Daily Blogroll

It was a 7.1 gig patch, but I did managed to get into Flying Lab’s Pirates of the Burning Sea last night, and spent a little more time with it tonight. Just went through the tutorial, did some of the Yuletide quests, joined a “society” (guild) named La Fédération, and wandered around the starting town. Veteran players were being helpful over the nationwide chat and the server was hopping. One server for North America, one for the EU, and a test server. I haven’t played PotBS for a couple of years, but I was very much impressed by their improvements to the land game. The NPCs sing, dance, and make the town very much a lively place to stroll – see the video at the end. ...

World of Warcraft’s forthcoming Cataclysm expansion (1 week away!!!!) is still setting fire to the blogroll today. Hey, if all a MMO has to do these days to generate some buzz is destroy the world, well, I have a couple candidates who could use some devastation. I logged on to Vanguard yesterday evening to check on how my characters had fared in the big colossal server merge last July, and was shocked to find that whenever it was I last logged into the game, there had been no patches since. For a game that has had zero developer support in eleven months, the community there still seems vibrant and positive. You just can’t kill a good community. ...

Saturday, I linked to a raid force taking down some old Kunark and Velious mobs. That got me into the game to try and see if I could find any of those same bosses - Cazic Thule, Faydedar, Trakanon and Velketor the Sorceror - up. As far as I know, CT and Faydedar, in their original forms, are no longer in the game. Trakanon had been killed just moments before I got to his lair. Velketor was up, though, and I’ve embedded a video of our meeting at the end. ...

I’m actually sitting in Star Trek Online right now, hovering above the Deferi Mining Outpost 3, waiting for the Breen capital ship “Desna” to show up. So I can kill it. So, what it is with Black Friday? When did that become some sort of holiday in and of itself? Now we’re apparently exporting it to the rest of the world. Rumor Control: Elder Scrolls V to be an MMO? ...

It’s Turkey Day in the USA, the day when we all gather together with our families and other loved ones and try not to talk about gaming. I kinda failed at this this afternoon when I was talking to my daughter and she wanted to talk about the new gnome starting quests in World of Warcraft… Time to start talking turkey. ...

Around the end of October each year, every game world is taken over by the dimly remembered remainders of an old harvest festival, All Hallow’s Eve, AKA Hallowe’en. The ancients sucked at making abbreviations. Star Trek Online wants to remind us that there’s something scarier than the spectre it might join its cousin, Champions Online, in the “Freemium” payment model. The third episode of the Devidian arc, ominously titled “What Lies Beneath”, comes out Saturday afternoon, on the day before Hallowe’en (AKA Halloweeneen, I guess). Should be a fun adventure tramping around in the bowels of an ancient space station looking for blue, soul-sucking ghosts. ...

Exciting MMO news lands in my inbox; I pass it along. Cryptic is dropping prices in their “C-Store” for the holiday weekend on existing items. Emphasis on existing; they also announce that the Galaxy X/Galaxy Dreadnought class cruiser will soon be available in the shop. This is the three nacelled Enterprise-D variant that Riker commanded in the future segment of The Next Generation’s “All Good Things”, and in particular is the ship that @Longasc has been trying to earn via getting people to sign up. Well, it’ll be in the store soon. ...

Another week, another truckload of gaming press releases. Bioware announces their new downloadable content for their Dragon Age RPG, “The Darkspawn Chronicles”. Meant as an alternate story – one where your character from Dragon Age: Origins and Awakening dies during the Grey Warden initiation – here you command the forces of the Darkspawn against the remnants of the forces of Light, led by the man who wouldn’t be king, Alistair. ...

wgOggPlayer.msg = {“ogg-play”: “Play”, “ogg-pause”: “Pause”, “ogg-stop”: “Stop”, “ogg-no-player”: “Sorry, your system does not appear to have any supported player software.\nPlease \x3ca href="http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:OggHandler/Client_download"\x3edownload a player\x3c/a\x3e.”, “ogg-player-videoElement”: “Native browser support”, “ogg-player-oggPlugin”: “Browser plugin”, “ogg-player-cortado”: “Cortado (Java)”, “ogg-player-vlc-mozilla”: “VLC”, “ogg-player-vlc-activex”: “VLC (ActiveX)”, “ogg-player-quicktime-mozilla”: “QuickTime”, “ogg-player-quicktime-activex”: “QuickTime (ActiveX)”, “ogg-player-totem”: “Totem”, “ogg-player-kaffeine”: “Kaffeine”, “ogg-player-kmplayer”: “KMPlayer”, “ogg-player-mplayerplug-in”: “mplayerplug-in”, “ogg-player-thumbnail”: “Still image only”, “ogg-player-selected”: “(selected)”, “ogg-use-player”: “Use player:”, “ogg-more”: “More…”, “ogg-download”: “Download file”, “ogg-desc-link”: “About this file”, “ogg-dismiss”: “Close”, “ogg-player-soundthumb”: “No player”, “ogg-no-xiphqt”: “You do not appear to have the XiphQT component for QuickTime.\nQuickTime cannot play Ogg files without this component.\nPlease \x3ca href="http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:OggHandler/Client_download"\x3edownload XiphQT\x3c/a\x3e or choose another player.”}; ...

MMO devs fire broadside press releases at my inbox, and I inflict them on others. We’ll suffer together or not at all. Actually, let’s start off with a non-MMO offer. The Humble Indie Bundle from Wolfire Games collects five acclaimed Indie games (including the addictive building game World of Goo, underwater fantasy Aquaria, innovative platformer Gish, rabbit beat’m’up Lugaru, and horror adventure game Penumbra Overture. Until Monday, you can get all of these games AND donate to Electronic Freedom Foundation AND Child’s Play … at any price you want, divided between charities and the developers any way you want. This is a can’t lose deal – I was up till 2AM last night playing World of Goo… on my Linux box. ...