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.
Like a whole bunch of people, me included, Peter of Dragonchasers was given a very limited Aion beta key that was good for only a weekend or two back in July. Since then, he has not been able to play in the preview events. Since the game has been released for quite some time overseas and needs very little testing, Peter wonders if this whole “beta” thing is just a ploy to lure people in with a free beta, and then force them to pre-order to play more?
Stingite at The Friendly Necromancer says the world of Wizard 101 is filled with danger, challenge and all that, but where are the pranks, hijinks and mischief you’d expect to find at a wizard school? Where’s the troll phone?
Warhammerer notes that Free Realms now allows you to invert your mouse, and that all jobs will now level faster. Noted 🙂 Also, look out for the new raceway and Demo Driver and Kart Racer quests this very week.
World of Warcraft watchers have discovered the addition of two new Halloween masks into the game, a goblin and a Worgen (wolf people whom you kill by the millions in Duskwood and Shadowfang Keep, iirc). Could these be new player races for the next WoW expansion? When I played, pre-BC, it was widely rumored that Worgen would be coming with that expansion. Would these new races bring new players to the game?
And (via Hudson, so thanks!) Gary Gannon wonders why most MMOs haven’t taken advantage of the rise of social networking and mobile gaming? I dunno, maybe they should, maybe they shouldn’t, but seeing people’s Twitter spam from the games they play just annoys me.
And lastly, the ever-prolific Hudson looks at the recently announced changes to City of Heroes along with the latest developments at its sequel-in-spirit, Champions Online, and figures it won’t be long before you won’t be able to tell the game apart at all. Except one will be a lot more like WoW than the other.
Well, I guess that’s all for today!
I’ve been working on a 3D exploration of famous MMO worlds (well, at least the ones I have on my hard drive), so dig out those old red/blue cardboard glasses and prepare to look at the worlds of fantasy in a new way, sometime this week.
3 thoughts on “Daily Blogroll 7/20 – Much Ado about Nothing edition”
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Hey Tipa! I love these round-ups, thanks for doing them!
Though I don’t share Hudson’s distaste for the quest hub model, he has a point. Goblins and Worgen would give the Horde a small race and the Alliance a furry one, but it’s unclear what else they would really do to shake up the game. I have already played all of but one of the game’s classes through at least level 23. Unless there’s something fundamentally different, I don’t see why the new races would motivate me to re-roll using classes that I either already have or did not like.
I would definitely make one of each new race just to experience the new content, but that’s maybe a week or two’s worth of content. (The same case could be made for New Halas in EQ2 – if I were calling the shots, I’d argue for more T9 content instead of a sixth path from 1-20, and, barring that, more content in the 50-70 range.) Perhaps Blizzard has something novel in mind, such as starting the new guys at level 40 so that their starting areas could ALSO serve as additional content for alts that are currently bogged down in the 40-60 range. Barring that, this does not really seem like a killer expansion feature to me.
I love the round-ups too (blogroll). Tipa must not need much sleep. Between work, gaming, reading blogs, writing for your own blog and the stories and comics she does, when the hell does she eat and sleep??