June 2016

Most Anticipated MMORPGs of 2016

stargrace June 7, 2016 No Comments

As is the norm each year, there are lots of potentially legendary games to look forward to this 2016. However, one genre promises to blow the rest out of the water. Backed by huge crowdfunding campaigns and some daring indie campaigns, the MMORPG genre is fully loaded this year. This piece takes a look at some of the most promising of the lot.

Star Citizen

This game has received truckloads of money from crowdfunding so you should ordinarily know what to expect from the developers. Apart from this fact, the proposed features of this game are enough to leave you salivating. Star Citizen combines multiple genres together in a bid to unleash a new era of MMORPGS. You still need the best bingo sites as can be found here on bingosweets.com to get your bingo fix but Star Citizen covers everything else from first-person shooting and sophisticated space combat to high level economic and social simulation. There is something for everyone. Industry watchers call it the Swiss Army Knife of video games. We agree!

World of Warcraft: Legion

There is a lot of attention on World of Warcraft this year as it had a lukewarm year with the last release. This is supposed to be a big year for the game or we could have the final days of one of the pioneer MMORPGs unfolding before our eyes. Legion is an expansion that will tell us if Blizzard still has enough in its locker to keep the World of Warcraft franchise working. From some of the promised new features on Legion, there is every reason to be cautiously optimistic.

Black Desert Online

The magnificent environment and intriguing characters are not the only things offered by this beautiful game. The game has already launched in South Korea and will come to the rest of us soon. This game takes a unique approach to sandbox MMORPG. With Black Desert Online, you are guaranteed to enjoy a really wondrous experience where you can choose your own paths to play. It promises to better GTA on that front!

Albion Online

Albion Online mixes the political scandal and brutality of EVE Online with a fully packed fantasy world. The game can be played seamlessly on both computer and tablet. It gives you and your friends the chance to build a kingdom in a literally cutthroat environment where dying means starting completely from scratch.

Warhammer 40K: Eternal Crusade

Warhammer: Age of Reckoning died quickly and many felt it was the end for the title. That was before Eternal Crusade was announced. Set 40,000 years after the original, the game has lots of new features but it is still largely about the fight between Ork and man. Eternal Crusade brings something different to the table as it is a tactical squad-based shooter where you will fight a persistent war against other groups for territory control.

The MMORPG will light up the year and we can’t wait.

Gaming

Happy 10th Anniversary, Wurm Online

stargrace June 6, 2016 No Comments

Today marks the 10th anniversary of Wurm Online, a game I’ve been playing in one version or another (most recently with Wurm Unlimited) for over 7 years now. It’s one of a handful of games that keeps me coming back and that I find highly addictive (in a very good way).

In celebration, a number of things are going on. I ended up signing up for two months of premium so that I could better partake. This granted me 5 silver, a tin leather knife, a returners mask, and a gift box with sleep powder. A lot of people are (of course) displeased with their gifts and are moaning about the lack of creativity and how they wish it was something different, but I’m quite happy with mine. Besides, we could have gotten nothing at all.

A big round of updates has come to pass too. With it came Rifts, neat little events that open every few days on each server. You can also create houses underground now, so living life like a dwarf is a definite possibility. It’s nice to see such a large update, and it’s great to see so many people returning / still playing.

I took inventory of what I had in my bags across the handful of characters I still have, made sure my main (the only one premium at this time) had the best of everything, and then set to work cleaning up the two deeds I own right away. I’m currently creating a path that leads from the market deed to my main deed, and I’ll pave it and get it done up all pretty. I know I was working on weaponsmithing, but I’ll probably swap over to something else for a bit, just because.

It’s quite a difference to see how fast (or slow) skills move in WO compared to custom servers in WU. My 7 year old character in WO has low skills compared to my 2 month old character in WU, but I take more pride in the older character (which is pretty normal, I assume).

In any case, it’s nice to be playing again, even if just for a short while.

Gaming

Beautiful, but Slightly Annoying

stargrace June 3, 2016 1 Comment

I’m questing through Altar of Malice right now in EQ2. It’s the expansion that took us from 95 to 100, and it’s a few behind these days so everywhere I go is pretty empty as players opt to get to 100 by experience grinding elsewhere (I can hardly blame them). My first days in Tranquil Sea were uneventful. I didn’t enjoy the quest lines and the story didn’t pick up until I got to Phantom Sea. Then it all got much more interesting.

One of my least favourite type of quests are the ones that require you to harvest something but as you’re harvesting you get a message like the one below.

That’s right, you managed to pick up the item but OH NO it crumbled to dust! Now you have to harvest another one. Honestly, these quests are nothing but annoying, especially when (as I have mentioned numerous times) RNG and I are not friends. There’s a handful of these types of quests scattered throughout the Altar of Malice timeline, and every single one made me groan. Just let me harvest double the amount instead of tossing in these failures! At least then I have some idea of progression and achievement instead of feeling bad that I’ve failed, again.

With that annoyance out of the way.. the expansion is amazing looking. It”s probably one of the prettiest places I’ve seen in EQ2. The dungeons are beautiful, and I found myself taking a lot of screenshots.

Now I continue to work my way to level 100, so I can at least have one character at the cap. Sure, I’ve got two crafters (out of 9) at 100 already, but that doesn’t really give me the same sense of achievement. Ideally I’d like to get a few more characters to 100, but we’ll see how that goes (as always). It’s nice to be playing in Norrath again, even if my subscription is up in a month. I’d like to be able to afford a krono or some other means of subscription but at 100,000 plat that’s just a bit out of my range.

Still, I’ll enjoy things in the meantime.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Gaming

A Red Dragon Fell

stargrace June 2, 2016 No Comments

The lurking red dragon had been hanging around for a while but no one was really out hunting it until a week or two ago. The crowds gathered, and we all wondered if we would have the manpower to take down the beast. Especially since we were missing some key (ie: high skilled) players.

The fight went smooth, even though a few lost their lives and it wasn’t “easy” by any means. It was fun. In the end there were 6 suits of dragon scale to award, along with a rare bone, a skull, and the corpse.

I didn’t win anything (again, RNG and I are not on speaking terms) but Moumix from my alliance did, and so did his wife. He donated his rare bone to Melketh, the tank of the evening (so he can tank in the future with more rare gear) and his wife won a lovely set of scale.

I think it was a good time had by all even if it wasn’t our largest event. Some new players turned up to help and that’s always a good thing. Now we have a Champion Troll King roaming the lands, and that is a beast of an entirely different nature. The chances of us being able to defeat him are pretty slim. Champions are scary creatures, and the troll king has an insane regeneration rate. I suppose we’ll just have to see.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Gaming

Skyfactory 2.5 – A Skyblocks Mod Pack

stargrace June 1, 2016 No Comments

Minecraft is one of those games that’s very easy to customize based on the person who is playing. Enjoy going after achievements? There’s a mod pack for that. Enjoy creative mode? Another mod pack. Enjoy exploring magic? Tinkering in tech? Want a challenge? There are mods for all of those.

That’s how I stumbled into something called “Skyblock” – but this mod pack is much more than just skyblock. It’s called Skyfactory 2.5, and it’s on the ATLauncher I was talking about in my previous minecraft post.

Skyblock is a challenge pack where there’s no actual world created. You spawn on top of a single tree that rests on a single square of dirt. Your challenge is to create a base and survive. There are optimal ways of doing this – take my platform pictured above. It’s done with half thickness planks instead of blocks. Why? Because monsters won’t spawn on them. It also gives me 6, so I can expand rapidly.

Once I made a crook and harvested a few saplings it was time to make a barrel that would let me compost my spare saplings and turn that into dirt. More dirt means I can plant more trees which of course means more wood.

Saplings need light at night in order to grow so to speed the process up a bit (they still take forever) I placed some torches. That’s as far as I’ve gotten so far. The pack is created custom so that you’re still able to create things like dirt and ore in a world where there’s no actual ground beneath you. Creating them is not easy, but eventually once you do the slow part you should be able to automate it. One of my first goals will be to have an automatic tree farm.

Since death means you lose everything ideally you want to leave your items in chests at your base and not carry them around with you. That way if you die you don’t have to give up and start the world over. I watched a hilarious youtube video last night of a group who happened upon a chance cube. Chance cubes are awesome, but they’re also random. The cube blew up most of their base, stranding two players on a single block of dirt in the middle of nowhere while their buddy was left with whatever remained of their base. It was hilarious. It’s these moments in minecraft that make me laugh the most, the unsuspecting trials and tribulations that you come up against (like that tornado that swept me away last time, that was hilarious). I’m looking forward to seeing what trouble I can get myself into this time.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Most Anticipated MMORPGs of 2016

Happy 10th Anniversary, Wurm Online

Beautiful, but Slightly Annoying

A Red Dragon Fell

Skyfactory 2.5 – A Skyblocks Mod Pack

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