It’s just one day shy of a week since the folks at Acclaim proudly stated Spellborn would be entering closed beta this very week. Has anyone gotten in yet? And if so, without breaking the NDA, is the stability good? How do you like the new tutorial on the shardship? How fun will it be once you find out you can’t skip it with subsequent characters? :) Well, maybe they’ll add some way around that. (This is based on the EU version of the game) ...
Has it ever happened to you? You’re skipping merrily along some barren Dragonspyre (or Marleybone) street, and you see a sparkling silver chest sitting there in the road or behind a tower. You open it and are transported to a new mini-game that is over before you’ve figured out what to do? What the heck do you do with them? In many ways, this puzzle is like the train mini-game that everyone knows and loves as the easiest way to refill potion bottles, except here, instead of just rotating the tiles, you are sliding them around. ...
After the fold is the second half of last Friday’s developer chat. Again, any errors in transcribing it are mine, and for the actual chat right from the mouths of the devs, you can find the full MP3 recording over on Historian’s site. In this half of the transcript, we learn about what’s coming for PvP, solo and group instances, what’s coming for the end game, how solo friendly the game is, and much, much more. ...
This is a transcript of the first half of the Acclaim Spellborn developer chat. The first half, as in, I typed until my fingers could type no more – and I was just halfway through. Even in the first half, though, many exciting topics come up. In attendance were David Perry; Howard Marks, the CEO of Acclaim; Neal, the CTO of Acclaim, Aaron from marketing and communication; Historian, the Acclaim Community Manager; and El Drijver, the Spellborn lead designer, on the phone from the Netherlands. ...
Acclaim’s Community Manager, ‘Historian’, just posted the audio for today’s Spellborn developer chat. In attendance were David Perry and El Drijver, Lead Designer for Spellborn. Head on over and give it a listen.
Back in, oh, I guess this would be the early 90s, I had a friend who was so excited about finally putting all her paintings – ‘paintings’ – on this new World Wide Web thing. I’d known she liked art, but painting? I didn’t know she did that. She sent everyone in our little circle of friends links to her paintings page. And it was all, every single one, pictures of her filtered through some oil painting setting of some early paint program. ...
Breaking news! Acclaim CEO Howard Marks says Chronicles of Spellborn closed beta starts NEXT WEEK! I’d love to talk about Spellborn. I’ve been a big fan of it for a couple years now, wrote about it at every opportunity at Massively, even had the collector’s box set shipped from Germany and leveled up chars on the EU servers because I REALLY LOVE THIS GAME. Cue creepy “ ” music… ...
Wizard 101 is built around a card game, and that card game is built around your deck. Deck construction can be tricky. I was talking with a friend about building decks for collectible card games last night, and he told me of some people who would bring massive decks of eighty or more cards to a tournament. How could that player ever get the card he wanted? How indeed? In the best Wizard 101 decks, you always get the card you want. ...
It’s been a long time since I peeked beneath Dina’s appearance armor to see what all that cool stuff looks like. I’d gotten the TSO Tier 1 armor crafting book from a crafting mission Kasul and I duoed, and so was making TSO armor like crazy to fill up some gaping holes in my outfit. But – what does this stuff look like? Yeah. Like THAT. You will never see my characters undressed again, I promise! On the right, Dina is in her normal outfit. ...
Yesterday I wrote about “Neo Steam”, which brings a decidedly Eastern, hardcore PvP, flair to that eternal conflict between technology and magic and the mystical substance that powers them both. Intriguing? Yes, maybe, but – it isn’t Steampunk! Not to me, anyway. Just having a mystical substance called “Neo Steam” is not enough to make it Steampunk in my book. If it were called “Neo Granite”, would that make it “Quarry Punk”? ...