The Casualties of War crew, during the Halloween event
I'm guessing someone at Icarus is a pretty big Firefly fan
Jayne... the man they called Jayne...
They sell homegrown crazy like nowhere else!
+2 points for obscure So I Married An Axe Murderer reference
Even in the apocalypse, sometimes you just have to get your shortstack on
Man, I love the NPC conversations...
How weird is it to suddenly stumble upon a typical boardroom?
Posted in Fallen Earth | Leave a Comment »
Tea Replicator Simulator – Now you can play a minigame to see if you can make Picard’s “Earl Grey, hot” just the way he likes it!Posted in Star Trek | 11 Comments »
I’ve temporarily replaced the Bio Break title banner with something a bit more… appropriate, to both the title of the blog and the MMO I’m playing. Probably won’t stay up for too long, but hey, it makes me happy.
This screencapture was taken in the power plant near to Trailer Park — I was just thrilled to finally find a fully-functional bathroom in game. Flushies and everything.
Posted in Fallen Earth | 11 Comments »
If this guy is your parent, you need to flee the house. Like, RIGHT NOW.
Remember way back when we all lost our collective cool because some media professor did a “social study” on how being an enormous griefer in PvP does not make one popular? Well, this might just well top it.
A charming fellow named d’Armond Speers (yeah, I know, another guy named d’Armond — they’re practically sold in 10-packs these days) who has a Ph.D. in computational linguistics and, as a natural result, speaks fluent Klingon, decided to conduct a little experiment on whether or not a new person (aka “baby”, “infant”, “toddler”) would pick up the language if that’s all the new person ever heard.
Oh, and yeah, he did this to his own son. For the first three years of the kid’s life.
With the birth of his son 15 years ago, dedicated linguist d’Armond Speers embarked on the ultimate experiment: He spoke to him only in Klingon — the language of the alien race of “Star Trek” fame — for the first three years of his life.
“I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language,” Speers said. “He was definitely starting to learn it.”
Now, this happened 15 years ago, and we can only assume that after many, many years of therapy, the kid is okay and doesn’t have a panic attack whenever he sees Star Trek merchandising or DVDs, but this is right up there with one of the most idiotic parenting moves of all time. And instead of getting hauled away for, I don’t know, ensuring that his kid would always be beaten up in school because he could only communicate in harsh grunts and gutteral syllables, it helped land him a job down the road.
I really wonder where his wife was at (presumably she was massacred by Klingon associates after childbirth), but at least the poor kid survived:
As for Speers, who still gets nostalgic when he recalls singing the Klingon lullaby “May the Empire Endure” with his son at bedtime, the experiment was a dud. His son is now in high school and doesn’t speak a word of Klingon.
Yeah! Nostalgic for child abuse! Wooo!
Posted in General | 17 Comments »
Myra's first attempt at crafting an early warning system for mutants.
In being a big supporter of Fallen Earth, I’m at times frustrated to properly explain why I like this game, because if I’m just a rabid little monkey who jumps up and down and goes “YAY! PLAY IT!” then quite a few people are in for disappointment when it’s not initially the be all, end all of MMORPGs.
So I thought I’d start to go through a few of the aspects of the game that keep me glued to FE like a moth partially melted onto a bug zapper. First up? Crafting.
In most MMOs, I’m not a big crafter. It’s usually never worth my time or money, as I stand to benefit more by being a supplier of components (ore, plants, materials) and just buy what I want with my profits. Fallen Earth is a game where, as it’s been said, you’re not really experiencing the game until you’ve gotten into the crafting system, and I’d tend to agree.
There’s two big draws to the crafting here. The first is that 95% of the items in the game (save for a special few quest rewards, I’m assuming) can be crafting, all the way from level 1 gear to level 45. There’s no restrictions on how many crafting specialties you can train up, except for your time, resources and patience. Personally, I’m doing them all except for weaponry (I don’t melee, so I don’t need to make hand-to-hand weapons) and cooking (far, far too many mats clogging up valuable bank space).
It may not sound like much, but to be able to hand-craft just about everything you wear, use and ride? It’s huge. You’re not tromping around the Grand Canyon wearing the remnants of sixteen different boss drops; you’re sporting the fruits of your labor, and you look quite fashionable while doing so.
The second draw is that unlike most MMOs, Fallen Earth lets you queue up crafting projects — up to 20 at a time — and then proceeds to craft them while you go off to do other things in the game or even go offline. If making 95% of your gear is huge, this is gargantuan. When you’re not standing still, watching your character hammer an invisible icon and waiting for an endless stream of progress bars to finish, but instead going off on adventures while still being able to make stuff, it’s liberating. I don’t feel like I’m wasting my time doing one or the other — in fact, I’m killing two birds with one stone. I even feel like I’m being productive in the game when I can’t log in, just because I know my guy is still making something.
Can I add a third draw here? I’m going to, even though I said there were only two. I LIED, people, deal with it! The third attraction of Fallen Earth’s crafting is that it turns the entire landscape into one giant scavenger hunt. Resource nodes and drops are plentiful instead of rare, and as a result I’m always hopping from one to another on the way to complete a quest or explore a region. My bank overflows with mats, and I’m frantically building things just to make room for more.
The crafting trees are plenty deep as well. A couple weeks ago, I was getting a little envious of my friends sporting their motorcycles, so I decided I needed to buckle down and work on crafting one. That required me to first build an ATV (which, in and of itself, is the end result of a long series of crafting quests), then use that key to craft an instruction manual for the motorcyle. Then I built the bike, but knew that it was just the basic, intro-level hog. I wanted a better motorcycle, one that I’d keep around for a while, because I knew that this was going to be my main mount.
So I set my eyes on a cargo motorcycle — motorcycles are extremely fast, but they have limited inventory, except for this guy. So, cargo motorcyle it was. Unfortunately, that meant a mountain of crafting between where I was and what I wanted, of which I’m still in the middle. To give you an idea of the chain of projects that I need to do:
It might sound long and tedious, but at no point am I just doing that and nothing else. It’s actually pretty heady to set your eyes on a goal like that and be able to reach it with a lot of planning and work.
Posted in Fallen Earth | 8 Comments »
In an exercise designed to satiate a whiff of whimsy, I wanted to plot out an entire year of MMORPG gaming, where each month a player would hypothetically play a different title for free, paying $0 for their year’s experience. What would I recommend starting with December? Hang on to my every word, faithful readers, and let’s see:
December 2009 – For the Yuletide season, I’m going to recommend an old favorite of mine, Dungeon Runners, a sort-of snarky Diablo clone that enjoyed exaggerating and mocking RPG conventions while feeding your desire for mayhem and loot frenzy. Since the title is being shut down on January 1, 2010 (with a nuclear explosion, as a matter of fact), this is the absolute last month to play it, and perhaps the best — they’re really jacking up the loot drops and XP rewards for DR’s final weeks.
January 2010 – Why not use the first month of the new decade to reconnect with a MMO of yore? Anarchy Online has been running free-to-play for a couple years now (although with certain limitations if you don’t subscribe). It may not have the glitz and glamour of more modern MMOs, but it’s one of the only “old school” titles that let people tromp around for nothing!
February 2010 – Assuming that Chronicles of Spellborn is still in “redevelopment”, or whatever that means, you can play this recent title for absolutely nothing — and that includes the full game! Of course, there’s the very real chance that some day they might pull the plug or wipe the servers, but it’s a small price to pay for free fun.
March 2010 – Get your Harry Potter on by signing up for Wizard101, the acclaimed title that mixes together turn-based combat and bright wizardy venues. They have an unlimited free trial that certainly gives you a nice big chunk of the early game, which took my wife and I a few weeks to run through earlier this year.
April 2010 – Warhammer Online’s “endless trial” is next up for your gaming pleasure — the full Tier 1 experience, with 24 classes, PvE and PvP is yours for the taking. If you’re willing to roll up a few alts, then this will more than meet a full month’s worth of fun.
May 2010 – Ever since switching to its hybrid free-to-play/microtransactions/subscription model, Dungeons & Dragons Online has earned the title of the best free MMO you can get your grubby mitts on. It comes highly recommended from myself, and the free content is quite expansive, certainly more than a month’s worth.
June 2010 – Cute little Asian MMOs that are funded entirely through microtransactions might not be your thing (and they certainly aren’t mine), but Maple Story is one of the best and most beloved if it is. So enlarge your eyes to 500% of their normal size, color your hair bright blue, and embrace 2D zaniness.
July 2010 – An Adventurer Is You! Or so proclaims the folks over at the long-running Kingdom of Loathing, one of the wittiest browser-based MMOs in the world. There’s no catch on the cost (players who want to support the game can purchase special items in the shop), and the wordy game has enraptured many a soul — including mine.
August 2010 – We’ll assume that by next August, Allods Online will have left beta and gone into full launch, in which case you might already have heard the siren’s call to play it. It’s been getting excellent press so far, and for a free to play title, why not give it a whirl in the dog days of summer?
September 2010 – Many a MMORPG player has cut their teeth on Runescape, the free to play browser MMO that showed how far the limits of Java could go. It might not be the most polished or good-looking title, but it’s had a number of overhauls and revamps, and hey — it’s light on the wallet.
October 2010 – Speaking of runes, Runes of Magic bowled a lot of people over in 2009 as both a decent WoW clone and an excellent free to play title. They’ve already released their first expansion (also free), and you could certainly do a lot worse than give this a try, particularly if you are a current or former WoWhead.
November 2010 – Sword of the New World is one of those odd little MMO cult hits that you know, intellectually, are better than the rest of the pack, but may have yet to ever give it a whirl. So why not, in this last month of our hypothetical experiment, do just that?
Posted in Allods Online, Anarchy Online, Chronicles of Spellborn, DDO, Dungeon Runners, Kingdom of Loathing, Maple Story, Runes of Magic, Runescape, Warhammer Online, Wizard 101 | 13 Comments »
FunCom recently posted their 2009 Q3 presentation, and of personal interest were a number of statements concerning the upcoming The Secret World:
Posted in The Secret World | 13 Comments »
Box art fascinates me, much in the same way that movie posters do. They tell a story, highlight their selling points, and in many cases, feature copious amounts of cleavage. So what does Cryptic’s Star Trek Online box art tell us?
P.S. – If combat’s what you’re looking for, the ship combat looks pretty dang spiffy.
Posted in Star Trek | 11 Comments »
Pictured: Snafzg and Syp
As we’re hitting World of Warcraft’s fifth (fifth!) anniversary this month, I’ve been doing a bit of thinking about the title. You know, the usual — missing the feel of the “old days”, the mixture of repulsion and attraction that the game exudes to me, and wondering if I went back in time to 2004, would I do it all over again?
Warcry did a great interview with Rob Pardo of Blizzard concerning WoW’s 5th, and there were a few quotes I wanted to pull and comment upon:
But if you do want to try to be that No.1 MMO, it’s hard, because not only are you going up against the five years of development we had, you’re up against five more years of development that we’ve had since the game launched. Players won’t think, “Oh, this game has as much content as WoW did at launch,” they think “Oh, this game doesn’t have as much content as WoW does now.” It’s a huge hill to climb.
I’ve heard this slung at newer MMOs with disturbing regularity — a constant comparison of a brand-new MMO to a title that had a far bigger budget and more years of post-release development. Doesn’t seem quite fair, but then again, new games have a distinct advantage over WoW — they’re not WoW. They’re not old. They’re new, they have the benefit of years’ worth of MMO lessons to draw from, and with skill, they could forge a new path instead of staying parallel to WoW.
We know that someone is going to beat WoW one day. Someone is going to make a bigger MMO, it’s going to be faster and better, and the WoW audience – some of them, anyway – is going to go to that game. If someone’s going to beat WoW, it might as well be us.
This as much hinting as he was going to give on their upcoming MMO, but there it is — their goal is nothing short of topping WoW itself. Huh. Time will tell if this is a brass cojones statement or the cold, hard truth.
If I was going to pick on a game design thing that I look back on and think was a mistake? We really never designed WoW to be a competitive e-sports game; it was something that we decided to start tackling because there was such a desire and demand to evolve it in that direction, to introduce competitive arenas. I’m not sure that that was the right thing to do with the game.
We didn’t engineer the game and classes and balance around it, we just added it on, so it continues to be very difficult to balance. Is WoW a PvE cooperative game, or a competitive PvP game? There’s constant pressure on the class balance team, there’s pressure on the game itself, and a lot of times players who don’t PvP don’t understand why their classes are changing. I don’t think we ever foresaw how much tuning and tweaking we’d have to do to balance it in that direction. Either I’d go back in time to before WoW ever shipped and change the rules to make the basic game more conductive for being an e-sport, or if not that, just say it doesn’t make sense. Right now, WoW has a bit of a schizophrenic philosophy behind it, and we’re trying to figure out how to guide it.
It’s tricky, now that we’ve gone down that road, because we have a passionate, large audience that enjoys it – the Arena, the e-sport – so we can’t just chop off that head. We can’t just say, “We fouled up and will go back to how it used to be before,” because we have a really passionate audience that wants it in the game.
“A lot of times players who don’t PvP don’t understand why their classes are changing.” That right there was one of my biggest beefs with WoW — that my game as a PvE player was often being manhandled, and almost never in a better way, because of the PvP experience and balance they had to do there. It’s absolutely great to hear him fess up that the e-sports thing was a really boneheaded move on their part — it’s always left a sour taste in my mouth and helped to push me away from the game.
As for what he says in the last paragraph, you know what? If it’s a mistake, bite the bullet and strip it out of the game. If they can’t figure out how to balance the title between the two extremes of PvP and PvE like that, then either take the Guild Wars route of having PvE skills have a PvP counterpart when you’re in an arena, or let arenas die. Close up shop and move on to something more constructive.
Warcry then asked a question I’d asked myself a while back — why would Blizzard go back on their firm position of things like “no PvE to PvP transfers” and “no faction transfers”, at risk of looking like total hypocrites?
We had all these suppositions, and as the years went on and we had more and more experience living with WoW as a live game, we realized that they weren’t just truths. They might affect a hardcore minority, but the people we saw weren’t really as hardcore as we thought they were. If we reduced raids from 40 to 25, we saw, it makes it more fun. You might have some hardcore players who get upset, but keeping people out of content isn’t right for the game overall. We mellowed sometimes, and realized we were wrong.
The other piece is that the WoW playerbase is becoming more casual over time. People who were hardcore into MMOs, they joined us first, but the people we’re acquiring over the years are casual. They heard about the game from a friend of a friend, and maybe it’s their first MMO – maybe it’s their first game. The game has to evolve to match the current player.
And here, I’ll concede the point to Blizzard. They are trying to cater more to the casuals than the hardcore, and that’s not a bad thing. It just irks me that they kept shouting down players for years that THIS was the way things were, just deal with it, and then all of the sudden — oh yeah, we’re going to completely reverse our position. So I guess one day expect Blizzard to suddenly announce that player housing is a great idea and they’re putting it in pronto.
Good interview overall — and it’s nice to know that Blizzard isn’t abandoning WoW in favor of all its new projects, either.
Posted in World of Warcraft | 16 Comments »
