Aion: Head start and crazy long queues

I’m playing Aion!!
…and I’m rather bored.  Aion gameplay at low levels is about as generic an experience as you can find in an MMORPG.  It’s pretty and polished, but so very bland.
For a MMORPG head start, it’s been very smooth, as I expected.  The game has been Live in Asia for a while now, so [...]

Read Full Post »

Aion: Launch Schedule

A quick post to update people on the upcoming Aion launch dates.
Preselection starts Friday, September 18, at noon PDT (3PM EDT) and closes on Sunday, September 20 at 9AM PDT (noon EDT).
Head Start begins shortly afterwards on Sunday, September 20 at noon PDT (3PM EDT).
The official Launch is on Tuesday, September 22, in North America.  [...]

Read Full Post »

Champions Online: Launch Day!

Nice job on an uneventful launch, Cryptic!  It’s all too common for launch days to be horrible nightmares of poor planning, bug overload and human errors.  Champions Online launched and it’s like it was just any other day.
Unfortunately, Cryptic also decided to unload a massive series of nerfs as well.  So the official forums are [...]

Read Full Post »

Champions Online: Level 30’s already?

It’s great finally leveling up and knowing that I’m not completely wasting my time on a character that’s going to be wiped.  The head start launch went as smoothly as could be expected. The servers were up about 20 minutes before the official start time.  It was an unexpected, but welcome, change especially considering many [...]

Read Full Post »

What’s Bad about Champions Online?

Even though I’ve been enjoying my time with Champions Online, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have some major problems.  Many of the problems are because CO is a brand new game.  Hopefully some of these problems will be fixed by launch.  Unfortunately, CO has some core problems that might be more difficult to manage.
This is [...]

Read Full Post »

Champions Online: Beta First Impressions

This is a much longer post that I planned to write, so here is the TL;DR version:
I’m having a lot of fun!  Customization is top notch.  The open skill system is fantastic.  Combat is dynamic and exciting.  I’m definitely going to be subscribing to this game.  I’m eagerly awaiting the early start on August 28th.  [...]

Read Full Post »

Darkfall Online is finally coming!

Less than a week from now on February 25th, Darkfall Online (DF) will finally launch in Europe! Plans for the North American launch hasn’t been established yet, but NA players are invited to play on the European servers.
It’s been 7 long years in development.  From the beginning, the developers (Aventurine SA) promised a sandbox game [...]

Read Full Post »

Warhammer Online: 47,000 concurrent open beta players

Because Mythic is not supporting an official forums, I’ve been using the VN Boards and Warhammer Alliance forums to keep up-to-date on news.  Here is a list of more forums.  Official statements about server status and various updates can be found at the Warhammer Online Herald (an official Mythic website).
Mythic posted a status report regarding [...]

Read Full Post »

Major concerns about Warhammer Online and its launch

“It’s beta!!”
I’ve been browsing various Warhammer Online forums (apparently Mythic is not supporting an official forum, which is a bit worrisome). It’s all starting to sound more and more like Funcom’s pre-launch problems. There are plenty of positive posts, but Age of Conan had loads of fanbois as well. There seems to [...]

Read Full Post »

Should I buy into the WAR hype?

For the past couple years, Warhammer Online (WAR) and Age of Conan (AoC) have built up an incredible amount of hype.  From a business perspective, it worked out quite well for Funcom.  Even with rather iffy beta reviews and high system requirements, it still managed to sell over 800,000 copies.  According to this article from [...]

Read Full Post »