Most Commented

Resources

Subscribe

  • Subscribe

Warhammer Online Hotfixes are In

Posted by Nelson Williams (Who am I?) | January 6, 2009

It’s as true now as ever before, Tuesday is patch day. Warhammer Online updates with a few cleaned up quests and a quick PvP fix. Here are the full patch notes ripped straight from WAR’s website.

Content

* The Deathclaw Cold Ones that assault the High Elf Chapter 22 hub will no longer attack players.

Quests and Public Quests

Quests

* Betrayal from Within: Adjusted the waypoints on this quest so that they correctly lead players to the Bastion Stair entrance.
* Broken Core: Fixed an issue which was preventing Squig Herder players from completing this quest because they could not choose a reward.
* Eyes of the Spy: Fixed an issue with the Raven Caller quest item which sometimes allowed more than one raven to be summoned.
* Bitter Blood: This quest will now reward …

Keep reading »

Comment

Pirates of the Burning Sea Updates Avatar Combat

Posted by Nelson Williams (Who am I?) | January 3, 2009

And it’s finally time, too. Pirates of the Burning Sea is, well, a pirate MMORPG that released to relatively little fanfare some time ago. Partly, the gaming community received it with a resounding wall of “meh” thanks to a dull and uninteresting combat system. Battles outside your ship boiled down to a simple matter of pressing a button, maybe two, and either winning or losing. There just wasn’t much to do in combat that could change the results of a fight.

The folks at Pirates noticed this little lack, and took it to heart. They’ve scrapped the old combat system entirely and replaced it with a new, more involved system backed by streamlined and effective character skills. The result is build 1.11, the Clash of Steel upgrade. You can read the release notes for 1.11 over here, which is something you’ll …

Keep reading »

Comment

City of Heroes Begins Macintosh Client Open Beta

Posted by Nelson Williams (Who am I?) | January 2, 2009

The superhero MMORPG City of Heroes has recently opened up trials for its spanking new Macintosh client. Previously limited to the obviously superior Windows operating system, this new client will allow the desperate market sliver that makes up Mac users to experience the joys of eye beams and massive raids against an immobile sac of protoplasm.

The full release of a Mac version for City of Heroes is expected around January of 2009. Or maybe February. Could be March.

Lead designer Position posted the announcement in this forum thread. You can also sign up for the Macintosh beta test over here.

Keep reading »

Comment

World of Warcraft, Lich King, Claim 11.5 Million Subscribers

Posted by Nelson Williams (Who am I?) | January 2, 2009

To put that into perspective, the US presidential election was decided by about three-million votes, and some European countries couldn’t even aspire to that sort of population. In a recent press release, Blizzard confirmed Lich King sales of over four-million copies in the first month, which makes me wonder when those other many millions of players plan on getting with the program. That number also tags Lich King as the fastest, and best-selling, release of all time, a record formerly held by Burning Crusade. Gee.

You can read the whole press release to discover just how tightly Blizzard has taken the game industry’s balls in their iron claw. If you’re one of those millions who have yet to upgrade, do it! Lich King is great, Death Knights are more metal than the black shores of Hades, and the quest lines are a vast …

Keep reading »

Comment

Warhammer Online Offers a 30-Day Bounty for New Players

Posted by Nelson Williams (Who am I?) | December 23, 2008

Despite a certain amount of grumbling in the ranks of the hardcore who shot to the end of the game in about 13.6 minutes, Warhammer Online has been doing rather well for itself in the MMORPG market. A good launch, decent player retention, and a niche apart from World of Warcraft have given Warhammer Online the hot player injection it’ll need to stay competitive against the cold and unrelenting might of the Lich King.

Mythic Entertainment isn’t stopping there, though. Taking another cue from the 800-pound gorilla, Warhammer Online has just opened up a recruit-a-friend program with a bounty of 30 days free time for every new player you sign up. Here are the details, care of The Warhammer Herald.

* When you become a paying subscriber to Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, you’ll receive 3 recruitment notices to …

Keep reading »

Comment

Tabula Rasa Goes Free a Month Early

Posted by Nelson Williams (Who am I?) | December 23, 2008

We’ve mentioned before that the MMO Tabula Rasa would be going free for a while before closing its doors, but the folks over at NCsoft surprised up by laying out the red carpet a month early. Right now, yes, now, Tabula Rasa is free to play for anyone who can sign up with a PlayNC account. They’ve also poured in a swirling soup of new content to sample, because really, there’s no sense in holding anything back, is there?

Tabula Rasa is a strange combination of First-Person Shooter and MMO Role-Playing Game that plays out something like Halo with leveling and a total lack of fresh ideas. The game failed to open big thanks to its rather generic nature and technical problems, not to mention certain MMORPG elephants in the room that blocked out any chance the market might have had to discover the game.

Still, there …

Keep reading »

1 Comment

EVE Online Rocked by Mining Bug Scandal

Posted by Nelson Williams (Who am I?) | December 13, 2008

Not that scandals are anything new to EVE Online, but this one is a big sucker that is sure to impact every major player in the game. Short version; about four years ago, some folks figured out a bug that would cough up mining materials from thin air. They reported it, the company that runs EVE, CCP, ignored the report. So these fine folks continued their activities. And expanded them. Since everything built in the EVE Online universe is made from material mined by other players, pretty much anything that flies has some of these magical exploit materials in it.

There is some evidence CCP knew about the bug, but kept quiet for reasons of their own. The only reason we’re hearing about it is because someone CCP can’t banhammer …

Keep reading »

13 Comments

We miss Star Wars Galaxies

Posted by Helvetica (Who am I?) | December 8, 2008

In the old days…

I could start any number of posts with this old litany, a long lost discussion about how when we played an MMO it was the most amazing thing in the world. Those strange, heady pre-WoW days when everything was glistening gold running chills down my spine. When exploring the vast endless on my landspeeder didn’t seem like just more terrain without feature.

Hunting rancors on Endor? Those days are over.

Keep reading »

Comment

World of Warcraft: Hit 80? You’re Hardcore

Posted by Nelson Williams (Who am I?) | December 6, 2008

Ghostcrawler, our favourite Blue over at Blizzard, recently posted on the World of Warcraft forums that “If you’re 80 already, you’re a relatively hardcore player.” He may be right. The content in Wrath of the Lich King was meant to last most gamers for months, if not well into the next year. Which is why it came as no surprise when I started seeing level 80 characters pop up a bit less than a day after Lich King’s release.

I’m really not sure what to think about such an achievement, as there are good reasons to burn through the game in what has to be the most boring, face-grinding manner ever invented by the cruel hand of man. There are world firsts to secure, new dungeons to raid, and new gear to collect. Many people feel that max level is where the real game in World …

Keep reading »

2 Comments

Age of Conan: What is Best in Gaming?

Posted by Nelson Williams (Who am I?) | December 5, 2008

Yesterday, Slashdot linked to my Age of Conan: How a MMORPG Dies article as part of a roundup news clip on the state of the Age of Conan union. Six-thousand hits later, it’s come to my attention that not everyone agrees with that post-mortem of the game. In fact, some of you think the game has alot to offer, even if it came running off the starting line like a special olympics hopeful dressed up in Jesse Owens’s track suit. I’m told that quite a bit of progress has been made in patching the bugs that plague the game and with the server merges, players will one again be able to work together in ways that don’t involve a slow, wary dance with knives out.

I must admit, my discussion of Age of Conan was based on the game that shipped at release, not the …

Keep reading »

12 Comments

Next Page »