Closed Beta

A Giant in the Stonefields This weekend’s fourth Rift beta event introduced seven new levels, two new zones, two new dungeons, and Warfronts. Warfronts being Rift’s version of instanced battlegrounds. And aside from the new Defiant-side dungeon, I saw all these things. I played a heck of a lot of Warfronts, each time tuning my various specs. With so much choice and so many combinations and so many styles of play, players should plan on making their specs flowing, freely changeable plans. ...

Trion has announced the third beta event for their Rift MMO. It’s been described as an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary game, and that seems about right. Like fantasy novels, I guess, where very few ever try anything new, and yet people still buy, read and enjoy them. It’s a decent genre entry, and as I don’t currently play any games in the fantasy MMO genre, I’m very much looking forward to it. (Wizard101 is so entirely different that it cannot be compared to the WoW-likes in any way. That’s what I love about it!) ...

This mysterious e-mail just mysteriously appeared in my in-box. My in-box OF MYSTERY! I can neither confirm nor deny that I will be leveling my lower gluteal regions over the weekend as a warrior brought from the past to defend the Vigil against the rifts – and from the evil warriors summoned from the future by the Defiant. E.g., the folks that were the community of the first beta event. ...

After the disappointment of finding out that Atlus’ NeoSteam wasn’t actually very (if at all) Steampunk, it was wonderful to come home today to find that somewhat more authentically Steampunk MMO Gatheryn has entered closed beta! Full details below, but be warned: They are going to ask you about your favorite Steampunk books…! Greetings! Some time ago, you expressed your interest in Gatheryn, a new steampunk-themed casual MMO from Mindfuse Games. We appreciate your enthusiasm, and we would like to thank you for your patience as Gatheryn draws closer to release! ...

The servers are coming down this morning, all beta characters are being deleted (answering a question of mine), and tomorrow, you’ll be able to start cooking, racing, shooting, mining and everything else. Here’s the full announcement: Some of you have seen the signs. The NDA being lifted. Cryptic twitters from developers. Unexpected fan site announcements. Some have speculated that the next stage of Free Realms is here…they are right. Since our initial closed beta announcement, we have been flagging more and more beta sign ups for access to the game. We have also been working with an affiliate site, Miniclip.com. The Free Realms beta has been open to the millions of players from that site as well as any new registrations made on our home page. While we did not announce it, we are already well into our open beta period. ...

You can talk about it now! Expect an article about it for tomorrow, but if you’ve been playing – how did you like it?

The NDA prevents me from going into any detail at all about Free Realms, but Massively has more Free Realms info than you can read, so I don’t really have to provide detail. I do have lots of screenies and reactions saved up, though. My highest level job is five, so I can’t claim to have seen much of the game, but what I have seen is amazingly high quality. The minigames are integrated well into the world (in much the same way I expect they will be in Gatheryn), and the adventure instances are funny and a lot of fun. ...

Just finished listening in on the Spellborn dev chat/‘webinar’. Lots of interesting discussion, some of which is after the break. While the devs were talking, I was programming. I went through everything on the Acclaim website, trying to figure out what combination of memberships, terms of subscription, and quantities of coin bought would combine to form the cheapest monthly cost? They will be, at some point, adding a set price of $15/month (for now, possibly rising to $18/month when they end the introductory price), but I thought we could get it cheaper. ...

The second round of closed beta has begun, all the old characters were wiped away (well, at least mine were), so I started up a new mage and brought her through level 5 so that she could become a Void Seer. Void Seers were, I thought, going to be pretty close to a basic healer. This isn’t the case – not at level 5, anyway. The only heals she has are the heals all mages get (and every class gets some kind of heal, even if it’s self only). Mage heals are curses placed on a monster, and when that monster gets hit with melee, ranged, or magic (depending on the curse), the group gets healed. To heal in Spellborn, you don’t spam the “more healing” button. You attack more. ...

This isn’t going to be a new player’s preview to the Chronicles of Spellborn – you can find links to that sort of information after this post that point to my experiences playing on the EU servers prior to the Acclaim closed beta, or take a look at Dragonchasers’ excellent initial impressions. On the EU servers, I played a Rune Mage. My special power: Special tattoos that could be triggered to cause explosions. Rune mages are the EQ2 warlocks (or WoW frost mages) of Spellborn, and since many of my damage spells also triggered instant heals or heals over time, I felt very comfortable mostly tanking things, moving only to get out of enemy AOEs, but mostly just building and executing combos through the skill deck. ...