar Binks went back in time to train Anakin before Qui-gon Schindler got to him… After an exciting Free Realms weekend in which the log-in servers were down for many hours, I still got some time in. Restarted as an archer and got to level 7, right in the middle of the grind to level 10. Tobold got his blacksmith to 20 and finds the whole job pointless since fairly cheap RMT weapons you can get at level 1 are way better than the best weapons you can craft at 20. ...
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. ...
It’s a gray, rainy day today, perfect time to stay home and game a little. Could be a perfect time to level up a few alts in City of Heroes. Zubon of Kill Ten Rats uses the new Architect system to design the perfect opponents for his new characters and bring them to level 20 in a single mission. Ogrebears has some issues with SOE’s partnership with ZAM.com to give that third party website more access to the game data than any other website, ever. It’s not so much that they have been set above EQ2i, LootDB, EQTraders and such, but because that it seems poorly designed and incomplete. ...