Just a brief post here. The blogger guild that JoBildo and company have been working on along with me has a name! Casualties of WAR will be the Warhammer flavor of the guild. Our forums are up over at casualtiesguild.com. We’d love it if you would head over there and sign up. Watch here and at the other blogs for more information as it becomes available.
Over at Nerfbat, Ryan links to the Fury forums with an announcement that Fury is closing in 48 hours. I feel bad for people that worked on the game as well as the people who enjoyed playing it. I agree with Ryan that there is always sadness when a game completely goes away.
I’m seeing a TON of these free to download, free to play games lately though. Unless I’m missing something there is a kind of a repeat of the dot com boom and bust cycle repeating itself in the gaming industry now. There seem to be a lot of game companies whose business plan is “we’ll figure out how to monetize it later.” To me, if they aren’t asking for payment for a box (or digital download,) a subscription, ad revenue support, or an obvious microtransaction model then I am just not going to put any emotional capital into it. I can’t believe that investors are putting real capital into these companies, but the development resources are obviously coming from somewhere.
As you might know if you have been reading this blog, I am interested in Mythic’s upcoming Warhammer release. You might also know that I am in beta and as such I have to be careful about what I write about WAR to make sure that I continue to honor the game’s NDA. I’m very glad to see that Mythic is starting to lift the veil on the game a bit.
On one of my favorite blogs, Wall of Text, Brent embedded a couple of videos that show a little about the look and feel of the Destruction capital city and the customization options for the user interface. Those videos are from a French gaming video site, JeuxVideo.TV.
Over at The Ramblings of JoBildo, JoBildo floated the idea of getting a guild together from the blogging community. He wants to start an Order guild. I’d love to play in that guild but I’m not rolling up an Order character as my main. Sorry. ;) With that in mind, I thought I’d offer web space, Vent Server, mindshare, and if you all want it, management and leadership for a WAR Destruction guild.
You don’t have to be a blogger to participate, you just have to read blogs and find this via this blog or JoBildo’s or similar.
So this post is to gauge interest in the idea of a blogging community guild based around the idea of grown-ups with jobs and lives playing together for fun and infamy. If you are, please post below. It’s not a blood oath, but it will give me an idea if this is something worth pursuing or not. I have the enthusiasm, ability, and inclination to do this. Do we have numbers?
Post here and show those Alliance, er, Order Sissies that Destruction Rules!
Hey everyone, been busy with family obligations and haven’t really been playing any MMO’s. I have been shoehorning in TF2 whenever I can for my game play fix. I’ll get back to writing in a few days. My kids will be ending their summer visit and work is slowing down enough that I can read and comment more effectively.
Thanks for dropping by, keep your eye out here. This has been a lull, not a shutdown.
Is this the first sign of danger for the release of WAR? I’ve been concerned about the state and how WAR would be received for some time now (not based on my beta experience, but rather on the still-very-short development cycle.) This game is still really only in it’s third year of development. This is not usually when a triple-a MMO is released. They have been working hard to get the game ready and released for a while now, and some information is finally forthcoming.
According to Mark Jacobs in an MMORPG.com interview;
A number of months ago, we sat down and looked at where we were with our Capital Cities and we looked at what we were doing with Altdorf and Inevitable, we looked at the Greenskin home, the Dwarf home and we went ‘there’s an awful lot to do here and there are some issues‘.
we decided to focus our energies on two capital cities; one for Order and one for Destruction, and make them fabulous. Not good, not great, but fabulous.
We wanted to make our Capital Cities the best cities in any MMO. We think we’re doing that, but it came at a price and that price is that the other cities aren’t going in the game right now.
In other words; “We’re running out of time.”
As you have noticed if you have tried to read this blog, it’s got no new content on it lately. I’m not done with blogging as I mentioned before. I’ve just got a lot going on right now. Thanks for checking back here. I’ll get going again soon. I just have a lot of family obligations and my late-night time is being eaten up by something insidious and addictive.
Team Fortress 2 has reset the hook, and I’m gut-hooked again.
It all started with the Pyro achievements. I resolved to get my achievements this time and not let them slide like I had with the Medic. I don’t tend to enjoy the Medic unless I’m playing with someone I trust, and I tend to server hop so that isn’t usually an option. Pyro on the other hand allows for several different play styles. I can play defensively, I can go offense, or I can adapt to the moment and do whatever the team needs.
During the early summer months, my gaming time (and writing time as well as you can see) is usually severely limited because of a change in priorities. Namely, my children are here for their annual summer visit. While I can’t play AoC for hours like I was, I can still get in some gaming here and there. Here’s what I’ve been up to.
Mario Kart Wii
It’s probably not quite as good as the GameCube edition of the game, but it’s dang close. In my book that still makes it one of the 10 best video games ever. I can’t tell you how much enjoyment my family and I have derived from this franchise. All ages seem to be able to enjoy it and there is actually a higher level of understanding that you can gain that gives it the depth that most adult gamers require for their enjoyment. Been playing a lot of this.
The title of this article is a question posed by a member of our AoC guild. The trigger for this question was that he and 3 others were waiting for a slow-spawning boss for a quest. They were standing near the spawn waiting when the boss spawned and a solo player immediately got to it and tagged it. So their group had to wait I don’t know how long for the boss to respawn, when the “offending” player could have just asked into the group and they all could have had it. It seems like this sort of antisocial behavior has been growing more prevalent in recent years. It’s not a new phenomenon though. I remember being a dark elf enchanter in Everquest and there was a guy (not a dark elf) killing guards inside Neriak. As I ran past him, I got a tell; “Give me Clarity.” Excuse me? “Effing give me Clarity!” Umm, I don’t want to. This resulted in a huge string of profanity directed at me. If he had been even a little courteous I would have surely buffed him. As it was, not so much.
Courtesy was much more common, and even expected, in Everquest than it is in today’s games though. I think one of the factors is where players come from today vs. what my circle of friends’ gaming background was when we started.
I have a theory (this should scare you.)
It’s been a little while since I wrote about AoC and what’s going on there. A lot has changed as I see it so let’s get started;
First of all, I understand that the game isn’t for everyone. I don’t understand the hate that is going around about the game though. There are some definite annoyances in the game. It still crashes and hitches too much. Not nearly as much as in the open beta but enough to make your blood boil at times. There are harvesting bugs, quest bugs (some of them just plain don’t work) and other kinds of bugs all over the game. That being said, it’s still very playable and Funcom is patching twice a week trying to get on top of it. As long as there is progress then I think it’s worth playing, more so than anything else I can think of right now.
According to a brief article over at Joystiq, Age of Conan has now shipped One Million Units. This is based on a report from gamesindustry.biz, a popular game industry news site.
Darren over at the Common Sense Gamer has a good little analysis of the situation on his blog as well.
For those of you not in the retail/distribution business, here is what this means;
I don’t want to go off on a rant here, but…(long)
You gotta love our heroes over at Sony Online Entertainment. Even when they have a good idea, one of their other ideas comes along and screws it up for them. The latest example is that of the Station Launcher. One day long ago, SOE said to itself; “Self, wouldn’t it be cool if we had one launcher for all of our games? That way not only could the customer launch any SOE game they owned from it, but we could use it to market all of the games that they DON’T have every time they launch a game.” Solid thinking, that. Hard to argue that the Station Launcher is a great idea. Hell, it even got me to subscribe to Station Pass not too long ago. But that is all changing now.
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