n3rfed

Got That First Review Score Handy, Eurogamer?

Eurogamer reports that all Darkfall characters may be felled, darkly, when Darkfall 2.0 launches.

Existing players stand to lose hundreds of hours of invested game-time should that happen.

But Darkfall producer Tasos Flambouras insisted that in Darkfall 2.0, wiping a character's progress "would not be as drastic" as in Darkfall 1.

"We've considered wipes on various levels," wrote Flambouras on the Darkfall website. "However, these are important decisions, because while this is like a new game, it's still the continuation of the current one.

The Star Wars: Galaxies NGE may be soon gone, but the spirit could live on.

Ok, Which One Of You Second Life Players Is Responsible For This?

 

Illidan Was Right, We Are Not Prepared

Observations from my first few (buggy) hours in Cataclysm:

* Parties are still of the Wrath Of The Lich King mindset, and will not listen to boss fight instructions. It's taken deaths on the first 3 bosses of Blackrock Caverns before it is thought "Hey, maybe I should listen to those words about standing in the laser beams".

* Even when 80 people are around you, yelling and spitting at you for you to get off your mount so you don't bug the boat, one moron will still spoil it for everyone.

* People will rather camp a spawn point then join a group to do a kill quest.

* If the map location of an NPC is bugged, people will spam General Chat, even though they were at that NPC 1 quest ago.

 

Just another MMO expansion.

This Is My XP Bar

It has not moved after turning in a bunch of dailies, one normal quest, and killing some mobs. It is the same for everyone else on the server.

XP Bar, I hope we can play together soon.

Connecting...

7 Hours Later...

Well, that was, er, quick. But when you have your own pocket raid following behind you, these things are possible.

Meanwhile, the North American servers have yet to even tick over to Cataclysm.

This Report Just In From The European WoW Servers

Tomorrow's To-Do List

1) Go to the supermarket - need eggs, cereal, and juice

2) Email David re: Saturday night

3) Drop off jacket at the dry cleaner

4) Log onto character outside Blackrock Caverns, find entrance for Looking for Dungeon Tool, use tabard to teleport to Argent Tournament, turn in 25 daily quests in Icecrown and Storm Peaks, use Heartstone to port to Orgrimmar, pick up next ranks of tradeskills and Old World flying, pick up initial breadcrumb quests, hop on a boat bound for Vash'jr...

5) Call Grandma

6) Pay electricity bill

7) Go to the gym

 

New New Games Journalism

I Plagiarised This From Massively.com

Whilst I was busy earlier this week forgetting I had a blog, the Quest-Online-Plagiarising-BioWare kerfuffle culminated in Derek Smart pointing his finger at his hired PR, the hired PR proofreading her apology as well as she proofread the initial press release, and Derek Smart then pointing his other finger at BioWare for stealing the quote from John Smedley in the first place. (Oh, someone else did it first? That's ok then!)

John Smedley of SOE, actually uttered those same words in his New Orleans Fan Fair 2004 keynote speech which predates Ray Muzyka's own commentary in the 2008 press release for Bioware's upcoming Star Wars : The Old Republic MMO. John said "Traditionally, massively multiplier [sic] online games have been about three basic gameplay elements - combat, exploration and character progression. In Everquest 2, we've added a fourth element to the equation; a story"

This is a convenient thing to say when Google, which is pretty well known for finding words on the internets, fails to return any relelvant search results for the Smedley quote apart from pages that have reported on the kerfuffle this week.

In fact, it appears as though the origin of that quote - misspelling of "multiplayer", incorrect capitilisation of "EverQuest", and all - came from the Kill Ten Rats comment thread in which Derek Smart later replied. Can't get enough of that Copy and Paste.

But what do we know? 2004 was a long time ago; a scary, strange place where video cameras and laptops were not yet invented in order to transcribe the 2004 New Orleans Fan Faire keynote.

So I asked John Smedley.

Um. I've never been to New Orleans. That was the one year I missed it for family reasons ;)

I have no idea of [sic] I ever said that. But given that he's attributing it to me in new orleans I doubt it. Maybe I said it some other year.

Or maybe not. With other Fan Faires being as well transcribed as the 2004 one (i.e. not), it is almost impossible to verify if Smed said this quote, or anything remotely like it. But surely that's not an issue we have to worry about. I mean, surely Derek Smart wouldn't just pick up a quote on, in his words, a "little known blog site" without sourcing it, right?

And yes, those were John’s words at that 2004 fair in New Orleans. Everyone is quick to point the finger, but when push comes to shove, nobody wants to do the actualy work of sourcing corrections. Nice.

I'm still not seeing your source there. Nice.