Any of you folks going to be in our fine city this year?

It's in Boston right?

 

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Yup. The guys from Trion (Rift) are going to be throwing a party one night that weekend, think I might go.

I avoid Boston like the plague, I was just there less then a week ago.


Good get some good intel. I recommend spiking their drinks and getting our accounts for free <3


I'm still impartial with Rift. I found a great exp exploit last night with level 14 mobs that die in 2 hits on my Pyromancer / Necro / Lock char near Sanctuary.. so I've been camping there grinding them non stop now for 4 levels hehe. I plan to hit them for a while till I milk that area dry and exp starts to dwindle.


The pvp is... eh... for me so far.. I hope to encounter better things in open field.. as I'm honestly NOT a fan of the bg's.


Take lots of pics please!

 

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So what can you report, chooch? Did you get to play Guild Wars 2 or The Old Republic?

 

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I watched people play both, but didn't play either myself. I don't usually go to PAX for the exhibition floor, I go for the panels, tabletop gaming, hanging out in console lounges playing games, etc. The lines to play hot new games are 2-3 hrs long most of the time, and it's not really how I want to spend my day.

I saw a few stage demos showing off SW:TOR, the world is huge and (obviously) looks and feels just like the source material. They showed Hoth and Tatooine. From everything I heard at the show the gameplay is standard mmo faire, plays like WoW or any other MMO to come out in the last few years. Lots of energy was put into the story mechanics as you'd guess from any BioWare game. (read: dialogue wheels).

GW2 I only saw at the Alienware booth running on some of their high end laptops. I don't think they had their own booth there. Graphically I didn't think it looked that impressive, at least not nearly as impressive as the trailers made it feel. Maybe that was the laptops not being cranked to full? Not sure. The solo PvE combat looked cool, the monsters I saw some dude fighting were huge compared to the player character. The UI and quest dialog was kind of ugly, actually.

I went to the MMORPG.com panel w/ reps from BioWare (SW: TOR), Trion (Rift), ArenaNet (GW2), 38 Studios (their game is early in development, codenamed Copernicus, it's Curt Schillings company), Turbine (LOTRO + DDO), and Bluehole (TERA).

That was kind of interesting, and also frustrating. Mostly they were talking about the future of MMO gaming, but sometimes I wanted to be like WTF are you all thinking. Curt Schilling said in the panel "PvP and PvE cannot coexist in an MMO without one or the other feeling tacked on." That was crappy, because lots of MMO's have done it over the last 10 years. The GW2 guy replied with "that's not true, you just have to split the game types up" - and went on to explain their insta-cap-level-pvp-characters system similar to GW1.

Lots of praise from every company rep about the super smooth launch of Rift, which was really cool.