Monthly Archives: April, 2009
Poll: Champions Online’s Naming Policy
Reference: from “Ask Cryptic”: Rejoice, the days of name-squatting are over! In Champions Online, character names are unique to a single player’s account. Everyone can now be “Odysseus.” Each account can only have one “Odysseus,” though. If Champions Online can’t figure out the precise character you’re referring to, you specify the player who owns the …
Question
Imagine you’re a MMO dev working on a project in, oh, say, five years from now. Just how hard will you have to work at not offending a single soul with what you include, what you don’t, what your filters will catch and what they let slip? How will it even be possible to create …
Baby: The MMO
Incoming baby pics… ignore at great peril! Sorry… now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Free Realms: Well, At Least They Got 50% Of The Title Right
Today my wife and I tenatively jumped into Free Realms, the Fisher Price simulator that comes across as the offspring of The Sims, World of Warcraft and Bejeweled. Oh, and Nickelodean. And Baby Einstein. And Mario Kart. Basically, it’s a schitzophrenic game that doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up, so …
WAR: Tales of Past Glory
I’ve been watching with a heavy heart as many from Warhammer Online’s blogging community are retiring from their solemn duties, one after another, in a morbid procession of regret, wistfulness and (sometimes) anger. Grimnir has the latest batch of farewells lined up, so I shan’t repeat them here, but there are some big names that …
Quote of the Day
What they’re not telling you is that as soon as you create a character that shares a name with an existing one, you get pulled into a gladiator arena where you have to fight, to the death, with any of the other characters that share your name. Because there can be only one. ~ “Tim” …
P.S.
Guess I should qualify the previous post with a couple comments: While not falling into a complete cynical cycle, I’m a lot more wary right now about how MMO companies promote pre-launched products. It’s funny that we see them doing the same thing over and over, for different games: Highlighting some excellent, interesting, innovative new …
New Commandment
I’m adding this to the Commandments page: #9: Never assume that any touted new/innovative feature that a pre-launched MMO demos will work quite as well as what is shown in the limited demo. If it exceeds those small expectations, rock on; odds are, the rest of that feature will be sub-par to what is displayed …
LOTRO: The Twilight Zone
I’m stuck in the Twilight Zone, again. One of my least-favorite zones in LOTRO, from both two years ago and now, is the Lone-Lands. Sure, the sight of Weathertop is cool and all that, but the rest of the place is pure blah, the epic story forgettable, and the quests endless. And I’ve been stuck …
Negative Traits: Why Not Have Them?
When I was a wee little lad, I was a freak for role-playing books. I didn’t necessarily have a huge group of RPers to play with, but I did spend countless hours pouring over rulebooks like Star Wars: The Role-Playing Game, Cyberpunk and D&D. However, hands-down, my favorite was GURPS. GURPS stands for “Generic Universal …
