The Cataclysm

There’s been a bit of speculation around the blog community lately about the upcoming Blizzcon and the next WoW expansion. I thought I’d take some time and talk about what I expect the new WoW expansion to bring to the game.

Level Increase

Nothing special here, the level cap will go up ten levels once again. There will be new achievements for being the first person of your race/class to hit the new level cap.

New Professions

I think there will be another new profession. Just kind of a safe bet here, they’ve added a new profession with each expansion. What will the new profession be? That’s tough to say. I’ve wracked my brain on this point, and I just can’t think of any new professions to be added based on the current game content. I’m sure Blizzard will come up with some new profession that I can’t think up.

New Races and Classes

So we’ve heard that supposedly it’s official that Worgen’s will be a part of the Alliance and Goblins will be part of the Horde. This seems odd to me. I could see Goblins being part of either faction, but Worgen’s as part of the Alliance faction? That just doesn’t really seem logical… Then again they pulled blue spacegoats out of nowhere for BC! To be honest though I kind of have a hard time believing this will be the case until Blizz confirms it.

I don’t think they will introduce any new classes. There’s already 10 classes in WoW and each one has 3 specs. In a way there are really 30 classes in the game, and Blizz is already having a hard enough time balancing the existing classes. I think the best thing for the game from a balance standpoint would be to not introduce any new classes, and I think Blizzard knows this.

Content

I think it’s pretty much given at this point that the new expansion will be set in the Maelstrom. I don’t know enough about the lore and history of the maelstrom to speculate on what kind of heroes or villains might show up there.

I think they will introduce a couple new maps for the Arena, and at least one new battleground. I thnk that the new battleground system that they have been discussing will appear with this expansion also rather than with the 3.3 patch.

Release Date

I’m going to call a july 2010 release date!

I wonder if i’m anywhere close on any of these points? Guess we’ll find out in the coming weeks!

Aion Cinematic Intro

The folks over at NC Soft have now produced a cinematic intro video for their upcoming title Aion! The video is very well done! The excitement level for this game continues to escalate! I’ve also included the opening cut scenes for both Asomdian and Elyos if you haven’t seen them yet! I hate to say it, but I think the Elyos opening is much better than the Asmodian opening! =(

Filling the Gap : Results

Here are the results from the poll I included with the my Filling the Gap post where I asked – What game should I play the trial for? Age of Conan got out to an early lead, but once Warhammer passed it, it maintained the lead. Sadly City of Heroes and Vanguard each got no votes – poor lonely MMOs!

So I will be playing the Warhammer trial soon, and I’ll let you guys know what I think!

Tweet Tweet!

I’ve been hearing about this tiwtter thing more and more lately. It seems that you can scarecly go anywhere on the web these days without finding twitter links. So today I decided to try and do a little more digging into what twitter is really all about. I found an article called The MMO Gamers Guide to Twitter which was fairly helpful and gives some nice links for gamers who use twitter, but after an hour or so of digging  I’m still not really sure that I understand the phenomenon that is twitter.. BUT I decided to give it a try anyway! So you can now follow me on twitter! I’ve also added the twitter widget to my sidebar which will show the most recent tweets!

About Me!

So nothing major today, just wanted to let everyone know that I’ve finally got around to updating my about page and have added a contact page! Links included here, and can be found on the navigation bar at the top of the page!

I’ll add more contact information later… If I ever get with the times…

I still have no idea what this newfangled “twitter” thing is all about!  >_<

What’s in a Name?

Some good news for those who were stressing about the excessive limit to guild names in Aion. Ayase has announced that they will be increasing the character limit for the western version of the game! Here is the quote:

I don’t know if this is something we’ll be able to get in there for the next event or at launch, but there will be a substantial increase of length for legion names.

As for character names, I’m unsure, there will definitely be convention alterations, but I’ll let it remain unsaid whether or not the maximum length will be changed.

Now Ayase says he doesn’t know if this will be implemented in time for launch, but I certainly hope so as I know this will affect many guilds out there!

The bit about character names is also interesting. He says there will be convention alterations. Hopefully that means that there will be no more capital letters in the middles of peoples names, or people with every other letter capitalized, and lets not forget people with numbers in their name!(the last item i’ve only heard of and haven’t witnessed myself, so not entirely sure on the accuracy of that bit) I am very happy to hear about this! It’s bad enough to see 20 people running around with various spellings of Legolas and Arthas without seeing a bunch morons named LeGoLaS or Arthas285…

Horde or Alliance?

Who says you have to choose? Blizzard doesn’t! At least not anymore. An announcement today from Blizzard revealed that players are now able to create both Horde and Alliance characters on the same PvP server. This is in preparation for their new service which will allow players to pay a fee to change factions.

You have to wonder though – what kind of impact will this have on the game? One thing is sure the next time you decide you want to do some world pvp and you kill someone a few times, you can rest assured that in short order they will be popping up on a level one character to tell you how bad you are. They’ll tell you if you would only fight “fair” they would surely beat you! I mean gosh you’re just so bad you can only kill them because you cheat! They were fighting a mob when you attacked them! You’re such a meanie!

Champion for Life?

Failgate London?

Well Champions Online seems to be getting everyone worked up lately! Check out what Keen and Graev, Bio Break, and Player vs Developer had to say about Cryptic offering lifetime subscriptions for $199 and 6 month discounted subscriptions for $59.99…

The catch? You have to do it before the game comes out. That’s right before you get a chance to play the game, before you get a chance to judge if you enjoy the game, like the community, or any other number of factors that go into deciding if you wanna stick with a game or not. This seems really shady, and reeks of desperation. Why take this offer off the table after people play the game? It should be an option for AT LEAST a month after the game is released, but 3 months seems more reasonable personally. Also the price seems a little steep. I think I might be more willing to go for a lifetime subscription to a game if it were priced more around $150 range.

When it Rains, it Pours

If you look closely you can see where a hole was burned through the middle of the fan!

Things have been going downhill for me recently. I don’t think it’ll come as a shock to anyone when I say our economy is firmly in the toilet. My work has been hit by it and thus my hours at work have been drastically cut back(I’m only working 15 hours this week). So I’ve been searching for a second job recently. Of course in this bad economy more companies are letting people go than are bringing in new people. To top it off as I sit down to play the Aion beta this weekend I find that my video card has pretty much fried.

I guess the fan on the video card quit for whatever reason, and the card over heated causing the fan to melt! As you can imagine this means I was unable to get anything done that I was hoping for during this weekends beta! I’m not sure, but I think the computer is out of warranty now. I need to dig up the paper work. If I’m right though, I’m pretty well screwed. With the hard times at work right now, there’s no way I can afford a new video card anytime soon. Which leaves me doing all of my internet activities on my laptop. My laptop runs WoW just fine, but Aion? We’ll see next Beta weekend…

/crosses fingers

Flag Counter

I found this flag counter website on Wilhelm’s blog The Ancient Gaming Noob. Although I get the tiniest fraction of the traffic that he does, I still thought it was a really neat thing and had to get one for myself! It’s quite exciting to think that people all over the world could potentially be seeing my blog! So check out the new flag counter in the sidebar. =)