n3rfed

'Tis Better To Throw Your Women And Children Overboard Than To Run Aground (Ok, That Made No Sense, But It Sounds Kinda Cool)

From a recent Massively article on the removal of some content from Warhammer: Age of Reckoning;

Well it's certainly not good when a developer cuts content they've been talking about publicly for so long, especially when launch is only three or four months away.

Why?

I can think of one very good reason why it is good.

Cries of "Waaagh" Will Turn To Cries Of "Whaaaa"

Fresh from the name cut, Mythic Entertainment has announced it has cut 4 capital cities and 4 classes for WAR's launch.

Surprising? Not in the least if you've been following the official beta information and, if you're a naughty boy like me, the beta leaks floods. What's of real interest to me is how this is going to;

a) Affect end-game RvR (theoretically, as it hasn't started yet) now that the major targets have decreased from 6 to 2. Is anybody going to bother to fight in the Elf/Dark Elf zones now that there is no capital city to push towards at the end of the road, or is Mythic going to allow all RvR areas to affect the territory control that leads to Altdorf/Inevitable City?

b) Affect group dynamics in the low level zones, at least before you get to the level where different factions on each side of Order and Destruction easily mix together, now that 2 factions have lost their tank and 2 have lost their melee DPS. If the rewards for quests are not too faction-specific, I'd wager we'll see a number of melee DPSers from, for example, the Dark Elf and Chaos factions head on over to Greenskin land early on in order to ensure they get a group when they want it.

Either way it looks like Mythic has got half of the content for their first expansion sorted then.

EA Mythic Now Mythic Entertainment. Talk Of Sims Online. Did Someone At EA Break The Time/Space Continuum Again?

Those that call the shots over at EA have finally gotten around to doing some marketing research on a company they bought 2 years ago and discovered that the first name was better after all.

"Hey guys, I've been thinking."
"Again, Brian?"
"Wait, bear with me here. Maybe if we didn't slap "EA" onto their name, the company would have a more favorable image. Both for employees and consumers."
"You're talking shit again, Brian."
"We might even be able to sell a few more copies of their games."
"Solid gold shit, Brian. Solid gold."

Why, hello there brand equity, my old friend. No, I don't know why people keep ignoring you either.

Google's Lively. Not The Top Result For "Lively" in Google Search. May Want To Work On That.

Google has pulled back the curtains on Lively, our Dear Overlord's answer to Second Life/IMVU/Vivaty/Habbo Hotel/Whomever else is hip and happening this month.

For a public beta from Google it's surprisingly content light, but does it have the features that have made other virtual spaces so successful?

It's got an island. A sex island.

You can be a Furry.

It takes ages to load anything.

Your Furry can have a hook as its hand. A sex hook.

Well, that's sorted then. Lively will go on to be downloaded a gajillion times.

(Tonight's closing thought: The proportion of Female to Furry to Male avatars shown in the second picture is, oddly enough, representative of the avatar population within virtual spaces as a whole by my calculations.)

Microsoft; Redefining "Amicable" Since 1975.

Microsoft Game Studios' Shane Kim, February;

I’ll confirm. Marvel and we have agreed to end development on the MMO. It was an amicable decision…

Marvel's Ultimate Superhero (see what I did there, comic book nerds?) Brian Bendis, this month;

Well, you're talking to one of the executive producers of the ill-fated Marvel MMO that went away. I have my laptop here, and on it I have the "X-Mansion" level fully completed that only I and five other people have access to play. It's gorgeous and fantastic and no one will ever see it. So I feel bad, because I think that MMO was a phenomenal idea that was extremely well executed and it went away because some guy at Microsoft who we'll never know pulled the plug on it before it even got underway.

MGS, I can't help but notice that you seem to have having a little difficulty with your MMOs. If I may suggest a sure-fire hit, how about a sequel to Asheron's Call? Surely the market is ripe for an Asheron's Call 2.