For those who don’t know, Florensia Online is a next generation MMO game from Japan.  Their dual ship and land battle system makes this game very interesting. Pirate lovers (or gaming addicts) will love the game! The graphics are stunning and their ship system is simply amazing. Give this next generation MMO a try, maybe you will like it, after all, you don’t know if a game is good unless you try right?

Anyways Florensia has decided to celebrate Saint Walpurga’s.  Saint Walpurga was a nun. Her feast day commemorates the translation of her relics on May 1st. Walpurgis Night is celebrated on the night of April 30th, the eve of Saint Walpurga’s feast, when the witches and other occult folk can celebrate before being banished by the dawn of this saint’s special day. Walpurgis Night is also a feast to bear in remembrance the bonfires of the Vikings who celebrated spring in that night. I’m not going to keep rambling on but its always great to know why we celebrate something right?

So what is Florensia doing to celebrate this great feast? From April 29th to May 7th, you can get some creepy and scary costumes to wear for Walpurgis Night from the item shop. These are exclusive, no expire items so who knows, they might come in handy someday right? They are going to be removed from the item shop soon so get them while they’re hot. Plus, its never too late to look cool. Jump into the online world of Florensia and celebrate Walpurga’s Feast Day!

Warhammer Online: Patch 1.2.1

Even though the title of this article might lead you to think otherwise, Warhammer Online’s latest patch(1.2.1) is actually wonderful. It’s yet another great step in the right direction for EA Mythic, and a good sign of things to come. So why the title? Well, it’s french – I like it. Plus, when the patch went live, it claimed to fix a lot of things it really didn’t. Additionally, it caused a ton of problems in the game for mostly every player. Some players experienced inhumane lag, many more were being randomly kicked off to the character selection screen, fewer were just simply crashed to the desktop. For a few days after the patch released, there was a lot of anger from the community. Needless to say EA Myhic reacted quickly and was able to solve most of the issues players were experiencing on a large scale. I’ve fallen victim to being kicked to the character selection screen every once in a while since then, but not as bad as when the patch first launched.

So what did they do with this patch?

They’ve been working on addressing some of the issues caused by having too many people in one area(sieges, mainly). As all of those who have been playing know, the servers were brought to their knees when too many people started sieging cities and fortresses. There’s still a limit on how many people can participate, but rather than crashing the whole damn server, people will now start being teleported out to another area. It still sucks that there’s a limit on how many people can participate in sieges, but teleporting people out is better than having the entire zone crash.

One of the more note-worthy changes, perhaps for the lower tiers(as they are now made slightly more interesting) is the addition of several other benefits for capturing a zone. Anyone who plays Warhammer Online knows how zone locking works. Basically you get points for doing certain things in a zone: winning scenarios, completing quests, killing people in the RvR lakes, taking objectives, and you also get some points toward zone control from the previous tier. Once a zone was locked, every player in the area, whether or not they participated in locking said zone would receive a decently-sized RP bonus.

Now, the system’s been changed slightly. Zone control still operates in the same way, however, you will now receive INF and XP depending on your participation in locking the zone. For example, let’s say I join a warband and we take every keep and BO in the pairing. If we have enough points in zone control from other things(PvE/Scenarios/etc), then the zone will lock, and I will receive a huge amount of influence, XP, and renown. Now, if I only help in taking one keep, or one BO, my INF/XP/Renown bonus will be much, much less. Additionally, based on your participation you will receive a certain number of bonus medallions.

What are medallions? Medallions are part of the new token system put into place to make obtaining set items “easier.” I say “easier,” because some pieces of the set items used to cost mere gold, and wouldn’t be really hard to get. By comparison, those same pieces cost roughly 50-65 tokens now. To help put things into perspective, you get 1 token for taking a keep. If you didn’t win a bag, you get an additional token for your participation. If you do get a bag, you can choose to pull out Entangled Medallions which will convert into two medallions. So, at most, you can get 3 medallions from a keep siege. If there’s a lot of keep swapping, zone lock swapping going on, you can build up medallions really fast. Unfortunately, if there’s no action going on, you no longer have the option of fetching yourself a few pieces of gold and just buying the set item from the vendor.

Overall, the changes are pleasant. Despite the few issues when the patch originally launched, it’s brought nothing but positive changes. Although I’m a bit angry about not being able to buy set pieces for gold anymore, it evens out; I can now buy gold bag loot for tokens, if I happen to not get lucky for enough keep sieges that I manage to build up 125 tokens to trade for it.

Evil is afoot. The criminals are going insane, running rampant, and terrorizing the unimposing citizenry. Purse snatchings, muggings even strange creatures committing all sorts of strange and arcane acts for their bizarre evil twisted rituals. I am not talking about the U.S. congress here people. These events are taking place in a popular city we all know. No not Miami, but Paragon City. It is up to us, the heroes to log in and stop the madness and the chaos.

It just happens to be the 5th anniversary of City of Heroes. NCSoft is celebrating this event all month long. This week, starting today and ending on Sunday, will see the reactivation of any old accounts that left in good standing. It’s our duty as Heroes past to take part in the defense of Paragon City once more.

I just love City of Heroes. I was in the original beta test for the game, and continued to play it for about two years after release. I left at that time due to burn out and needing something deeper at the time. Its strength can sometimes be its weakness, the simplicity in game play. I have gone back many times during free game play, promotions, and just to play for a month or two here and there. I love the way the game is setup. Just log in and go do missions. That’s it, that simple. You can group or solo, either way is a viable way to level and have fun. You can customize your game play by attaining enhancements for your powers. These enhancements augment certain aspects of your powers and help you truly customize your hero.

The game has evolved over time adding PVP, crafting, auction houses, (don’t remember what they are called in coh), and the City of Villains expansion, just to name a few. This is a product that continues to deliver time and time again. The in game community is excellent. I have never had problem finding a group or help for any mission. Everyone I ran into was very helpful. Having such a consistently good, helpful player base is rare in MMO’s. It might be due to its niche nature that holds the community strongly together, or maybe just the fact that everyone is trying to play a truly heroic persona. Either way it works.

The time has come, patch your account, put on your super suit and help defend Paragon City. The best part about Paragon is its complete lack of Night Elf Hunters.

On August 15 last year, I wrote about a game SOE had just demoed at its annual FanFaire. Called Free Realms, the game was promoted as a free MMO for 9-14 year olds, where they could engage in any manner of activities, from adventuring and fighting (typical MMO activity), to cooking and playing with pets (reasonably common MMO activity), to driving go-karts and playing soccer (rare MMO activity). Oh, and did I mention the free part? It intrigued us all — and it was made by SOE, no less.

At the time I said the demo looked quite amazing and it struck me that a lot of people, adult gamers included, could make great use of the environment as a place where they could all meet, either to game with each other or to social network, especially if they were friends who are otherwise playing different games to one another.

And you know what? Despite some comments I will make in a moment, I think that might just come true. This is a very polished gameworld to be able to engage in for free and I think it will appeal to both sexes; and probably even more to female gamers.

It sounds like I must have been playing Free Realms recently to make that sort of call and, yes, I have been. A little while ago, I made a bearded avatar I called “George Imperialsaga” (I used the in-game name generator to come up with that), and due to his likeness to a certain bearded director of space fantasy movies, petitioned that his real name should be George Lucas which, bizarrely, SOE approved. So if you’ve seen George Lucas running around in-game lately, yes, that was me. Guilty as charged.

So what’s the game like? Well, at the risk of disappointing people, it’s like every other MMO out there. You run around a game world; you do quests; you can talk to people; you can explore; etc, etc. Surprisingly, based on everything I had thought it would be, I found it to be very grindy. Very, very grindy, actually. While it’s a cool concept that one character can be multiple professions and, in turn, it’s very easy to unlock the first level of each profession for your character, like ninja, postman, medic, blacksmith, warrior, treasure hunter, wizard, kart driver, chef, brawler and explorer (phew, and that’s not even all of them), it actually takes quite a bit of running around and “doing stuff” to get to level two. I haven’t even gone beyond level two as I set about playing the opening level of as many professions as possible, but if the game follows regular MMO conventions and makes level three harder to achieve than level two… well, it’s a good thing the game’s free, as kids might need to spend years leveling in it.

Of course, the company line would be that the game’s not about leveling, but rather the fun experiences you can have along the way but, I’m not really sure about that. Seeing other players with cooler equipment, I felt this played out like any other MMO and I wanted to level my guy up so I could be like the cool kids, more than anything else.

All in all, Free Realms looks and feels like an overly cutesy, yet still grindy, version of WoW with perhaps a dash of sandbox insofar as being able to go anywhere and do anything with the same character, rather than re-rolling, re-speccing or having multiple characters. And you know what? Despite my personal aversion to grinding, I think the kids might like it. This is definitely one MMO to download (a surprisingly small download, too), and have a play with, especially if you have young children or even younger brothers and sisters or nieces and nephews coming around to your house. Try it.

Free Realms launches Tuesday, April 28.

The Chronicles of Spellborn which launched a few days ago on April 23rd launched with a 2 week free subscription for all new players.  If you signup to the game, which is free to download, you’ll get a free 2 weeks to test it out.  Not sure why they didn’t do the normal one month free promotion like most games do, maybe it’s because there giving out the game for free, but in any case if you want to test out the game, you’d better sign up before May 7th when the promo ends.  You can go here, http://spellborn.acclaim.com/downloads.html, to download the game and create a free account.

Also look for our upcoming review of The Chronicles of Spellborn in the coming weeks once we get some game time in.  You can also checkout some other PC game reviews at our friends at Testfreaks.com.

Happy 2 year anniversary LOTRO! How time flies, it has been two years since this game has launched. The game has had many changes, updates and one expansion. In order to celebrate this anniversary Turbine is giving all former subscribers a free welcome back period starting April 24 till April 30th. Not only do you get to play about a week for free but you also get a 25% XP bonus for the entire time! This is a great reason to check out some of the new changes to the game as well as taking advantage of the XP bonus.
I was in the beta test for LOTRO, and loved the game at the time. I stuck with it for about one and half years. One of my big problems with the game at the time was that I could not find any quest objectives. The quests where written too obscure and would not clearly give you directions.

The funny thing is, I would ask for help and the community in the game was very helpful. Unfortunately the directions I would receive made no sense. These people were very friendly and helpful, as well as very knowledgeable in regards to Tolkien lore.

They would give me directions based on the names in books, for example; I would ask for a particular quest location, they would respond something like this, “follow the Brandywine river south to erun liund then go north at Farmer Gareth’s field, there you will find your goal” (sorry if I massacred or just made up the names it has been a long time since I played). At the time my map was not explored or I could not possibly locate the names they gave me on the maps. Bless their lore rich hearts but they were of no help.

Recently LOTRO has added a quest tracker into the game. This is a big improvement to their obscure quest writing. I had the chance try this out during their last free time event. I was very impressed with the feature. Questing was once again possible, objectives are easy to track and find.

I am looking forward to setting some time aside, dusting off the old crossbow and cloak then heading out into the wilds of Middle Earth to lay waste to evil. The world is still stunningly beautiful, the player housing is very well implemented, and the community is still pretty damn awesome. If you are a former subscriber go visit Middle Earth once again, you might like what they have done with the place.

Update: We also received a special Gollum screenshot from Turbine to commemorate the 2nd anniversary.

The human race has stumbled upon an ancient secret race in the depths of space and is now in a fight for its survival, or something like that.   Black Prophecy an upcoming real-time space combat MMORPG being developed by Reakktor Media that looks to bring back some good old fashion space flight sim combat.   Although you can play in 3rd person if you want, but common who wants that.

The actual storyline is a little more complicated.  The human race has been fractured into 3 separate subraces, Tyi, Genides and the normal humans.  The Tyi and Genides are the only playable races and both are trying to control the rest of the human race.  In their war for power they stumble upon another race, the Restorers, who basically delcare war on everyone else.

The Tyi race are cybernetically enhanced humans while the Genides are genetically enhanced humans, so each race has their own strong points, although I’m not sure how much that will make a difference since you’ll be flying a ship the whole time.

Missions will be instanced which I kinda don’t like.  At this point there isn’t enough info out there to know if it’s just some missions or all missions, but hopefully it’s only some.  Reakktor has also stated that in some of the bigger instanced missions up to 300 players can participate in battle which just sounds crazy.  Players will also be able to pilot fighter carriers and other capital ships, although the specifics have not been released.  Players personal fighters will also be completely customizable.

The leveling/skill details have not been released yet, but they did say there will be 30 skills that a player can choose from and upgrade.

That’s basically all the info I could find as it’s still very early in the development process.  If you’re interested they are taking signups for closed beta.  There’s also 2 trailers and 1 gameplay trailer available on their site, it’s worth a look, the graphics look amazing.

Tauren Patch Enforcer

Wow released a new patch today. Patch 3.1.1 is out. The patch contains mainly bug fixes. The big deal with the patch is a talent reset. So once you log in make sure you redo your talents. Glyphs are unaffected, by the reset. There is a very handy new feature that arrived on the last patch which allows you to preview your talents before you select them. It’s under options, display, and then check “preview talents.”

After playing with the talent changes over the weekend, I have to admit this patch was good. Even with the DK nerfs we are still a very strong class that can dish out good damage and take some punishment. There was a bug with death strike, it was only healing me for 200 health instead of 2300-2400 that it should. This was a corrected after a rather untimely and gluttonous death, after I rezzed it started working as it should. I hope today’s patch fixes all these issues.

As a result of the patch I have gone back and tried other characters. I originally created a Paladin when BC came out. I leveled him to high 30’s almost 40. I quickly became bored with the mechanic. I loved the concept and back story of a Horde Paladin, but it just didn’t click with my play style. My issue was the horrible mana management. The Paladin would eat through mana like a night elf hunter licks windows, which if you know Nelf Hunters is quite often.

I respected my Paladin and put three points into Judgments of the Wise;
“Your Judgment spells have a 100% chance to grant the Replenishment effect to up to 10 party or raid members mana regeneration equal to 0.25% of their maximum mana per second for 15 sec, and to immediately grant you 25% of your base mana.”

What this means is your Paladin can mow through mobs and have an almost full mana bar at the end of every fight. This has made playing a Paladin fun again. Exorcism now works on all mobs as well, with a guaranteed crit on undead and demons. This has added to your DPS as well as a little more options when fighting.

** Interrupting this post to show you an email I just received from that old character you shelved;
Dear —- (insert name),
Hi there. Remember me? We had such good moments together. But you don’t write or call anymore? It’s me not you, but good news, my talents have been updated and reset, please play me. Please. I am stuck on the character select screen and it just sucks to see you pass over me and not press select.
Love your old character.

Go ahead and play some of those alts, let me know if you have seen any difference now that the talents and spells have been updated. Or just let me know if I am crazy and those alts still suck.
Have fun in Azeroth, and remember friends don’t let friends play Night Elf Hunters.

In the world of movies, music, in fact, all forms of media, it is often difficult to tell when something is deserving of a sequel. A lot of movies have open endings, and if their ultimate fate is not decided by a saturday morning cartoon, such as Godzilla, then…wait. What am I talking about? Sorry, I was spacing out for a minute. Moving on. This is the second part to my first impressions review on Aion: The Chinese Tower of Eternity, the Beta. There are some things that were not discussed in my previous post, which are an important part of gameplay. Since I did not want to completely obliterate any articles below mine with a humongous wall of text, I decided to add a second part on here describing combat, classes, and an actual description of the flying system(not a praise).

I. Classes:

Classes. Some people love them, some people hate them. It divides nations and destroys relationships. People want a class to blame when they’re losing in city sieges. Others want a class-less skill-based system. It’s a difficult choice for any company to make when developing an MMO. For the most part, a class system tends to be the more popular choice. Though not clearly defined in all of them, most RPGs have some form of class system. Aion is no different. In fact, it doesn’t seem like they were being very creative when it comes to creating classes. You have your four stereotypical archetypes: healer dude, heavy armor dude, agile dude, and caster dude.

I’m not going to lie, the classes are all really fun to play, despite their very archetypical stereotypes and cliché names. You start off either as a warrior, a mage, a priest, or a scout. At level 9, you can complete your ascension quest, and then by level 10 you’ll be able to choose your second class. Here’s the breakdown:

Warrior: Your standard sword/shield or giant bashy weapon guy. These guys hit things up close, and hit them hard. They can turn into a Gladiator, which is an offense-focused warrior, or a Templar; a defensive warrior.

Mage: Another stereotypical class. Gee, I wonder what they do. These guys cast spells. Fire, ice, earth, whatever. They hit really hard with said spells, and can often dispose of enemies(monsters, that is), without ever having the monster come into contact with them. Mages can turn into sorcerers or spiritmasters. Spiritmasters are a pet class, they can summon pets, and still use their ranged missile spells. Sorcerers get no pets. Instead, they get highly devastating ranged spells.

Priest: Equipped with a bow and arrow, the priest lunges from the shadows to drive their twisted blades into their enemy’s throat. They then – what? They don’t do that? Alright, so priests are actually healers. They can choose either Cleric or Chanter as their secondary class. Clerics heal gooder, and Chanters buff gooder.

Scout: The scout can turn into a ranger or an assassin. Rangers attack with a bow, and assassins are melee DPS. There. Done.

So the classes aren’t very innovative on paper, but they’re done so well, you won’t really care that you’re the 5,000,000,000th cleric in the world.

II. Combat

Aion brings skill combos back into the equation. You won’t be arrow-mashing like you were in Age of Conan, though. Skills activate as soon as you press them; you don’t need to press up, up, left, down, left, start, abc, up, select in order to fire off your salvo. Let’s say you have “Skill 1″ and “Skill 2″, when you mouse over a spell or ability it will tell you what place it holds in a skillchain. Now, let’s say “Skill 1″ and “Skill 2″ are both in the same skillchain. Skillchains have a whole window dedicated to them, so you can memorize or reference how your spells are going to chain and what the effects will be. Additionally, we’re going to say “Skill 1″ is hotkeyed to the number “1″ on your keyboard. When you press “1″ to fire off “Skill 1,” the button for the next skill will show up on your screen. From there, you can either click the button, or press “1″ again to fire off “Skill 2.”

I’m a fan of how skillchains were done in Final Fantasy XI, and I wished that if a spiritmaster used “stereotypical spirit master ability #1″ that I, as a sorcerer, could use “stereotypical firey thing #2″ and we could create an effect together. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works; you create your skillchains by yourself. It’s still really well done, though. Get the skill chain right and you’ll trigger an effect. For example purposes, we’ll say “Skill 1″ and “Skill 2″ create a knockback effect. If both spells hit, you’ll knock your enemy back. Effects can also be seen on the skillchain window. Some effects will trigger every time you complete the skillchain, others will have a certain chance of success.

Finally, to wrap up the combat section, we’ll discuss something melee need to worry about. The game encourages movement during combat. They have implemented certain bonuses that are trigged by moving in a certain direction. For example, if you move left or right(strafing), you will see arrows pointing left and right under your character. It means you have triggered that directional bonus. In this specific case, that bonus is increased dodge rate. Pushing forward on your enemies will increase the amount of damage you do, and pulling back will increase your block rate. You must be holding down the button for the effect to remain active. If at any point in time you stand still, or move in a different direction, you’ll remove your directional bonus or receive a different one, respectively.

III. Flying

I know, I discussed the wings in my previous post, but didn’t really mention how to use them. It’s actually pretty simple. I’ll use the default keybindings to explain it(these can be changed). First of all, you’ll notice right away when you’re in an area where you can take off. You’ll see a green ring surrounding your “fly” button. To take off, press PageUp on your keyboard. You’ll be hovering just a few inches above ground, at this point. In order to increase your altitude you would press “R” on your keyboard. To decrease altitude, you would either slowly glide down using the Space bar, or pressing “F”. Once you’re close to the ground, you can land by pressing PageDown.

That’s all there really is to it. Note that you can glide everywhere, even in areas where you’re not allowed to take off and fly around.

IV. Happy Ending

That’s all there really is to the first 10-15 levels of Aion. Again, I wish I could’ve seen the Abyss, but the beta was only about 6 days long, and I’ve had a hectic work schedule recently. Nevertheless, most of these things apply to all levels past ten. You’ll be using skillchains and directional bonuses often. Obviously, you’ll be flying a lot, too. Needless to say, I’m still looking forward to this title and hope to play it with all my friends, and the people who have posted comments on my previous post(I made new friends!).

OK, fine there are no dancing gnomes in this post. Well just the one. Welcome to my end of the week recap. I will do a brief recap of what happened in Azeroth this week. WOW dropped a doozie of a patch this week with 3.1. In case you missed it, the patch notes are located here;
Patch Notes – http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=16403300172&sid=1

Major New Features – http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/ui.html
This patched added many new features, enhancements and of coarse nerfs to the game. For class specifics please click the links above to sort through the class changes. Let’s look at some of the more interesting items, determined by a very complicated algorithm run on a quantum computer power by irradiated gnomes.

First the new dungeon, secrets of Ulduar is finally here. Blizzard describes the dungeon as a prison intended to permanently confine the Old God of death, Yogg-Saron. This is a very difficult dungeon with very good rewards. In this dungeon you have the chance of acquiring a new legendary weapon named: the night elf hunter eradicator. Ok, fine it’s actually called Val’anyr-Hammer of the ancient kings. It’s a one handed mace with the stats currently unknown. The only know factor is the on-equip effect;

Val’anyr Hammer of the Ancient Kings- Equip effect – Your healing spells have a chance to cause Blessing of Ancient Kings for 15 seconds allowing your heals to shield the target absorbing damage equal to 15% of the amount healed.

The difficulty in obtaining the mace is that it will not drop from any boss. Players will be able to rebuild it through a quest line started by the Shattered fragments of Val’anyr. These are dropped by most of the bosses in Ulduar-25. You will need 30 Fragments to reforge the Hammer of Ancient Kings. So good luck.

The Argent Tournament is yet another cool feature Blizzard has added. The tournament adds a series of dailies which lead to very cool weapon, tabards, pets, banners, faction shirts, and even mount rewards. Here is the best part of the quests…wait for it…wait for it… Its solo friendly!!! Here are some of the pics from the weapons and the exclusive first ever image of the new Night Elf Hunter Multi-passenger Mount. Many Bothans died to get this information to me…wait wrong game. Here are the images enjoy;
A Forsaken Blade;

A Troll Gun;

Gnome Blade;

Dwarf Gun;

And Finally…..

New Night Elf Hunter Multi-Passenger Mount;

Sorry I just couldn’t resist.

Some of the other features implemented in this patch include; free talent respecs! Several talent trees have been redone so everybody gets this freebie. I will take my free talent respect and say thanks. We are now able to queue for battlegrounds from anywhere in the world, WarHammer style! This is a simple and yet much needed feature. It is much better to queue out in the field of battle, than having to run into city to queue up. When you’re done in the battleground you are transported back to where you where before the battle began. So you can continue to quest. Great feature and Good job!

Ammo changes for you hunters out there. All ammo now will stack to 1000. The haste bonus given to ammo pouches and quivers are now incorporated in the hunter’s auto attack. Basically hunters get a bag slot returned to them. Hunters can also call stabled pets once every 30 minutes from the field. The downside is you have to be 80. BOOO BOOO! This is a skill that should be available to all hunters regardless of level. I would think a leveling hunter would need this more than a level 80 with maxed leveled pets. Hopefully this might change in a future patch.

The final feature, hearthstones are now on a 30 minute cool down. This is awesome. I have my main character and some of my alt’s hearthstone set to Dalaran. So I can basically travel anywhere every 30 minutes.

This was a brief over view of the new content Blizzard has delivered. Everybody has been busy trying out the new stuff as well as updating all our add-ons. Have fun in Azeroth and as usually kill a few Night Elf Hunters for me.