World of Warcraft

Sorry for the entire and almost complete lack of posts this week… family stuff. Guess I should have called it the “WEEKLY Blogroll”…. What makes an MMORPG an RPG? Nowadays, EVERYTHING seems to be called an RPG. First person shooters like Call of Duty 4 are suddenly RPGs because they include levels (and, arguably, classes as well). So is that it? Is any game with leveling now automatically a Role Playing Game? Zubon of Kill Ten Rats wonders if that’s all there is. Psychochild responds by taking a look back at the origins of the term in pen-and-paper gaming. These days, I tend to regard games that don’t force you into certain paths as more of an RPG that on-rails MMOs like WoW. Zubon has a point when he says Second Life is more of an RPG than most games that claim the title. ...

Aside from just being a shout-out to John Landis fans, I will be away on family business all weekend, returning Tuesday. I don’t know if I’ll bring my laptop, but I won’t be gaming in any event. The banner picture is of a raid dying in EQ2’s Wrath of the Elements x2 raid instance. It’s a guild raid, and the guild is Twilight Disciples, and it’s a PST raiding guild with a full roster of raiding nights, but the WoE raid was fun enough that, warning them I’d likely be missing most weeknight raids due to being asleep, I accepted their offer to join. I even won some T3 gloves from the raid, but I don’t have enough shards to finish them. If you’re not an EQ2 player, most of this paragraph was gibberish. ...

Okay, THAT was a day of good discussion, so thanks, Wolfshead :) Why did I feel your “first impressions” article needed rebutting? Well, SOMEONE had to stand up (and thanks to Hudson, who did!). I couldn’t say that stuff about WoW and expect to come away without comment. In grand blogging tradition, Wolfshead now has a rebuttal to my rebuttal :) ...

Where I live, both Burger King and Texas Steak House are in walking distance. Both serve meals, and both of those meals may contain beef. I could walk into the steak house and notice that the wait was too long, the menu was not posted prominently with pictures of the meals as you walked in, the meals were vastly overpriced, the music was too loud, the place was too crowded, the servers demanded I decide how I wanted my meal cooked, they served alcohol, and that since Burger King was arguably a LOT more popular, they would be well served by changing their business, or at least to be more aware of the BK way. ...

I almost resubscribed to WoW last night. Just for a month, just so I could see some of the new places, see if the stuff the expansions added changed the game for the better. I didn’t, though, because to roll up a Death Knight and see all this cool stuff would cost me $$$ for the core game, Burning Crusade, and Wrath of the Lich King. Maybe when Blizzard finally makes all-in-one editions, like everyone else these days. ...

The weekend went by too fast, as it always does. Rock, Paper, Shotguns Kieron Gillen had the perilous job of re-reviewing Darkfall for Eurogamer. Eurogamer’s original review score, 2/10, was savaged by the Darkfall developers and players. In Darkfallout, Kieron talks about the perils of being the clean-up crew for a disaster, and why he was shocked at the reaction by some other game journalists to the first review. Following up on last week’s discussion about how MMOs are like men, women, dogs, or kitchen cleansers, Green Armadillo notices that his dog is a lot like an MMO player. Except we have to go get our OWN food. ...

Welcome to another daily blogroll! EQ2 has re-opened character server transfers via its Station Marketplace RMT store, halving the price and making the process as smooth as possible. I’ve started moving my essential characters from Najena and Befallen to Antonia Bayle, my original EQ2 server before my desire to play with friends led me to have characters on a half dozen servers. ...

Like an ebbing tide, the weekend slowly recedes, leaving behind the flotsam and jetsam of yet another Monday. Only a few years too late to knock ’em dead in Mrs. Moran’s 3rd grade English class on similes. Are the World of Warcraft’s raids too dependent on scripting to be done by unaided humanity? I haven’t played WoW in a few years, but it’s sounding more and more like WoW raids are just a multiplayer, more colorful version of the old “Dragon’s Lair” video game, where you had to move to lit-up squares in a room to defeat monsters. Actually it sounds EXACTLY like it, as Copra found out to his dismay. WoW raiding – an update of a classic 80’s video game for a new generation. ...

I love the feeling of peace and serenity EVE Online gives. And then sometimes weird, exciting stuff happens. A corps-mate and I were testing weapons fire and tank abilities last night when a battle broke out behind us as rival corps met outside a station. It was great, and for some reason reminded me of the very first story I ever read about EVE Online, about The Great Scam which put the game on everyone’s long range scanners. ...

Only 178 days till Christmas! With 2009 halfway gone now, I thought you’d want to know. I predicted this year would be one of the best ever for MMOs, with some high-profile releases and expansions, but with many titles delayed and some now not due until next year (like Star Trek Online and EQ2’s Sentinel’s Fate expansion), 2009 just might lose the “best year ever” crown to 2010. My being bad at predicting was harshly lit when I predicted last year that the expansion that would turn out to be Shadow Odyssey would be Odus, and this year, when I predicted Velious, it really WAS Odus… and what’s worse is that it really is about what you’d expect from a generic expansion. ...