Even Dragon Age Legends needs more tanks I was amused to load up Dragon Age Legends last night and find a message urging me to recruit friends to the game and to urge them to play a tank. Given Blizzard’s new Call to Arms program, which rewards needed archetypes that queue for random dungeons with potions, loot and cosmetic items like mounts and pets, I was a little surprised to see this bleed into the world of social gaming. ...
Yeah, I’ve been MIA for a couple weeks now. Work time is creeping into home time. It’s so cold when I get home that I find myself cuddling up with blankets and a cat on the couch, watching Netflix (tonight: the Canadian comedy “Slings & Arrows”, season 1). I’m not wild about this “winter” thing in general. I haven’t been able to get on the bicycle for a few weeks now, and it’s really making me antsy. ...
I absolutely would love to know how many people people are REALLY playing World of Warcraft vs Lord of the Rings Online vs Warhammer Online vs Total Global Annihilation (Online) and so on. Heaven knows its not in the interest of gaming companies to tell us. To me, it means they have something to hide. Every company is all so excited to reveal their numbers when they are trending up. When they are silent, that can only be bad news. ...
Who owns your MMO character? The game companies say they do, but they didn’t put hundreds of hours into turning the character from an animated paper doll into a person with relationships, memories, friends, victories, stories and history. But it’s precisely because you HAVE taken the time and done all these things that the companies can keep running their game. But as long as game companies control access to your character, you’re paying them so that you can add value to their game. ...
If there could be a greater revolution in online gaming than Microsoft’s upcoming Avatar Kinect, I’m not really sure what it could be. uses its popular new peripheral to track your gestures, mouth movements and even your eyebrows and use this data to create a lifelike puppet of you in an online chat room. The traditional problems of the Kinect remain; your avatar won’t be spending much time walking from place to place, but it is certainly worlds better than having to clean house to have friends over. ...
Soooo…. how about that Massively article? Did it make you mad as hell? Meh. I had a look at my site analytics today, just to see if people were coming here to read about the so-called controversy and you know? More people came to read my view of Velious through frost-covered glasses. That reinforces what I’ve always known about MMO fans. We just want to get online and PLAY GOOD GAMES. ...
If you want to hear about the huge controversy over Jef Reahard’s one hour dismissal of Rift, well, I’ve already said all I’m going to say about it. There’s lots of MMOs, like Kung FOO, Fists of Fu, and Mabinogi that I played for an hour or two and felt no attachment. If someone had come up to me and asked me how I felt about those games after that hour or two playing them, I’d have told them what I thought. ...
I suck at predictions, but everyone else is doing them. Luckily, I have a Magic 8 Ball. I’m just gonna list some games, and ask the Magic 8 Ball what it thinks of them. Question to the 8 Ball for all of these games: Will this game have a good year in 2011? Age of Conan: “Outlook Not So Good”. AoC released its first expansion, “Ride of the Godslayer”, last summer, and that’s pretty much the last I’ve heard of the game. I don’t think the Magic 8 Ball is correct; I think Funcom is content to support their current player base without feeling the need to go F2P. Their massively hyped launch should have helped them recoup their development costs years ago. ...
I long ago pre-ordered SOE’s DC Universe Online, but this was my first opportunity to play it, in beta, on the PC. Though it’s on the PC, the little picture hints and controls clearly expect you to be using a PS3 controller to play the game. I don’t have a PS3 controller, but I do have a XBox controller, so I plugged it in and away I went. ...
Scott of Pumping Irony was chiding me and other bloggers today on Twitter for getting totally excited about a game, writing loads about it, then dropping that game the moment something new came by. I was all defensive, pointing to my long-term coverage of W101, STO, DDO and, when I played them, EVE, EQ and EQ2 when – I remembered Fantasy Earth Zero, Dragonica, Dream of Mirror Online, Dragon Oath and so many other games I played heavily for a few weeks, then totally forgot. ...