Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.
.Borderlands with all the DLC now costs as much as the DLC, which is 50% more than the base game. (And it is all 75% off on Steam this weekend, so if you meant to try Borderlands at some point, $7.50 is a good price point.) (The Borderlands trailer is still pretty awesome.)
See also ongoing discussion of joyfully spending money on F2P.
: Zubon
If you are attending PAX and do not play League of Legends, I would totally take your Sivir skin code. Because, hey, you’re not using it, right? ;) [Update: thank you Chris Roddam! I am hereby coded. If anyone else has a code but no use for it, two of our blogger friends in the comments were also interested.]
And if you are not playing League of Legends, I would also totally take your referral credit if you wanted to try it out. Because, hey, free champion if 10 of you do, right? ;)
Long weekend for me, so I’m going to beat up some bots right now. Cheers!
: Zubon
The one thing that I will commend ArenaNet for in this pre-release hype-building phase is that they are illustrating the time, work, and love that is being poured in to each ounce of Guild Wars 2. ArenaNet could do the simple thing and just prop up the charismatic Colin Johanson with a video blog. Maybe ask him to wear sunglasses, only black shirts, and sport an English accent to make it seem like developers are all rock-stars, but that’s not real. What is real is hearing from all the people that it takes to make one small part of a video game. In the latest ArenaNet blog post they do just that.
This beautiful article goes through a complete process of creating a single PvP map from lore to design to programming. Even my man, Peter Fries, talks about the PvP announcer’s voice with his cohort, Scott McGough. It is readily apparent that each developer wrote their own portion. Habib Loew raises the banner for game programmers and gives an overview of the programming required for PvP within the engine designed for massive PvE. Shen-Ming Spurgeon goes pretty specific discussing one of the major visuals for the map: great balls of fire. I really like how in-depth Spurgeon went for the task.
It’s really a nice read, and I hope that the developers have more time to do this. A big challenge when the polite request is likely “how do I make my job interesting?” I think they did a great job. I think it really helped that these were all bounded in a focused part of the game rather than, “Yo, Chuck Knigge, tell us what you do.”
Like Rubi over at Massively says, there is serious information overload. So many interviews, articles, videos, etc. that it is nearly impossible to focus. For those wanting links I’d check out Guild Wars 2 Guru’s thread, Talk Tyria, and GuildMag for some great updates. For faster commentary than I can handle make sure to look up Hunter’s Insight. With PAX coming, it’s not going to stop for quite some time.
–Ravious
The only thing that is dead is the MMORPG gold rush, and that is something to be thankful for. It only created a huge number of very bad games in the hope of getting rich quick. Surprise, surprise, video game players aren’t total idiots, and bad games don’t really do well. Especially not if you have a business model where you expect your customers to keep paying for a long time, instead of selling them a game they can’t test first and running with the money before the customer finds out the game is bad.
— Tobold
EDIT: Thanks to Mr Crackers for clarification, but it appears that conquest is not the only PvP game type.. I guess even including WvWvW.Â
Holy NCSoft information crush coming from Germany this morning. Carbine Studios shows off their shiny new MMO with a funny trailer. Seems like an MMO worth watching with gameplay a tad more action than the vanilla norm (“don’t stand in the poop” red circles) and a theme that shares creative space with Firefly or Borderlands with more magic. More on that later. ArenaNet also joins in on the crush with a brand new Guild Wars 2 trailer with a fantastic, artistic opening. This is on top of everything else coming out of gamescom. I don’t have the mental fortitude to digest all of this so I will focus on one small offering. Guild Wars 2 PvP.
Blogs are useful for the discovery of serendipitous information. There are plenty of news sites, and many blogs will repeat the same stories. The big value add is having someone else who will highlight just those things you are likely to care about; once you have found that you have similar tastes to Ethic, following his pointers is a big time-saver. Beyond that, once you have established similar tastes, you can try tangential items that you might not have tried or even heard of if not for this one dude you know on the internet with similar tastes. My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, really? (Hence Amazon’s “people who bought/looked at this also bought…”)
But the opposite is useful, too. Once you know that some movie reviewer is a doofus who you always disagree with, you can start using his reviews as a guide, just with the scores reversed. It is really hard to find your perfect opposite, but when you do, treasure him. I have someone on my RSS feed specifically because he reliably gets really excited about games that will crash within three months of release. I need to find his equivalent for the stock market.
: Zubon
If ArenaNet is teaching us anything it’s that the game we see today might not live until launch. Some interviews here are now part of a mirror-world Guild Wars 2 that won’t exist in this timeline. Yet this is the double-edged sword ArenaNet knows it is welding, and as they swing that sword again, I believe everybody on all sides are learning just a little bit more. Jon Peters spends some time on the ArenaNet Blog discussing what players will be seeing in the upcoming demo builds for Guild Wars 2 for the lucky players at gamescom and PAX. He doesn’t sugarcoat anything has he starts out by saying energy is gone.
Continue reading [GW2] Demo Changes (Turn and Face the Strain)
As promised, I dove into Wizard101 ranked PvP this summer. This was to follow up on some heavy bitching I did last spring about KingsIsle’s (KI) long-standing neglect of glitches in the system. My level 20 Diviner has achieved the rank of Captain via 1v1. The game’s level cap is 60. So in all modesty, this is no small accomplishment. Diviners have the lowest hit points and base accuracy in the game. However, Diviner spells also deal the most hit points in the game. After weeks of deck revisions, spending training points in new schools, and hatching pets to support my toon, I have but one thing to say: I can stop any time I want. Really. Not.
I wrote about this before, but I want to reiterate that KI fixed the questionable nature of Mastery Amulets, and how that equipment could benefit players in PvP by helping them reach Warlord if they could afford to get one from the cash shop. This came about not only from fixing the flaw with the spell Earthquake. KI implemented so many new layers and complexities to PvP that Mastery Amulets are reduced to a standard strategy to which PvP players must simply “learn and adapt” to succeed.
Between sales, the price of Civilization V on Steam is $49.99. The total cost for “All Downloadable Content For This Game” is $49.39.
When DDO came out, I wondered why it was not using a module pricing strategy: base game cheap/free, sell the dungeons individually. You could even have a store for player-made, developer-checked dungeons for which players get a cut. Of course, selling the packs piecemeal encourages power creep by the question of whether this pack is worth the $5. Is the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus awesome enough to spend extra money on it? The same power creep/worth it question arises every time Team Fortress 2 puts a new weapon in the store, but at least there you face a near-certainty of getting the weapon as a drop (or crafting it) fairly soon.
: Zubon
Of all the enemy-within factions for the playable races of Guild Wars 2, the Nightmare Court of the sylvari is easily the most disturbing. Loresmith Ree Soesbee discusses the sylvari lore including the appearance and goals of the Nightmare Court in the final blog article for the Sylvari Week. They are the mirror of the noble sylvari. They see the commandments of Ventari’s tablet as shackles to the power and potential to the new race. They are the means that will end the pure-hearted sylvari race.