Well, it has been a little while since I’ve been able to post, but I’ve gotten the good old Internets back. Its amazing how terribly isolated you can get from news when you’re lacking the Internet… and TV… and you’re in the middle of a tiny town in the middle of a giant forest. Anywho, I’d like to pop up a few things quickly to get caught up to speed.
First off: Warhammer Online . I pre-ordered a while ago and thus was allowed to participate in the Preview Weekend last week. There’s a ton of information out there on the game, but I will give my general thoughts on the game briefly. First off, PvE is pretty much your standard flavor of MMO that you’ve been playing for years. However, it was smooth, felt polished, and it was fairly fun. There was also a ton of content, at least at lower levels – hopefully something that will carry throughout the game. Not only that, but it also contained a few interesting features of note. First off was public quests, which I thought were an absolute blast. It was cooperative, in that I was working to complete the quest with a few dozen other people, but at the same time, I was also competing against them to rank highly in the scenario as to ensure I’d get some decent loot from it. Over all, from the PQ’s that I went through, they were very nicely done and an awful lot of fun. Next to that, you had Open Groups. If a group is set to ‘open’ (which is the default), it means that people can invite themselves into your group. That might sound a little weird to many people at first, but it actually is quite nice, even more so in public quests and open field RvR.
Next to that, RvR is just awesome. Flat out. I didn’t touch scenarios as much, as I was far too enthralled with open field RvR, but what I did do was fairly solid as well. Open field RvR is where it shined. The battlefields seemed well designed and it also gave me a lot of flashbacks to Dark Age of Camelot… but without some of the nagging problems, such as abuse of crowd control and stealth. While the game isn’t going to shatter the way MMOs are made, or is even really original, it still looks to be a good, solid, surprisingly polished, release.
Next up: Android . No, it isn’t a game. Yes, it is Google’s phone. The HTC Dream has been getting leaked out a bit and I want one. Also, it appears Google will be working on a browser that sounds particularly interesting, more so for web-based applications, and even more so with ones taking heavy advantage of Javascript (which is many of them).
Finally: It appears that I am back at college once again, where I will be attending a US University once more, instead of an… interesting Japanese one (Japan was awesome though). It actually feels pretty good to find myself getting back to work – not to mention back to all the excessive tabletop gaming that always takes place when I’m here. Before I got back I was already volunteered into two 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons games (so I can finally expand my 4th edition review!) and I’ll be running one of my own. However, with a far, far superior system: Fudge.
