How AoC and WAR might affect WoW: One player’s perspective

Lots of people are speculating how Age of Conan and Warhammer Online are going to affect World of Warcraft subscriber numbers. I could link to quite a few posts, but I’ll cheat and link to Tobold’s post, because he already did the linking for me.
I’m a tiny data point in a sea of MMO subscribers, [...]

More NDA blues, and MMO evolution

I’ve been posting comments on various blogs concerning Warhammer, and I have to be careful not to let thoughts about the beta slip in to my comments. One drawback when that happens is I fear I sound like a WAR fanboi. I can’t offer an even assessment of the game, because I’m not allowed to [...]

Why I don’t get tattoos

When I was a kid in college, I had ample opportunity to tattoo myself with whatever symbol/theme/thing I happened to be into at the moment. I went to school outside Philadelphia, and Philly has a ton of wicked tattoo parlors. High-quality artists, lots of people with seriously interesting ink on their bodies.
I always hesitated, though, [...]

I hate NDA’s

I hate NDA’s, but I have to respect them. Or at least try to respect them. I pretty much click off on the NDA with my fingers crossed and saying something like “I swear I’m not going to talk about this game…unless someone is buying me beers.” I’m not cheap, but I think I might [...]

License to print money?

For years following the release of Everquest, the prospect of developing and releasing a massively multiplayer online game based on a licensed intellectual property (IP) was viewed as a project fraught with difficulty. Star Trek MMO’s were discussed, development was begun and stopped, a game was never released. Star Wars:Galaxies famously underperformed expectations (although I [...]

Searching for trouble in Age of Conan

Hey, for those of you playing Conan, how’s the performance? If you’re reading AoC forums, what’s the general opinion? My blog has been getting hit pretty heavy since the 18th or so (the day after the pre-release access for AoC started), and my top 10 searches that brought readers to my page all have to [...]

Packed like lemmings into instanced little boxes

Apologies to Sting (who should actually be apologizing to us for the majority of post-Police pop crap foisted upon the world) and the Police, but when I look at MMO’s these days, I’m seeing compartments of gameplay, and I’m not liking it. I want a virtual world, not a holodeck. I want a place to [...]

Passing on AoC for the moment

The Age of Conan pre-release access started today, and despite hearing good things about stability and performance, I don’t feel compelled to check it out again.
I’ve given Age of Conan and my mmorpg preferences a lot of thought since playing the AoC open beta. It’s not that Funcom has made a bad game. In fact, [...]

The level bump in MMO betas

I’ve been thinking about my experiences in the AoC open beta PvP weekend, and how it’s shaping my decision to buy the game or not.
For those who might not know, Funcom gave each open beta player a token that bumped their level up to 20 from the previous cap of 13. Your character was moved [...]

Conan’s second PvP weekend

If open betas are as much about marketing as they are about testing, turning the Age of Conan servers into open PvP for the remainder of beta was a strange decision.
Funcom was in an interesting position. They previously let players level up to 13, but they didn’t allow open beta players to go further because [...]

New Age of Conan beta build

I downloaded and installed the latest Age of Conan patch last night. It seemed to fix a lot of my performance problems.
First, the patcher was pretty quick. Compared to World of Warcraft, it was great. Compared to WoW, though, downloading the latest Netscape browser overnight on a 14.4 modem in 1995 seems quick.
Second, load times [...]

What would Mythic do?

Funcom’s explanation of the open beta snafu, which I first saw over on Bildo’s site, finally cleared up my questions about what the hell’s been happening over the past few days. Gotta say, I’m not really thrilled with the answer. I’ve been hoping that Funcom left old code in because they wanted to test some [...]