World of Warcraft

All anyone is talking about these days is Winds of Pandaria. I desperately want to join in, but how? I don’t play WoW any more. I’m feeling a little left out. But hey, why let that stop me. I may not play WoW much any more, but I have played another game that was desperately trying to attract new players while keeping old ones – EverQuest. A game that is still going strong. At this stage in its life, where WoW finds itself today, EQ added a race of dragon people, a whole new accelerated leveling path. Later came mercenaries that allowed almost any class to easily solo. All this kind of stuff. ...

Yeah, I’ve been in the Winds of Pandaria ALPHA for awhile. I’m telling you, it’s AWESOME. You guys are gonna freak. NDA prevents me from being too specific, buuuut… ya know Deathwing? Yeah. He’s a mount and you can ride him. Wanna play a Pandaren Monk? Their special ability is KUNG FU LEAP. You start a jump, and then this map of Azeroth comes up, and you can land anywhere you like. You jump into frickin’ ORBIT, and guess what you see when you’re up there? Well, I can’t say, but you will need new pants afterward. ...

Ophiga and friend The big news yesterday was the dropping of the Press NDA for Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic. I read all the press reviews I could find; I’ll point to some of those later on, but almost all of them credited the storyline for pulling them deeper into the game. The game mechanics may be old hat, and the standard roles, dungeons and raids are present, but the story, by all accounts, is worth the price of admission. ...

If you were given six months to live, you wouldn’t spend it leveling up a new character in some MMORPG. You’d want to do something that gave your life meaning. Six months at the end of your life isn’t more valuable than six months right now. In fact, six months right now is way better. Truth is, your friends and family don’t care that you leveled a character. They care about the time you spent with them. (Fact is, it’s almost certain nobody in the world cares about your achievements in video games, and in a couple of years, neither will you). ...

Magic Castle for Sale: Sold! A few days ago I was trying to define what I thought of as an MMO. I started off thinking it was just a realtime, online game with other players, but as the day went on, thinking about it more, I felt it had to include a persistent avatar representing the player that could be named and customized. I was pretty confident that nailed the essential nature of an MMORPG. ...

Star Wars: The Crayon Republic So yeah. I’d have a better screenshot, but somehow I’m the only person who did NOT get into the Star Wars: The Old Republic beta weekend. But I have MS Paint, and I’m not afraid to use it. Doesn’t matter. Game is going to be a hit – that’s not even in doubt. You can kill stuff with light sabers. Kiss a wookie. Visit Alderaan before it went to hell. And even though the game is set three thousand years before the events of the movies, everyone still wears the same frickin’ clothes. ...

Scene from a WoW raid There’s probably worthwhile studies to be done on the MMORPG phenomenon. The games of the genre are designed to keep you interested and engaged for thousands of hours. The game itself is a potential setting for the formation of a long-lasting community that could extend far beyond the game realm. MMOs have provoked real life violence. Prisoners are rumored to have to play them to support repressive regimes by bilking money from Westerners. ...

The awe-inspiring Harbinger of Regulos If you took all the bullet-point features of Rift and compared them against all the bullet-point features of World of Warcraft as it was before its first expansion – Rift comes out fairly well. The appearance armor and dye systems which lets my rogue look like I want her to look STILL haven’t made it to WoW. And the rift system itself is a real game-changer, and there still seems to be plenty of room to experiment when building a role from souls. ...

Dragon Age Legends One thing you gotta say about Dragon Age Legends: like the single player games upon which its based, in Dragon Age Legends you Get. To. Kill. DRAGONS. (Warning: link goes to Facebook). Unlike, say, Dungeons and Dragons Online, where I have yet to kill a dragon. The one you see in the tutorial is little more than a tease. It’s fighting a mind flayer, though, and we HAVE started killing those in our static group, but the name of the game isn’t Mazes and Mind Flayers Online now, is it? ...

The SOE sheep live in danger I work a full day in the office, then strap my laptop to my back, pedal home and work a full night as well. It’s called crunch time, this is the third month of it, and work people pay me to do is taking priority over writing which nobody pays me anything to do. If I were working on a game, I could excitedly drop hints about it, but the only way you’ll see what I’m writing is if you need to be bonded. Or you happened to be a bond agent. BUT! If you ARE, well, we’ve got something pretty amazing for you this summer :) ...