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.
.I found a good enough sale to overcome the DRM risk, and I do not know that I have anything useful to add to what has been said before. The campaign really is that good. I have not tried the multi-player, and I am unlikely to spend much time in competitive play, but I look forward to some cooperative play in my future.
There are enough reviews, so I will go with idiosyncratic, non-comprehensive comments. And it turns out I have a lot of them, after the break.
It was before GenCon that White Wolf (maker of table-top RPGs and upcoming MMOs, owned by EVE’s CCP) was alleged to have told a friend of a friend that some people would be happy and some people would be upset by a coming announcement. This was refuted by White Wolf, and GenCon passed with very little big news from White Wolf. Later at the Grand Masquerade, which is an officially sanctioned World of Darkness convention, White Wolf released their first teaser bit about the World of Darkness. Our blogger in arms, Ardwulf, posted some pretty breaking news and the video of the teaser over at his site. The news hit the floor, and I realized that the alleged statement rang pretty true for me.
The quick news run down is that it will be launched at the earliest in 2012, and it has been in production for about 3 years so far (with 1.5 years of design/planning prior to that). The game will be called World of Darkness Online (WoDO), and it’s first iteration will be based on Vampire: the Masquerade (Masquerade). Later on, it is hoped that the other splats like werewolves and changelings will become playable characters, but for now it will be vampires and possibly human characters, such as hunters (vampire killers) or ghouls (Blood-addicted humans).
CCP is also making “official” some playstyles, which WoDO will contain in an interconnected manner. They are coffee house (Second-Life chatroom), theme-park (World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online), and sandbox (EVE, A Tale in the Desert). However, the game is going to have a very mature slant with little room for immaturity, some sort of self-policing, and inclusiveness to the LGBT audience. There will be combat, but it won’t be the core of the game. So that’s what we know so far. My thoughts after the break.
If you hit for 5 damage each time and your opponent has 100 hit points, you are weak and low level, and combat is slow. If you hit for 500 damage each time and your opponent has 10,000 hit points, you are powerful and high level, and combat is epic. I hypothesize that most people have trouble conceptualizing division.
StarCraft II has an armory where you can upgrade your units. Everything is in the thousands. There is never a point at which the “,000” matters. There are no single thousands either, so you could divide everything by 5,000 and nothing would change or even need a decimal place. But it might not seem terribly epic if the Moebius Foundation offered you 2 credits per research point.
: Zubon
Bad/Unforgiving games tend to have very tight communities in a Stockholm Syndrome sort of way. You join a guild in WoW to raid some dungeons and get some loot. In old EQ or UO a guild was more like AA or a cancer survivor’s group or something, and naturally tight bonds formed.
…
So I guess the question I have about UO, and FFXI, and EQ, and all those great old “social” games is this : did those games have great communities because they created social interaction, or did they have great communities because they eliminated non-social players?
— Boatorious
Did you know that resetting your Paypal password isn’t bad these days, if you have a good recovery method set up? I went long periods of time without access before getting mine together. Since my bank information was there, I was very careful about following the ideal password guidelines, not using a shared password, and not writing it down. I would even give it some clever relationship to other passwords I use so that I could keep remember it. Then I forgot it. Every. Time.
The e-mail service I had for my primary address seemed to auto-spam or -delete anything claiming to be from Paypal. Really, what could Paypal send you that you would not think was spoofed? I do not know if they did not have the current recovery system set up or I just was not using it well, but it was too annoying for me to bother for months or years. I apparently did not use it that much.
One day, I sat down to try the password variations I thought I would have used the last time I recovered it. I failed. After getting my account locked, I called and talked to someone there. When she apologized for the inconvenience, I thanked them for locking it down. I mean, I would have wanted them to block it if anyone other than me was trying a series of variations on the actual password. She had never heard that response before.
: Zuon
There’s been some recent activity at Undead Labs. Â You might recall they are the newest MMO hotshots in town going to create a console-based zombie MMO. Â The best thing is that Jeff Strain and Co. are taking a page right from their alma mater ArenaNet and creating some brilliant concept art right off the bat. Â You can check out their art director’s post here, but one of the scariest, most haunting zombie pieces ever I just had to include after the break. Â I seriously can’t believe it’s just concept art.
After all the chaos of having my Guild Wars account hacked dissipated, I began to reflect on some of the misgivings I should realistically have as a customer. That the system eventually works is a small consolation in a hoop-jumping exercise that would put an HMO to shame. You see, I felt betrayed. (Warning: a bit ranty.)
sid67 comments at Hardcore Casual:
My criticism here is that [developers] usually don’t try to make the getting or the making [of items] itself very fun. For example, EVE has a great economy but the *doing* of it is about as fun as pissing on a flat rock.
This is the other reason I do not play EVE. I could have a merry time being a middleman and playing the spreadsheet. You see a 20% price differential between stations five jumps away, and you can capitalize on that. The actual gameplay involved in that is filling a cargo hold, waiting for a half-dozen jumps, and emptying a cargo hold. I decided not to pay to pretend to be an intergalactic trucker (in an environment where pirate attacks on your truck are surprisingly common).
Before that, I was drawn to the notion of mining. It sounded like a rarefied version of the MMO crafting I often enjoy, being the backbone of the economy, and potentially going from the very rocks to final production. The actual gameplay involved in that is activating a mining laser and waiting for the hold to fill. I decided not to pay to be mostly AFK (in an environment where pirates make a hobby of harassing miners).
And I have paid to pretend to make charcoal, flax, and linen in A Tale in the Desert. The actual gameplay of Facebook games often rivals the crafting in most MMOs.
: Zubon
Every Tuesday before my Tuesday night MMO event, I usually go hit up Nicholas the Traveler in Guild Wars. Â I punched in my fairly strong password changed from the alleged NCSoft password snafu, and received notice that my account was deactivated (code=45)! Â A quick Google search of code 45 showed that it dealt a lot with bannable offenses, such as botting or PvP match manipulation. Â So many bad emotions flared through my mind, but at the bottom of the barrel was hope.
I knew I had done nothing wrong. Â My biggest rational fear (thought up after a dreamless sleep) was that I had transacted with a true [evil] botter in buying items for Nicholas. Â Otherwise, I don’t even use the unofficially allowed mods. Â I don’t bot. Â I barely PvP anymore, and only in pretty friendly arenas. So, I had a false confidence that all would be right in the end.
This morning ArenaNet dropped a nice article expanding on the mobile app for Guild Wars 2. Â In conjunction with a brief interview at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, we finally get some screenshots of this app-in-production. Â News of the app has been known since the Curse announcement over PAX Prime, and there are some other really good interviews about the feature. Â I think some of the apps are going to be pretty cool, but I am dubious as to how much of the Guild Wars 2 experience they will carry to the small screen. (ArenaNet says that there will be similar functionality for web users, instead of app users.)