The Secret World: a new style of MMO

This will be my first beta weekend in The Secret World (TSW) and I must admit that I am really looking forward to it. I'm really hoping TSW will be a refreshing break from the classic leveling system found in so many MMOs and I'm not locked down to any one particular class from the get go. All players get to choose 7 passive and 7 active skills and you get to pick those 14 skills out of 500. The variety of skills cover everything from magic spells and shields, right down to a basic shotgun and ax use. The system actually kind of reminds me of what Star Wars Galaxies was like at the start. It allowed you to mix and match a variety of different abilities. The Secret World seems to take it to a completely different level, giving you unlimited access to all 55o skills and not locking you into any particular sets like the class system does. Imagine taking all your favorite skills from your WoW hunter and combining them with your favorite skills from your Druid and Warrior to make one uber cat tank with a pet. That's kind of the idea the developers have in The Secret World.

Read on

SWTOR Fansite TORWars Q&A

Site name: TORWARS
URL: http://torwars.com
Name: Jeff Hollis
Started: October of 2010
Type: News and opinions, blog, media, Podcast

SWTOR Face: In your words, how would you describe your site? Do you have a particular focus or interest?

TORWARS: We're a SWTOR news site, and we cover every aspect of the game. Not only do we update the site multiple times every day, we also tend to take a very tongue-in-cheek approach to everything. SWTOR is fun, and we think the news about it should be too!

SWTOR Face: How many people work on your blog/site (including writers, editors, webmaster, etc)?
TORWARS: We currently have a staff of seven. (This does not include our Twi'lek dancing girls.)



SWTOR Face: When did you start blogging (about any topic)?
TORWARS: David and Jeff, the co-founders, have been writing on the web for more than ten years. For some of this writing, they actually managed to get paid (much to the amazement of everyone!)

SWTOR Face: When did you start blogging about SWTOR?
TORWARS: They started TORWars a little more than a year before the game launched.

SWTOR Face: What, if any, MMOs have you played?
TORWARS: If you can name an MMO, someone on our staff has played it. This includes big MMOs, small MMOs, old MMOs, and MMOs most sane people have never heard of.

SWTOR Face: Are you attracted to SWTOR because of the gaming experience, Star Wars, or both?
TORWARS: Primarily because it's a BioWare game, and we're big fans of their games. Also, we're huuuuuuuuge MMO fanbois and fangurls, and so this is a very natural fit.

SWTOR Face: What is your most memorable experience in gaming?
TORWARS: Personally, I'm really looking forward to hooking up with a hot Wookiee princess in SWTOR. That will indeed be memorable.

SWTOR Face: What was your first Star Wars experience?
TORWARS: The founders (who are extremely old) both saw Star Wars in the theater in 1977. We then collected Star Wars toys, played a lot of X-Wing, read a lot of Star Wars comics, and generally refused to grow up, even to this very day.

SWTOR Face: Republic or Empire?
TORWARS: Empire. Evil is funner. More funner. Funnerer. Whatever!

SWTOR Face: What excites you most about SWTOR?
TORWARS: We've heard that slave bikinis are in the game. Making a fat male Jedi, and then running around in a slave bikini is pure comedy gold.

DC Universe™ Offline free to play!

DC Universe is now Free to play and Sony has screwed the change over up big time  after downloading 13GB + to test out the game I got to play for 15 minuets and then the server went off line.. that was 18 hours ago this is what Sony are saying on Facebook  :

We are still actively working on issues with both US PC and US PS3. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope to have things up and running as quickly as possible. Thanks so much for your patience.

As folks have seen we have had some major issues today keeping our US Servers up and running. We are working very hard to correct the problem and we will be keeping the servers down until we can deploy new software to help us fix the issues....

Update:!!

Update from DCUO Exec. Producer: "We will be reopening the server soon. Although we do not have a fix yet for this problem we have added additional code to try and catch and diagnose the problem. I apologize in advance if we crash again, but know that the information we get will help to make sure we solve this problem as quickly as possible." 

It’s still fracked but we will just kick it and hope for the best!

If this was a once of I might give them some slack but with servers doing down up to 9 out of the last 14 days this is not looking good for Sony.

The forums and Facebook are full of angry players complaining about freeloaders crashing there servers, and to be honest I might be upset too if I paid for a game that then went free to play, and then crashed all the time.. But i didn't pay for it but I would not have even looked at it if it was not free to play. If Sony get their act into gear and get this mess cleaned up I might give it a run and if I do like it I would me more than happy to pay for it to enhance my experience.... but that a big IF...

SWTOR PVP 3v3 Video at Gamescon

More SWTOR PVP action from Gamescon for you. This time we get some 3v3 action and a smoking hot actress dressed up as Darth Talon. No idea why in God's name they are chanting Darth Maul? I’d be chanting for the hot red chick! Not some dumb ass Sith that can't keep his legs attached to his body … Maybe the guys over there swing different . OOOO I’m Bad!!! : P





Check out the video. The angle sux balls but it gives you another look at PVP in SWTOR:

Sith suck balls and want to do your mom ... did we really want to hear it anyway?!

You know I understand why BioWare made the decision to separate global chat channels between factions. If you haven't heard, Georg Zoeller has clarified on the official forums that global chat will be separate between Sith and Republic but normal local chat will be able to be viewed by everybody and understood. By understood, in case you haven't played WoW before, Horde and Alliance and see each other saying stuff, but the text is scrambled. In a lot of other MMOs opposite factions do not get global or server wide communications. If they weren't separated we might see something like this:

From Georg Zoeller: “Guys, Let's back up for a minute and clarify what's going on here. Nothing has changed since San Diego Comic Con. As discussed at SDCC, the decision was made to separate the general chat channels by faction. However, this decision ONLY affects the planet-wide chat channels such as "General Chat." If you're standing next to another player (local chat), you can talk to them regardless of what faction you're part of. The only thing we removed, as already mentioned at Comic-Con, was the ability to communicate with the opposing faction across the entirety of a planet to avoid the issues (like griefing, abuse, and other factors which led to a very unpleasant experience) which we saw way too often in testing. We discussed the option of hiding the global chat and defaulting it off, but ultimately the ratio of negative incidents was too high to justify that. The reasoning here is simple: We really didn’t want to create a game option that essentially says "[x] Give me an 80% chance of having an infuriating and annoying chat experience," and putting the onus on the user ("you can just /ignore them") is not our idea of a quality game experience.Removing planet-wide cross-faction chat radically reduces the amount of reach a misbehaving player has before account action can be taken. We’ll likely add the ability to filter local cross faction chat as well. Hopefully that clears it up a bit.”

Choose your own adventure. The pitfalls of MMO

Recently I decided to give RIFT another go. I got an email stating that they made all these changes and added new content .. blah blah. So I thought, what the hell? My account is still active until October ... I'll give it another shot.

The first thing I was asked to do was to change realms as the realm I was on had been allocated as a trial realm. This is a really good idea. This allows the developer to have trial accounts that don't get used by spammers, and real players with real accounts are guaranteed that they're dealing with and speaking to other real players with real accounts.

So I transferred over to the new oceanic servers. TRION, the developer of RIFT, created two new oceanic specific servers about a month ago. Although this might have been six months too late for a lot of oceanic players, I was surprised to see the server full, in the middle of the afternoon, on a weekday. Although TRION didn't listen to the community that begged and pleaded with them to create an oceanic server when the game began, they have eventually seen sense.

If you haven't tried RIFT yet, I do recommend that you give it a go. The levelling and the  storyline/quests are not bad ... but, where RIFT seems to be lacking is with a real in-depth story. I couldn't even tell you the name of the world I'm in, and I've played the game on and off for over two months ... let alone tell you anything substantial about the main characters. The lack of cut scenes and true story-telling really let this game down. The graphics, interface, classes, and general world are all pretty good. I'd be so bold to even say that those elements are better than WoW but WoW also had the story-telling, dramatic heroes and villains, and cut scenes. In WoW I built up a true relationship with my character that was maintained over several expansions. It wasn't until they tried to re-hash old content that I found it was time to move on. Even with the best interface, if an MMO doesn't have a compelling story that attaches a player to their character, players will not spend real time in a game.

Another perfect example of this is Star Wars Galaxies. When the game was first released it was classified as a sandbox game. It was a massive open world, with no real guides but it was a world created within the Star Wars universe. The majority of the gamers were there because they love Star Wars. It was a buzz just hanging out at Anchorhead cantina, or going to Jabba's palace for the first time. The story was engrossed in the game and the complex character development system suited it perfectly. It wasn't until Sony was put under the pump by Lucas Arts to show a massive improvement that Sony made a critical error. They stopped listening to their community. They tried to copy the WoW model and at that very time destroyed everything that was potentially unique about the game. The simplistic character levels that they implemented just didn't work with the complex world they created.

So, back to my point, it doesn't matter how simplistic or complicated the MMO world is, the story is king. If you can't make a gamer get attached to his character, develop fps instead! If you are looking for a general idea of what Star Wars the Old Republic may be like, I suggest you download and play Mass Effect II. This will give you a general idea on what is possible with real story development.