Going along with the continuous restructuring of NCsoft West, the European Aion community team has recently been invited to take the long swim across the Atlantic Ocean and join US community manager Liv in Seattle, forming a unified Aion community team. Sebastian "Ayase" Streiffert, the United Kingdom community manager, and Martin "Amboss" Rabl, the German community manager will be flying to the United States, while Loic "Atreid" Claveau, the French community manager, has declined the position in favor of moving to the marketing department in Brighton.
Everyone's favorite drunken Final Fantasy XI game master, GM Dave, has decided to finally cross over to the dark side and take a spin in World of Warcraft. Instead of relating his experiences with feeding people who call GMs for unnecessary reasons to the FFXI dragon Jormungand, he's been asked to relate his experiences with World of Warcraft for one entire week by one of his site's donators.
March 16th will mark 10 years of SOE's EverQuest, and Massively is here to celebrate! Follow along with us as we countdown to the big day with galleries, developer interviews, staff memories and more! Best of all, on the final day we'll be holding a special contest where you will have the chance to win SOE goodies! Stick with us every Monday, Wednesday and Friday until the 16th for our complete EQ 10th Anniversary coverage.
Massively got word that EVE Online lead game designer Noah Ward, aka CCP Hammerhead, would be in New York City last week. We jumped at the chance to find out more about the Apocrypha expansion, and Ward was kind enough to give us our own hands-on demo while answering our questions about where EVE Online is heading. We were pleasantly surprised to find that EVE's lead writer Tony Gonzales was on hand as well. Fans of the game's backstory will know him for writing The Empyrean Age novel, which chronicled the events leading up to New Eden's factional warfare.
For those of you who don't know, I'm super in to roleplaying. No, I'm not a Shakespearean nutjob who spouts "I shall put my sword betwixt thine evil heart!" No, nothing like that. I'm just a guy who likes getting into the setting of game. When you go into Naxxramas and see Anub'Rekhan, you see a boss where I see a commander of Anub'arak, the traitor king. It's because I know the lore so well that I like to play around with it, involve my character in it, and really keep the fantasy of the world intact around me. But I've learned something over my course of 12 years of MMOs. It's something that happens in every single game that I've played and a problem that I've found insurmountable when it comes to roleplaying. It's really hard to roleplay when a thirteen-year-old is thrusting his virtual crotch in my face, screaming "LULZ GUYS! LULZ! Lolololololol!!!!11oneeleven"
It's funny the things that can suck you right back in, just when you thought you were out. I've been feeling pretty burned out with World of Warcraft over the last couple of weeks, and I wasn't enjoying the feeling at all. There was a brief interlude where the Argent Tournament piqued my curiosity, so I grabbed the PTR downloader to give that a try. That lasted all of about an hour, when I realised just how long it would take me to download the files. I'm not sure if I should blame BT for my frequently crappy connection speed, or Blizzard because they can't seem to create a decent downloader. It doesn't matter really, as I can QQ about both equally. Then it hit me - burn out didn't need to be a bad thing. In a shocking turn of events, I decided to actually listen to our readers' advice, and spend some time with other MMO, and maybe try a change of pace.
A while back we asked for any glitches our readers were seeing in their favorite games. Of course, we also love it when we get screenshots with fantastic and funny notes like the one that came with today's glitchy Warhammer Online screenshot sent in to us by Maldronnar. He writes in: You said you wanted some shots of glitches, so here's one of my favorites from WAR. Around the High Pass/Talabecland area there are several caves that never seem to look right on my end. A glitch that still exists even after the 1.2 update is what I like to call "Magical Purple Caves". I've heard that if you wait around long enough inside of them, you'll spawn an instance with Barney the dinosaur as a boss, and that he has some really good mythic drops. Here's my Warrior Priest, Maldronnar, contemplating whether or not he should go in after the children's icon, or continue on to that keep defense.
Warhammer Online players are in the midst of the Bitter Rivals live event, plus another big new patch. I'm going to guess that it probably took a lot of development muscle to get the Black Guard, Knight of the Blazing Sun, Slayer and Choppa in a fun, playable shape. Not to mention the improvements to open RvR, Scenarios, PvE and general quality of life fixes. I have no doubt that the east coast developer has the next several patches planned out to some degree. Nonetheless, Mythic, Warhammer Online and its community are at a development crossroads -- and so today I'm going to explore a few possibilities.
Craig, James, and Lem all have plans for some Team Fortress 2 this weekend, which leaves us wondering... how did all of these FPS players sneak into our team of MMO gamers? We aren't sure, but we've already started making contingency plans. (We'd tell you what they are, but then we'd have to kill you, of course.)
Spring is nearly here, and that means new videogame releases are bound to decline over the coming months until summer arrives with nary a release in sight. For us MMO gamers, though, what it generally means is we look for a particular game to pack away -- like geeky summertime squirrels! Some of us stick with what's working, whether it's World of Warcraft or EVE Online. Others patiently await new exciting releases like Champions Online, Jumpgate Evolution and Free Realms. And then there are those who take a break and play the non-MMO games coming out during spring, only to return to their favorite MMO of choice once the well runs dry elsewhere.