Daily Blogroll Oct 11: Can’t break the NDA edition.

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.
That vest and farm boy shirt? Smugglers don’t mess with something that works! Seriously! Three thousand years pass, the galaxy convulses through light and darkness a dozen times over, and almost nothing has changed. By the time Han hooked up with Chewbacca, wookies and Corellians probably get paired for life at birth or something.
Well. On to the blogroll.

Speaking of NDAs, Wasdstomp wonders if NDAs are a good idea at all. Because once in beta, everyone knows everything ANYWAY, but they can’t TALK about it. There’s probably half a dozen Google+ hangouts going on RIGHT NOW where people are buzzing about their newest light saber and the color of their snow speeder.
The reason for NDAs in late-stage products? To make players feel like they have something special, lure them into actually spending a lot of time in the game in the few hours they have, and then they are hooked. The first taste is free. Plenty of MMOs in open beta, you can go download them and be playing months before official release (case in point: recently released Dragon Nest, until last week). Since it was open to ANYONE, nobody cared that much.
MMO Symposium’s Ffaffner continues his chronicles in Wurm Online. In this episode, he walks to the coast to meet up with some friends. Wurm Online doesn’t have “safe paths” or “fast travel” or “maps”. As if Lewis told Clark to meet him in Oregon by saying “just keep walking west till you hit the ocean, then go north a bit”. And no Sacagewa.
This is a game, after all, where walking a hundred miles and then being put to hard labor IS the gameplay.
Chris of Levelcapped wonders if it’s easier to kill if you don’t think of your enemy as human. Well, he’s talking about the various bugs musclebound space marines are always killing, but it could be Nazis, Commies, Vikings, Terrorists or whatever the enemy of the people happens to be. The whole POINT of war is to dehumanize your opponent until he is easy to kill. And it’s no surprise the default way to defuse a tense situation in any given video game is to kill everything that moves.
Is that all games are? Genocide by the numbers?
The Ancient Gaming Noob has a WoW Sparkle Pony to give away! Amaze and astonish your friends with the ultimate in hazy horseflesh! All you have to do is make a travel poster of your favorite place in Azeroth and send it in to him. I guess the Burning Crusade expansion is right out. And can you have travel posters to locations that don’t exist since Cataclysm destroyed them?
I don’t know! Read the rules for yourself!

If nothing else, Dust514 is going to be the world’s number one MMOFPS screen shot generator… Playstation.Blog’s James Gallagher talked to CCP Executive producer Brandon Laurino about the persistent-world shooter that’s going to dovetail seamlessly with the space game of EVE Online.
So what’s the gameplay like?

Essentially it’s a vehicular combat game on an extremely large scale, and then when you move into installations and outposts, it’s more infantry based. We’re using Unreal Engine 3 and we’ve incorporated a Mega Terrain engine into it that lets us create huge levels with varied terrain, with a vast array of vehicles ranging from buggies to tanks to aircraft. Typically, you would use vehicles to traverse the landscape and engage in closer combat when you deploy into outposts, but there is a huge amount of tactical freedom, way outside of those broad examples.

So…. Halo?
And to help drive up page views, a Taiwan gamer ten-boxing Pit Lord Argaloth in Baradin Hold. His boxen include a paladin, seven elemental shaman, a priest and a resto shaman. So you know, if you want to raid, be a shaman I think is the lesson here.