Monthly Archive for June, 2010

LOTRO – Level 20

Into a DungeonWell I’m still playing Lord of the Rings Online after my latest return, popping in from time to time when I’m not EQ2′ing.

My Character Yetian is now level 20 and has entered the city of Bree, found my Kinship house and ventured into both the forest near Bree and the Barrows.

I am enjoying the game again and even at my slow pace there is plenty to see, with the views still outstripping other MMO’s I have played. The character models are still poor  though and I’m trying to get a decent black outfit now I can use appearance sets of armour.

Continue reading ‘LOTRO – Level 20′

World Of Tanks – Q&A

I was contacted a while ago about an upcoming WW2 based MMO called World of Tanks. The title pretty much tells you what the game is about, large scale tank battles online. As a Battleground Europe player I agreed to a Q&A session with the company behind world of tanks. The questions that follow were put to Wargaming.net by myself and a few of my Battleground Europe squaddies. I have to admit it’s a game I hadn’t heard of so the info below is new to me as well as many of you reading this post.

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Battleground Europe 1.31 is live!

An Image of Bombs landing in Battleground Europe 1.31Last night I managed my first play session in Battleground Europe since the new update went live. 1.31 Is for the most part a graphical overhaul to the 9 year old MMO which is celebrating it’s anniversary by launching this new version of the game. There are other changes too such as the revamp of the capture mechanic but I only managed to get in on one building capture as I spent most of last night in bushes surrounding towns I was defending looking for incoming enemy.

I’ve taken a few screenshots to show you of said bushes and other random sights, I’m sure more will follow in later posts. One of the most impressive sights of my first session was when a dozen or so bombers dropped their bombs over the town in sync. I was on a nearby hill so had a great view of the bombs falling and hitting the town, complete with some nice explosion effects. Before any call of duty players read this and complain the graphics are not up to their standards think of one thing. We are not talking about a 30 player map here and a game that’s just been released. We are talking about a 9 year old MMO with huge open play areas with many more players, a game that due to it’s age is still mostly processed by the CPU rather than the GPU. In fact a squaddie last night told me that he overclocked his CPU to see if it improved his  frame-rate and noticed a big difference. Battleground Europe also as far as I know doesn’t have multi-core support so more cores won’t help, just clock speed. MMO’s have to cater for a wider range of tech due to their expected longevity and I think the new graphical changes for Battleground Europe look great. Continue reading ‘Battleground Europe 1.31 is live!’

Tindr the Bard – New Halas Alt

Tindr the Barbarian Bard of neXusWell new Halas arrived with the recent EQ2 game update and with it my latest alt… erm 2 actually. That’s right, my tank alt Rive was created and then didn’t really go anywhere. The reason was a discussion on guild voice came to the conclusion I should make a Troubadour as we were short on utility classes and as I’ve never played a bard to high levels I figured what the hell and did so.

As a result Tindr the bard is now level 24 and has just finished questing through Halas. There are not far off 100 quests I reckon in the Frostfang sea which is the new starter zone and includes the city of new Halas. The city itself is not bad looking and I’ll include a few pics at the end of this post for you to have a look over.

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Lord of the Rings to go F2P

This Autumn, Lord of the Rings Online will follow Turbines other MMO, Dungeons and Dragons Online and go Free to Play with a cash shop to match.

DDO has become very successful since it went F2P, and I have no doubt LotRO will follow it, but what happens to all the Lifetime Subscribers?  My guess is a mountain of in game bonus items and more than likely a few tokens for the cash shop every month with a discount.

I know a few people on this site have lifetime subs, your thoughts?

Via Joystiq

The “M” in MMO

I received an email a while ago from a company about a world war 2 based free to play MMO that’s currently in beta. I have been asked if I would like to pose a few questions to them which they will answer to post on our blog here.  I’m all for this kind of interaction with game developers whether or not it’s a game I chose to play.

The MMO in question states on their site that you can have up to 60 players playing in battles, this is where my question of the day comes from.

What makes the M in MMO? I’m talking about the first M, the massively part of the acronym, the part that makes an MMO what it is for me. There is also the point some will make that it’s the world you play in and it’s scope that has to be large, but you can see this in offline games such as Oblivion and others. Continue reading ‘The “M” in MMO’