If you interact with any kind of social media about gaming then you probably saw the story last week about EA and the homophobic lobby, and the white knights of the internet rallying to defeat the hatred via … a petition! The story goes like this:
If you interact with any kind of social media about gaming then you probably saw the story last week about EA and the homophobic lobby, and the white knights of the internet rallying to defeat the hatred via … a petition! The story goes like this:
So Guild Wars 2 went on sale yesterday. You won’t actually be able to play the finished game for months, although they’ll let you in for the odd beta weekend, bugs and all. But if you pre-purchase then you will have paid full price already.
So Guild Wars 2 went on sale yesterday. You won’t actually be able to play the finished game for months, although they’ll let you in for the odd beta weekend, bugs and all. But if you pre-purchase then you will have paid full price already.
So Notch (best known for designing and writing Minecraft) has released some information about the next game he plans to create. It’s to be a sandbox space exploration/ trading/ coding game called 0×10^c. I would normally pronounce this
Read this interview with Jenova Chen (designer of Journey). Included in the interview is quite a convincing explanation of why people become griefers and what designers could do to minimise it in games, IF they wanted to. “I am a competitor,”
I posted awhile ago about the Double Fine kickstarter – a crowdfunded project to support a new point and click style adventure game with some big industry names behind it. As it happens, that particular project broke all Kickstarter records by raising
I’m not sure if the EVE community has been working up to this over several years, but it’s like being at the drama bus stop at the moment, with several ‘stories’ all arriving at the same time. First up was The Mittani (recently
I have a lot of sympathy with Effraeti, who waxes lyrical on why she isn’t a feminist. She reminds me a lot of myself a few years ago when I was straight out of college. I was getting on with things, working as an engineer, and maybe wincing
The clocks changed here yesterday so let’s call it summer! Last week was fairly heavy on MMO news, another sure sign that developers/ publishers are firing shots across the bows in anticipation of the summer convention season. (That’s a second
Short post today: Here are some screenshots of the GW2 cash shop, courtesy of QQ Reporter. There’s plenty of cosmetic stuff, as expected. And also loot bags and mystic keys (which can be used to open mystic chests that will be dropped randomly from
I personally think that loyalty is a vastly over rated virtue. Being loyal to family or to a partner is great. Being loyal to your employer is sweet but badly thought out (they’re unlikely to return the sentiment). Being loyal to your country is
Guild Wars 2 ran a press beta weekend last week, where press is defined as a mix of fansites and paid press. We’re seeing posts about people’s first reactions now, which are (unsurprisingly, since a large proportion of the players were from
One of the interesting snippets that came out of Activision’s last earnings call was the information that about 10% of WoW subscribers took up the annual pass offer. Green Armadillo shares his thoughts on this, and I agree that this is higher than
Challenge in RPGs has been a mixed bag at best for designers. If they ramp the challenge up in an encounter, and classes/ builds differ noticeably in any way, then it favours min-maxing. A game with lots of these challenges can become largely about figuring
Here’s a couple of screenshots from Kaon under Siege, the most recent flashpoint. It has many zombies, of which the top picture shows us disposing of one (yes, this one’s a screamer). Also there are some cool darker areas where you get to
Laverne: “Gosh, I hope this isn’t like the primitive, dangerous microwave ovens of my century. Those things could really pop a hamster good.” Maybe you just had to be there. Anyhow, all you need to know is that Day of the Tentacle is
Last week, I wrote a post that touched briefly on the SWTOR endgame and it generated some great discussion in comments about what sort of things players liked to do at endgame anyway. The SW:TOR endgame is hideously lacking if you’re not interested
I am really enjoying levelling characters in SWTOR. One thing I personally get from levelling characters in a new game is a reminder about things I like or dislike about diku type MMOs. I like that when levelling, no one really cares about your spec
Oo, it’s been ages since I wrote a links post. Let’s see what’s in the can. For the record, I’m still enjoying SWTOR and will write a post about my experiences in the endgame sometime next week. While both Stabs and Richard Bartle
So Spinks is now level 50, and I think I’ve completed all of the flashpoints apart from Directive 7 (which is cool but looooong – I dropped out before we got to the end, but the guys were able to finish it) and Kaon Under Siege, which is
Two examples this week of devs making some unexpected decisions. Diablo 3 Now there’s no launch date yet for D3 but we’re assuming that it will be ‘soon’ since it’s only taken Blizzard about 12 years to get this one going.
OK, anecdotal evidence perhaps but the most popular blog post on this blog for both last year and this year is the one I wrote about Diablo clones/ Diablo-like games last year. Most popular search terms? “diablo like games”, “games
A couple of posts cropped up on my RSS reader recently which throw some light on the reality of life in sandbox MMOs. Stargrace posts about her struggles in Wurm Online, and Chris Smith@Levelcapped exudes a sense of achievement in finding somewhere
Do you believe that Guild Wars 2 is going to be the saviour of the fantasy-themed diku-based-but-with-a-few-tweaks FTP AAA open-world-but-also-themepark-kind-of MMO? Will it be be too WoW-like to please the Guild Wars fans? How do a plant based
I read recently that Blizzard have removed the “Scroll of Resurrection” offer on WoW — this was a longstanding deal by which if you had been unsubscribed from the game for a few months, a friend could send you a code to get a couple
So, first content patch of the game has brought new flashpoint, operation (raid) stuff, class tweaks, and PvP tweaks and boy has the latter turned out to be a doozy. There were tweaks made to the open world high level PvP zone on Ilum to encourage players
So, first content patch of the game has brought new flashpoint, operation (raid) stuff, class tweaks, and PvP tweaks and boy has the latter turned out to be a doozy. There were tweaks made to the open world high level PvP zone on Ilum to encourage players
A funny thing happened to me this week while playing Star Wars: the Old Republic. My Sith Warrior chick (partner says accusingly, “She looks evil!” but I think he’s just influenced by being in the same room as me while I’m playing)
A funny thing happened to me this week while playing Star Wars: the Old Republic. My Sith Warrior chick (partner says accusingly, “She looks evil!” but I think he’s just influenced by being in the same room as me while I’m playing)