I’m not dead, yet.

Sorry for the lack of updates lately! I’ll be frank, I did not log in WAR for a few weeks, not really because I don’t like the game but gaming has been a bit sporadic for me these days, maybe it is the fact that thousands of games have been released in a few weeks.
I hope everything is good in WAR still, I’d like to try the recent changes soon but I guess before January this will not be possible!
My job contract has been turned into an undetermined duration so I’m quite happy !
I’ll be back with WAR news sometimes.

Happy Birthday Half Life!

That’s right guys, Half life was released the 19Th November 1998, 10 years ago!
That might not be significant for everyone but for me it is. I started my gaming career with Duke Nukem then I played a lot of Quake2 and then Quake3 so the FPS genre always was very important to me.

When Half-Life was released I remember playing it for hours, the story was so awesome. And then mods got released, Counter-Strike on which I played hours, but not only, Natural Selection and Day of Defeat also were really good mods that I spend way too many hours on.

Happy Bday Half Life!

Fear my photoshop skills!

Small update!

Maybe you are wondering what the hell I’ve been up to recently? No? Bah OK I’ll say anyway !
The short answer is a lot of Fallout3 and not a lot of free time, I’ve been busy at work and didn’t really want to play WAR. I’m still waiting anxiously for that patch 1.0.5 hoping it will improve the game. I’ve been thinking about rolling a Squig Herder recently, the career looks fun, goblin rocks and they are going to get boosted with the next patch. Also I figured that the part in the game where I have the more fun is in the first tiers.

On another note Left4Dead has just been released and I didn’t have a chance to test it yet. So that means I have some zombie bashing to do when I get the chance. I guess I’ll have to postpone my WAR activities for the next week because I’ve received an invitation for the “The Chronicles of Spellborn” beta test, I already finished the client download just need to patch and I can give it a try. Of course the game’s still under NDA so I will not be able to give you much information… The game should be released the 27Th November.

If all this planned gaming was not enough, a good mate of mine, which played WAR with me got suck back to good ol’ Azeroth… I know I said numerous times that I would never touch Wow again, but having a mate to play with is really better than soloing an MMO, so I’ve been wondering if I should get WOTLK, even tho my Girlfriend would not be too happy, she is an anti-Wow person! I already have a Horde Shaman, a Warrior and a Warlock that are level 70. The shaman is my preferred character so I could jump right in, thing is I’d just do the quests to level 80 not sure If I could be arsed to play after that seeing the grind it is… I’ll think more about this.

Need some fun ?

I’ve not touched WAR for a few days, I got a bit bored lately and I’m kinda waiting for improvement, namely the next patch.
I mainly play Fallout 3 these days, the game is really awesome, I can’t say it enough times!
But anyway if you want a right laugh try the web game QWOP, jesus this is so funny I nearly died from laughing at work. Basically you gotta move the leggs of a guy to make him run, and some fun ensues!

Also if you like forums like f13 or the like, you should try Forumwarz, awesome web game as well.

Not much to say otherwise, things have been pretty slow lately, WOTLK people have fun grinding your way to more grind in a snowy environment!

Busy Gaming

I’ve been taking a break from WAR since Friday. I like the game but there are so many others getting released that need to be tested! At the moment my list looks like that : Dead Space, Fallout 3, Left4Dead Demo and NHL09(This will probably get ditched from my list it is not that good). Of course this is not taking into account the game that will be released soon : Call of Duty 5, Mirror’s Edge and later Left4Dead and The Chronicles of Spellborn.

Fallout3 is really awesome, the developers did a wonderful job at making a world that is enormous. I mean you can walk in the wastes for a long time then find a school go inside, spend at least 30 minutes clearing it and exploring just to get out to find more. The possibilities are endless. On top of that the skill & perks system, while not being overly new, is really well done.

The story is deep, you have plenty of quests to do, I barely started the main quest because I was mostly doing the side ones and just basically running around. I really like the combat system, It feels like it is better than Oblivion by a mile. This is really a good game, kudos to Bethesda.

Left4Dead was the other game I’ve been playing mostly this last week-end. With mates and voice coms this is incredibly fun, adding to this slaughtering hordes of zombies while drinking a few beers, this game can’t go wrong. It is good but not perfect, there are still a few bugs that I hope will be fixed for releases but generally speaking the gameplay is really good.

Dead Space is on hold for the moment as well as NHL 09. Don’t really know why I ordered this one, sounded good on paper but in reality it is quite poor. It is blatantly a console port, some screens even tells you to use the “X” or “Y” button… I can’t stand that and it doesn’t support my native wide screen resolution.

If you like small web games, I discovered on some blog can’t remember which tho, “Kingdom of Loathing”, an awesome little RPG game which is funny as hell! I suggest you try it if you are stuck at work like me!

Patching niceness!

As everyone knows the patch note for 1.0.5 was released. The PTS is being put in place, all in all good stuff is coming our way guys! I just hope the test servers are coming to Europe sooner than later.

Most of the careers changes being small tweaks generally, I won’t comment on them before having tested them. The term slightly increased or decreased is quite vague and I won’t base my though on this.

Here is a list of things that I like :

• Morale abilities will now be much more responsive. These abilities will now fire immediately when activated by the player on the first attempt. – Finally need more responsiveness

• Morale abilities will now display their cooldowns correctly at all times.

• Root effects, with the exception of morale roots, will now grant a 5 second immunity from all roots to the victim when the effect breaks, and in addition will no longer stack with other roots. – Playing a marauder I know how this fix is nice

• The responsiveness of ability activations has been improved. Players will now see less of a delay between the activation of an ability and the corresponding animation. – Thank god !!

• To promote population balance among the various scenarios, we have added a feature that reduces the number of times a scenario can launch in a short period of time. This will give scenarios which are launched less frequently an opportunity to catch up in the queue population and launch more often. – W00t!! I hope this works, I was getting really tired of always playing the same scenarios.

• Fixed an issue with the targeting system that could be used by players to gain an unfair advantage. Targeting of friendly players will now work in the same way as using abilities. Players must either use a keyboard key or click with the mouse to acquire a friendly target. To target a monster or NPC, players must click on the target in the world or /assist a friendly player. Players using our default user interface should see no change as a result of this fix. – Good bye mods that targeted for you.

• Locking the chat window will now persist upon logging out. – Was getting tired to have to lock them myself every time.

I can see that the careers that needed it the most received some love and that can’t be bad. The engineer, magus and skig herder players will probably feel all fuzzy inside !

Can’t wait to have this patch go live, some good things in it. Some other issues still need fixing but this goes in the right direction.

On another note, I created a module for the WarBoard addon which is a Fubar type addon it is basically a bar on top of your screen with various information. Mine shows your Frame Per Second as well as the Average frame per second you can get WarBoard_FPS here.

Resubbed!

That’s right, on the 1st November my free time of WAR ended. Of course I resubbed immediately, I can’t say I have an enormous love affair with the game but it has some stuffs right and I enjoy playing it with my mate. It still have issues that have to be fixed and that are annoying, since patch 1.1 I’ve been having CTD’s almost every hour and it’s really not fun when you are trying to complete a dungeon. I have faith in Mythic and I want them to succeed!

Like I said in my previous post I’ve been playing a bit of Dead Space, which by the way is really awesome, a mini review will probably happen sometimes, and Fallout 3 + NHL 09 should arrive soon. Obviously WAR is not my only game these days but I like getting back to it. I want to hit Tier4 and see how that looks still so we are still motivated! At the moment me and my mate’s Disciple of Khaine are respectively Rank25 and 26 so things are going well, we’ve been doing some Gunbad, scenarios and questing.

I hope that the servers transfer will be available for Europe soon because my server looks a bit too empty for my liking. I’m looking forward for the futur fixes, my main issue at the moment is more on the technical sides all these CTD’s and stuttering really has to go because it is annoying to play the game with them.

Some fine chap over at FreddysHouse started a petition for GOA to change their flash website to something better and less demanding on the resources. You should all sign it if you, like me, find the website to be crap. Here. Magnus already answered the community, here is what he had to say :

I’ve passed this petition along to people within GOA and we’ll be following it. Not that it’s really needed – we’re keenly aware of the general perception of our webpage as it is.

Obviously, Community Management have compiled many reports on this topic and we’ve continuously worked for a change. Events have recently taken a turn for the better and I’ve gained renewed hope for a real change. There’s really nothing conclusive I can share on this at the moment but I certainly will as soon as I’m in liberty to do so.

Do know that this is something close to my heart and we’re pulling all the strings we can here.

Hope that we will see changes soon.

Rest from War

I just wanted to make an update on my advancement in WAR.
I’ve mostly stopped playing my shaman because honestly I did not really enjoy it, he’s rank22 some aspects of the career are awesome and goblin really rocks but maybe heals should be buffed because I hardly can keep someone alive in RvR. It gets frustrating when you can’t keep people alive!

I’ve been playing my Marauder and enjoying it. The career is fun and I like doing damage more than healing I think. Yesterday I hit rank23 and just entered Tier3 so I had plenty of PvE to do, I started by maxing the influence in Chapter10 then I did some quests and worked my way in Chapter11.

At some point I joined with some guy and this ended by becoming a nice warband so we did all of the PQ of Chapter11. One was really cool, Army of Faith, in this one you are outside of a gigantic monastery and first you have to kill the peasants around. When that step is done you can enter the monastery where you have to kill a few warpriests. During the last step you have to kill a witch hunter who is apparently the boss of the church. I though the scenery was really cool and well designed, alas the loot was quite crappy for me.

In the following days I’ll be taking a break from WAR because I have some other games that I have to test.

• Dead Space
• Fallout3, was ordered and is on its way by mail
• NHL 09 not shipped yet

That means I have some work on my hands for the following week I guess. I’ll be playing some scenarios but not as much as before. I’ll post a small review of these games soon.

Money, Money!

I was browsing around the web, nothing particular just a few random sites and I stumbled upon a blog’s article speaking about Wow. The guy over at Serial Ganker who wrote the article, which by the way I recommand reading, was saying how he is disgusted by Blizzard because they don’t care about the players anymore and how they just want to milk the cow as much as possible.

And then something struck me.

• World of Warcraft subscription per month
  • 12.99€ / 13.99$
  • Asian fee is approximatively 0.04$/hour no monthly fee exists

• Number of World of Warcraft subscribers
  • 10’000’000 in the World
    • 5’500’000 in Asia
    • 2’500’000 in Northern America
    • 2’000’000 in Europe

• Revenue per month
  • 25’980’000€ / 34’975’000$

• Revenue per year
  • 311’760’000€ / 419’700’000$

• Total Revenue
  • 641’896’020€ / 816’038’673$

Of course all of these numbers are approximates that I found on the Internet™. I did not take into account the Asian community as well, which is half the World of Warcraft subscribers, because they do not have a monthly fee but rather a hourly fee which is harder to calculate and I’m tired! The money earned by selling the actual game was discarded, this is only about the fees.

The monthly fee I used is the one announced on the official website but I did not take into account that you pay less if you subscribe for 3 months at once for example.

There is also another thing that must be taken into account, the upkeep of all the servers, building and of course the salaries.

Still Blizzard receives each month A LOT of money, Mythic does too of course, approximately 9’742’500€ / 11’242’500$ per month in comparison, but since not everyone is paying already they did not get much money at the moment.

I never really thought about that and now I clearly see that this business involves a lot of money.

Futur game releases #1

I really like Warhammer and I’m having tons of fun but sometimes it is good to play something else for a while. So when you come back you get this feeling of how awesome the game you left was and you notice the little things that you did not pay attention to before. In the next month plenty of new good games are going to get released so it is just the right period to do just that!

Here is a list of games to look forward to, along the European release date, usually US dates are a few days earlier. I also added some previews from the various gaming site around.

• Dead Space – 24/10/2008 : Survival Horror in Space
  Reviews : 1, 2, 3
  My Opinion: I’ve always been a big fan of the survival horror genre in movies, I love being scared and apparently Dead Space does just that. The game has just been released in Europe today so I could not test it yet but I’ve read numerous reports saying that it is really scary. Recommended to play at late hours in the dark with sound pumped up for maximum effect!

• Red Alert 3 – 28/10/2008 : Real Time Strategy
  Previews : 1, 2
  My Opinion: What can I say about this? Well I remember playing the original game when I was a young guy, those Tesla towers, the nukes and of course the actors played cinematic how can you forget them! I was quite a fan and I hope they can restore some of that with the new one. They still have actors, well should I say babes ? playing in the cinematic and the ever going fight between the Allied, the Soviet and the Empire of the Rising Sun.

• Fallout 3 – 31/10/2008 : Futurist Role Playing Game
  Previews : 1, 2
  My Opinion: I must admit that I never got to really play the old Fallout games released in the 1990 but this new one looks promising. You start the game in a post apocalyptic Washington DC and you must find your way through the city. There is lot of freedom you can wander around and kill mutants! There are the usual quests and NPC that you can talk to. Also the targeting system seems interesting, you can either engage monsters the traditional FPS way going gun blazing or you can engage the VATS targeting mode which pauses the game and let you pick parts of the enemy body to aim for, you have a limited number of action points that are used in this mode though.

• NHL 09 – 31/10/2008 : Ice Hockey Simulation
  Rreviews : 1, 2
  My Opinion: The reviews are for the xbox360 version but the game should be the same on the PC. I’m a big ice hockey fan, I’ve played it a long time when I was younger as a goalie and I had a blast. The older NHL games always made you change player and manage the whole team and I usually found that a bit too much for my liking. EA did something really nice in this game, centering the game around one player that you are, creating him much like a RPG character you would play in a fantasy world but here you play an ice hockey player. The coach gives you advice how to play and keeping your position instead of skating after the puck is more rewarding. Also they added the possibility to play online with others to play multiple matches, you can even take the goalie position I can wait to try it out!

• Wrath of the Lich King – 13/11/2008 : Fantasy MMORPG
  Previews : 1
  My Opinion: I won’t lie before playing Warhammer I played Wow extensively, I was in a big military guild doing raids from 8pm to midnight every day but Saturday. That was somewhat fun, because we went to all the big dungeons at the time, Mount Hyjal and Black Temple mainly. On the other side, if you missed a raid the management would get mad at you and the general atmosphere in the guild was more centered around loot and boss killing than having fun together as a team. After a few months I got really bored and it became a burden to have to log on every evening, the fun was just not there anymore, so I stopped. To be honest I’m done with Wow so I did not really read about the expansion but the few that I’ve seen looks to me being more leveling and grind, nothing more.

I had planned to speak about more games namely CoD5, Mirror’s Edge or Left 4 Dead but this article is already too long to my liking so I’ll do that in a later post someday next week!

That’s it for this issue, some really good games are coming our way and I can’t wait to test them out. Of course War will always be my home base where I always come back for some RvR fun!