Author: Nimgimli

Pile on Post: Warhammer Open Beta Sept 7th

Posted on by Nimgimli

If you’re following Warhammer Online at all you already know this (I really really doubt that Dragonchasers is your first stop destination for Warhammer news): Open Beta is scheduled to start Sept 7th.

Lots of speculation ensues, since we’ve been told servers go live on September 18th, and there’s a Head Start/Early Access program for pre-orders of an indeterminate length. Do the math and you get a really short open beta.

As I posted in the comment section of JoBildo’s site, I can only hope now that Mythic is treating Open Beta as a marketing tool and don’t anticipate making any major changes based on what they learn from it. I hate to see them rush-patching/fixing anything major in the last weeks before launch.

Stropp made a good point as well:

On the other hand, it’s probably a sensible move by Mythic. Open betas can be brutal on a games good PR. You always get a bunch of players who get in and rip the game to shreds. There’s always haters. Limiting the amount of time before release, limits the amount of time they get to spread negativity.

(read the rest of the entry)

I think there’ll be a ton of WoW fanboys who totally (and unjustifiably) slag the game as soon as they get a look at it, just because this is NOT WoW 2 in spite of what some people seem to think (using that “fact” as praise or derision, depending on what’s side of the WoW fence they live on).

The problem is going to be keep this illogical hate in check so that it doesn’t become a meme.

Back to the Beta-War for me

Posted on by Nimgimli

As I mentioned, I haven’t been *playing* the Warhammer Online beta for quite some time. I’d jump in and do testing as directed by the devs, but it’s been a long time since I just logged in and played the game as if it was in release and I was just playing for my own pleasure.

It’d been a rough week this past week, though, with very little gaming time to be found, aside from the odd quick Pixel Junk Eden fix (wonderful game, btw). So last night when I finally had some time, rather than playing LOTRO and being social with the semi-new guild (they probably think I’m dead by this point) I rolled a level 1 Warhammer Character and started playing.

I’ve mentioned ‘beta burnout’ and this is a good time to explain what I mean. With any MMO, if you’re an alt-aholic, you know the feeling you get with those first 5-10 levels after a while, where every class plays pretty similarly and every quest is burned into your brain and requires no thought and really it just becomes drudgery to get through them. I *really* don’t want to be feeling like that when War launches. The nature of beta (particularly one as long as the War beta; it was going strong when I got in it and I’ve been in it for 6 months) is that you get your characters wiped pretty often and that kind of forces the alt-aholic lifestyle on you. I absolutely love the game and really want it to feel as ‘fresh’ as possible on launch day.

The point of all that is, I decided to pick the 1 race/class profession that appealed to me that absolute least, because I figured there’s no way I’ll be playing that combo in release. I plan on my release main being Order, so I’d roll Destruction. I never like playing small races, so I figured one of the Goblin classes. Healers are always pretty helpful so there’s an outside chance I’ll roll one of those in release, so didn’t want to go that route, which left Squig Herder.

Here the gag of NDA starts to cut off what I can say. I’ve linked to the official page and its a bit out of date. I’ll add my cry to all the “Mythic, please drop the NDA!” pleas I’ve been reading.

Anyway this turned out to be an excellent acid test of the game for me. So I picked the single least appealing class/race combo I could find and started playing, and it was about 3 am by the time I finally pulled myself away. I did traditional quests, of course. I unlocked Achievements. I played through Public Quests and won shiny loot in various ways. Inspired by Rick I jumped into RvR scenarios, something I’ve quite frankly avoided (I’ve done ‘open world’ RvR but the scenarios have always felt a bit intimidating to me). I had an absolute blast, never really hit a ‘boring’ spot, found a few bugs to report (nothing major, the game is in great shape, but finding them made me feel like I was ‘doing my job’) and now the only problem I have is that I *really* enjoyed the Squig Herder. Dammit, another Alt in my future!

It’s going to be a long month, waiting for release… 🙂

The Born Queen

Posted on by Nimgimli

Wow, but it’s been a long time since I offered my thoughts on a book here. Playing Age of Conan prompted my to drag out my Conan books for a re-read, and that didn’t seem worth covering. When I started to read Greg Keye’s The Born Queen I realized I’d sort of lost the thread of the series, so I went back and re-read The Blood Knight.

Anyway…so The Born Queen brings the Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone tetralogy to a satisfying conclusion, but it sometimes feels like a frantic trip. As the pacing of the book increases, chapters get shorter, rotating through the various characters one chapter at time. It feels like you’re riding a whirlwind at times. Granted Keyes has a lot of story to tell, and I suspect he had too much for this 4th book to contain, but not enough to warrant a 5th book. As I told Angela this morning (I was up reading long after she’d gone to sleep; a typical event with this series), “I’d love to read the director’s edition of the book.”

Bottom line though: this was a great series. If you enjoy big rambling epics like Martin’s Song of Ice & Fire, you’ll probably have fun here. It isn’t -quite- as meaty as Martin, but it comes close. Keyes is a fantastic world builder. As the series starts the world is pretty pseudo-medieval ‘normal’ but as things go awry it becomes a more and more fantastical environment, and it all makes sense within the rules that Keyes built the world around.

His character development isn’t quite as strong, though its still good. Some of the characters tend to be too “purely good” or “purely evil” and there were a couple of shifts towards the end that were hard to understand. Again, these are nits, and characters like the charismatic Cazio or taciturn old Aspar White will stick with you long after you close the book.

Approaching the end of a series this long is always a bit frightening. Will all this time reading turn out to have been wasted if the author can’t pull all the strings together? That’s not a problem here, and Keyes even goes against what is currently accepted as good form, and offers an epilogue to ease us gently out of his world. Much appreciated, that was.

To recap, the complete series is: The Briar King, The Charnel Prince, The Blood Knight, and finally this one, The Born Queen.

A great series for fantasy fans.

Keep those access codes handy today

Posted on by Nimgimli

Thanks to Grishnar over at theBrasse.com for bringing this to everyone’s attention.

At some point today you’ll be able to enter your beta and headstart codes into the Mythic Beta Center. There’s really no rush if you pre-ordered the CE, but the first 50,000 ‘standard’ pre-orders to enter their codes will get an invite into the upcoming Preview Weekend. So keep checking! (I just checked at 8:15 am ET and my Head Start code was still flagged as ‘invalid’).

More details from the source:
http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsOverview.war

Blogs are rollin’ in

Posted on by Nimgimli

OK, I’ve added all the listed Casualties of War blogs to the blog roll here. Also a couple of Dairy-Free (ie, non-CoW) blogs that I had in the blogroll.

The first category is simply the blogs of people in Casualties of War, without any real regard for topic. The second category is blogs devoted primarily to Warhammer Online.

If I missed your blog, feel free to leave a comment and let me know if you’re in Category 1 or Category 2.

And sorry that I moderate all comments. This blog has been in place since 2002 and every comment spammer on the planet seems to know about it.

Welcome to beta, Collector’s Edition pre-orderers

Posted on by Nimgimli

So I gather that folks who pre-ordered the Collector’s Edition of Warhammer Online have been invited to closed beta. Now they’re scrambling to download the client.

I first typed “There is a Warhammer Online Beta and I am in it.” back in February. I’ve definitely struggled with “beta fatigue” once I realized that this was a game I really wanted to play after release. Now that we’re closing in on launch I’m getting seriously pumped again!

It’ll be great to have a fresh wave of enthusiastic testers hitting the servers. I *really* hope they (and I!) don’t have to download a whole new client for Open Beta though!

Anyway just wanted to shout out a “Welcome to the fun!” to the new testers. I hope you’re as pleased as I’ve been!

Massive Gamer…WTF? (UPDATED)

Posted on by Nimgimli

EDIT: This post is now very much out-of-date (see comments). The folks at Massive Gamer have done a great job of bringing their site up to snuff.

So I’ve been seeing mention of this new magazine “Massive Gamer.” I’m an MMO fanboy and all that, so I figured I’d best check this out. You can too: Massive Gamer. Check it out and come back. I’ll wait.

So tell me, were you moved to subscribe? No? What’s the matter with you? Isn’t a shot of the AoC babe enough to get you to fork out $25!?

Sorry, I’m really trying to bite back my sarcasm for the sake of the writers of the magazine, but c’mon Massive Gamer, get a f-ing clue! You’ve got to give potential subscribers a taste before they’re going to buy (and a table of contents, hidden behind the Press Release link, doesn’t count).

If you think your content is so incredibly valuable (y’know, more valuable than the content of every other magazine and newspaper with a web presence, all of whom post at least some articles online) that you can’t afford to give away an article or two, at least offer the option to buy a sample issue for $5 or whatever.

And for the love of all that is holy, hire a web designer. What’s up with those rapidly scrolling images at the top of the page? Is that just to see how annoying you can be? Why isn’t there an “About” link or a “Contact Us” link on the home page. On the subscription page, how about some basic facts, like, oh, how many issues in a year’s subscription? Is it monthly? Bi-monthly? Semi-annual? How about an indication that your secure certificate is with a reputable company (it’s a GoDaddy Cert, btw) for less savvy web users who don’t know how to check a certificate.

Throw me a bone here. Convince me you’re something other than a fly-by-night company that’s going to put out 2 issues and then fold, taking my money with you.

I’m ranting because it’s just tragic. What I’m asking for costs nothing. It just requires a modicum of caring about the customer experience. When the magazine fails, the publisher will blame the economy or the fact that print is dying, and he’ll convince others that there’s no hope for a print mag dedicated to MMO gaming.

And that would be a shame, because I think such a publication could succeed, given half a chance. But the Publisher of Massive Gamer isn’t giving his fledgling magazine even a tenth of a chance.

Post count = Epic Phail

Posted on by Nimgimli

Are you ready for the litany of excuses for why I haven’t been posting? Here goes. First, the Casualties of War forums have been going crazy and I’ve been trying my best to keep up with it and get to know some of the folks I’ll be waging WAR with (ancillary excuse: through those forums I’ve found out about bunches of great WAR blogs that I now must read). Plus I’ve been trying to be an *active* Warhammer Online beta-tester again. Plus I joined a guild in LOTRO and have been playing that more than I probably have since launch. Plus there’s that work thing that’s been slopping over into my off hours.

Anyway it isn’t just here. I haven’t been Plurking or Tweeting and I’m way behind on my news feeds. I need a vacation to catch up on my leisure time!

Hopefully the Warhammer NDA will drop this week. I’m thinking about the game an awful lot but I’m really hesitant to post about it and accidentally reveal something that breaks the NDA. Been thinking a lot about what class to play (first, I’m an alt-aholic for sure) and was leaning towards White Lion but now not as much, but I don’t feel like I can say *why* I’m changing my mind without breaking NDA.

Thank goodness Mythic is going the “x characters per account” route that Age of Conan did. From everything I’ve read, we can have a full roster on every server if we want to, as long as we don’t mix Destruction and Order on any single server. That means lots of alts and experimental characters, which is half the fun of MMOs for me.

Open Beta ought to start next week some time and I’m sure NDA will lifted by then. Thanks for not removing me from your RSS feeds. The posts should pick up in frequency soon!

Use your PS2 to stream media to the living room

Posted on by Nimgimli

The Industry Standard brings us an article about QTV:

QTV by BroadQ uses a $30 piece of software to repurpose a PS2 as a digital media set-top for a TV or home theater. All users have to do is pop the DVD into their PS2, turn it on, and they are ready to either stream local network content or Internet shows like Revision3’s Digg Reel without leaving their sofas.

Brilliant idea. I’m going to be on the lookout for a copy of this software, and in the meanwhile I’ll dig out and dust off my old PS2.

WAR is coming

Posted on by Nimgimli

I was going to write a big long rant about blog comment wars and how psychotic some people get (not meaning anyone here, mind you) but then I thought maybe that wasn’t a very productive topic. I’m never going to change the minds of haters (who can’t even manage to get my name right) and the internet is a big place, so best to just walk away and let Karma deal with them.

Heh, ok, now I’m REALLY going to let it go.

So Warhammer Online. I haven’t talked about it much, but since my love affair with Age of Conan crumbled, its been my rock. If WAR let’s me down, I’m not sure what my next handhold in the swirling vortex of the MMO-verse will be. I’ve been in the beta for a few months now, and with the NDA in place I haven’t wanted to talk about it for fear of giving away something I’m not supposed to. And honestly I’ve been a crappy beta tester, ironically, because I enjoy the game so damned much that I don’t want to ‘spoil’ it for myself before launch. So I’ve been testing pretty lightly, trying to skip over ‘lore’ stuff and just test game systems.

Anyway…today the news is reaching a fever pitch, which is good because the community has been faltering a bit in the wake of some classes and content being pulled for launch and some other unpopular decisions on the part of Mythic & EA. But today, as JoBildo pointed out, we got a date for when Open Beta can be downloaded (Aug 15th). Presumably the beta itself will open shortly thereafter.

Bigger still, the War Herald announced a US launch date for the servers, Sept. 18th. Considering games usually ship on Tuesdays, and the 18th is a Thursday, I wonder how this will work. Will the game ship on Wedneday, to arrive on Thursday? Or will it ship on Tuesday, causing much confusion to those who get it on Wednesday and can’t log in. No matter, just pre-order and get early access.

Lastly, pricing, which is pretty standard:

* Monthly Subscription: $14.99 USD
* 3-Month Subscription: $41.97 ($13.99 per month)
* 6-Month Subscription: $77.94 ($12.99 per month)

Oh, and the guild JoBildo mentioned now has a name and a website: Casualties of WAR. The guild is open to bloggers and friends of bloggers. So far it seems like a great bunch of people in there.