One thing you have to remember about Wizard 101, is that when you fight Rattlebones on Unicorn Way, and the game gives you a little message saying you might want to fight bosses again for more rare loot? What they MEAN is, you might want to fight bosses a hundred times each to get maybe a chance at their loot. I don’t know how many times I fought Kraysys in the Forum for my Life hat before tonight. But tonight, I got my hat first try. ...
Apologies to Randall Munroe Yes, I really do believe you can’t honestly review an MMO without investing yourself in it for a fairly substantial bit of time, so that any oddities with controls and stuff become second nature and you can understand the core of what the game developers were striving for. A 1999 EverQuest review could have written all about the low polygons and stiffness of the character models, the laughably sharp-cornered world and so on, and missed the forest for the trees. You have to play a MMO long enough to see and appreciate the forest before you stamp a score on a review. ...
Wizard101 the game will be offline 08 May 2009 during our regular maintenance period of 3am to 4am Central time to address issues with items disappearing from dorm and housing walls. After the update, your items should appear where you placed them. If you still notice something is missing, please let Mr Lincoln know by submitting a bug report by going to Wizard101.com the website and clicking Help & Support. There you will find a link to Contact Us with all the details. ...
In the aftermath of the scandal surrounding Darkfall and its 2/10 Eurogamer review, I just have a couple of things to say. You Darkfall players and those bloggers up in arms because they didn’t play it sufficiently enough to get a good picture of the game? Listen up. Are you the ones who write about EverQuest II that the starting areas are drab and some screenshot you saw a few years ago wasn’t bright enough for you? Weren’t able to figure out the skills or heroic opportunities and pronounced it broken? Wondered why I stuck with the game even though it clearly wasn’t as good as WoW? ...
I scurried my way to visit a housing turtle as soon as I finished patching Wizard 101. I wanted to get started decorating my house as soon as I could, but which? I’d been thinking about buying one of the Wizard City castles, but when I tried to decorate it one last time on the Test server, I found the outside difficult to work with. I talked it over with Kasul, and he convinced me to go with a Marleybone home. ...
My new computer is due to be delivered today! I’ll be at work, of course, but maybe I can finally find their delivery center and pick it up afterward. My hope and fervent dream is that this will be the computer powerful enough to run Lord of the Rings Online…. Anyway. A couple of weeks ago, Paragon Studios introduced the Make Your Own Farm Mission (aka Architect) system, where players could find a badge they wanted to gain, and find the perfect mission among the thousands created for this purpose to gain that badge, or that level, or whatever they liked. Experience with similar level creators in such obscure games as Diablo, Diablo II and LittleBig Planet wasn’t clue enough that many players would use their new powers to create and play custom missions to benefit their characters. ...
We’ve word from Ravenwood that the newly-named Builder Turtles are being dropped off at their new homes across the Spiral, and that tomorrow, we’ll be able to buy and furnish our own homes. Thomes the Friendly Necromancer has been finding lots of treasures everywhere, and I’ve gotten a good look at all ten of the currently available homes (and a closer look at a couple). ...
On the next Cooking with C’Varre: Thick & Chunky Halfling Stew
Every time I get an urge to play an explorer MMO, I fire up EverQuest, log in to my rogue, the original Tipa Tanglewood, put on hide and sneak and shroud myself in stealth, and head in a random direction, certain to see something I’ve never seen before, even having played the game for ten years. I was exploring the lands of the Seeds of Destruction and got to chatting with some of my old friends (hi, Carlysle and Netura!) and somehow found myself heading to a group in Valdeholme in the Serpent’s Spine, yet another Entirely New Zone for me. ...
It’s a gray, rainy day today, perfect time to stay home and game a little. Could be a perfect time to level up a few alts in City of Heroes. Zubon of Kill Ten Rats uses the new Architect system to design the perfect opponents for his new characters and bring them to level 20 in a single mission. Ogrebears has some issues with SOE’s partnership with ZAM.com to give that third party website more access to the game data than any other website, ever. It’s not so much that they have been set above EQ2i, LootDB, EQTraders and such, but because that it seems poorly designed and incomplete. ...