I was thinking this morning about Norman Spinrad’s “Bug Jack Barron”, where a treatment can make you immortal, but a child has to die (this btw is a massive spoiler if you have not read the book). In MMOs, we are immortal, but at some point we’ve done everything or it just gets boring and we move on to the next game. If we had immortality in our real lives, how long would we live before we were just desperate to have it end so we could move on? ...
I saw Star Trek Friday night – and it was great. Kinda made me wonder if someone could do the same for Star Wars… like if, somehow, Jarjar Binks went back in time to train Anakin before Qui-gon Schindler got to him… After an exciting Free Realms weekend in which the log-in servers were down for many hours, I still got some time in. Restarted as an archer and got to level 7, right in the middle of the grind to level 10. Tobold got his blacksmith to 20 and finds the whole job pointless since fairly cheap RMT weapons you can get at level 1 are way better than the best weapons you can craft at 20. ...
Recently released screenshots for Cryptic’s Star Trek Online give us our first glimpse of the starship interiors and interfaces. This latest screenshot shows how starship captains will have the ability to construct a Tactical Operations (TACOPS) deck in their ships. Using an intuitive Computer-Aided Decision Interface (CADI), tactical awareness of the current and surrounding sectors may be displayed in a simplified, easily understood manner by the state-of-the-art Situational Bidimensional Character Array (SBCA). The ship may also be entirely controlled from TACOPS with a simplified command syntax, or SCA.
Yes, this is the Daily Blogroll MY OWN BLOG didn’t want you to see! I’m kinda tired of Free Realms. Not the game; heck, considering my computer now refuses to run Lord of the Rings Online for long, I’ve been spending most of my gaming time in Free Realms. Beau is having fun playing. Pete at Dragonchasers took a 75 degree turn and went from being marginal about the game to a fan in just three short days. Syp of Bio Break is still dubious, but what does he care – his wife is Tinker Bell! ...
As near as I can tell, nearly 900 people came to this blog yesterday just to name the Marleybone builder turtle in Wizard 101. That’s fantastic! There’s still a bunch of time left, and as long as the contest is going, there’s going to be a big button over there on the right leading to the post since, this being a blog, stuff scrolls off the front page almost immediately, and the Name the Turtles contest is already buried under THIS post, and a long, long comic about two hobbits discussing how cool a X Files MMO would totally be. ...
Ya know, I was going to start this forward looking collection of cool stuff about Cryptic’s forthcoming Star Trek Online with a look backward at Perpetual’s time with the license, but I couldn’t. The Perpetual people were making the game they wanted. It wasn’t the game I wanted, but they weren’t making it for me. They were making it for people who wanted a Star Trek game that wasn’t very different from World of Warcraft. ...
In 2007, you could have surprised absolutely nobody by predicting that 2008, last year, would be the biggest, best year ever for MMOs. Triple A titles abounded – Age of Conan and Warhammer Online were both just going to tear WoW a new one, but heck, even WoW was coming out with its second expansion. Pirates of the Burning Sea would take MMOs into a new direction, Chronicles of Spellborn would be an indie hit from Europe, and Flagship would be following up Hellgate: London with their MMO homage to Diablo II, Mythos. ...
2008 has been an absolutely amazing year for MMOs, and my personal progress through them. Last year at this time, I’d just found the absolutely most perfect EQ2 guild – they were great raiders, loved grouping, and were fantastic people besides. With Clan of Shadows, I managed to do every flagging raid for Ruins of Kunark and was ready to step in and do my best to help the guild as they conquered Veeshan’s Peak. It wasn’t to be; I didn’t make the full membership vote. It wasn’t even close. That disappointment, along with other things to fill my evenings, eventually led to the end of raiding. Without raiding, though, I didn’t have much incentive to log in anymore. I tried to make things work with another guild, Delusions of Grandeur, but it just wasn’t CoS. I guess if I couldn’t make it in CoS, I didn’t want to settle for a lesser guild. ...
Thanks to TheRemedy for the heads-up on the Cryptic Star Trek Online trailer. The trailer jumps from fight scene to fight scene, and the game seems to go boldly where all the single player games have gone before. Some of these fights look straight out of Star Trek Armada 2, and the hand-to-hand fights look just as pointless as fights in every other MMO. I did some poking around the Cryptic web site and found a list of quest descriptions. I’m interested to hear about more STO quests if you know of any :) ...
It was a pretty slow weekend, considering. I meant to do a first look at Pi Story to complement the one I did for Florensia, but I didn’t get to it. Nor did I play Florensia any. I did play some EverQuest; Saturday I did all sorts of running around with my ranger, soloed Hate and Sky with my cleric, and Sunday morning met up with a guildie to do The Hole more or less legit, in that I actually played Tipa the entire time :) But I’ve talked about that in a previous post. ...