Ragnar’s Realms

Admin wrote: 

Filed under: PC, Sony PlayStation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360, Action, First Person Shooters

No doubt in a rush to get a new game - any new game - on store shelves so it can wash its hands of the whole Kane and Lynch debacle, Eidos has announced that it will release Conflict: Denied Ops for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC on February 12, 2008.

The game is the latest from the “conflict” obsessed folks at Pivotal Games, and will allow one or two players to simultaneously control a pair of gun-wielding supermen, not unlike the aforementioned Kane and Lynch. Pivotal’s Conflict series of games are not exactly known for overwhelmingly positive scores, and if our earlier impressions hold true, the same fate awaits Denied Ops, though hopefully once reviews begin rolling in no writers will find themselves on the business end of a pink slip. If so, perhaps Gerstmann needs a roommate?

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Today,  

Filed under: Odds and ends, Blizzard

It appears that it is time for me to branch out from my usual silly antics here on WoW Insider, and take a moment to flex my writing skills instead of my artistic ones. Today I would like to speak to you about some of the long history of WoW, but not in the “Know Your Lore” sense of history. WoW Insider reader Tim wrote in to request some information on the evolution of World of Warcraft, from its infancy in beta to launch and beyond and I, having been here through the majority of it, decided that I should put pen to paper (fingers to keyboard?) and share what I know and what I have witnessed along the way.

Are you aware (and I’m sure some of you are) that at one point in World of Warcraft, there was an experience penalty suffered when you were slain? Indeed, even though the lack of experience loss is one of the things that sets current WoW apart from other MMOs, back in its infancy the death penalty was practically the same as what you would find in EverQuest or Final Fantasy XI, though without the de-leveling found in the latter.

Let us take a moment to sit down, pull up a cup of your favorite socially acceptable beverage, and go over a handful of the many changes that WoW has gone through since Blizzard introduced it to a select number of beta testers back in 2004.

When I was first accepted into the WoW beta, it was in the period following the 0.6.0 patch, so naturally I’m going to start my discussion there. At the time, my friends and I were heavily invested into the MMOs of they day - EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, and the newcomer to the scene, the previously mentioned FFXI. Upon seeing the early WoW screenshots and videos that Blizzard had released, the opinions of my friends were basically divided in to two camps: Those that were ravenously excited about the game, and those that felt its visual style was far too cartoonish to be taken seriously. I was in the former group, being a huge fan of pretty much everything that Blizzard had ever released, the Warcraft games in particular. I applied for beta the moment they posted a sign up page, and eventually I received the blessed email that informed me I had been accepted in.

My first character, as was my tradition with pretty much all RPGs, MMO or single player, was of course the paladin Arturis. Signing in to the game, I was overwhelmed at how true to Warcraft III the style had translated, and immediately I set to work slaying wolves and kobolds outside the quaint little abbey in Northshire.

The talent system, at that time, had been completely removed in order to be re-written from the ground up. The previous talent system, I later learned from presentations at both BlizzCon ‘05 and ‘07, was a very simple 3 step upgrade scheme. For example, you could take a spell like Fireball, upgrade it to a second tier that had more damage and a longer range, and then push it up to a third tier which once again upgraded the damage, range, and perhaps added a dot effect to it. I don’t remember the actual specifics of it, because that was both before my time and paladins don’t get to throw around too many fireballs, even back then.

In the place of a talent system there was a completely different skill system from what we know and use today. Every level, starting at level 1, earned you a single skill point that you could later spend to learn new weapons or trade skills. Since Arturis, in all his previous incarnations across various games, had been a master swordsman, I set my first goal as getting to level 10 so that I could invest my 10 skill points into purchasing the ability to use two handed swords. In doing so, I encountered my first major bug in the game that I would encounter frequently until well after beta; Creatures were spawning half (and some times completely) inside of trees and cliffs, caught just enough that they couldn’t move in most cases, and couldn’t be hit in others.

Patch 0.7.0 rolled around and introduced a slew of new features into the game, though only one of them affected me at my low level: The mail system. For the first time I discovered the joy of being able to send in-game items to an alt without having to trust someone enough to trade the item to a third party and back again. Though FFXI had a mail system at the time, the WoW system was by far less clumsy to deal with, and to this day one of my favorite features of WoW.

The Auction House was introduced in Patch 0.8.0, and though the patch notes list them as being added to every major city, I only recall seeing them in Ironforge and Orgrimmar (though I was only in my high teens with Arturis at the time, and had not made it down to Booty Bay yet.) If the AH’s had been added to the other cities then they were removed almost immediately - I spent a great amount of time traveling back and forth between Stormwind and Ironforge just to use the AH, and this was before the tram existed between them.

O’Eight brought in another huge change - the first talent trees were introduced, for Warriors and Mages. This prompted me to create a dwarven warrior - I don’t recall the name, honestly, though I’m sure it was something guttural and clandestine, which would make your knees knock and your spine shiver at the mere sound of it. Or perhaps it was Bob. The world may never know, because I don’t think I got much more then level 3 with him. The Dwarf Possibly Named Bob and I just didn’t click, and he was soon deleted. I spent more time staring at the blank panel that would some day be the paladin talent tree and imagining what kind of holy justice I would eventually be able to dish out to the demons and undead of the world of Azeroth.

Another system that got an overhaul in addition to the talent system was the rest state system. It had gone through several incarnations, supposedly, but when I started playing it was less of a reward for taking time off and more of a penalty for playing too long. That’s right, if you played longer then a certain amount of time it would decrease the amount of experience you received, as a way to insinuate that your character was getting too tired to go on and that he needed a nap at the nearest inn. With the revamp in 0.8 they removed the penalty and normalized it to the way we see rest state today, going from rested (with bonus exp) to normal (without bonus exp) and not below.

Patch 0.9 brought about the introduction of a brand new character class that you may have heard of called “The Hunter”. Talent trees were introduced for the priest and rogue classes. It was either this patch or the one previous that paladins lost the Healing and Mana Auras that used to make eating/drinking unnecessary for anyone in the paladin’s group. I was little bummed out by the loss, but I could understand the reasons for removing them. A week or so later brought us patch 9.1 with a few important bug fixes. Now I can’t recall the exact time line (it has been awhile), but it was somewhere around here they Blizzard implemented a “fix” to those creatures that were getting stuck in the terrain. Now, if a creature could directly attack you yet you could attack it, it would automatically Evade any attempts to damage it. This is still in the game today, though you don’t see it anywhere near as often. This fix didn’t actually decrease the number of creatures stuck in the terrain - they were still getting stuck well past when the game went live - it just made it so you couldn’t kill those creatures for free experience, which some players were abusing for faster leveling.

This brings us to the final live release, which was quickly followed up with patch 1.1 that introduced all those fun little things we call Racial Abilities. Paladin talents finally arrived, along with those for hunters. And Arturis was officially wiped from the beta server (along with the rest of the beta characters), only to be rise again and start over on Elune. Still, this version of WoW as it existed on launch day is amazingly different then the game we play today, but that would be a topic for a separate article for another day.

-Arturis

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Admin wrote: 

Filed under: News, Halo 3

Happy Friday kids, the Bungie Podcast is back! With the ringing of bells and sounding of trumpets still echoing through the hills, you’ll be able to get your latest Bungie Podcast fix over at Bungie.net. And this week they’re talking with Christopher Barrett about life at Bungie HQ, the Heroic Map Pack and more. We haven’t had a chance to give their ‘cast a listen to or our official X3F critique, but we have confidence that you’ll be able to practice safe podcast listening skills. Enjoy and be sure to give team Bungie lots of crap in the forums for taking a vacation … we serve Fancasts weekly, vacation or not.

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Admin wrote: 

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, PvP

It used to be that Alliance players thought of Alterac Valley as the only battleground in which they had a fighting chance, an advantage to make up for their apparent inability to win any of the other battlegrounds. With the changes to Alterac Valley in patch 2.3, however, the idea is gradually spreading like an infectious disease among Alliance players that Blizzard loves the Horde most and purposely lets the Horde get speedier access to lots of Honor rewards. Just visit your nearest Alliance battleground match to hear the latest crying and whining about how all the other Alliance players are stupid noobs who can’t tell how bad they suck and are going to lose every time.

Alliance: please, get real. The more people there are in either faction, whining and moaning about how hopeless things are, the more likely that faction will lose. The whiners are spending all their time typing out their useless babble, not leading, fighting or healing. To boot, they’re also demoralizing the whole group, breaking down all sense of coordination, cooperation, and confidence. If you encounter such a moaner/whiner, do not engage in any long discussion with them — just put them in their place, “/ignore” them, and encourage others to do the same. They whiners are dead set on depressing themselves and anyone who will listen and no matter how witty your comebacks may be, and the more energy is wasted on them, the less is going into the game.

If it is in fact true that the Horde wins battlegrounds more often, then this is itself the reason. The “For the Horde” mentality bolsters the idea that the Horde is good at PvP. If you think your side is more naturally good at something, you’re much less likely to think “Blizzard hates us!” when you lose, and much more likely to try and improve on your game for the benefit of your faction. Yes, there are plenty of Horde-side players who moan and whine too, but these don’t fit in with the “For the Horde” spirit of the group as a whole — and everyone knows it.

That said, it can be truly disheartening to lose all the time — the whiners are having genuine feelings and those matter too. Their problem is that they wallow in these feelings and try to infect others with their mood rather than striving to improve themselves and their situation. I play Alliance as well, and I purposely guard points of interest in the Battlegrounds so that I can encourage and help direct my teammates if they don’t already have a good grasp of what to do. This really isn’t that hard. I’m not the best player or the best leader in the game, but what I can offer is a lot better than fruitless complaining.

I wouldn’t necessarily advocate that the Alliance copy the Horde and go around saying “For the Alliance!” all the time, but we do need to try and be a little more allied than we have been up to now. The whole meaning of “Alliance” is cooperation — we must try to show that spirit in our games if we’re going to enjoy ourselves and win. We can, and should, try to familiarize ourselves with the best strategies for success in the battlegrounds, but by for the most important preparation for the battlegrounds is to conquer the voice of despair within. Defeat that, and you might just defeat the Horde.

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Admin wrote: 

Filed under: Nintendo Wii, Fighting

Gamers concerned that their favorite gender-confused Zelda alter-ego would be absent from Brawl have absolutely nothing to worry about. The Hyrulian princess’s down-special move will still transform her into Sheik, now re-imagined to match the visual style of Twilight Princess.

According to the official Smash Bros. Brawl blog, Sheik’s look is based on an early design drafted during development of Twilight Princess, meaning that at one point Sheik was a shoe-in for Link’s grittiest adventure to date. Sheik appears to retain the needle storm, chain, and vanishing moves from Melee, and shares the “Light Arrow” Final Smash with Zelda.

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Today,  

It’s not often that I say something made me queasy and mean it in a good way.  But in the case of “Super Mario Galaxy,” Nintendo’s superb new Mario platformer for the Wii, I can say that the game made my stomach turn on a number of occasions…and I enjoyed every minute of it.

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Admin wrote: 

Filed under: Nintendo Wii, Fighting

Smash Bros. Melee’s Multi-Man mode, which pitted you against tons of wire frame models was a great way to take out your aggressions, especially if a wire frame model had just beaten you out for the big promotion or the WF Gang was picking on you in school. Smash Bros. Brawl’s take on the lengthy battle mode looks to be even more satisfying though, with wire frames replaced by the the much more substantial-sounding Fighting Alloy Team.

More exciting is the revelation that a buddy will be able to join you in your campaign against the colorful robots from all the way across the country with online co-op. There’s also just regular old two-player, for all the Smash Bros. fanatics’ real life friends … Hey, if you don’t use a mode long enough, do you think it will actually get dusty?

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Today,  

Filed under: Cheats, News items, Battlegrounds

Well, if you are one of those people, you should be pleased. Bornakk just announced that, as of right now, warnings and penalties will be issued to those who receive too many reports. The penalties include account suspensions and the removal of honor points and honor rewards. He says they’ll be “taking action against thousands of accounts immediately,” and of course we are all reminded to keep on reporting people that seem to be out of the action for too long. This looks like a big step in the right direction. Will the AFKer problems be solved, or are additional measures required? I guess we’ll see.

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Today,  

Filed under: News, Halo 3

In the latest Bungie Weekly Update, Frankie and the gang lay down some information about future Halo 3 downloadable content and also discuss the latest sports craze that’s sweeping the nation, Grifball. A few vague but tantalizing tidbits were dropped about forthcoming DLC. Bungie lets us know that future DLC might arena maps suited specifically for competitive play, updates to classic Halo maps, weird maps designed for weird game types, and more items for Forge. It’s important to stress the word “might,” as these things aren’t certain to be included in new DLC, but they very well could be.

The second major portion of the update discusses Grifball, a Foundry map variant and gametype that plays out sort of like an insane mixture between Assault, hockey, football, and American Gladiators. As the name suggests, the game was created by none other than one of our favorite machinima creators (and Fancast guests) Burnie Burns of Rooster Teeth Productions. Why is it called Grifball? Let’s just say that the man who grabs the ball turns orange. Let’s also say that the opposing team wants to kill the man with the ball.

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Today,  

Filed under: Wipeout, Store

Small update today, but not necessarily a bad one if you’re a fan of WipEout Pulse. The third add-on pack for the game is now available. When will these packs stop coming? Good question. Next week is the final update. Here’s the full release list:

• WipEout Pulse “Harimau” add-on pack (
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