Today the Guild Wars 2 Stress Test took place, where Are­naNet was sup­pos­edly test­ing server sta­bil­ity in prepa­ra­tion for the sec­ond Beta Week­end Event. This was some­thing that made me really stressed out, and for one sim­ple rea­son: I had to work!

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Are­naNet just announced they achieved the 500k Likes mark on Face­book on their Guild Wars 2 page, and released the final image they promised. But sur­prise, this time it’s not a con­cept art. The image above, ladies and gen­tle­man, is a freak­ing screenshot.

So if you hear any­one say that Guild Wars 2 doesn’t look good, feel free to point them to this image and say loudly and proud “you don’t have a clue what you’re talk­ing about”.

Con­grat­u­la­tions to the Are­naNet team for the achievement.

So yes­ter­day I got my hands on a beta key for the new action RPG from Runic Games, Torch­light 2 (thanks to Still­wa­ter for the link). Hav­ing played the first game of the series for a good 60 hours and enjoy­ing every minute of it, I’m really look­ing for­ward to this game, spe­cially now that I would be able to play it coop with my sig­nif­i­cant other and my friends. Both me and Mrs. K reg­is­tered our keys, down­loaded the installer, and installed the launcher.

Now this is where things got ugly. Both of us had prob­lems, but she man­aged to get the instal­la­tion to work after a few attempts. I, how­ever… did not. The launcher sim­ply doesn’t launch. I click on it, I can see the process open on Task Man­ager, but after 20 sec­onds or so it closes with­out even a hint of “why”. I have tried this over and over since yes­ter­day, and it sim­ply refuses to actu­ally open the launcher to down­load the game. Read more →

I have mixed feel­ings about this. In one hand, I really, really want to play this game. Every sin­gle video released of it makes me go “OH YEAH!! Gimme some of that!” It looks beau­ti­ful, it seems to play amaz­ing, it’s just concentrated fun.

On the other hand… I don’t want other games get­ting in the way of my Guild Wars 2 future extended weekends.

Source: Kotaku

Can you make a MMO feel like a sand­box with­out actu­ally being one?

On my ear­lier post on Elder Scrolls Online I men­tioned how it could have designed with dynamic events sim­i­lar to those on Guild Wars 2 to give play­ers more free­dom to play how­ever they want, but how much free­dom would that be? Read more →

Elder Scrolls to me means total free­dom. Means walk­ing for a whole hour in a straight line and be sure that the only limit to what I can explore is my skill. It means hav­ing lev­els as a way to mea­sure the state of your char­ac­ter devel­op­ment, not where in the world you’re allowed to go. It means cre­at­ing a blank slate char­ac­ter, and lev­el­ing by “doing it”, not by choos­ing a class at the begin­ning and the choos­ing skills on a window.

Recre­at­ing the free­dom Elder Scrolls play­ers expect within the World of Warcraft-style mechan­ics Zen­i­max Online is using for this MMO would be impos­si­ble with­out chang­ing the way that play­ers inter­act with the world. (…) The Elder Scrolls Online aims to allow play­ers to enjoy what­ever piques their inter­est, so long as you are appro­pri­ately lev­eled. (…) Zen­i­max declined to share details on indi­vid­ual classes, though the stu­dio con­firmed that the game is class-based instead of using the free-form char­ac­ter pro­gres­sion of Skyrim.

Source: Imgur

That, I believe, is not what Elders Scrolls means. Read more →