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A New Year Doth Cometh!

So, we reach the end of another year. 2007 has certainly been interesting from a gaming point of view. The 360 in particular having some quality releases. It’s been an interesting year for MMO’s too, with hype that spills over into next year and beyond. It’ll be interesting to see how things pan out, Warhammer Online and Wrath of the Lich King especially.

Speaking of MMOs, Both myself and Joanne have rolled on a PvP server in World of Warcraft, PvE just feels too safe, so for the foreseeable future we’ll be levelling up afresh on the Burning Steppes server amidst the evil Horde gankers…

Hopefully next year will also see me solidify the blog design and what I want to achieve with it. But, being me, it probably won’t…

Have a great New Year and thank-you for visiting the site, I look forward to improving it as the year moves on.

Tags: New Year

BioAss Effect!

For Christmas I got three great Xbox 360 titles, Bioshock, Assassin’s Creed and Mass Effect. Over the next few days I’ll probably comment on them a bit more but so far I’m really impressed by them.

Me being my usual daft self! When all three games combine they form BioAss Effect!

Brief thoughts on each of the games…

Bioshock - Unnerving aesthetic with downright eerie atmosphere. It actually scares me, but I’m a wuss…

Assassin’s Creed - Stunning technical achievement, fun and accessible control and I actually “like” the “secret” twist.

Mass Effect - Truly cinematic, great (if slightly standard) sci-fi plot with great characters and well-paced gameplay.

I’m off to earn some more gamerpoints…. MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Tags: assassin's creed, bioshock, Christmas, mass effect, xbox 360

Merry Christmas Everyone…

It’s that time of year again where people argue and fall out while eating turkey and vegetables. Christmas, that time of giving and receiving. But mostly receiving…

Just a brief note to wish everyone a merry Christmas, don’t get TOO drunk, and remember to have fun!

Lucy wondering HOW Santa brings her presents when he is SO small!

Tags: Christmas, Lucy, Santa

Level 67, finally!

After 17 days of game time, I’ve finally dinged 67 on my Mage, Ryliana, today. Getting to the mid-60’s hasn’t been too hard since entering Outland but my progress has really slowed.

So much so that I’m preferring playing on my alts even though I’m close to reaching the mystical level 70. The main reason for my lack of enthusiasm for Ryliana right now is that quests are giving me around 1.5% total experience and each kill is giving me around 0.1%. Which when I say it here doesn’t seem too bad, 1000 kills or 66 quests, but it just seems like the grind is such hard work.

Ryliana WILL get there, just as I’m sure my alts will too, although Rothlar (my original main character, a dwarven priest) is sitting at level 47, my new night elf druid alt, Mistralfen, is currently at 33, with a few others around the level 10 mark.

I’m just finding the mid-60’s to 70 grind a bit gruelling with my mage at the moment.

Tags: levelling, mistralfen, progress, ryliana, wow

No Patch 2.5?

Eyonix over on the official WoW Forums commented on a thread asking if there’ll be a patch 2.5, his answer was a straightforward, No. At least they aren’t considering one at the moment.

To me this suggests they are happy with progress on Wrath of the Lich King, which suggests it may be closer than people think.

Patch 2.3.2 is currently on the PTR and we may see it next week on Live. Potentially this means we “could” see 2.4 on the PTR before the New Year but realistically it’ll probably be the first week or two of 2008.

Patch 2.4 is a fairly large content patch with at least one major change to the core engine. The Combat Log has been completely reworked, now sending an “event” containing lots of information instead of a simple text string, this will enable many addons to be much more versatile. For example, threat meters will be able to track multiple enemies with the same name as they’ll be able to distinguish them via their IDs instead of just having the name to work with.

As well as the combat log, there is of course, the Sunwell Plateau, featuring both a 5-man and a 25-man instance, the 25-man following on progression-wise from Black Temple and Mount Hyjal (meaning very few people will actually get to see it) although I’m sure the 5-man will get some hammer.

Along with the instances there is a new “public” area, Sunwell Isle. Sunwell Isle will feature new daily quests, perhaps for other professions?

All this will take a fair bit of testing, say 1-2 months. Presuming 2.4 goes onto the PTR on the first week of January that would make an optimistic live launch in mid-February. Giving 2.4 a few months of play on live would take us to around May-June as a possible launch time for Wrath of the Lich King.

If Blizzard aren’t planning a 2.5 I’d say that is a good timescale. I’d imagine if at some point Wrath hits a speed bump due to issues they’d start a 2.5 and aim it for the May-June slot pushing Wrath to an August-September launch.

For sales reasons I’d imagine Blizzard are aiming for a Summer launch for Wrath. I personally can’t wait, lots of cool stuff ahead for WoW.

Tags: mmo, Patch 2.3.2, Patch 2.4, Patch 2.5, Sunwell Plateau, wow

Addon Corner: MrPlow

We all know the feeling, you’ve been questing and grinding, you open your bags to find that quest item you need to use and… there is no way on Azeroth you can find it amongst all that crap. Between vendor trash, cloth and consumables, an individual item just gets lost.

MrPlow (presumably named after the Simpson’s episode) takes your bags, gives them a good shake and sorts them out.

It takes any part-stacks in your back and joins them together, it also defragments your bags, leaving all the space at the “bottom” of your bags.

 
Before and After shots of MrPlow (Really poor Before shot though, it WILL fill in gaps too)

All in all a very useful addon, keeping related items together (all quest items, all potions etc.) is especially handy.

Tags: addon, MrPlow, wow

EVE: Trinity is here!

EVE Online is a novel and unique space-based MMO that is played on a single server. It has repeatedly had the record for the most concurrent players, often having upwards of 20,000 players online at once.

EVE’s latest expansion has launched today, Trinity completely overhauls the graphics engine and upgrades the models in the game as well as the usual gameplay tweaks and additions.

Of course what would a launch be without drama? The initial patch download had a critical problem for users of Windows XP. It would delete the “boot.ini” file from the root of your system causing XP to fail to boot the next time you start up. This has since been fixed in the download available now but early adopters were bitten by this causing all the non-technical users to panic and freak out when their systems stopped booting.

There are a number of ways to fix this, I’ve included just two of these after the jump.

More »

Tags: boot.ini, drama, eve online, mmo, patch

Addon Corner: Atlasloot

I’ve mentioned Atlas in a previous Addon Corner, so this week I’m going to give a brief overview of Atlasloot.

Atlasloot is a loot browser, it allows you to view various loot tables including Faction and Reputation rewards, PVP gear and instance drops. It can be used on it’s own or attached to a map addon. Obviously by the name you can tell it was meant to link with Atlas but it can also link with Alphamap if you use that.

Atlasloot in it’s solo form, you can view reputation and PvP rewards this way

If you use it alongside Atlas, you can the ability to click the boss names on the right of the Atlas display to show the loot table overlaying the map.

Atlasloot combined with Atlas, it integrates well with Atlas’ UI

Atlasloot makes it much easier to see which instances drop useful upgrades without having to Alt-Tab out to a site like Wowhead, Thottbot or WoWWiki.

Tags: addon, atlas, loot, wow