old school

I know it's not exactly related, but it's certainly RPG: to celebrate the release of the 4th edition of D&D, the folks from Penny Arcade sat down with the Wizards of the Coast (aka TSR) and recorded a gaming session, from rolling up the chars forward.

AoC etc

Well, the reviews for Age of Conan continue to roll - Tobold has done a good overview of the reactions (along with his comments on what, if anything, it will matter to WoW).

I have to admit that my most recent gaming has been Rock Band, rather than an MMO. AoC does nothing for me. WoW is pretty dead to me as well - I'm going to try to meet some commitments for running a few more evenings before I quit, but I think once I'm out I'm out for good. We'll see. I might be leaning towards Eve Online, but I might also just try new stuff - there should be a new round of betas to do, if I go looking.

AoC et al.

It's been a whole week, and RL precluded pretty much any gaming for me. I see that others have been doing lots of Age of Conan, which is nice - I'm glad it's finally available for public consumption. I note that Tobold indicated customer service might be a bit thin right now, which would be shortsighted on their part if true, as these early days can make or break the game.

Outside of this, I note massively has an article on putting raiding on your resume, something I've actually done for this round of job searching (actually, the line reads 'massive/virtual worlds', but close enough).

There's lots of talk about the avatars being added to Eve Online. I don't think I can have an opinion until I've played the game. Of course, I guess I should play it before they add the avatars, as otherwise I won't know what's different. Happily, I should have time to mix it up now that my WoW sub is set to expire.

WotLK news doesn't help

So this weekend a landslide of new info came out about Wrath of the Lich King. It wasn't enough to stop me from cancelling my subscription. If the folks I've been playing with lately can come together to do a regular run, I may do one more six month hit, but I haven't played in a long time, and don't know that I'll have time once we move this summer.

I may take a break from it until I see a game that makes me think there's hope on the horizon, or I may try all the free games and trials and such. We'll see. All I know is, all I see in WotLK is more of the same, which isn't working for me right now.

research and exploration

Van Hemlock has a wonderful post up about how to work around the fact that all the hard work that goes into creating a new PvE area (dungeon, what have you) goes away as soon as people post a guide on teh intartubes. He discusses the system in Eve Online, where good stuff spawns randomly, and you have to hunt for it using consumable goods. He also talks about arcane research in Asheron's Call, which apparently used special andles keyed to your account name. Unfortunately, someone reverse engineered the system, and they killed it, but I enjoy the idea of arcane research - especially things like critical fails (you mix it up, and it kills you dead).

Age of Conan

Well, rumour has it the NDA is off, at least for part of Age of Conan. Tobold has written up his impressions. I'm going to refrain from comment, as I'm not sure the NDA is off for everything, and I can wait until release - I'm pretty sure I don't have any earth shattering comments about the game. I will say that if broadband in the US doesn't get better internet delivery is DOA.

Time away

Well that was a busy week! I hardly even read anything. So going back to the reading, it seemed like Conan was on a massive PR spree. I'm sure you've already read enough about it at this point, so I'll point instead to the story that Turbine has picked up a bunch of cash - enough to do some interesting expansions, even. The story talks console, but I doubt it - at least not for LotRO - it doesn't fit, in my mind. Not that I've played the game, of course, so who am I to comment?