Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I always felt that World of Warcraft didn’t get me as a player. All I ever wanted to do was wander the world and look at what had been made, but the gated realm that it offered made that tough. Not impossible, though: my first few weeks of WoW were slow-going, because I’d be impatient and run into leveled lands without the appropriate character. Then I’d die, return to my corpse to resurrect, and carry on. It was ridiculous, but I took my low-level character to places she was never meant to see by judging where best to run between higher-level NPCs. My desire for a tourist class in an MMO has yet to be fulfilled, but looking at Wildstar’s latest pair of videos it looks like Carbine has made the best attempt at it so far: Paths are Wildstar’s way of giving you more of the specific content you like, and the pair of videos below has already convinced me to try out as an Explorer.
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It seems that Neverwinter’s had a bit of a weekend. The game was offline for five or six hours after very naughty players discovered an exploit that allowed them to make billions of the game’s in-game currency, Astral Diamonds. While that may at first seem problematic, but not too serious, this in-game currency can be used to buy “Zen” from other players, Perfect World’s virtual currency bought with real-world money. This sudden flooding of Astral Diamonds into the game’s economy broken everything. So the publisher is scrambling to fix things. By turning back time.

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Neverwinter goes into a proper open beta very soon (today in fact, for those with the head start, 30th for the plebs), and we’ll finally be able to have enough time with it to properly get to grips. The all-too-short beta weekends have shown a game that’s definitely bursting with potential, not least because of the Foundry in which users can create their own in-game quests and campaigns for others to play. Also, today is the day that Perfect World release the one billionth trailer for the game! Congratulations all involved.

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I haven’t been back, or even been inclined to go back, to Guild Wars 2 since its initial release, though that probably says at least as much about me and my grasshopper mind as it does about it. I know a bunch of people are playing it, but I don’t know how I can usefully address them about what’s going on with the game, at least not without becoming something of a fraud. A free, tongue-in-cheek retro platformer based on GW2 though? That I can tell you about, and I don’t need to say even a single thing about high-level content to do it.

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MMOs are that peculiar genre, that everyone loves to hate, and also loves to play. And with a new clutch entering their betas at the moment (most notably Neverwinter and Wildstar), they’re not going anywhere. So which are you currently throwing your subs or incremental payments at?

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“RF Online” are words that sow fear into my heart. 160 years ago, in 2006, I had yet to come to the realisation that “No!” was the only sensible answer to, “Would you like to review this MMO for meagre freelance pay?” So it was I took on the task of RF Online, a Korean MMO that put the “grrrrrrr” in “grind”. It is with… confusion, really, that I notice an open beta is beginning for a game called RF Online 1.5.

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Rising like a hideously mutated phoenix from the ashes of STALKER 2 is Survarium. Although, as is well established in Jim’s interview with the team from earlier this year, the F2P MMO is deliberately a very different game. And now it’s a game for whose alpha you can register.

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The last time I played Wildstar, Carbine’s upcoming MMO, I had a decent time but I was left anxious about how close it stuck to the numbers, numbers, numbers model and why its Explorer path was so much like a late 90s platformer. Now it’s increasingly looking as though they might just have been sitting on the good stuff, like a hen made of veteran MMO developers incubating an egg of semi-sandbox play. Er.

Best forget that analogy. Instead, take a look at this player housing video – while the numbers, numbers, numbers stuff is very much in evidence, so is tantalisingly freeform DIY.
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I like a trailer that’s up-front. What Is Wildstar? it asks, in a self-deprecating fashion. As NCSoft’s latest MMO, from Carbine Studios, prepares to begin its beta, they’re making sure you know. This is a properly good trailer.

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I was going to mock the new Dragon’s Prophet trailer for featuring people sitting on what appeared to be Bucking Dragoncos. But then I realised how much more brilliant mechanical dragons would be than stupid boring mechanical bulls, and herald Runewater Entertainment as GENIUSES.

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