The world of SWTOR is completely safe for now, the raid content is clear for a while now and since we have no actual date as of when the new content will hit the test servers, me and my guildmates went mostly back to other tasks. Its like raid-vacation right now and taking into account how much time all of us devoted into that game to achieve our goals, its somewhat relieving to have for other things again.

Me, I am mostly back to crosshair based games right now. And the itch of competing in FPS games is crawling up from deep within - again.

Oh and on a completely unrelated note: Earthrise shut down its servers. lol Earthrise.

Taken from the Firefall Facebook page

Read more

A while ago, the development team of Star Wars: The Old Republic said that it was very important for them that every class of the same department (dps/heal/tank) should be more or less equal and that it should be more important to bring the player, not the class. As it stands, Bioware failed to achieve this goal. While class balance seems alright for casual purposes, the differences between some classes are so incredibly high that one might ask if class balancing was ever concern to the development team.

Sith Juggernaut PvE and PvP - Looking badass, fighting like Hello Kitty.

Read more

Well. Not really. 2011 was pretty much a shitty year when it comes to new MMO releases and the only shining gem that surfaced from the mud was SWTOR. Considering that even co-workers I didn’t even knew where gamers got hooked into this game, there is not much room to describe failure here.

Bonethraser 16 Nightmare

Read more

I can’t remember that I stopped playing MMOs during any summer of the recent years. I even played as if it was a dark and cold winter in some years, completely burying myself behind supplies of water and fast food, nerding the hell out of my actual game. Who needs different weather anyways if you won’t leave your place until you run out of food? As fun as it sounds (well actually, it doesn’t in retrospect), I can’t get myself to a game in particular this summer. Actually, it seems that I begin to break my oath of ‘gaming until death’. Suddenly, with a lot of stuff going on in my real life, I feel somewhat disconnected from the whole scene. All of a sudden, hardcore gaming as it is, doesn’t feel so attractive anymore. What happened to the good and warm feeling of owning shit out of noobs? I don’t know.

All Points Failure: Reloaded. Although very communicative, Gamersfirst is months behind their original schedule.

Read more

Since my flu seems to finally wear off a bit - at least I don’t need to cool my head off with ice over and over - I decided to take on something I mentioned through the whole E3 coverage the last days and especially when following the official SWTOR forums in that context. Never before have people reminded me of a quote thats so true that it hurts already. And the fact that it comes from a SWTOR dev makes it even better.

“We don’t have friendly fire in The Old Republic for a simple reason: a lot of players are, well… idiots.”
-Damion Schubert

Sand people vs. Sith Inquisitor. To date the AI has probably a higher IQ than the average player.

And the good thing about this quote is: Its even more true when you erase the friendly fire reference.

Read more

lright. Maybe its just my pill-ridden mind that causes me to post yet another philosophical blog on MMO phenomena but if it helps to fight down the recent flu I catched up, so be it. While my attention span goes down in a horrible way when I’m ill, at least regarding games, I always notice that I begin to check up on older titles I left. And the fascinating thing is that - except for the really horrible titles - you almost always can talk yourself into the good aspects of your former games quite quickly.

Almost as quickly as discovering why you left certain games a long time ago, falling into the same trap over and over.

Read more

Well, the answer obviously is that it would end up as a largely underrated game that gets far less attention than it deserves and spreads far too slowly throughout the global gaming market. It would still be one of the most awesome games ever created, even if you don’t consider yourself one of the grindy persons who work their way up to unlock hero mode encounters along with all the raids available.

Every viking would envy this absolute carnage infused hammer-combat paradise.

At least thats what Vindictus seems to be. A pimped up Secret of Mana on crack and speed alltogether with maybe the best action rpg combat system ever created, along with a physics engine that is unparalleled in this kind of games. Read up.

Read more

Its two months again and after ditching Rift for repetetive content I couldn’t bear any more, I turned to rl sports along with working on parts of my house for the time being. Mostly due to a lack of games worth investing time into and the fact that I had several marathons where I invested time into games on a 24/7 basis, starting with Cataclysm, along with Earthrise and then again with Rift.

Star Wars: The Old Republic - Everyone gets his own shiny ship!

Read more

Oh yeah, all that time invested, all that hours I stood in front of a crafting machine, all that plans I set into motion in advance of territorial warfare.. and not to forget the countless hours my character was stuck in the game or the servers were down - again. It was fun though and Earthrise is still an exceptional game. But while the game gets more and more fixed every day, the community itself is so broken that it seems barely worth to log in anymore. This chapter, as sad as it is, is over.

While on the search for the next big nerd adventure, I decided to return to the guys of Intrepid and pick up Rift until some of the shining stars which are to be released later this year give me a chance to beta test them.

Read more

February, 4th marked the beginning of a ’should be’ long term gaming experience, a sandbox game with territorial warfare, plotting players and guilds against each other for a fight over ressources, exchanging bullets for the last remaining spots capable of delivering the precious treasures of an otherwise scorched earth. As stated, I knew that the game had and still has a lot of issues and I still stand by my statement: This game could be one of the most awesome MMOs ever created. But things happened, that keep this somewhat infant behemoth still struggling for air.

Uberrobots with mechanized death tentacles. Optimus Prime would be jealous.

Lets round up some of the things that went wrong and check the chances of ER being able to give the reaper a good boot to the head.

Read more