Lens on Friday Quickies

I'm going to try something new for Fridays, touching on some of the items in the news in bullet form.  Aaaaand we're off!

GUILD WARS 2 STRESS TESTS--One yesterday and another today.  The Thursday stress test consisted of an hour of us stressing out their infrastructure team by hammering their network into submission.  Lots of explosions in their NOC and gigas of bits spilling onto the floor.  Quite the mess I'm sure.

With an evening stress test tonight (For you East Coasters) their numbers should be even higher...and if need be, more stressful.

A couple of my guildies got their first shot at GW2 Thursday and it met with universal "Me likey!"

Two weeks to go!

WORLD OF WARCRAFT LOSES 1 MILLION PLAYERS...AND THEN GETS HACKED--Well with GW2 coming up and months to go for Mists of Pandaria, it's hardly surprising you'd see some churn and so WoW has lost 1 million subs in the last quarter.  That's a pretty big chunk for 3 months.  We'll see how big of a bump they get from MoP and how big a hit from GW2.  To my mind, WoW can see its end-of-life on the horizon.  By "end-of-life" I mean that the U.S. Mint will stop printing them money, not that the game will go away.  I wonder when we get more info on Titan...

And then Thursday, they announce that they'd discovered a system penetration to battle.net on the 4th.  Account names, security questions, encrypted password files, mobile authenticator database all compromised.  After the many fails in D3 I must say...those clown shoes Blizz bought are fitting very nicely!

Another major game company with great credentials has failed the basics.  None of that information, NONE, should be in a position where it can be compromised in that fashion.  And until they tell us precisely the nature of how (spearphishing, malware, sql injection, etc.), I'm going to assume "sheer incompetance" and trust them zero.

How does it feel to be put in the same category with Sony Online Entertainment, Blizzard?

VANGUARD GOES F2P--Speaking of SOE...hey, how 'bout that free Vanguard!  Actually, Vanguard isn't a bad game at all.  It's got some quite nice game systems.  Combat is very conventional for the most part (straight out of the mold of its antecedant EverQuest), but it has two other ways to advance, crafting and diplomacy.  Crafting has its own sort of mini-game, and diplomacy has a mini-game similar in certain ways to a CCG.  Both are kind of nifty and the game is certainly worth a look at the starting investment price of $0.

ELECTRONIC ARTS SUES ZYNGA--This is how much I loathe Zynga...Go EA!!!  What next...cheering for Bobby Kotick?  I'm not a big fan of all the lawsuitery going around, with every hardware maker suing each other and the software giants acting like monkees flinging their excrement at each other.  But in this case...please burn Zynga to the ground.

How blatant is their theft (in my not-so-humble opinion)?  Zynga's Sims-alike game has 8 different skin tones to choose from, same as EA's Sims.  And all 8 have exactly the same RGB values.  The odds of that?  About one in 1.56 x 10^53.  That's a whole lotta of zeroes.

Let's hope that EA extracts a dollar amount with a whole lotta zeroes out of Zynga.

LAYOFFS AT EN MASSE--This kind of thing is always a bit depressing, but not in this case overly surprising.  I never thought that TERA, a pretty MMO with engaging action-based combat and little else, would win a significant and lasting player-base.  That sort of game-play is more popular with the console crowd than the MMO crowd, and so TERA had an uphill battle to fight.  And the ludicrous clothing options did a marvelous job of projecting "this is a port of a Korean MMO" vibe to further disincentivize the Western MMO audience.

Not to mention the presence of the "12 year-old slut bunny" race, as a friend put it.

Let's hope those affected find new gigs soon.

"STAR TREK: INFINITE SPACE" MMO CANCELLED--It was hardly a big-name project, but it had the Star Trek license and that was reason for some hope that it would see the light of day.  It's another sign of the cruel world MMO developers live in at present.  With big money games (TERA, SW:TOR) seeing layoffs over the last few months, big and small games failing to launch (Copernicus from 38 Systems and ST:IS here), it's a very uncertain time.

Again, good luck to those who were working on this project.

STEAM GOES NON-GAME--It seems like kind of a non-game story..."Yeah, so Steam is going to start selling other software other than games.  So it's going to be like the PC app store?"  All of a sudden, the light goes on!

Holy crap could that be a license (Hah!, software humor!) to print money.  You thought Valve made money off games...imagine if they made money off everything!  Look what Apple does with the App Store on the iPad and iPhone.

No wonder Gabe Newell isn't a big fan of Windows 8 and their version of an app store.

The funny thing is...I'd trust Valve to handle that sort of complicated process in a streamlined and effective fashion more than I'd trust Microsoft to handle Minesweeper.

Of course, I've never used Microsoft's 360 Live service, so I can't make a cogent comparison between the two...not that'll I'll let a little thing like "knowledge" get in the way of my slagging on Microsoft!

"LORD OF THE RINGS ONLINE", SAY HELLO TO MR. ANVIL AND MR. HAMMER!--Guild Wars 2 officially launches on August 28th.  Less than one month later, on September 25th "Mists of Pandaria" launches.  And LotRO's new expansion drops right smack dab in the middle on September 5th.

Good luck with that, Lord of the Rings Online!

Yes people have been wanting Rohan and mounted combat for a long time, but your commerce-driven design, with increasing costs for content and more pay-to-win goodies on the store are driving away your long time loyalists, leading so many of us to say...

"With Guild Wars 2 and MoP coming out...LotRO, screw you and the mounted combat you rode in on!"

FASA REDUX PART ONE: MECHWARRIOR ONLINE--Once upon a time there was a game company (not computer game, board game and paper-and-pencil role-playing game!) called FASA.  It initially stood for "Freedonian Aeronautics and Space Administration" (look up the Marx brothers you cultural illiterates!) but came to stand for, more generally, some really, really good game IPs.

One of those fine fanboy-loved properties was the Battletech boardgames and the Mechwarrior RPG.  In time, there were a lot of computer games (some meh, some very good) based on the Mechwarrior universe.

And after years of absence, we're getting a new Internetty MechWarrior, in "MechWarrior Online".

Superficially, it looks to be about what you'd expect...big honking robot blasting the crap out of each other with missiles, lasers, and auto-cannons.

What's not to love about that?

It seems that they are looking at a model somewhat similar to the very successful "World of Tanks", which I have downloaded, but not yet played.  I have a bunch of guildies playing the hell out of WoT though, and they loves it longtime.

It doesn't really fall into the MMO category by most standard definitions (15 players per side on a fight to the finish, no persistant world [yet, although the makers have talked about adding world control with the announced but not yet shipped "World of Warplanes" and "World of Warships"]) but it does have a number of the elements.

As I wrote about a few columns ago, the definition of an MMO is getting a lot more blurred these days.

Regardless, MWO looks like it may be heapin' buckets o' fun, especially for the old fanboys.

FASA REDUX PART TWO: TWO SHADOWRUN GAMES--And this would be the other immensely popular, fanboy-infested FASA property, Shadowrun.  Think "cyberpunk smooshed up with the return of magic into the world".  Yep, William Gibson meets J. R. R. Tolkien.  Johnny Mnemonic meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

They cranked out LOTS of quality material to support the old RPG.  There were even a few Shadowrun computer games, from some pretty good console games (Sega Genesis and SNES I think) to a tragi-comically awful FPS from Microsoft that crapped all over the much-beloved IP.

Seriously...people, we geeks LOVE the stuff we love, treat it with respect.  Microsoft, we won't buy it when you mess with Shadowrun.  Ang Lee, we won't go see your Hulk movie when it has a hulkpoodle in it.

So, rant complete, there are two new games coming for the Shadowrun fans, both via Kickstarter.  One is being overseen by Jordan Weisman who created Shadowrun in the first place.  "Shadowrun Returns" is going to be a single-player game for tablets and PCs.

And the other, perhaps overly ambitious entry, is a browser-based MMO, "Shadowrun Online".  They don't have the inherent pulling power that Weisman has to the old-school fanboys (and their Kickstarter dollars), so they have a harder row to hoe.

Both games look interesting, and I'm hopeful that both can succeed and lead to more projects.  I've always felt that Shadowrun was fertile ground for an MMO.  Perhaps at last we'll see!

UNTIL NEXT TIME--I think this new Friday format worked...at least for me.  I hope we get enough news every week!