We know there's loads of stuff in store for us in World of Warcraft's Patch 2.4, unfortunately we have to wait until Blizzard releases the official patch notes. For now, we have to content ourselves with whatever we can get.
If you like to play massive multiplayer online games then you have probably heard or already bought the Age of Conan Gold game. One of the until these sorts of games is being one of the first players on the server and everybody racing to the level cap.
Ok so. My collectors edition of AoC arrived today. Figured I'll do a detailed report on its contents for all of you who didn't pay the extra cash to get it and show what you're missing out on. Just be glad I didn't make a video of it cause I probably sounded exactly like this guy (Was so hard to find this video on Youtube since it has been ages since I last saw it and apparently tons of people document their macbook unboxing (Wonder why?). I searched through at least two pages of macbook unboxing videos and couldn't find it. I remembered that the guy sounded orgasmic so I gave the keywords "Macbook unboxing orgasmic" a shot and there we go! The first result in the search.
Character transfers may take up to 5 days to process. You won't be able to play the characters you signed up for a transfer during that time, so you may want to spread out your transfers so that not all your characters are locked at the same time. Once you've completed the transfer process as described above, your characters will appear on the destination realm, ready to continue your adventure. I get an error message saying that my character still has items in his mailbox and therefore cannot be transferred, but my mailbox is empty.
"While we have enjoyed the initial success for Age of Conan, we know that a solid launch is but the start when it comes to the MMO genre," said game director Gaute Godager."As we look ahead, we are preparing a huge amount of new content, and what we are presenting today will evolve Age of Conan even further. It's naturally an incredibly ambitious update plan for a live MMO game, but we are certain our players would want nothing less."Age of Conan came out on PC last month, and the free trial period is almost at an end. Our full and review will appear next week, alongside an interview with Godager. Until then, head over to our initial thoughts on Age of Conan for an idea of what to expect.
For the sake of not letting the hype blind me, I haven't spent much time studying Age of Conan in advance. I'd rather play the beta, starting tomorrow hopefully, and see for myself. But while I don't read the AoC official site, I do read blogs, so I can't help but get some information from there. The best source I've found up to now for Age of Conan commentary is Keen and Graev's Blog. While I had to sign an NDA to get into the open beta, Keen says the NDA was dropped for participants in an earlier AoC event, which I find confusing, and somewhat ironic, given that Keen once chided me for breaking an NDA a few hours early. So he has not only comments on various AoC feature announcements, but also first-hand experience tales directly from the game. Anyway, in his latest post he is talking about AoC's battlekeep vulnerability system. In other games in which guilds can conquer keeps, like DAoC, those keeps often change hand at 3 am, when the owning guild is sleeping and the attackers organized an early bird raid.
Sometimes you're just doomed from the start, it seems. The first game of the day on the Scarlet Crusade server, for example, is almost always a 4 Horde versus 8 Alliance game.
Age of Conan Early Access Impressions
In a post-World of Warcraft world the concept of grouping while leveling has changed. Where grouping was once essential to survival in MMOGs, today it's an optional extra. As a result, leveling up can feel pretty lonely. In most MMOGs it's no longer necessary to group unless you're running an instanced dungeon or the rare quest geared toward a specific number of players. While I love the fact that I can play WoW on my own terms and my own schedule I feel like I'm missing out on the whole "massively multiplayer" thing. Isn't that the reason we play MMOGs to begin with? Why should we wait until end-game raid content to play together? These three things will take time to accomplish, but if you're patient from the start, once you reach level 60 you'll be flying high with a nice handful of cash, and have some serious crafting and trading skills that will help you to keep raking in the Final Fantasy XI Gil.
But detachment is what needs to occur in order to convert things like intense passionate participation into clear, compelling, ethnographic writing. It has taken me until now to truly be able to convert one particular experience into anything resembling articulate. In this particular night of passionate participation, I found myself curled up in the foetal position and sobbing post-raid. True story. At the time, I was a new level 60 (meaning, that my gear wasn't uber in any sense, I only had one purple item, and I didn't have Vent or even CT mod yet). I had however been in many instances with coordinated groups, had my fair share of bad PUGs (Pick-Up Groups), and was a pretty confident player.