Games

OK, so I was half-right…

Just read an interview on MMOG Nation with Paul Barnett, Creative Director of the highly anticipated Warhammer Online MMO for EA Mythic.

It’s a long interview, but I highly recommend reading through it because Barnett’s opinions are both informative and extremely entertaining. In fact, the real reason that I’m blogging this is because it made me laugh out loud.

First, a little background… “Pets” have become a standard feature in MMO’s. Basically a pet is an animal or non-player character (NPC) who accompanies you on your adventures and often fights alongside you. Unfortunately, some pets are much cooler than others.

Well, as Barnett explains, the developers are having fun with their implementation of pets in Warhammer…

The fact that we’ve got pet classes, right? Pet classes, just not crap. Here’s the problem with pet classes right? They’re rubbish, they’re all rubbish. Who wants to have a little widget that wanders off and fights for you? How bloody crap is that? It’s sort of like … I don’t know what it is. It’s like being in school, and threatening people only because you’ve got a big mate next to you. He’s a cretinous coward. So! What we did with pet classes is we have these Squig herders, little tiny goblins with big ears who are basically on speed. They’re great. They wander around, and they summon these Squigs. And one of the Squigs they summon is this battle-armored Squig; enormous, great big armored Squig with a ring through it’s nose! And the Squig turns around and he eats the Squig Herder. And he’s sort of in the stomach of the Battle Squig, and he grabs ahold of all the intestines and he pulls on the intestines to make the Squig bounce around the land and fight things. And the Battle Squig sort of chews people up. And then when it gets wounded it sort of staggers around and coughs, and spits the Squig Herder out of his gob, and he sort of flies through the air doing this: “Waaaaaaaaaaaaauuuuuughh”. That, to me, is what our game is all about: because it’s Pet classes, just not crap. It’s fun.

Can’t wait to see that in the middle of a battle!

Lord of the Rings Online is a gorgeous game. Every once in a while, you’ll be wandering the landscape hunting for that tenth boar head or last bear pelt and you’ll just have to stop for a moment and admire the scenery…

The Town of Bree

Rainbow in the Shire

Dusk on the Shore of the Brandywine

Posing with Gandalf

Posers with Gandalf

Losers with Gandalf

Blizzard set the gaming world in a frenzy recently when they released that they would be announcing details of their next game on May 19th at the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational in Seoul, Korea.

A gaming/MMO blog named Wandering Goblin.com has a terrific article titled A Handful of Facts, A Spoonful of Reason analyzing the various rumors and speculation resulting from Blizzard’s teaser announcement.

SPOILER WARNING! I tend to agree with WG’s analysis/guess that Blizzard will be announcing a Starcraft MMO.

One thing we absolutely know about Blizzard is that they won’t be rushed. I suppose we’ll just have to wait until next week to learn how and when Blizzard will be relieving us from more of our hard-earned cash.

Lord of the Rings Online totally frakking rocks!!!

Whew! I’ve been dying to say that for weeks now.

I was lucky enough to be invited to a beta stress test for LotRO about a month ago, which ate up more than 15 hours of my time that weekend. I have since been invited to participate in the remainder of the beta phase for the game, which is scheduled to be released April 24, 2007.

A Non-Disclosure Agreement prevented beta participants like me from discussing the game publicly… Until yesterday that is, when game developers Turbine announced that the NDA had been officially lifted. Yay!

So now I can tell you how much I’ve been enjoying this game. I’ve played a number of other massively multiplayer online (MMO) games and can already tell that LotRO is going to be one of my favorites. With two more months of beta to go, LotRO is generally as stable (possibly even moreso) than some other games available now. <cough>

Character creation doesn’t stray much from the standard MMO formula. You can select your gender, race, class, and name, as well as customizing your appearance. You get to play one of the good guys in the War of the Ring: human, hobbit, dwarf, or elf. Each choice you make is accompanied by all the appropriate Tolkienesque lore to get you into the spirit of the game.

The newbie instance demonstrates immediately how much time and love the developers have put into the game. The graphics are lush and fluid, the sound is immersive, and the user interface is clean and attractive.

As with any MMO, the game is all about leveling, which happens at a satisfyingly swift pace for the first ten levels or so. The grind does manage to remain interesting, partially because you are running around in the same world as Frodo, Gandalf, and the rest of the gang. You even get to participate in the epic storyline in the form of special quests that come along every four or five levels. In fact, I already ran a quest for Strider, who I found holed up in the Prancing Pony in Bree. How cool is that? (Tolkien geeks are probably the only ones who truly understand that last sentence. )

Of course, the game isn’t 100% solid yet and there are certainly some minor performance and design issues that I’d love to see addressed. But with such a terrific start, I can’t wait to see what else the fine folks at Turbine have in store for us.

Finally, any discussion of MMOs has to at least mention the 7 million pound gorilla that is Blizzard’s World of Warcraft. With that many subscribers and a major expansion published just a few short weeks ago, I don’t see how any other MMO is going to be able knock WoW off the top of the list. But if anything can, it might be Lord of the Rings. I know I’ll be doing my part to overthrow the evil empire. (Mordor, not Blizzard. )

If you happen to be on the Meneldor server anytime soon, send me a /tell (“Deck” – level 16 Human Captain). See ya in Middle Earth!

Supreme Commander is a highly-anticipated real-time strategy (RTS) game from Chris Taylor, creator of classic games like Dungeon Siege and Total Annihilation. The 1.1GB single-player demo is available from WorthPlaying, FileShack, Gamespot, and Boomtown.

According to this article on Eurogamer.net, an executive from Blizzard Entertainment hinted that a sequel to the smash hit Starcraft might be in the works.

“As a Starcraft player I can tell you that I hope it wouldn’t go a decade – we launched Starcraft in ’98 – I hope it wouldn’t go a decade before we stand here and celebrate the next Starcraft together.”

I’m not a very good RTS player, but I’ll be very interested to see what the almighty Blizzard might do with another Starcraft. We’ll see…

On a totally unrelated note, I apologize for not blogging more often… I’ve been neglecting to pass on the interesting stuff that I find day to day, but I’ll try to change that. Thanks much!