MMORPG

Scene from a WoW raid There’s probably worthwhile studies to be done on the MMORPG phenomenon. The games of the genre are designed to keep you interested and engaged for thousands of hours. The game itself is a potential setting for the formation of a long-lasting community that could extend far beyond the game realm. MMOs have provoked real life violence. Prisoners are rumored to have to play them to support repressive regimes by bilking money from Westerners. ...

Chillaxin' in Meridian Every time I post, my character is wearing a new outfit. It’s a compulsion! I can’t help it. But this outfit is special – it’s T1/P2 complete. Everything comes from either Tier 1 expert dungeons, or Prestige 2 PvP gear vendors. The gear from T1 and P1/2 are roughly equivalent. I spent Saturday chaining warfronts to get to Prestige 2 expressly to get that tunic. Afterward the guild (and I) raided Greenscale Blight where we easily took down the duke and got the interrogator (or whatever the next boss is called) to 17%. I was asked to switch to bard spec, which is raid code for “your DPS sucks, play these songs and try to stay out of the way”. But that’s okay. ...

If you really want to keep it, put a ring on it That’s the amazing Stingite and I admiring each other’s fashion sense. Because that’s what these games really are, when you get right down to it – Barbie dolls for adults, right? Things are busy at work, but not as grueling as recently, might just be about time to start up with the blogging again. But, tonight, just want to update on my Rift progress. Which may be dull, but I vowed to play Rift as my main MMO for at least six months, so for news of what I play – it’s Rift, and not much else. ...

The awe-inspiring Harbinger of Regulos If you took all the bullet-point features of Rift and compared them against all the bullet-point features of World of Warcraft as it was before its first expansion – Rift comes out fairly well. The appearance armor and dye systems which lets my rogue look like I want her to look STILL haven’t made it to WoW. And the rift system itself is a real game-changer, and there still seems to be plenty of room to experiment when building a role from souls. ...

Dragon Age Legends One thing you gotta say about Dragon Age Legends: like the single player games upon which its based, in Dragon Age Legends you Get. To. Kill. DRAGONS. (Warning: link goes to Facebook). Unlike, say, Dungeons and Dragons Online, where I have yet to kill a dragon. The one you see in the tutorial is little more than a tease. It’s fighting a mind flayer, though, and we HAVE started killing those in our static group, but the name of the game isn’t Mazes and Mind Flayers Online now, is it? ...

The SOE sheep live in danger I work a full day in the office, then strap my laptop to my back, pedal home and work a full night as well. It’s called crunch time, this is the third month of it, and work people pay me to do is taking priority over writing which nobody pays me anything to do. If I were working on a game, I could excitedly drop hints about it, but the only way you’ll see what I’m writing is if you need to be bonded. Or you happened to be a bond agent. BUT! If you ARE, well, we’ve got something pretty amazing for you this summer :) ...

Gremlin Gadgeteer A couple of years ago, you could have sold a Mythos beta key on eBay for a hundred bucks, easy. Now that it’s finally out – in Europe, anyway – the reaction is a little more muted. What’s happened to the Diablo 2-inspired action MMO in the intervening time? Hellgate: London devs Flagship Studios, so the story goes, had used Mythos as sort of a proof of concept for some of the tech they were using in their main game. Turned out the devs liked Mythos so much that they decided to build it out into a follow-up title. It featured bizarre races, inspired character classes and talent trees and some of the most involved crafting you could ever find. ...

Couldn't get more glowy Lucked into a group grinding the Abyssal Precipice instance and dinged 50 a few times in. So, I’m now max level in Rift. More than that, I have the required, for rogues, +HIT > 50 (mine is around 75), so I am geared sufficiently for T1 dungeons. In T1 dungeons, I need to work HIT to > 100, and then in T2 dungeons, to > 200 for raiding. ...

Fighting a Shimmersand boss Though Phase 1 of Rift’s River of Souls event took its time and lasted long enough – two weeks – for everyone to get a chance at it, the second and third phases took only about half an hour together. If you weren’t there – or worse, if you were stuck in an hours-long queue – you missed it. It’s gone, it’s over, there’s a new raid now (“The River of Souls”), but the one-time rewards are done and gone. ...

Waiting for Phase 2 I’d been playing around on EverQuest II this afternoon after spending the past few days fervently leveling to 48 on Rift. I was just about to explore Nektropos Castle on my flighty berserker when MMO Gamer Chick reminded me, via Twitter, about Rift’s Phase 2 event! So I logged out of EQ2 and logged right into a queue on Rift. Half an hour later, I finally spawned in Meridian, ready to go do whatever it is one does on Phase 2 day. A system message helpfully informed me that the system was coming down in 25 minutes for a brief update to smooth things for the event. ...