Get ready, RPG lovers! Notorious Studios, packed with ex-Blizzard talent, is dropping a free alpha demo of *Legacy: Steel & Sorcery* during Steam Next Fest.
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The fall chill was in the air, in 2007. It was another Hallow’s End and the decorations, quests and festivities in World of Warcraft were the exact spirit of Halloween. The world felt like a fantasy novel had come alive and the holiday had this sense of true meaning. Now it’s as if a holiday is more side quests, you don’t really want to mess with unless the game offers some kind of inresistable reward for the effort. Players complain frequently about the lack of connection with holiday events or, even worse, they get almost little press and fanfare being more or less automatic gestures of the change of time. Why in two decades has gaming changed so much from the cozy, comfy connected holiday experience to what tad amounts to almost ignorable window dressing in online games? While I think it wouldn’t be fair to answer that with a…
Today while I work on the YuriCorp Community Minecraft server, I am reminded of the origins of online multiplayer games: MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons). MUDs were text-based online games, often accessed using Telnet, that allowed multiple users to play together. MUDs were the genesis of the MMOs we play today and early attempts at adding a graphics layer were the very first series of MMOs. That includes The Realm Online. The major downside of early MUDs was that they were entirely text-based. In the 1990s, with slow dial-up internet connections, text was really the only viable option. However, the evolution to graphical MUDs happened quickly. One of the first major graphical MUDs was The Realm Online, released in 1996 by Sierra On-Line The Realm Online was quickly relegated to forgotten memories as Ultima Online (1997) released and was a completely superior experience while EverQuest launched in (1999) making The Realm Online…
Over the years automation has taken a powerful hold on online social commentary and allows fraudsters to launch their attacks and scams at scales never seen before. While you’re online, you’re going to want to think of your personal and financial safety when you engage in any monetary transaction. The thing is, it’s very easy to blur the lines between what’s a monetary transaction online and what’s a simple click of a button. Fraudsters use this and launch complicated attacks via bots and other methods to target online users in a variety of categories. Scammers are going try everything they can to separate you from your possessions (virtual and real). Today we’re going to delve into the nuances of scams in the world of video games and MMOs, however the best place to start with the topic is the US Government’s “How to Avoid a Scam” article produced by the…
FFXIV is one of the few MMOs out there that still require a monthly subscription fee, along with the likes of World of Warcraft and uh, I’m sure there is some more out there. Point being, if you want everything the game has to offer you have to pay the subscription fee. Of course, like WoW, Final Fantasy XIV let’s you play for free with some limitations. Unlike WoW, the free trial is actually insanely lofty and pretty much let’s you play most of the game without ever having to subscribe. A Note for Those Who Have Ever Purchased the Base Game Bruh, you’ll have to start over. You’ll have to make an all new Square Enix account in order to play the free trial and, if at any time you upgrade from the free trial, you can not return. So keep that in mind. The good news is that…
Veteran Internet users know of the turbulent time when Activision bought Blizzard and the gaming community exploded with anger. Of course, this wasn’t the first sell of Blizzard… the gaming company had previously been acquired by Vivendi, Sierra-Online (via CUC) and Davidson & Associates just to sort of measure out a few. Blizzard had a long history with Vivendi and that spree of 1998 to 2008 was pretty much considered their golden years. So, with that said, with all the problems the 2020s have brought Blizzard, what is the solution to their woes? Go back to their glory years where WoW released, Diablo released, StarCraft and StarCraft 2 released, etc. Forget Diablo, It’s Not a “Blizzard” Game Let’s set something straight, Diablo is actually a Condor Games game. Blizzard bought another studio, renamed them Blizzard North and they worked independently from Blizzard. The last thing they produced was in 2001…
Limited Run Games is a publisher of limited runs of physical games. There are other outlets, like Strictly Limited, that do a similar thing but Limited Run Games is what I would consider the industry leader in this very interesting world of limited video game releases. Their popularity recently has continued to only soar as collectors attempt to collect a wide range of their products, from the games they love to those who just love to collect every release. To be completely candid, I recently was looking at MidBoss’s Japanese release of the 2064 collector’s edition and fell immediately in love with the artwork and everything about it. Obtaining the previous US release led me down a long and wild adventure into a niche market that’s exploding in popularity and has a lot of pieces to untangle. The Principles of False Scarcity & A Limited History of Collector’s Editions If…
So you’ve just started the new expansion (WoW: Shadowlands) and everyone else has months of Renown and you’ve just hit max level. Maybe you’ve taken a break for awhile and your friends haven’t caught up with you yet. It was super frustrating for me too, at the start of the expansion because it felt like I had to do everything to catch my renown up each week and it was pretty fatiguing. Except the good news is that you don’t have to do every renown quest every week if you don’t want to and if you start later in the expansion, you’ll still be able to farm your way to everyone’s current level. It’s very simple: How to Catch Up To catch your renown up just do anything in the game that rewards you something. Covenant Callings, Battlegrounds, Dungeons, world bosses (once per week), various weekly quests, etc. Most of…
This is a rather short guide, because I have a lot of anxiety when I have a new character I want to run through raid finder and there is a lot of toxic people who instead of going, oh you’re just trying to get some gear, instead go “LOL NOOB” and many other more horrible things and that sucks. So let’s talk about preparing, so you can at least avoid any embarrassment when you load into the raid finder. The first thing to do is understand you’re going to suck if you don’t have gear and that’s totally fine and nothing anyone says matters, as long as you’re DPS or you’re a few months into an expansion and picked healer. If you roll as a tank into raid finder in the minimum required gear, you’re going to have a horrible time. We’ll talk about tanking in a bit. Next you’re…