Zoiks!

Wow - I've just read the Darkfall launch blog war epic flame saga (Wilhelm has a nice summary). I think I've been hit with an intelligence debuff that may take weeks to wear off.

/firmhandshake

Cruising around the internets, I ran across Killed in a Smiling Accident's Guide to MMO Etiquette, Chapter 1, which made me laugh more than a little:

Seeing a stranger (enemy faction in a PvP game)

You may attack them, but you should wait for them to despatch any mob they are fighting first[...] If they are climbing a cliff, you should lower a rope, and offer them a chance to rest before engaging in combat, after checking whether they have six fingers on one hand.

The whole thing is definitely worth a read.

Darkfall launch

Well, Darkfall launched, and it didn't go so smoothly. The only thing I could add to the comments others have made (Tobold has links to several) is that the game did launch, more or less when they said they would (although, to be fair, they didn't say it until fairly recently, but still). Hardcore PvP - I respect the idea - I've actually just gotten Team Fortress 2 up and running, and I love the mayhem. But it's not really the same thing. I'll be curious to see how it goes once people have had a chance to level a bit (or whatever you want to call it - skill up?). Given that I like some of the ideas they're implementing, I'm hoping they make a go of it.

I haven't looked yet, but I bet it's $15 a month, which would be a mistake. In going to look, I see the problems are pretty severe - the forums are closed except for a message saying 'we're working on it'. The webpage hasn't been updated since Feb 1, it looks like. Well, I guess I'll wait and see how it plays out.

Fare thee well, Tabula Rasa

Poor Tabula Rasa - slashdot has reminded me that the final swan song is this weekend. It was a good game, as far as it went (I enjoyed it a lot more when I played it in January), and it's sad to see so much work just... disappear. I stand by my assertion that the game should be open sourced and left to the fans, but the game's website would seem to indicate a fairly... final... finale. "[I]f it is truly our destiny to be destroyed, we are taking them all with us."

Resident Evil

Ouch. Been a little while since I posted. It turns out Lord of the Rings Online wasn't good enough to keep me playing (not saying it wasn't good - just not good enough). So I'll keep reading the news and see what should be next on my 'try it' list. I really hope this year we don't see any failures due to unfinished games at release. That would make me sad.

One of the things I ran across recently, that I hadn't heard about, was the Resident Evil racism thing. I saw this comic on Penny Arcade, followed it to the related blog entry, and then did some research, finding an interview with Newsweek's gaming journalist in which he spoke at length about how troubling the game looked.

Now, first person shooters generally aren't my thing, and 'real world' type games aren't either, so I'll most likely never play this game. But I think it offers a nice warning (for those who will take it) that if you are making a 'real world' type game, you should be careful (even if it's not real world, in fact, you should be careful).

Non-combat roles in Earthrise

I was reading the Earthrise forums a few days ago, and ran across their great 'question of the week' forum, in which they answer (more or less) one player question each week. In reading through them, I ran across the one that more often than not is the one I want to know about: what are my options for gameplay that don't involve killing things? The answer is not as detailed as one might like, and it's not absolutely clear to me that they value non-combat roles as highly, but it's nice to see they're at least thinking about it. It would certainly be nice to have a SF MMO that isn't WoW with lasers.

I'm a geek

I think I may have more fun tweaking my system for speed than I do gaming, sometimes. I just reinstalled my system from the ground up, changing the disks to a striped RAID configuration (a what?!?), because LotRO wasn't going fast enough on my system. I'm now re-updating the game client (and several gig later, it will finish, we hope - I'm a little fuzzy how 333/359 is 10% complete, though).

I'm enjoying Lord of the Rings, thus far - I just made it through the starter section, with the big quest at the end of it, which I found quite enjoyable. So far I haven't interacted with a single other person (well, one, but I'm trying to forget that), which isn't all that MMO-ish. We'll see if that continues.