Allods Online appears to have given up on attempting to be a AAA title, and has turned to the last resort of the desperate. An advert that tells you absolutely nothing about the game, but has some nice ladies saying that they would very much like to play with you, (My Lord). Though they seem to be having a perfectly pleasant time playing with eachother already.
Is this how all games will advertise themselves in the future? Or just the ones with low self-esteem?
You can rolls abouts as much as you likes, but don't be smashings the 4th wall!
Behold the mightiest of artifacts, the Stone of Gygax! Not only a house item, but a roving housepet that is sure to critically hit its way into your heart!
The Stone of Gygax is available for today only, from a nice Sphinx by the name of Imenand, sitting near the Enchanted Lands docks. Her quest, “Riddled throughout the Land” involves a fair bit of travel, but using the conveniently located spires to the south will help speed things up. No spoilers here, but the usual suspects have a write-up already.
What home is complete without some polyhedral dice? Not Maltheas’, that’s for sure! It is a fine tribute to a man that helped shape a generation of fantasy gamers.
The company abruptly abandoned its case against Everiss, which was being heard in the supreme court in Sydney, halfway through the second day of the case – and is now facing a legal bill of A$114,000 (£68,800) for the defence’s costs.
Evony claims that it dropped the lawsuit because its players were unhappy with it. If that was the case, you might have thought that they would have dropped it before the courts went into session. I suspect it had rather more to do with them suddenly realising that the Australian courts like to base their judgements on objective truth, rather than whatever silly made-up nonsense the Evony lawyers put before them. There was probably a limit to the amount of humiliation their Australian-based lawyers were prepared to suffer.
Quite possibly they also wanted to conserve their legal funds to deal with Blizzard’s presumably impending wrath regarding World of Lordcraft.
Well done to Bruce for standing up for the truth! Also, thanks for being the one that got sued, as I doubt I would have been quite as effective at assembling a legal defense!
Sources from the case suggested that Evony did not want the publicity to overshadow its launch of the next version of its game, Evony: Age II, which is due for release imminently.
Great Caesar’s Ghost!!! Evony II? Assuming that that is not the same as World of Lordcraft, I’m looking forward to examining it to see who they ripped off this time.
There is an issue with this morning’s Star Trek Online patch. Certain PvP maps are causing players to lose all their skill and bridge officer points, and become level -39. Needless to say, this is not a good thing to have happen to you, and the afflicted are finding themselves unable to get any missions.
Maps that are confirmed to be causing this include Cracked Planetoids, and Shanty Town, but my advice would be to avoid all PvP until it is fixed. With a number of developers at PAX, it might take a little while to be resolved. It is unclear at this point as to whether there will be a server-wide rollback, or a fix targeted at affected players.
How bugs like this slip past the test server and the QA department is one of the great mysteries of the universe.
Update: Here are the patch notes for the morning update which brought in this issue:
General
Fixed an issue where the Tribble Of Borg was unable to be claimed again from the C-Store if it had been discarded
Fixed the /stuck command in space so it no longer sends players back to the map’s respawn point inappropriately
Characters created before the release of Season One will now be able to be deleted properly
Commodities transactions will now appropriately complete for the value displayed in the UI
Missions and Locations
Fixed a condition in the mission that sometimes kept the Borg Tactical Cube from spawning by the gate in the first space map of Special Task Force: Infected
Lowered the required amount of satellite debris necessary to advance the mission for some Klingon Star Cluster missions
PvP: Klingon vs Klingon Space area control map now has the correct text
Fixed an issue where defense turrets were not present in certain PvP maps
Powers
The Tribble of Borg buff power will now properly reapply instead of stack when used before the buff expires
Items
Fixed an issue that prevented Bridge Officers from equiping weapons that have the “[Borg]†enhancement
Costumes and Customization
Admiral rank pips now appear on all uniform options
Admiral rank pips now appear properly textured on all uniform options
Fixed an issue that caused an error message to appear inappropriately when attempting to create a Fleet Uniform
UI and Controls
Fixed a bug that prevented players from continuing to respec once they’d pressed the “Accept” button unless they pressed the “Reset” button
Clarified the /Stuck UI which would previously lead users into an an infinite UI loop with the /killme command
Stacked Item counts will now display appropriately in the exchange
Fixed typos in the description of the Tribble of Borg item
It is not a new phenomenon. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Someone trained as an ecologist, such as myself, is prone to look at things through the lens of environmental adaptation, and competition. When you’re a sociologist who specialises in religion, everything starts looking like religion.
I was reading a New Scientist interview with a chap called William Sims Bainbridge, who has written a book called The Warcraft Civilization.
In the past, you’ve done a lot of work with religion. What does religion in WoW tell us about religion in the real world?
The horrendous question that always troubles me is, what if religion is factually false but necessary for human well-being? What does science do then? Could there be some other stage of development in which we express ourselves through a kind of protean self in numerous realities with different levels of faith or suspension of disbelief appropriate to each of them?
That, on a much smaller scale, is what is happening with the fictional religions in WoW. The overwhelming majority of the people that play WoW don’t take its religions seriously.
And we actually have good reason to believe that people who play computer games are, on average, much less religious than the average person in society. I tend to think that fantasy literature in general inspires people to believe that the traditional religions are fantasies too.
Maybe we will move to a time when we no longer make a distinction between belief and the suspension of disbelief. The difference between faith and fantasy might not have been very distinct in ancient times, and it’s possible that we will move towards a time when instead of religion, people’s hopes can be expressed in something that’s acknowledged to be a fantasy but also, on some level, sort of real. WoW might exemplify that kind of post-religious future.
People do not take the religions in WoW seriously because they know they are not real. The majority of people that play WoW ignore most aspects of the lore and backstory, not just religion. It is no more a guide for what is happening to religions in the real world, than it is a guide for the state of our dwindling dragon population.
MMOs are certainly a fantastic laboratory for scientists. Through them you can examine many aspects of game theory, economics, and ethics. But from what I read above, the writer is trying to squeeze his own favourite subject into something that I don’t think has much to do with it, perhaps in an attempt to make his subject matter appeal to a wider audience.
I’ve not read the book itself yet. I suspect it is quite fascinating, and no doubt covers far more than just religion, but the interview suggested to me that he may have vested online gaming with a great deal more philosophical weight than it deserves. He needs to use his gamer eyes, not just his philosopher ones.
This is an old post from a couple of years ago, but I thought it might provide some small entertainment to newer readers.
There have been a number of incidents recently, in Argentina, involving a being known as a “Duende”. This has been badly translated for English media as “The Creepy Gnome”. In a number of appearances, including two caught on film, he has created hysteria wherever he goes. While he has yet to cause any physical injury, merely the sight of him is enough to force the taking of a SAN check, and not everyone has rolled well, with several people being hospitalised from fright.
Here it is in full menacing action.
It should be clear to any player of Warhammer Online that this is not a gnome at all.
Firstly, those young people were filled with terror, and gnomes, whilst being completely awesome in every way, are not known for their causing of terror, and they like it that way.
Secondly, no real gnome would be seen in a hat like that. It’s not a stereotype they want to reinforce.
No, I’m afraid it was clearly a Night Goblin, as I shall demonstrate in this painstakingly crafted side by side comparison:
Those young people should consider themselves lucky it was an unarmed night goblin with the urge to dance that came upon them, and not a witch elf, or a chaos chosen. Nevertheless, even a single night goblin can be dangerous to the untrained, so they were wise to flee.
Last year, the reports from interviews with Jack “Jackalope” Emmert were that the Xbox version of Champions Online was “ready to go”, just waiting for some Microsoft red tape to get sorted out.
Jackalope, on the Champions Online forum yesterday:
100% of our focus is on making the current PC product the best it can be. There are no current plans for a console version of Champions.
1. Stop designing MMO to be released on both PCs and consoles. You end up removing half the depth, the game fails, and then it never ends up coming out on a console in the end anyway. See: Champions Online, Age of Conan.
I agree with that guy. Seriously, stop doing that. Unless you’re Square Enix, in which case you can probably get away with it, in spite of the grotesque UI you’ll inflict on your PC users, because we Final Fantasy fans will pretty much take what we’re given.
You’re probably not Square Enix. Planning for your game to work on a console with a gamepad, and on a television, is just going to lead to game design compromises that mean that PC gamers do not get the experience they deserve.
