Blizzard announced earlier today that there would be no BlizzCon this year. BlizzCon in Blue This is a particularly odd announcement as the somewhat regular autumnal event would have been poised to celebrate both 30 years of the Warcraft franchise as well as 20 years of World of Warcraft, the undisputed most profitable and popular title the company has ever produced.  And you could throw in the return to China and the big new expansion… I mean, there was stuff to celebrate. Strange times indeed.  Maybe this is an aspect of being part of Microsoft? Instead they will be doing other e ..read more

I feel like we are kind of stalling out on Valheim once more.  More than “kind of” really.  Conan Exiles showed up and ate into our play time in a big way, and now WoW Classic Cataclysm is approaching and it feels like the group will pick up with that once it lands.  Plus, of the four of us, only Potshot and I really invested much time in either of those first two titles. And that is fine.  Our passions ebb and flow.  We can always return to Valheim and the world we have.  I mean, we never do return to our old world, always opting to start fresh… but it could happ ..read more

The Upwell Consortium is at it again, with new structures poised to change New Eden. Yesterday, after a short teaser countdown, CCP released a video and a dev blog announcing the next expansion for EVE Online. Equinox – Seize Control – June 11, 2024 Named Equinox, it is slated to go live on June 11, 2024 and bring with it some of the promised/threatened changes for null sec.  All of it is somewhat vague and hand-wavy at this point, but there are some general features that have been announced. So what is in store with Equinox? Harness Planetary Power with the Skyhook Planets are going ..read more

Yesterday the bumbling CEO of Embracer group, Lars Wingefors, announced that the company would be split into three groups in an attempt to distract from his disastrous handling of the company over the last year, which was based on a business plan that seem to have all the sophistication of: Buy a bunch of companies ?????? Profit! All of which led to the need to lay off more than 1,400 people, close down nearly 30 projects, shutter several of the purchased studios, and required the sale of two enterprises, Gearbox and Sabre Interactive, to keep the company going and to, of course, “maximize s ..read more

So we know Cataclysm Classic is on the way.  We have the timeline, with dates already pinned down for all the major milestones.  In a little over a week the pre-patch will arrive and it will be time to decide if we’re in on another WoW Classic adventure. WoW Classic 2024 Roadmap – April 9 revision I find it a bit amusing that on social media Blizz has been pushing the idea that this will be a speedy experience… as opposed to the original which, in addition to pissing people off by destroying the vanilla world, felt like it languished too long for a five level expansion. Fast Cata ..read more

It is going to be one of those Fridays where I am going to uncork a bottle of frustration and rant a bit about various business deals and statements, each of which has managed to make me progressively more annoyed.  When I started this post I thought I might have to divert to Twitter to add in some of the more recent screw ups Elon has made.  But no, the video game industry continues to provide, and the main problem was limiting myself to a few stories and ranking them in the order of how likely they were to make my head explode. EG7 Sold PlanetSide and then What Happened? Back in ..read more

The sandbox nature of Conan Exiles… figuratively speaking, though there is also a lot of actual sand in the virtual world of Conan and the map is a big rectangle, which lends itself to the metaphor as well… means that there really isn’t a story or anything to point you towards a particular goal. You can hang about doing things like base building or crafting or whatever… at least on a PvE server like ours… and the game won’t get impatient or start sending NPCs your way to intone meaningfully about how great it would be if only you would go take a look down some dark dungeon down the road and lo ..read more

Ars Technica informed me last week that there are 861 rogue-like deck building games on Steam currently.  Given that was a few days ago, there are probably half a dozen more there now. I feel like the term “rogue-like” (or roguelike, as it has become one word for some) has been diluted of its early meaning, which was literally a game like Rogue, which included a bare few essential elements, and its immediate progeny which included things like Moria, Hack, NetHack, Island of Kesmai, and even the original Diablo according to lore. (More in random level generation than perma death, but it wa ..read more

I am going to towards Freeport for real now, starting from East Karana, which was a crazy scary place back in the day.  I remember being high enough level to feel confident wandering North Karana and crossing the bridge into East Karana and seeing all the stuff wandering back and forth there… all higher level and more dangerous that North Karana mobs… and scurrying back across the bridge to the relative safety of the North Karana. Tidbit: You can’t swim across the river to zone into East Karana, you have to cross the bridge. It was a bit more sophisticated in my memory But eventually I ..read more

As I mentioned in the last post, Potshot managed to find some foals out in the wild and, as all things in the world of Conan Exiles respawn in the exact same location, a very MMORPG aspect of the game, he was able to go out and grab a selection of mounts for us. Foals are somewhere around there… I honestly didn’t do any of this and even the wiki is pretty vague on how you actually acquire the foals… you sneak up on them and grab them I guess… but once you have them the process of turning them into horses you can ride is somewhat similar to how you “convert” followers. What, the wheel of pai ..read more