So, I’d been hearing some noise on the various sites I check out about a game called Dragon Age: Origins. It’s made by Bioware. If that name sounds familiar it should. They’re the ones developing the new Star Wars MMO . They’re also made Baldurs Gate, the first Neverwinter Nights, Mass Effect, and so many other completely well done games it’s not even funny. So, the game gets released and I say “Well, I shall purchase it to check it out”. That was on Thursday.

The rest of the weekend was pretty much a blur to be honest. I remember sleeping at my computer chair for like a half hour and running out of cigarettes but being too sucked into the game to bother running to the store. And then there is the game.

So I selected a human noble first (there are 6 origin stories every one of them is completely different) as I find it best to go through the first run of a game like this as a human and with as much metal on me as possible. See that blood covered lady above me? That’s my mom. You can tell it’s going to be awesome from the beginning when your mom is wearing armor and covered in blood.  As a Human Noble you also start out with a sidekick which you get to name. It’s a Mabari Warhound. He’s cute, big, friendly, and will eat people’s faces right the fuck off.

This is me on my Grey Warden initiation quest. The back you see belongs to Morrigan a shapechanging magic user who later on, if you’re a good boy (OR GIRL) you get to have a nice cutscene with. I was blown away by the graphics on this game. Right now I am running everything on medium just to save on wear and tear.

In a few short moments there will be stabbing. You can get a wide number of party members from anywhere. And much like some Bioware games there is a like/dislike meter based on the choices you make and whether or not you go evil or good. The redhead is a girl named Leilana. She’s Orlysian which in our world would be the French. She’s a holy stabber of faces.

This is the one moving tree that did not try to kill me. He rhymes and wants me to find his acorn. And he’ll give me something nifty for doing it. Did you hear me? NIFTY. (It was a magic stick). The quests are incredibly detailed and you’ll unlock stuff as you go along your merry face stabbing way and discover things such as Codex pieces. These are mostly fluff but you can read them and they go into great detail about the past history of this world, it’s people, and all manner of things.

A moral dilemma. Help the hot woody chick  and her werewolf friends and have them join my army or help the elves and have them join my army since they don’t like each other. I went Rodney King and they’re both in my army now.

This is Shale. Shale is part of The Stone Prisoner DLC for the game which you get for free when you buy it. Shale is pretty much this game’s version of HK-47 (you get geek points for knowing who I am talking about). Shale will indeed join your party and does not stab things in the face. Instead he makes paste.

Just in case you thought it was all cinematic fluff. It is not. The above is an ingame shot. Throughout the game your party members will interact with each other depending on who you have in the group at the time. I usually keep Evil Chick and Good Chick together as it provides me with lulz at the sniping between the two.

So yes, go forth buy this game. Do it now. You’ll be like “Second Life Drama? Pass, gonna go stab a dragon in the face”. By the way, the dragon (the first one I ran into at least) does not want you to stab it in the face and it took me 30 minutes of fighting until it said “Find, commence with the face stabbing.”

When I first was introduced to fishing in Second Life a little over a year ago, I loved collecting all of the cute fish, clams, crabs and sharks.  Back then you could fish at the 7 Seas headquarters, or at a handful of public and private fishing areas around the grid. These days, however, content creators have gotten into the act and have not only added fishing areas near their shops, they have created custom prizes that you can win.

Destination shopping areas such as Sn@tch, Katat0nik, Exodi and Locos Pocos, just to name a few, provide their customers with a fun and interactive activity, and the opportunity to catch a prize that, in most cases, is not otherwise available.  At katat0nik, for example, in addition to custom fish (merkat lovers, anyone?) you can catch the blueprint and required pieces to make your own Whale Hooker dress in one of three colors, depending on the items you catch.  At Exodi, Ryker changes the prize periodically, and right now you could reel in some glittery bikinis.

So, why do I enjoy fishing? Two reasons, and the prize doesn’t count (that’s a given, right?). First, it is enjoyable. Okay, it may not be for everyone, but with the right group of people it is a downright pleasant way to kill an hour or two. Sometimes, I’ll pick a fishing spot, settle in and activate my hour-long auto-cast gesture and sort inventory, listen to music or chat with friends.  And at the end of the day, I have a few goodies to enjoy.

Second, these are some really generous people and if I can pay them back with my traffic, I’m going to. Sure, I know there are some who think that traffic doesn’t matter, but I happen to think that it does. When you use the search function in-world, the results are ranked by traffic. If I like a place well enough to spend an hour or two fishing for whatever custom prize is being offered, then I like them well enough to want to see them do well. If the traffic I generate for them by fishing helps them to move up the search ranks, chances are more people will find out about them, buy their stuff and give the creator the income and incentive to keep creating. It’s a win-win situation, as far as I’m concerned.  And honestly, paid classifieds have gotten so out of hand the the average content creator cannot compete monetarily, so it is in traffic, REAL traffic, not bots, that the content creators can be seen the way they rightfully deserve.

I asked around and here is a list of some favorite fishing holes that offer custom prizes (thanks, plurk friends!):

• Sn@tch
• Exodi
• katat0nik & Lazy Places
• Loco Pocos
• Starlust
• Caroline’s
• FakE
• Silent Sparrow
• Lo Lo
• Petable

There are a ton more, just check out this list from the 7Seas website!  Now, grab your rod and I’ll meet you at the fishing hole.  Just remember to BYOB…bring your own bait!

Do you have a favorite fishing spot? Leave the slurl in the comments!

Tags: 7Seas Fishing, Gabby Panacek, Traffic

On October 17th 2009 Robert Bowling from Infinity Ward did a podcast with the folks at BASHandSLASH to promote the highly anticipated game “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2″ and frankly PC games and gaming have not been the same since. Some including BASHandSLASH are referring to it as Black Saturday.

Basically what Infinity Ward and Activision/Blizzard have done is slapped the entire PC gaming community in the face. How did they do this? They removed the ability to have dedicated servers. Dedicated servers have been a backbone of the PC multiplayer gaming scene since they days of Half Life. They have allowed communities to form on different servers, they have allowed server admins to run their own set of rules (some good, some bad) and they have allowed the more creative to make mods and maps which in turn extend the playing time of a title by adding new things constantly.

Instead they hand us a little thing they call IW.Net which is what they’ll be force feeding all PC users for what I suspect is now on. IW.Net is going to be run through Steam. It’s going to be a matchmaking system much like what they have for consoles. This make no mistake about it, is a very very very bad thing mostly because it users p2p. Which if everybody’s hardware is the same (like you have with consoles) is a very okay thing. However, not everybody’s computer is the same so basically we’ll be sharing ALL of the lag. It’s even worse if you’re an international player because there will be no dedicated servers in your area. Instead you will be playing American players and with that their latency.

But I am getting slightly off track here.

Apparently, Robert Bowling was off in Europe promoting the game. When he got back and saw the petitions, the seriously pissed off forums, and the really angry tweets he hopped onto his blog and released a lovely bit of fluff.

There have and will continue to be reprecussions from this deception (Bowling stated earlier this year that nothing in multiplayer would change). Already thousands of people have cancelled their preorders (at 60 USD a pop), other game developers such as Dice are capitalizing on this fuck up, and people have begun to put two and two together and are cancelling their WoW  accounts since it’s now Activision/Blizzard.  It’s recieved numerous 1 star reviews on Amazon UK and the price is actually already beginning to drop.

So the writing is on the wall PC Game Developers. If we can afford and build gaming rigs, we can also afford not to buy into your bullshit. That’s what consoles are for.

Disclaimer: There are some pretty cool people out there and they play World of Warcraft. If you get offended by this, you are not one of them.

Recently during my mini-vacation from Second Life I’ve been playing a bunch of MMO’s and lately everywhere I log into I am surrounded by WoW players. And the experience overall has been what one could call mind numbingly depressing. Especially in the Aion Open Beta. The crying, the whining, the bitching that shit is too hard. So now, I am going to list the reason why I hate most World of Warcraft players.

1. You get rewarded greatly for very little.

Seriously, back when the game first started you had to be level 40 to get a mount. But you whined, you cried, you bitched and moaned and it got lowered to level 30 and the prices had to be dropped because gosh, saving gold was just too hard. But that wasn’t good enough. You cried some more and now the level requirement for getting a mount is level 20, you can pretty much get any mount (without having to earn exalted status) and it is now even cheaper. So good job! You’ve just cheapened the experience for everybody who had to scrimp and save and wait for level 40.

2.  You are too gear oriented

True Story! I was a level one Templar in the open beta for Aion and I had a WoW player tell me “If your gear is not right I am not inviting you into group”. Guess what? He was level one too! This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to you kooky little kids. Basically it doesn’t matter what level you are. If you do not have the “right gear” you will immediately go “Well fuck playing with that guy”. You will pass up on possible skill, experience, general know how in order to go “All our gear is teh leet”. It’s fucking shameful

3. You can’t play well with others

This is true, back in the day MMO’s used to be about getting groups together and generally running around whatever continent you’re on and kicking in ass in the name of loot and XP. But you couldn’t hack the social interaction could you? Noooooo. You had to bitch and bitch and bitch until every game you played started becoming more and more solo friendly. Why? If I had to guess it’s because you could barely interact with other people in real life let alone an online enviroment. I mean you solo fuckers even screwed up Dungeons and Dragons Online (admittedly that game was screwed up from the get-go). The whole group experience from Tabletop D&D was fucked over by your incessant need for alone time while playing with monsters.

4. You are not smart

I really mean this. With add ons like questhelper, carbonite, and so many more you have apparently lost the ability to read. Instead you will just rely on the little yellow arrow to point you to where you need to go. This becomes even more evident when you log into other MMO games. You spam region chat with idiotic questions like “Where is the lobonite fossil?” (Note: It’s up in the cliffs west of the citadel. You have wings use them), “Where’s Tully?” (He’s a pig and he’s been kidnapped by kobolds. He’s on the fucking cooking fire), “Where’s the Ancient Cube” (try looking in the area the quest log TELLS YOU TOO!!), and my favorite “OMG How do I steal the nymph’s dress?? She keeps killing me!” (Well did you wait for night time which is mentioned like 3 times in the quest description?).  You constantly do this in every MMO you enter. You have lost the sense of reasoning and problem solving which at one point was a critical part of being a gamer, from tabletops to PC’s and beyond. I mean your general degradation of reasoning skills caused Wizards of the Coast to turn D&D into a really dumbed down game that’s “Easy to play”.

5. You are Carebears

In every MMO there is usually a sense of loss when you die.In EQ there were the famous corpse runs/experience loss. In Pirates you suffer the loss of your rigging and a ship durability and whatever was in your hold. In EVE online you suffer the loss of your ship, whatever it was carrying, and possibly skills. In Aion you lost experience points which you had to buy back. Even in City of Heroes, when you died you went into something called “Experience Debt”. But not you World of Warcraft players! Noooo you get to gosh….repair your equipment. There is no risk in entering PvP, there is no  risk in dying during PVE so you’ll go into shit way above your level, die a lot, and eventually cry loud enough it’ll be made easier.  Recently they made it even less costly when you die. They added more graveyards so your poor little virtual feet don’t get tired by running back to your corpse over a far distance.

6. You ruin the experience for every other gamer around you

This one is important. In every game you enter you just can’t seem to help yourself with your incessant need to treat every chat like Barrens Chat. Your constant crying that shit is just too hard. Your continuous bitching about gear and the fact you are the greatest player since like….ever.  You can’t even let WoW go in other games. In Aion I saw a Legion called “World of Warcraft”. Seriously, it is enough to make some people just log out of MMO’s completely.

So do us a favor? Unless you can act like a human being stay the fuck in WoW

Tags: Aion, EVE Online, Everquest, Word of Warcraft

Instead of the usual Tuesday post, I want to tell you about Aion (pronounced Ion). What’s Aion? Well, it’s another MMO! I know, I know, BLASPHEMY. Whatev.

For real, Aion is amazing. It’s a fantasy MMO set around 2 rival factions on either side of a burned-up world. The Elyos and Asmodae live polar opposite lives. The Elyos are always in sunlight, with easy farming and fresh water and constant sunshine. They are very tan and pretty. The Asmodae live on the other side of the world in constant Winter and night. They are not so pretty. Each faction has the same 8 classes, so really you’re picking for the character look and backstory, both of which are really interesting either way.

Here’s a video on the classes:

Fast Tube by Casper

I should probably point out that that’s in-game footage. As in: it totally looks that pretty all the time.

I picked an Elyos Scout/Assassin. Here she is on the fully animated character selection screen:

You can have up to 8 characters per server. Because PvP (and PlayerVsPlayerVsEnviornment) is such a big part of the game, you can only play one race per server. If I’d like an Asmodian character, for example, I need to play on 2 servers.

Levels 1-10 puts you in the new players area where you learn to play. This actually goes pretty quickly. A dedicated day of play will see you out of the newb area and ‘ascending’ (at level 10) to the game map. I’ve only played Elyos but I’ve heard that Asmodae works about the same way.

The interface looks pretty basic in terms of MMO’s:

You have HP, MP, DP (Divine Power to do special moves) and XP to the left, your shortcut menu of fighting moves in the middle and menu and mini-map on the right. The middle shortcut menu is expandable up to 4 slots viewable on-screen, or you can view just one and switch between them. The little circle on the left of the mini-map shows you the time of day. A really cool thing about Aion is that certain quests can only happen at certain times. For example, in the new player Elyos area, you need to steal the dress of a Nymph for her lover. You can only get the dress when she takes it off at night to bathe in the moonlight. Also, the game has weather. It will rain and storm occasionally. I’m told that magic-weilders get extra power during the storms. Your charcter will hold a neat leaf umbrella in the rain:

The fighting is interesting, too. As an assassin, my job is to creep up behind the enemy without being detected and kill him or almost kill him in one shot. Because of this, assassins get to weild two weapons at once and fight quicker than any other class. When fighting as any class, you can use chain moves. Chain moves are powers that are meant to be strung together. Like, if you execute one move successfully, you can use another and another, for a big finish with tons and tons of damage to the enemy.

You can also craft weapons, armor, food and medicine after level 10.

Also, did I mention how pretty this game is?

There is a certain amount of customization allowed in the game. You can dye your clothes and armor any color with dye you bye from the shop. You can also craft special armor that looks slightly different than the dropped or bought armor.

The character customization is insane:

Fast Tube by Casper

I’m having a great time playing Aion. It’s certainly in open beta, along with a handfull of other SL peeps. You can pre-purchase and download here to join the beta. The game will be released on September 22nd.

So recently I’ve been taking what you would call a vacation from the land of Second Life. I think at some point everybody hits that wall where we’re out of build ideas, the stuff we do when in-world is a little blah, and we just kind of putter around going through the motions. So, the question arises: What do you do when you’re not in Second Life? Well lately I’ve been a member of the British Royal Navy.

I was looking for a new MMO out there. And frankly, I was sick and tired of the fantasy setting. If I had to kill another goddamn giant rat with an glorified stick I was going to scream my head off. And unfortunately sci-fi MMO’s that are any good are few and far between. So, two of my good friends poked me and told me about Pirates of the Burning Sea. I was a bit skeptical at first, mostly because it’s a Sony Online Entertainment thing but after playing it pretty much non-stop for the past two weeks I have to say it is pretty damn good. Or according to my British Naval Officer Tybalt Graves…it is the “bees knees”.

There is not very much detail in Open Sea (the first picture) and it is for good reason. If you put the level of detail you can get in the combat maps onto the open sea it would be laggier than Second Life on a weekend surrounded by camping chairs (“plz to sex now k?”). But once you get into combat, you’ll see your captain standing at the helm and your crew running back and forth. This poor dumb Spanish Merchant Convoy has no clue the pain that is about to be put upon them.

The ship you see here is called a Stralsund Frigate. It is not the biggest ship in the game. Those are the monstrous ships of the line that go from 4th Rate all the way to 1st Rate. I did not get a picture of those in combat because I like my ship. And my 34 guns do not even come close to matching the 64 guns of an Alexander 4th Rate which is the weakest of the ships of the line. There are 4 Nations to choose from. Once you have made that choice you get to stick with it. You can only play one nation on one server per account. So if me, being a British Naval Officer on one server wanted to play a Pirate I would have to go to another server to make him. The choices for Nations are British, Spanish, French, and The Brethren.  There are 3 classes to choose from as well for everybody except the pirates.

• Naval Officer: In all MMO’s there is the role of tank. Naval Officers usually get the biggest ships and in PVP are usually the ones who line up and begin opening up a world of hurt on each other
• Privateer: Basically you’re a legal pirate. You have the advantages of speed, speed powers, and if done right you can disable a ship in no time flat.
• FreeTrader: I have not played with these much, however this would be the crafter class of the game. Crafting in Pirates of the Burning Sea is a long drawn out specialized process which could fill another blog post all on it’s own.

There is life on shore as well. Players go into towns to obtain missions, put loot on the auction house, and to make items in the crafting menus. There is also Avatar Combat, some missions do not even involve a sea battle instead you set on shore to take out some people who need it on ground. You can also board ships you’ve disabled and defeat them that way.

And there is even something for you fashionistas! Avatar Customization is fairly detailed and there are quests to unlock clothing, accessories, and even parrots for your shoulder. I almost always play a male in games so I can’t show you how the ladies look. But I did some fiddling around and you ladies get even more options.

Now here is the warning. PvP is pretty much required in Pirates. You can indeed manage to make it as a Carebear if you really want to. But you will miss out on a lot of rewards and there is a certain satisfaction that can be obtained from having a Spanish Player (everybody calls them Tacos because most of the Spanish players are actually from Spain and it makes them insane with rage) yell at you for sinking their very pretty and expensive ship. And you can lose your ship. This is not WoW. If you lose all the durability on your ship it’s time to get a new one. So save up money. Nobody likes the guy who comes to the fight on a raft (there is a raft).  And there you have it. If you join up I’ll be over on Antigua as Tybalt Graves, Aidan Graves, or Meri Rylee. And if you do come to the server play British. I would really hate to have to sink you.