I linked to a wonderful post by Jennifer of Girl, Unplugged today wondering why it was okay to have dumpy-looking male heroes but the female ones had to be hypersexy and … damn, in my hurry to get everything done on time this morning, I forgot to actually put the link in so —- Meet the Newer (Sexier) Team! Read it! It’s great AND funny! Now I gotta run to Snowhill to see the Dares in concert!
Oh, speaking of Free Realms, the band that does the theme song “It’s Your World and Welcome To It”, the Dares, will be performing the song live at E3 AND on the Snowhill stage in game (on all servers, from what I understand) at 7PM EDT or 4 PM PDT. If you West Coasters are at work and can’t see it, we’ll let you know how it went because, like, we’re three hours ahead of you. In the FUTURE. ( not the actual song name) ...
Wow, June already. The year seems to be flying by so quickly. I saw “Up” over the weekend, kind of dark for a Disney/Pixar film, but I liked it quite a lot. Gaming-wise, it was largely Free Realms along with some trips into EVE and Vanguard. I hope to make it to Antonia Bayle’s Festival of Unity sometime this week. Kasul at Shattered was at the opening ceremonies to the Festival of Unity, conveniently held at a place where evil characters would be slaughtered by good-aligned guards oops. Okay. For 2010, a Festival of Dis-unity, to be kicked off in the Crossroads in the Commonlands, okay? Naturally, this one would have to be held on the Lucan D’Lere server…. ...
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!)
Welcome to another Friday! Got plans for the weekend? I’m planning to take a short break from EVE Online and get caught up on a beta, Mabinogi, Wizard 101 and will reinstall EQ2 to see if that fixes the problems I’m having with it freezing on launch. Spinks starts us off with a long and detailed look at the power of story in MMOs, specifically, the plight of the Forsaken as they meet their maker in World of Warcraft’s Howling Fjord. Those Forsaken aren’t dead, they’re just pining for the fjords! ...
Click to make this larger Tracker Wolf has taken it upon himself to teach this noob the basics of PvP in EVE Online. The game is pretty complicated to begin with, but PvP is like lifting up the control panel for Boeing 747 and finding the controls for the space shuttle underneath. Hanging in a safe spot deep within lowsec, narrowing in on lone pilots using half intuitive, half trial and error pings from the system scanner? Done that. Bringing up information about the pilot and their ship, length of play, corporation and so forth to see how likely they are to put up a fight? Done that. ...
SOE has long said about its games that no matter how many or few players a MMO had, as long as it made money, they’d keep the lights on. Seems that day has come for The Matrix Online, which will be sending red pills back into the real world July 31, but they won’t go quietly. Major events in the virtual universe will be revisited, leading up to a world-ending event, so if you have a MxO account gathering dust, now might be the time to plug back in and have one last romp through the city. ...
I’ve been staying away from talking about Darkfall and Free Realms lately because, what’s more to say about it? Well, Darkfall is about to launch in the US, and we can only hope that makes more waves than Spellborn’s rather uneventful splash when it did the same a couple months back. Keen thinks Darkfall’s NA launch will give the game a chance to launch in the shape it should have been from the start. It’s kind of odd, really. Is Europe becoming a kind of live beta for US players? Spellborn, Runes of Magic, now Darkfall – the Europeans pay to make the game better for us. ...
No, I don’t (to answer people on Twitter) actually know anything about EverQuest III. I don’t even know if it exists. And in this NDA-loving age, if I knew anything, I couldn’t write about it. Isn’t it grand that the only time someone can write about something these days is if they know nothing about it? Some people think SOE should just abandon EverQuest, as if there was a taint on the brand. Wrong. Both the PC EverQuests are still going strong, and EverQuest’s ongoing influence over modern MMOs can’t be overstated. The next EverQuest may not be (probably won’t be) called EverQuest III. Maybe it will be called something like EverQuest: The Tunarian Age. EverQuest: Through the Sands of Time. EverQuest: The Higher Planes vs The Undershore. Whatever. You get the point. ...
Working on a first impressions piece about Mabinogi. Will keep the self-flagellation to a minimum but really, I only do it because it feels good when I stop. On to the blogs! Are persistent henchmen the new groups? Syp thinks they might be. Star Wars: The Old Republic will have them (echoing the party you gathered in Knights of the Old Republic). Guild Wars has their henchmen. EverQuest has their mecenaries. Star Trek Online has their bridge crew. Have MMOs truly come full circle back to their single player, you+your crew of helpers, roots? Is it truly not worth the trouble anymore to be part of a group that includes other living people? ...