Monday, March 05, 2007

New LoTR review/podcast, GDC, Vanguard and the brickwall

Lots of stuff to cover today, hence the really cramped title of this blog entry.

First up, Lauren over at Mystic Worlds has put up her review of Lord of the Rings Online in the form of her third podcast. The review is very well done and anyone who is interested in this title should take a listen to it. We all have lots of really good information of what this game is about, so now is the time to take a good hard look at LoTR to see if its for you or not. If you pre-order it, you can take advantage of the $9.99/month price, plus an invite to the Open Beta. The good thing about the Open Beta invite is that you get to keep your character after launch...good stuff. This is all stuff most readers already know, but its always good to reiterate what this game is offering.

Well, most of our community's big hitters are in California right now getting the scoop for us at GDC. This includes Brent from Virgin Worlds. Ryan, Gary and Todd from MOGArmy and a whole host of others (I think even Wilhelm from Ancient Gaming Noob will be there). So, expect the news to come in hot and heavy. I'm expecting some really good video from MOG...they do some excellent work and have really stepped up the pace when it comes to the media outputs from their site. I know that Brent has been working very hard on some site enhancements and also has lots of interviews lined up as well. I wish I could be there...oh well, maybe next year.

Vanguard had a "special" treat for subscribers this weekend in the form of double exp. I was logged in for some of the afternoon and most of the evenings to take advantage of this. I'm not really a gung-ho player at the best of times, so I only gained about 2.5 levels...which is pretty good. So, I'm sitting at level 16 for my ranger right now...not bad. I mostly finished off quests and tried my best to finish off Achatlan, but failed miserably. Oh, and I actually had my first "shit group" in Vanguard. It comprised of the perfect mix of clueless people (minus me of course) who had no idea of to play an MMO, or how not to pull aggro off of every mob around them. The good news, after I quickly dropped those asshats, I got into a really good group and we cleaned the place up. It's irritating though...all I need is one more quest item drop and then I'm done with Achatlan.

Tobold recently put up a blog entry ("My World of Warcraft Crisis") that I really related to and I just wanted to mention here. Looks like he's hitting the equipment carrot brick wall that WoW is so famous for. I'm not going to beat a dead horse because I've talked about WoW's game design issues at length. Still, it got my attention and I thought that I would bring it up here. I feel your pain buddy...I feel it.

On my Wow front...I'm very close to canceling my account. I'm sure that once LoTR Online hits that I will pull the trigger and put this one to bed. Don't ask me why I haven't done it yet. I'm also very close to canceling my EQ2 sub for now. I haven't played that one since I started playing Vanguard...but we'll see. Oh yeah...if you're wondering how my Old Stomping Ground experiment is going, well, its not. LoTR, Vanguard and learning C++/DirectX has been keeping me quite busy. I will not admit failure yet...after all, I resubbed (..is that even a word???) to take a look at Issue 9, which has not been released yet. So, I still plan on taking a look and reporting back here.

That's it for now. Have fun kiddies :)

D out.

3 comments:

Bildo said...

"On my Wow front...I'm very close to canceling my account. I'm sure that once LoTR Online hits that I will pull the trigger and put this one to bed."

Right there with you, actually. I've just lost the zest to play it. Call it the grind, the repetitive nature of any MMO stacked up over 2 years, or just the fact that I'm psyched about LotRO... call it whatever you may. I'm just not having fun in WoW anymore.

I do think even with LotRO I'll resub to CoV when issue 9 hits though... just to see if it's enough to spice the game up (more than kill kill kill) to get my attention again.

darrenl said...

I'm sure I'll revisit WoW again in the future..because I usually do, but there's going to have to be some big gameplay changes for me to do so I think.

Anonymous said...

Hi Darren,

Thanks for the podcast plug. :-) Last night I cancelled EQ2 and Vanguard. I was conflicted about EQ2 even though I wasn't playing it because EOF was such a great expansion. I had been keeping my account open to say, "great stuff, keep doing more of the same." I wish that what it is that's missing from EQ2 was there for me.

As for Vanguard, I wanted to love this game but didn't like it at all. I logged back and played for about an hour to see if I liked it anymore than I did before and I didn't.

We're down to just the two accts now for WOW. My son is completely bored with it, due mostly to the fact that their guild went belly-up on the raiding in TBC. He liked LOTRO well enough but is loathe to start a game again from level 1. He's like that. Even when AC2 was weeks from closing he kept going, not wanting to start all over again with us in WOW.

We should try our best to all find each other play LOTOR together.