Warhammer: Age of Reckoning

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. ...

After hours of agonizing labor pains, SOE popped Free Realms out last night, just before midnight in California. They were just half an hour from having to have their launch party in Fairbanks, but they technically shipped it Tuesday, despite it being Wednesday in four-fifths of the world. Despite the late hour, the server was bustling with new chefs and brawlers. It doesn’t look like Station Access members are considered members in Free Realms yet, or maybe it’s just me. Look for me in the game, my character is Tipa Tanglewood. Speedy custom name approval FTW! ...

Penny Arcade starts off Freeday Friday with a little bit of snark about the Chronicles of Spellborn payment plan. While it’s true that you can now use a credit card like for every other game… I think trying to figure out their Coins-based plan is a fun game all on its own, don’t you? Reported everywhere is Lord of the Rings Online’s second anniversary promotion. Free to try again, 25% experience bonus on kills that stacks with all other bonuses, tokens you can trade in for cool stuff, etc etc. The xp boost is very nice, anyway. I haven’t seen what the tokens trade in for, but I have my suspicions I have a lot of Blueberry Tart recipes in my future. ...

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. ...

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. ...

I admit it, life before Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning was fairly bland and meaningless. My life before I became consumed by WHOOOOAAAAA was just a shadow – a shadow OF a shadow, really. Before Public Quests, how could I really do a quest? Before the Tome of Knowledge, how would I know what to do? Before Open Groups, how would I ever find a group? MMOs before WAR were mostly people just standing around, without direction, without anything to do. ...

There’s just so much to say about Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning that people don’t even talk about. I’m don’t mean innovations like Public Quests or the Tome of Knowledge or Open Groups or stuff like that, but stuff that really makes you sit down and go, “damn, why hasn’t any other game ever done this?” It’s that “I coulda had a V-8” forehead slap moment. I’d have liked to have been in that meeting where some nebbiish dev looked up from his books and said, in a quavering voice that would change the direction of the game forever, “why don’t we have DWARFS in our game?”. ...

Maracas aren’t as good at warding off intergalactic invaders as I thought they would be. While out gathering the day’s meals, my duckling tribespeople were startled by a huge contraption which WALKED on white, clanking legs down from the sky and sucked up the food animals that were being kept in the pen behind the main hut. It then buzzed the village twice and stalked back up into space. ...

Was your life as devastated as ours when one, two, and then three days went by without a Straight Talk Warhammer? Did you feel feverish, slipping in and out of consciousness, and have long and repetitive arguments with yourself about whether or not Sokka from The Last Airbender was inspired by Xander Harris from Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Friends, we know exactly how you feel. But from those pits of despair and dreams we have wrangled news of one of the most excitingly original careers ever conceived of by a game which has already proven time and time again that a war between orcs and humans was too good an idea not to copy, the Witch Hunter. ...