Posts by Colin Brennan at Massively

Age of Conan: Check out our Age of Conan page with all of our interviews, hands-ons, galleries and features! Player Consequences takes a look at whether the fugitive PvP consequence system is too harsh.

Lord of the Rings Online: Check out all the news on Book 14 and our guides on the basics of Monster Play, the new rare crafting trophies, and Hunter fast-travel. Plus, let us help find the perfect name for your dwarf or elf!

World of Warcraft: Check out all the news from the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational, including major WoW class changes. Rob Pardo reveals WoW was planned as free-to-play, and says not to hold your breath for a console version.

Massively Features: Find out why you should be playing Myst Online: Uru Live, check out our KingsIsle interview on Wizard101, and peep our first impressions of Requiem: Bloodymare and a video tour of Silkroad Online!

EVE Online: The Empyrean Age has arrived! Check out the wonderful world of alts, our new EVE Online Community Spotlight and The Basics of PVP Fitting.

Warhammer Online: Massively has gone to WAR: don't miss our interviews and hands-ons from EA Mythic's studios, plus our event wrap-up. Check out The Bastion Stair dungeon and our guide to WAR's Order careers!

Colin Brennan

Pittsburgh, PA - http://www.epiclootforall.com

Colin "Seraphina" Brennan has wasted more money on MMOs than most third-world countries possess in their entirety. She's touched almost every single game on the market, and has been playing MMOs since the MUD DragonRealms and the era of Mplayer's Underlight. When she's not stuck to a beta test or playing a new MMO, she's at the University of Pittsburgh finishing up her Psychology/English Writing degree. Sera's also been in the developer's chair, being the lead writer of two grassroots Alternate Reality Games.

Colin Brennan

Pittsburgh, PA - http://www.epiclootforall.com

The reasons why you need to play Myst Online: Uru Live

by Colin Brennan Jul 2nd 2008 at 5:00PM

Filed under: At a glance, Fantasy, Puzzle, Myst Online: URU Live, Culture, Opinion, Hands-on

Shorah, readers! Kehnehn rahm b'yihm shehm!

Myst Online: Uru Live seems to be one game that not only continually gets the proverbial shaft, but also knows how to come back from the dead better than the Scourge of the Eastern Plaguelands. Ubisoft canned it, Cyan Worlds brought it back via a shard system in "Until Uru", GameTap brought it back officially, GameTap canned it after one season, and now Cyan Worlds is once again attempting to put life back into their only online Myst game thanks to the extremely active and vocal community.

Mike Fahey over at Kotaku might think Uru should die already, but this blogger is currently squealing in glee in his computer chair. In an attempt to pass the glee on to you, loyal readers of Massively.com, I've compiled not only what Myst Online: Uru Live is all about, but why you should turn your attention to this massive online adventure game.

Continue reading The reasons why you need to play Myst Online: Uru Live

Tags: cyan, cyan-worlds, featured, gametap, joystiqfeatures, myst, myst-online, myst-online-uru-live, relaunch, ubisoft, until-uru, uru-live

And the winning Mog Bonanza numbers are...

by Colin Brennan Jul 1st 2008 at 3:00PM

Filed under: Fantasy, Final Fantasy XI, Contests, Events, in-game, Consoles

That's right Vana'diel adventurers, the numbers you've been waiting for are finally here! The mogs, under the strict supervision of Square-Enix, have drawn the winning numbers for the first ever Mog Bonanza lottery in Final Fantasy XI!

If you want to check the numbers, just log in and check out the message of the day that will appear for your server. If you miss it for some reason, you can always type in /smes into the control panel to see it again. It's important to check your marbles though, because you can only redeem your prizes until August 1st. If you have a winning marble, simply take it to your nearest Bonanza Moogle at a city port (Port Bastok, Port San d'Oria, Port Windurst) or the Chocobo Circuit and they'll redeem your marble for your prize!

The good gentlemen over at Pet Food Alpha have put together exactly how many winners there have been for your viewing pleasure. Over 837,000 marbles have won the rank 5 prize, Miratete's Memoirs, alone! That's a lot of marbles, kupo!

[Thanks, Fusionx!]

Tags: fantasy, ffxi, final-fantasy-xi, kupo, lottery, mog-bonanza, mogbonanza, square-enix

Anti-Aliased: Keep crying, sportsmanship is dead

by Colin Brennan Jun 29th 2008 at 3:30PM

Filed under: Culture, Opinion, Anti-Aliased

One harsh world PvP battle later, your corpse lies on the ground as your opponent stands triumphant over you. Both of you put up one good battle, as even your opponent is down to barely any hit points -- the kind of battle where a few randomly generated misses turned the tide of the engagement. Yet, what do you get for your efforts against this opponent? Do you get a /salute, or a /kneel? Maybe even the honor of a /bow? No, of course not, you get the /spit and an orcish teabag in your face just so the 12-year-old on the other side of the keyboard can get his daily jollies.

Of course, that's not counting the 7 more times he's going to camp your corpse just so you can't progress for the next 3 hours. And it's also not counting the ninja looters, the belligerent kids in battlegrounds who take orders from no one, and the lying little brats who spew language fit for a factory worker but cry to their parents the second you try to enforce some authority.

We have many ways of quantifying these behaviors; things like "If you can't stand PvP then go to a carebear (normal) server," "If you don't like it being done to you then do it to someone else," or "Get better gear, n00b." We all know what's going on here, and it's none of the above. Let's just say it aloud and come clean about it: Sportsmanship is dead, and it's been dead for a long time.

Continue reading Anti-Aliased: Keep crying, sportsmanship is dead

Tags: age-of-conan, alliance, aoc, blizzard, ccp, city-of-heroes, coh, culture, eve, eve-online, everquest, featured, ffxi, final-fantasy-xi, funcom, horde, japanese, joystiqfeatures, ncsoft, opinion, pve, pvp, soe, sony-online-entertainment, sportsmanship, square-enix, world-of-warcraft, wow

Anti-Aliased: Fourth Edition and the Kamehameha Fallacy

by Colin Brennan Jun 19th 2008 at 10:00AM

Filed under: Culture, Opinion, Anti-Aliased

I've wanted to do a post on Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition for a while now, but I just couldn't put my finger on what I wanted to talk about with it. The rules are very much made in the vein of World of Warcraft -- you can tell that by just opening up the book, going to the classes and seeing all of the various powers that you can obtain by leveling -- and the whole system feels a bit more MMO-ish than normal. The funny part is, if you're expecting a "D&D Fourth Edition blows" rant, you're not going to get one.

Instead, let me entertain your opinions on the way we design our MMOs. This column is dedicated to something I like to call the "Kamehameha Fallacy," otherwise lovingly known as the "Mine's Bigger!!!!!11one" syndrome. This fallacy is the reason you're addicted to MMOs, the reason you hate Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition, and the reason today's MMO leader (World of Warcraft) is doomed to fail all wrapped up into one little ball.

Continue reading Anti-Aliased: Fourth Edition and the Kamehameha Fallacy

Tags: anti-aliased, blizzard, ccp, dm, dnd, dragonball-z, dragonballz, dungeon-master, dungeons-and-dragons, eve, eve-online, everquest, featured, fourth-edition, grind, joystiqfeatures, kamehameha, kamehameha-fallacy, sandbox, soe, storyteller, tier-6, tier-7, world-of-warcraft, wotlk, wow, wrath-of-the-lich-king

Sci-Fi releases the genre for their new MMO

by Colin Brennan Jun 16th 2008 at 8:30PM

Filed under: Sci-fi, Interviews, New titles, News items

Recently we've reported on a partnership between Trion World Network and SCI FI channel to create a new MMO that will be tied into a SCI FI show. But, for all we knew about the new project, we didn't know what genre it would fall under or what the setting would be.

That all changed in an interview from Ten Ton Hammer with Adam Stotsky, the executive vice-president of SCI FI channel, about the new SCI FI project. While most of the interview focuses on the partnership between Trion and SCI FI, Cody "Micajah" Bye was able to pull out the setting for the new project from Stotsky.

Stotsky confirms that the project will be science fiction in nature, centering around Earth in an alternate universe.

"It will be a very different Earth than the one we currently know today," Stotsky told Bye during the interview.

For the rest of the interview, drop by Ten Ton Hammer and check it out.

Tags: new-mmo, sci-fi, sci-fi-channel, sci-fi-project, stotsky, ten-ton-hammer, trion, trion-world-network

Fan-made Vanguard trailer has community talking excitedly

by Colin Brennan Jun 16th 2008 at 7:30PM

Filed under: Fantasy, Trailers, Video, Vanguard, Machinima

It's no secret that Vanguard: Saga of Heroes is a gorgeous game, we've given it very worthy spots in One Shots many times in the past few weeks. But every once in a while, someone's able to capture a game in a light that makes already amazing graphics become even better. And that is certainly the case with this Vanguard user-made trailer that's been sweeping forums.

The trailer shows off the main draws to Vanguard, such as the large open world, access to many fantastic mounts, ships, and other travel methods, and the epically large dungeons with equally epic monsters to destroy. The trailer is apparently so good at what it does, Silius, the lead game designer, even congratulated the makers on a video well done.

Go ahead and click on the link below to jump to the land beyond the break and watch the trailer for yourself!

[Thanks Ricky!]

Continue reading Fan-made Vanguard trailer has community talking excitedly

Tags: faeran, fan-made, fan-made-videos, machinima, silius, soe, trailer, unoffical, vanguard, vanguard-saga-of-heroes, vgwalkthroughs.com

"Free-To-Play" model pulls in a dollar per user in the west

by Colin Brennan Jun 16th 2008 at 4:00PM

Filed under: Business models, News items, Free-to-play, Casual, Virtual worlds

One dollar per user per month may not sound like a huge revenue for any game, but when you start thinking in the terms of the user base of games like Habbo Hotel, Club Penguin and RuneScape you start to realize how much a dollar is really worth.

Lightspeed, a venture capital firm, recently did a few calculations to come up with the figures of how much revenue is generated by a single user in today's most successful free-to-play, microtransaction supported MMOs. What they came up with is a pretty interesting look at how much a "successful" MMO will make. For example, Habbo Hotel pulls in around $1.30 on average for each of their active users per month, while RuneScape pulls in 84 cents per active user per month.

The one figure that stood out from the pack was Second Life, which pulled in 9 dollars per user per month thanks to things like land ownership and the premium subscription that land owners have to buy to be able to own property. Even with Second Life in the mix, it's interesting to see that these types of MMOs don't make much per user, yet still can pull in great amounts of revenue by entertaining huge player bases.

[Via Kotaku]

Tags: club-penguin, disney, economy, free-to-play, habbo-hotel, jagex, kotaku, lightspeed, linden-lab, microtransaction, runescape, second-life, sl, subscription-based

Get your "Crowd Control" badge from PMOG!

by Colin Brennan Jun 16th 2008 at 3:00PM

Filed under: News items, Free-to-play, Browser, Casual, PMOG

We've been covering the different happenings with the Passively Multiplayer Online Game for a while now, but for a change of pace, it seems that PMOG has covered us by giving us the honor of our own badge!

If you're a PMOG player and an active Massively.com reader, then don't miss your chance to get the "Crowd Control" badge for visiting Massively.com! Simply visit Massively for five days a week for two weeks with your PMOG toolbar enabled, and you'll have your new badge before you can spin around five times and say "I love achievements". Your new Massively.com badge will be displayed proudly along side your other badges, telling everyone who plays PMOG exactly where your allegiances lie.

In addition to our badge, many more badges have been added to PMOG, including the 'Thumb Buster" badge for our parent site, Joystiq. Be sure to check out all the new badges by dropping by PMOG and creating an account.

Tags: achievements, badges, breaking, crowd-control, gamelayers, joystiq.com, massively.com, pmog, thumb-buster

Anti-Aliased: It will all be fine in ten minutes

by Colin Brennan Jun 11th 2008 at 4:30PM

Filed under: Fantasy, Asheron's Call, Events, in-game, Game mechanics, Endgame, Opinion, Anti-Aliased

Back in the day when a 500 Mhz processor was fast, we were lulled into these weird online universes with multitudes of golden tongued promises. "Play online with thousands of others!", "Make a hero and save detailed and vast worlds!", and, my favorite, "Live in an persistent universe where your actions will have long lasting effects!"

Certainly, two of those promises have come true. Our worlds are traveled by thousands upon thousands of users daily, and the characters we have created are truly the stuff of legends who have saved these vast worlds countless times. But the one thing that has still eluded us all this time... persistence.

The funny thing is, it's not because we can't program or realize persistence in our games. We have the technology and expertise to do that just fine. We don't have persistence because persistence isn't profitable.

Continue reading Anti-Aliased: It will all be fine in ten minutes

Tags: ac, asherons-call, blizzard, dynamic-content, dynamic-worlds, epic, events, featured, features, histories, history, joystiqfeatures, lore, marketing, massively-multiplayer, persistence, player-involvement, profit, static-content, turbine, world-of-warcraft, wow

Wii need innovative MMOs

by Colin Brennan Jun 8th 2008 at 9:00PM

Filed under: World of Warcraft, Fantasy, Age of Conan, Culture, Game mechanics, News items, Opinion, Casual

Let's get honest for a second here -- every MMO that seems to come out nowadays is the same game with a new paint job and one game design feature expressed above the rest. Currently, that game is Age of Conan, where larger breasts and the real-time combat system got the spotlight in this round of game making.

If game designers keep this up, we're going to watch the market dwindle as new gamers become jaded with new games just repeating the same content they've already been through over and over again. What we're looking for is an MMO that can break open the market like World of Warcraft did when it launched.

According to Earnest Cavalli at Wired, the Wii is the holy grail that MMO developers should chase after; a veritable icon of how to bring the market to a wider audience than just testosterone pumped adolescents.

Continue reading Wii need innovative MMOs

Tags: age-of-conan, aoc, blizzard, funcom, game-mechanics, innovation, opinion, wii, wired, wired.com, world-of-warcraft, wow

Disclaimer: Faction grinding is not actually fun

by Colin Brennan Jun 8th 2008 at 7:00PM

Filed under: World of Warcraft, Fantasy, Game mechanics, Endgame, Opinion

Faction grinding may be a bore, but it is a necessary evil in games like World of Warcraft. As much as you may not like sitting around an area and killing the same creatures over, and over, and over again for items, you may be doing just that once you hit the level cap and have nothing better to do. All of a sudden, that faction grind is looking mighty tempting.

Kaliope heard through the grapevine that Blizzard might be considering a new method of achieving faction points. One of the possible ideas mentioned: letting faction unlocks occur on an server level rather than on a per-character basis. Instead of doing the grind with every single one of your characters on a server, only your main would have to grind all the way up to exalted. Then, all of your characters on that server could claim the benefits of having the exalted level.

Obviously this would mean some angry customers and more high-end items hitting the market, so the idea isn't perfect. But there's an interesting discussion going on at Kaliope's blog about how to ease the grind so it actually can become fun, rather than a slow and painful gameplay element.

Tags: blizzard, faction-grind, faction-recipes, faction-reputation, grind, rep-grind, reputation, world-of-warcraft, wow

Tabula Rasa goes AWOL from Q1 NCSoft financial reports

by Colin Brennan Jun 6th 2008 at 9:00AM

Filed under: Sci-fi, MMO industry, Tabula Rasa, MMOFPS

When the financial reports for the Q1 performance of NCSoft hit the Massively offices, fingers were quickly pressed to pages with one intent -- finding out what was going on with Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa. Already this year, we've heard dour reports on the status of the game, which were then rebuked by NCSoft, but those reports still planted seeds of doubt. Our hope was that the financial numbers could shed some light on what was happening with the game and perhaps reveal the game's direction. Was the game going uphill, or was it careening toward Auto Assault's junkyard?

But finding financial information about Tabula Rasa was like trying to track down Deep Throat. In the whole of the Q1 financial reports, TR appears twice. Even when most of NCSoft's major properties are listed and statistics are given, TR does not get mentioned.

But where Tabula Rasa does briefly appear, things do not look good at all.

Continue reading Tabula Rasa goes AWOL from Q1 NCSoft financial reports

Tags: featured, financial-report, jae-ho, joystiqfeatures, lee-jae-ho, nc-austin, ncsoft, q1-financial-reports, tabula-rasa, tr

Entropia Universe bidding war leads to $12,000 payout for newbie

by Colin Brennan Jun 5th 2008 at 4:00PM

Filed under: Sci-fi, Entropia Universe, Events, in-game, News items, Virtual worlds

How would you like to wake up and find that you made $12,000 overnight? Seems like a dream, doesn't it? How would you like to have that $12,000 come from a single drop you found one day while farming in your favorite MMO? Now it seems even more like a dream.

But this is the reality for Timon "Stuka" Miles, a relatively new player to Entropia Universe, the game where the fictional currency is linked to real world money, akin to Second Life. Stuka's fortune stems from a piece of DNA from the extinct "Letomie" monster -- an item that can resurrect the creature if all of it's DNA fragments are found inside of the game. After a brief placement on the Entropia Universe forums, Stuka moved the auction to the official in-game auction house where it attracted the attention of Zachurm "Deathifier" Emegen, owner of the 26,000 real world dollar Treasure Island, and Jon "NEVERDIE" Jacobs, owner of the 100,000 real world dollar space station.

Continue reading Entropia Universe bidding war leads to $12,000 payout for newbie

Tags: bid-war, deathifier, economy, entropia-universe, letomie, mindark, neverdie, PED, project-entropia, stuka

The Daily Grind: How do you feel about Living Legacy?

by Colin Brennan Jun 5th 2008 at 8:00AM

Filed under: Fantasy, EverQuest, EverQuest II, Events, in-game, Opinion, The Daily Grind

The word on the blogosphere right now is that current subscribers are not happy with Sony Online Entertainment's Living Legacy marketing campaign. While former subscribers and trial account users are getting many perks to come back to EverQuest, many current subscribers are feeling a bit snubbed.

Living Legacy is certainly offering a multitude of events and other exciting opportunities for current users, but the general feeling is that these offerings don't come close to what former subscribers are getting. What we here at Massively want to know is how do, the current subscriber of EverQuest or EverQuest II feel? Is Living Legacy pleasing you with what it currently has, or do you want the campaign to give back more to those who have been with EQ?

Tags: eq, eq2, everquest, everquest-2, living-legacy, SOE, sony-online-entertainment, the-daily-grind

Anti-Aliased: There's other people there too, ya know.

by Colin Brennan Jun 4th 2008 at 10:00AM

Filed under: Culture, Opinion, Anti-Aliased

I'll be blunt -- I hate grouping. Nothing pains me more than grouping up with four of the "internet's finest" and going into a dungeon to kill some monsters. 95% of the time, it seems I'm doomed to find 4chan (NSFW) rejects or screaming 10-year-old kids (NSFW). Of course, these are the parties that take an hour and a half to assemble and only last two rooms into the dungeon. Someone inevitably screws up and gets six mobs on them, and then they instantly turn around and blame the priest for "not being able to heal properly". Of course they don't actually say "not being able to heal properly"; it comes out more like "u suck n00b priest".

Continue reading Anti-Aliased: There's other people there too, ya know.

Tags: anti-aliased, blizzard, community, featured, ffxi, final-fantasy-xi, fun, joystiqfeatures, monolith, multiplayer, mxo, playonline, soe, square-enix, the-matrix-online, world-of-warcraft, wow

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