Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Would you like to play Star Wars: The Old Republic for a whole weekend? For free? See, I thought you would. EA plan a free server-stress-testing weekend in the very near future (they haven’t quite nailed down which weekend it will be yet, oddly enough), and we have 12,000 keys to give away. No, I typed that right. Twelve thousand. It’s first come, first served, and we recommend you click below right away before the rest of the internet gets wind of this.

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Another day, another gobbet of news about pricing options in an MMO. This time it’s Everquest II, which has been running two parallel worlds, one for subscribers and a lesser world for those who want their fantasy for free. Confusingly, the slimline free world is called Everquest II Extended, presumably because Everquest II Shrivelled didn’t focus test well. Soon, that world shall be no more and subscribers will find themselves playing alongside all manner of freeloaders as the playerbase is merged. Non-subscribers will find some features limited, including access to the new Age of Discovery expansion. More details and a trailer below.

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The latest dev diary from the Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning team (which you can see below) details a bit about how the class system works. We’ve heard a bunch about this before, it’s their “destiny” system that tries to let players make decisions about their character creation as you progress, rather than being defined by your character choice at the start, and then only slot in a few attributes. It basically turns the tradition on its head, allowing you to unlock new destinies (read: classes) depending on how you spend points on the various skill trees. There’s also some fancy in-game footage of what is shaping up to be an interesting-looking, if very trad looking, RPG.
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I am posting this link almost purely for the benefit of RPS contributor Richard Cobbett, whose aversion to spiders in games is such that he’s forced to play Skyrim while dosed up with a medical team on standby, just in case his heart gives out. Sadly the mod is only a crude fix for now, and replaces spiders with awkward stuffed-looking bears. There’s a crab alternative if the bears look too stupid. (They do.)

Actually, I’ll let you off for skipping this one, because it’s really not all that interesting to anyone other than the Planetside hardcore. It’s a trailer for the New Conglomerate faction, and as such shows nothing in the way of in-game stuff, and instead delivers a bunch of spinning schematics of pistols, kneepads, and aircraft. Tsk. Get with the real trailers, Sony!
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Sunday mornings are for realising that it’s going to be a slow week of typing because you bought a new keyboard and it’s just ever so slightly different to the old one, which means one extra bad key hit per sentence. Sigh. At least it glows in the dark.

• Brandon Sheffield’s Game Changers article appears to be a sort of predictably zeitgeisty filler material in the subjects that he picks, but having read it I think it’s actually a genuinely important overview of where we are right now, looking who is changing the industry, and why. On the Humble bundle project: “One of the project’s additional successes comes from its ability to retain that indie feeling while growing massively. As the bundles have gotten more successful, they attracted the attention of investors. Sequoia Capital provided venture funding of $4.7 million to the bundle’s future growth, which is a decidedly un-humble amount of money.” These are the companies worth paying attention to. Humble alone is interesting enough because it is generating significant wealth for indies who might otherwise have struggled to break even. That success is indicative of where the “indie” revolution has got to, now: people have worked out exactly how to get the games to the players, and the money to their bank accounts. And that’s worth being aware of.

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Get a move on. The first deal listed in this week’s bucket has less than an hour and a half left on it, so you probably want to just skim read this intro, barely pay any attention to my weekly plug of my web site about cheap games, SavyGamer.co.uk, don’t even pause to exchange pleasantries with me (have you had a nice week?). Get straight into the meat of the post, this week’s discount download round-up is here: Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a moment in this video of a new Gmod feature where I start to feel sorry for Breen. He looks at the camera, just as Garry starts to pluck at his very bones, with such sad resignation. His dignity gone, debased for our entertainment.
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