Dawntide. How refreshing.
… you may be wondering where the NDA that comes with most beta tests is. There isn’t one, because fundamentally we want people to talk about Dawntide and show things off, and we need to know when something is broken. If people find something wrong with the game, they’re going to tell other people it’s a bad game regardless of any NDA. Feel free to take and post screenshots and discuss the game with your friends.
Thanks to Werit for the invite!
– Ethic
Announced here: Will launch on December 1st in North America.
The LOTRO Lifetime Membership is now available for $199.
Any current or former player who renews or upgrades their subscription to any multi-month plan by October 31st gets the Siege of Mirkwood digital expansion for FREE!
All players can pre-order the new LOTRO Adventurer’s Pack which contains 2 character slots and one shared storage slot that allows players to share items with all of their characters on the same server for $19.99 and get the Harbinger’s Cloak which provides 8% speed boost and the Dusky Nimblefoot Goat mount for FREE!
Starting today, existing Lifetime Members who pre-order the LOTRO Adventurer’s Pack get the Siege of Mirkwood digital expansion plus two in-game items (Harbinger’s Cloak which provides an 8% speed boost and a new mount) for FREE!
– Ethic
Use The Force and you may be able to find this beta application page available to fill out when you click the link.
If not, you have failed the test young Padawan. I am sorry.
– Ethic
After getting my feet warn out on the first day, I decided to look into getting a better mode of transportation.
The first mode was easy. I had a preorder key for an ATV. Typed it in and a key appears in my inventory. Use the key and an ATV appears before me. Click on that and away I go. Level 2, right out of the tutorial and I have a mount. Excellent. I checked the cost of gas and… ouch. I found the garage/stable just outside of town and parked it for later. Special note: mounts have extra storage!
I decided I better get a horse since feed looks cheaper than gas by a long shot. I found the horse seller in town and decided to save up to buy an untrained horse since it was affordable. Time to go scavenging for scrap metals, woods and other items to sell. I also needed to gather some leather to make a bridle to train my horse when I buy it.
I spent my first evening entering the post-apocalyptic world of Fallen Earth the other day. I don’t want to spoil the beginning tutorial with too many details (because it was actually pretty surprising) so I will just lightly brush on some of it.
You pull an axe from the head of a corpse and then use it on a guard. You find a rifle and use it to defend your position. You heal soldiers. You buy things. You make things. You drive an ATV. All of this is inside the Hoover Dam. You find out the horrible truth about what you are.
Eventually you will make your way to “town”. As you can see in that screen shot, I am fully equipped with two pistols, a crossbow, a 2×4 and a pipe. And I’m only a crafter. The things you need to do just to be able to make something useful.
I climbed up on top of one of the buildings to get a better view. Here is what appears to be the ruins of a monorail system. This is a closer view of town. Down below from here you can see one of the many graveyards just outside of town. I climbed back down and spent some time dreaming about a brighter future. I took one more look at the remains of a possible monorail system. Around the corner I spotted a junk yard. People are already finding a way to make a living. Around town you will spot several forms of transportation, the most common right now is a horse.
I have only just started my adventures so there will be more details down the road, but for now I wanted to highlight two nice features I have not seen done this well before. Both the chat and the inventory can be sorted out by tabs that you control. It is really nice. I really love the ability to make tabs to sort my inventory any way I want to. Weapons and ammo on one tab? Check!
– Ethic
Dungeons and Dragons Onlineâ„¢: Eberron Unlimitedâ„¢ is now available to play, for free (in the US).
– Ethic
The last time I made a run at World of Warcraft, I made my wife play along in the interest of creating something else we can do together. We made it to about level 40 and then Lord of the Rings launched. We gave that a try and she went back to WoW. I was hooked and so we went our seperate ways even though still sitting side by side in the computer room. After I switched to playing LotRO in a static group once a week, I lost interest in playing it solo the rest of the week so my thoughts turned back to WoW. We tried to have her now level 80 hunter power my level 40 hunter through some quests but it just was not that much fun, and I was not finding my hunter to be much fun anyway.
Flash forward a few patches and I asked her if she would be interested in giving the refer-a-friend program a shot. She’d have to start over but with triple XP we ought to get up to level 60 pretty fast. She was ok with the idea so we launched our attack, this now being my third account at this point. Blizzard loves people like me.
Advice for future Champions Online players:
The name you choose for your forum name is what becomes your @name. Do not use your account name for that would be stupid. A friend of mine did that and now he has to wait for them to change it for me. I mean for him. Right.
– Ethic
Ethic: Let’s start off with getting a feel for where you are in WoW right now. Tell us a little bit about the guild you’re in and what they are trying to do at the moment.
Grim: I’ve been with Juggernaut since July of 2006 (Immortalis on Hellscream/Dalvengyr prior to that). There is only one challenge left for us in the current tier of content, and that is known as Yogg+0. Yogg-Saron is the final boss in Ulduar, and you have the option of utilizing up to four NPC’s to aid you in the fight against him, each one providing a special set of buffs to make you stronger, faster, more resilient, etc. Needless to say, using all four NPC’s makes you quite strong, and the fight is quite easy. Most guilds at our level of raiding have successfully defeated Yogg-Saron with only one NPC’s aid (Yogg+1). Yogg-Saron without the aid of any NPC’s, however, makes the encounter extremely difficult. Currently, only five guilds in the world have accomplished this feat. Sadly, the strategy we’re employing involves two tanks (warrior + deathknight), so I get to cheer them on from the sidelines until patch 3.2 rolls around.
Summer is here and that can mean only one thing, the Lithe Festival has come to the Shire.
One of my favorite parts of the festival, besides getting away from the trolls for a while, is the fishing contests.
If only there were prizes given for the most goldfish caught or maybe listening to a dockworker make astute observations, I would have won big.
But really, catching goldfish in a river has got to be a pretty special talent.
– Ethic
