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 sign of summer.)
Also, I saw The Hunger Games at the weekend, which may be this year’s first ‘summer’ blockbuster. (Enjoyed it a lot, in case anyone is wondering. We don’t see enough teen girl power fantasies that are about survival, purity of heart, and fighting social injustice rather than about romantic entanglements.)
The Mists of Pandaria beta started last week, without an NDA, so expect increasing amounts of news/ screenshots/ live video feeds etc on the internet from now until launch. I am bitterly regretting the WoW-blogger tendency to focus in hard on a single class because if (like me) you play a class that isn’t popular in the blogosphere, it’s actually quite hard to get a) a sense of excitement for your class and b) any information without having to delve around the bowels of patch notes/ dev comments on the mmo-champion front page. On the other hand, if you’re interested in druids or hunters, you’ll get it all analysed about several zillion times.
Anyhow, I suspect there isn’t much interesting to report on warriors. Even the glyphs look a bit dull, although there is one cosmetic one that makes your character look on fire when it is enraged. I’ll call it the “girl on fire” glyph.
Cynwise wonders where all the warlocks went in Cataclysm and looks at levelling data to find out how many people abandon their warlocks along the way. Warlocks in MoP beta, incidentally, have some tanking abilities (ie. proper tanking abilities, not just an attack with high threat.)
Apparently Blizzard have confirmed that they have started working on the next expansion after MoP. Are there any NPCs left to become raid bosses?
Green Armadillo is considering SWTOR 3 months after launch, and takes a look at how much money he would save if he buys it now compared with going in at the start, and how many bugs will have been fixed and extra content added (in 1.2).
This also reminds me I was going to write a post sometime about how fun Arb and I have found it to play our alts as a duo. There are times when the characterisations are almost uncanny.
Rohan has been playing TERA during a beta weekend, and isn’t impressed by the beta community.This is a game I dismissed automatically as soon I saw videos of female characters running in a way which involved panty shots. Call me psychic if you like…
Still, you live by the sword, you die by the sword. TERA choose high heels, skimpy armor, and lolicons. And thus they get the audience that is primarily attracted by high heels, skimpy armor, and lolicons.
Pete at Dragonchaser reports that Notch is apparently working on a new space trading sandbox game. He mentions the magic word ‘Elite’ and I start doing the pavlovian dog thing 🙂
CCP presented some information about the World of Darkness game at EVE Fanfest 2012. I had to read that article twice to be sure I’d gotten it right that they said “The game will have a focus on fashion”. So just like EVE then 😛
Welcome to Spinksville! 
“Are there any NPCs left to become raid bosses?”
Please, please, please let us kill Varian….
I am minorly pissed off at SWTOR. Not majorly. I sign up for the free trial weekend.. by the time the slow download finishes it is Sunday and I am not allowed to use the trial. I ask support to either let me use the trial or switch the 7-day trial my friend sent to the wrong email address to my email address I signed up with and let me try this thing out… no dice… I assume they do not want new players or something. Annoying. I got a little mad and told their support rep to fuck themselves. Perhaps not the best idea. :).
The warlock thing isn’t really that complicated.
Warlocks and Rogues both have their populations gutted at the start of WotLK on account of both being late BC FotM classes who, unlike the the hunter and mage, happened to be really crap at the start of the expansion when the Death Knight came out and never eally recovered.
Thanks to the removal of the hybrid tax, they never reallly regain their king of the deeps crown and remain technically complex to play compared to other DPS, without the reward of topping the charts (Yes, Cat Druids. No one cares).
Rogues got a bit of boost from the legendary but Warlocks didn’t get one and therefore there aren’t many.
Predicition: The will be a metric sex-ton of monks and warlocks in Pandaria. Also, endless legions of Paladins as always.
Also, people tend to start Warlocks, because they notice there aren’t man and the raid could maybe use a warlock and dump them because, well, they’re complicated and the raid probably couldn’t use a Warlock.
I guess it’s a bit surprising to me because we always had metric tons of warlocks in my guild when I have been playing WoW.
There’s piles of warlocks in every guild
But I’m willing to bet a chunk of them had their first raiding experience in BC, where STACK MOAR WARLOCKS was a solution to huge chunks of the content and some people got attached to them.
It’s a shame about Tera, because the combat thing is fairly fun once you get to level 20. But like you I just couldn’t get past the sleazy costume design — 90% of the costumes look like something out of a fantasy-themed Victoria’s Secret catalog, including the stuff worn by the race of 12-year old girls… ick.
I agree. I had a look at the early shots and simply didn’t feel comfortable.
Upskirt shots of cartoon girls who look about 12 is a tad too close to child porn for me. I do appreciate it’s a different aesthetic, that anime draws females child-like, but I’ve not been exposed to it enough to become used to it.
Which is probably just as well – what will non gamers/anime fans think when they look at a middle aged man’s computer and see some of the more compromising Tera imagery?
Looking forward to World of Darkness very much.
The politics in a world where popular people can declare a player they don’t like targetable by permadeath will make the stories from Eve sound like Jack and Jill.
I should probably avoid saying anything mean about The Mittani when it comes out!
What I very much expect is that a bunch of EVE jerks will glom onto WoD with the express intent of griefing as many vampire fans as possible, and if any of them are teenage girls then so much the better.
Besides which, The Mittani has already been trying to target players for perma-death from what I can gather ;P
“Notch is apparently working on a new space trading sandbox game. He mentions the magic word ‘Elite’ and I start doing the pavlovian dog thing”
Eve of course is based on Elite and for many of us it’s a trading game.
Very interesting to see someone start over from basic principles. I’m really looking forward to what he comes up with.
It was a long time ago, admittedly, but I seem to remember that Elite had a space combat system that was actually fun 😛 (Well, maybe apart from the docking but even that was OK once you had the hang of it.) Also EVE is full of griefers and Elite was a nice single player game that wasn’t.
We already have a game of Elite Online. It consists of the hardcore raiders telling everyone else they’re Doing It Wrong 🙂
I was 10 when I played Elite. I think I actually managed to actually dock the ship once.
That said, I went into Eve Online with the idea that it’d be Elite Online because I don’t really care about big and mean your community is. What bugged me was that the gameplay itself was pretty dull.
The moment someone comes out with a more action orientated spaceship sandbox MMO, or at least one were combat isn’t clumsly, dull and annoying, EVE will hemmorage players.
Ha ha I also spent a lot of time crashing into the sides of space stations.
Then someone told me you could just press C (or was it alt C). And you’d auto-dock.
I bet you guys are sooo glad I told you that now 🙂
Tera’s community seems like a scary, scary place right now that I lost IQ reading the area chat. Still, the combat is very fun, the scenery is pretty, and the Human Male and Castanic Male models are awesome enough at least, so I just ignore what i don’t like, roll with my beefcakes, and I’m happy.
(Of course, if you don’t like beefcake, you get a choice of High Elf male or Moogle/Hamster Guy. If you don’t like cheesecake, play a different game.) It’s interesting-the character creator is pretty good-not as good as Aion(would have liked height sliders, even limiting them to +/- a couple of ‘feet’ to keep the microscopic characters out would have been good), there’s a lot of facial choice, but no body type choices. It’s going to be a niche game, and I suspect it’s going to go more freemium type later. Not sure if it can support P2P really(though one can hope maybe after the beta, P2P might scare off some of the worst people.)
I’m kinda glad I pre-ordered, it’ll basically be my summer MMO in between a lighter summer raid schedule, the MoP beta and eagerly awaiting Guild Wars 2(as well as playing stuff like Warriors Orochi 3, Darksiders 2, and Dragon’s Dogma.) I don’t see myself sticking with it forever; GW2 will very much likely be pushing that one to the back.