Sparkplay Community Manager Andrew Sipotz was kind enough to send along this fantastic image of a scene from their forthcoming anthro MMO, Earth Eternal. More about the game when the NDA drops :) Maybe if this one works out, they’ll do an Albedo expansion? Click on the image to see it in high resolution.
Adventuring after a mysterious apocalypse forever changed the landscape, with strange creatures everywhere and a refugee populace just trying to survive in a mutant world overrun with danger…. I didn’t even know I’d gotten into the Earth Eternal closed beta. Tails Tales of my chubby little rat rogue, the kind that Cinderella did NOT want helping make her dress, once I’ve seen more of the game. Back in EverQuest, unexpected adds usually meant a group wipe (unless you were specifically doing an AE group). Crowd control or a puller who knew how to split was really important. Modern MMOs ramp down the difficulty quite a lot, and Spinks wonders if specialized crowd control has any sort of place in World of Warcraft, given the tendency to just gather up a room and kill everything at once? And this is why WoW can’t have nice things, like enchanters and bards :) ...
“It would like them much; but an ye wot how dragons are esteemed, ye would not hold them blamable. They fear to come.” – “Well, then, suppose I go to them instead, and—” – “Ah, wit ye well they would not abide your coming. I will go.” And she did. She was a handy person to have along on a raid. – Mark Twain, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” ...
Can’t stop Saylah from blogging :) - Tipa Leave it to the creative player-base to find a way around the 3-hour queues on the high population servers. Some have decided to stretch the “Personal Shop” feature that allows you to sell items while unattended, into a means of keeping their characters online 24x7. I mean – seriously, all I could do was laugh my ass off when I logged into the game and saw the sea of players who are mostly just AFK, setup as vendors. I felt like I was in the market district of some turn of the century ghetto. Mind you, somewhere in that mass of “For Sale” slogans and messages are quest NPCs and people that really have things to sell. Can anyone say, “Where’s Waldo?” ...
Aion launched yesterday for pre-orders. Cownose got in. Petter had the five hour queue (and he’s under deadline!) Heartless_ isn’t playing, but loves him some queues, anyway. Lars got to level 3, server kicked him off, welcome to four hours in the queue. Naamah got in, but his friend had to wait three hours. It’s a good thing, though. I think he kinda has to be positive about the whole thing, though. AT&T and NCsoft conspired against Keen. ...
Picture is Maxfield Parrish’ 1922 masterpiece, “Daybreak”. Dad had bought an old print of that from SOMEWHERE and we had it above our mantle as long as I can remember. I used to think of stories behind that picture. The true story, that it was a painting done specifically to be reproduced using the then-new CYMK four color lithography process, never occurred to me.
*Another guest post by the always awesome Saylah! – Tipa * Three hours in a log-in queue, was the price my family paid to create characters on servers with friends or acquaintances. I knew the wait would be long but nothing prepared me for that length of time. It exceeded any of the long queues I’d experienced in the early days of World of Warcraft, following our AC2 guild to Illidan. The pre-selection opportunity hadn’t yielded the ability to get on the servers where we knew people. Initially, it wouldn’t allow us to create new characters on our intended server as Asmodian, stating we had Elyos characters there. The only Elyos characters we had were from Beta, which aren’t persisted and shouldn’t have mattered. ...
I’m really enjoying Runes of Magic. When I first saw screenshots for the game a year and a half ago, I called it a WoW clone and didn’t think much about it, and this does turn out to be a game that knows its market - WoW players. Most keys work the same as in WoW. It definitely looks like WoW – if the starting zone doesn’t remind you of Elwynn Forest, then you never played an Alliance newbie, looking for a Hogger group. Though if you went looking for a Hogger group THESE days, you’d be talking to yourself, because it’s not 2004 and everyone is way past that. ...
Guy just keeps popping up everywhere, don’t he? I am playing Runes of Magic now because, hey, WoW is coming out with a new expansion that I probably won’t play, so why not reminisce about good times in WoW by playing some other game? Runes of Magic only allowed me to pick from two races, Elf and Human. I thought they had some short folk in the character concept art, but I guess those were just meant to be children. It’d be kind of cool, by the way, to start of as a child in an MMO (optionally, anyway), and play children’s games of crafting, socialization, war and magic while slowly aging and learning more of the wider world and your place in it. ...
Here’s the hot news from the Austin Game Developer’s Conference about Wizard101! Clearly it’s not news about the next expansion, but I can’t say I’m disappointed! VERY exciting stuff! The next major new content being developed by KingsIsle Entertainment for Wizard101 is a series of Wizard Mounts that provide a fun, fast, and stylish way of getting around. Many different types of Wizard Mounts will be available with more to come in the future. Initially, four will be introduced: Brooms, Horses, Cats, and Dragons! ...