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.
.At an event taking place in the UK today, Cryptic’s Design Director and Executive Producer, Bill Roper, informed Strategy Informer that Champions Online would be released in the US and Europe on 14th July 2009.
Posted at StrategyInformer.com
– Ethic
Hat tip: Kotaku
I have had a bit more time with my Rune-keeper since my initial impressions. The class solos brilliantly, with great damage and few problems with being a cloth caster. It teams very well, burning through enemies on the easy stuff and healing during the hard stuff. I still feel the need to apologize for throwing around lightning and ice storms in Tolkien.
Today is the 2 year anniversary of the launch of Lord of the Rings Online! Happy Birthday!
To celebrate, Turbine is offering an “extended week of free gameplay from April 24th – April 30th, 2009. In addition, there is a +25% bonus experience boost on mob kills for everyone playing on those days!”
Also: “anyone with an active subscription as of June 30 will receive a passive, in-game gift known as the “Writ of Passage” which will treat players to a permanent 20% discount at stable masters.”
Some interesting news about the future of the game has been coming out. I’ll share what I find below.
A major game mechanic being introduced later this year will be known as Skirmishes. This name may change, Steefel points out, but it’s their working title throughout production. They’re described as dynamic instances that are aware of the party’s size, and they respond accordingly, in relation to how big or small the party is. They are also repeatable, and will have multiple objectives that will give you enough incentive to do them multiple times with different sized groups. “It’s the natural evolution from the focus on small party dynamic instanced experiences, and it takes it to a whole new level,” Steefel says. Plus, we were teased with a bit of exciting information regarding customizable soldiers that you can train and bring into these skirmishes. Unfortunately, that’s all we got on that.
Later on in the year, players will get the opportunity to explore deeper into the southern Mirkwood area, focusing mainly on the city of Dol Guldur, previously known to the Elves as Amon Lanc. You may remember Dol Guldur as Sauron’s stronghold where he retreated after the One Ring was lost. It became a key fortress that allowed Sauron to regain his strength and rebuild his armies.
On top of all of this, we’re also told that the level cap will increase by year’s end, and a new Summer Festival will be coming with Book 8.
– Ethic
Your MMO must convince me that it is worth playing in less time than it takes me to download the next one. If your tutorial/introduction does not include heavy doses of awesome, soon, you will not be getting my credit card information. If you cannot bother to make the game look good in the one bit that you know every single player will see, I must assume that the rest of the game is worse.
Warhammer does this very well. Tutorial? More or less none; proceed straight to the war. You start on a battlefield. I started as a Greenskin, which is probably why I bought the game. Take a few steps forward from the log-in spot, and you can see dwarves attacking. The Dwarf area is much the same, with squigs and goblins running around the cave next door and giant cannons pointed at the enemy. NPCs are blasting each other in case you did not get the idea. The elf pairing has the gentlest, and therefore worst, introduction. Your starting spot feels safe, and your first enemies are tiny fairies. Even there, you have attacking forces 10 seconds away, and the good guys get to shoot down harpies with a ballista. Win.
The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ does this pretty well. The opening is pretty tame, but it immediately tosses in the things you want from Lord of the Rings. If you are a hobbit, you immediately see a Black Rider. Dwarves start next to Gandalf in a scene referenced in The Hobbit, and they proceed to a troll fight. Elves get a troll too, and humans and elves both start with the world burning down around them. It is not a great, action-packed intro, but it gives you the setting while you get your bearings.
City of Heroes is a mixed bag. Outbreak is very weak, notably the “run in a straight line” bits. Breakout is better, with a more interesting map and a mass NPC slugfest. The real awesomeness of City of Heroes, however, is the costume designer. Even before you put your character in the world, you pick from a mess of powers, see the cool toys that lie in wait, and then probably spend a ridiculous amount of time playing with paper dolls. That kind of thing makes the slow start of actual gameplay tolerable.
Many other games do it badly. I don’t even bother to mention most that I try. They were not worth the time to download, even if I downloaded while I slept. That thread has a bit of hate for Age of Conan, but they had the presence of mind to make the 1-20 game one of the most celebrated bits of content around.
: Zubon
Anyone want to comment on WoW’s opening? I tried a few way back in beta. The Undead was the most impressive. Dwarves were kind of meh.
A favorite little moment in City of Heroes was when my friend Adam maxed out his Sniper Shot. This was back before Enhancement Diversification, back when Hamidon-Origin Enhancements gave +50%. One of them was +50% to range and +50% to damage. Slot six of those in a power: quadruple range and damage. Put them all in a snipe, which already has a lot of range and damage.
The range of the attack was beyond the game’s draw distance. He had to assist off a spotter to test how far it went. We were testing on grays, which was good because it was also well beyond the distance at which you would be rewarded for the kill.
: Zubon
This is, of course, less impressive than the Canadian sniper who holds the record for a kill at over 1.5 miles.
It’s about 10:00 AM on a Wednesday. I’m at the office. I’m tired as hell.Â
Last night I took my level 56 Loremaster into the Grand Stair on hard mode in Moria. This was my first taste of the end-game content in LOTRO, and I loved it.Â
Do you know that scene at the climax of Disney’s Ratatouille when the bitter old food critic finally tastes the vegetable dish the movie is named after? The food critic is blissfully transported back in time via flashback to his childhood. That’s how this instance made me feel.
I guess it wasn’t a lifetime ago that I last felt the thrill of an end-game instance. I only started running the heroic-encounters in SWG a little over six months ago. But six months is a long time in MMO time. Nothing has happened at the office in that time, but endless stories have been forged in-game.
End game instances are the only instances which can be extremely difficult and challenging. You can’t bring more help than is allowed in the instance and you can’t out-level the monsters inside. You have to work as a team and you have to have a good strategy down. It’s the only way to win. And god is it satisfying when you win.
After completing the instance a second time, I said my goodbyes to my kin-mates. “I have to leave for work in two hours” I told them.
Tired as I was, I couldn’t sleep. My face was stuck smiling. I felt like I had partied at a dance club all night. Yet as good as I felt about my all-night gameplay, I knew I had only just dipped my toe into the shallow-end of the pool. There are so many more instances and so much more content to master.
I can’t wait to face more “hard mode” challenges. Thankfully, now that I’m near level 60, I won’t have to wait long.
Re-reading Asimov’s “The Last Question” reminded me of that day’s vision of computers. As computers became more powerful, they would become larger, with millions of banks of [transistors/vacuum tubes/integrated circuits]. Asimov’s stories refer to city- and planet-sized supercomputers, usually with limited access but sometimes with many terminals so that anyone can ask The Computer a question. Asimov’s computers exhibit increasing returns to scale, so computing becomes centralized with large computers running everything, overcoming the Hayekian knowledge problem through massive computation. This seemed as obvious a future as flying cars. Then PCs came, and we have since learned a great deal more about how size affects computation speed.
We now live in a networked world. We have massive numbers of small computers that cooperate. Your computer is pretty good, but its greater value comes from being able to connect to this server and a million others. Your life features distributed computing, torrents, Wikipedia, and all the Here Comes Everybody Web 2.0 fun and games. Your gas pump has a credit card reader and may have a news feed. Your stoplight monitors traffic, changes timing, and talks to its own network. Your cell phone has more computing power than the entire world did when your parents were born.
Now this future is obvious. Rainbows End charts the near-term implications brilliantly: computers light and thin enough to be sewn into clothing, contact lens monitors, enhanced reality, and ubiquitous wireless internet tying everything together. Everyone and everything is networked at all times, and many of us carry our own little self-selected worlds with us. Smaller computers, faster access, more personalization.
I wonder what future will be obvious sixty years from now. Biological computing, with living cells in place of circuits? Direct neural interfaces with re-programmable brains? Uploads and emulations? Nanotech is an extension of our current line of thought. Perhaps an AI singleton will start converting mass to computronium, and we will arrive at Asimov’s planet-sized computer by a different angle.
: Zubon
They were standing there on the kitchenette counter where a co-worker with an overflow of Easter candy had left them. The marshmallow Peeps were lined up, execution style. I gleefully grabbed the nearest one and popped it into my mouth. There was a satisfying soft cry as the air inside the marshmallow tried to break free from the sweet inside of the bird-shaped candy. I took a moment to reflect on all the cruelties the Peeps endure. I imagined people’s deepest desires blossoming from the days of cave and fire to inflict carnal delights on small animal shaped treats. And, then I thought of MMOs…
MMO developers can be a clever bunch. They put that 2 HP spotted faun or clover-eating rabbit walking along while players are on a zone-wide crossing. The obvious thing to do? Drop a run-by DoT or damaging yell on your way by the poor beast and watch it flop over dead. It’s like a minigame without consequence or reward. Sometimes the devs allow the poor creatures to fight back. Regardless, it is nearly an MMO pastime. So much, I believe, that if it weren’t for the graveyard daemons, peaceful fields would be strewn with dead, lootless fauna.
It goes deeper, though, when players return as completely overpowered demi-gods to places of relative peace. Whole hapless murloc villages are torn asunder by a sole dimension-walking hero. The guy wasn’t even helping anybody else. The imagination makes up for what the game engine lacks. Over on the Darkfall side, the practice targets the plump, weak freshly-minted players in the noob zone. The hardened veterans fall upon the sheep like avenging razor-fanged wolflords. The world is theirs.
And, maybe that’s it. In worlds where players have no perceptible stake amidst the infinitely respawning mobs and hallowed raid locks, for that one moment we can be kings.
–Ravious
what is best in life?
Tobold plugged a Newcastle University Business School research project based on the potential beneficial or detrimental effects of playing MMORPGs during off-job hours on employee well-being. The survey reads like some undergraduate amateur hour where they did not really take time to contemplate the responses (e.g., they don’t even have my degree, grammatical errors), but I can deal with rough surveys on topics I am interested in. What I cannot deal with and what caused me to immediately dead stop on my progress for their “research” was their opening list of how strongly do you agree/disagree with the following:
1. PLAYING MMORPGs: The following statements concern how important massively-multiplayer online role playing games (MMROPGs) are for you.
To be fair later on in separate sections they ask whether you get enjoyment from playing, if you are cheerful when you are playing, when you play you play for yourself, etc. BUT, the damage is done. The tone was set. I believe I have a very healthy amount of computer gaming time that allows me to amuse my wife and play with my toddler and be fully successful at my job; yet, this Monday morning I felt like MMOs were the worst and most unhealthy thing in my life after reading that list. I refuse to complete the survey because it is clearly apparent what result Dr. Savvas Papagiannidis from Newcastle University (U.K.) and Dr. Despoina Xanthopoulou from Erasmus University Rotterdam (Netherlands) wish to have. Look for them later this year on a depressing report coinciding with a gamer suicide or divorce.
–Ravious
it’s all about the small stuff
I made a simple story for my first Mission Architect story arc (#91818), “Not the Destined One.” I would be glad to hear any feedback you might have. It is a villainous arc, but you can run it as a hero. Not terribly difficult, light humor.
: Zubon