In this article, you're able to see an adorable companion pet, whose name is Sea Pony, and it is surounded by a bubble. You can catch it from the Darkmoon Island waters by fishing
Ignited Games' 2D, side-scrolling, multi-player, online role-playing game WindSlayer 2 is now in open beta testing. To celebrate the OBT, Ignited Games is hosting several in-game events.
Most of the Aion fans would have read alot about the mega update coming to the Korea server in a week's time. The update, Version 3.0, is called Promised Land, and true to its motif, added tons of promised features and game content.
Not only does Eligium's surprisingly wide range of features offer a new gaming experience, but it also makes the game significantly more customisable and flexible than conventional MMOs.
The stunning free-to-play MMORPG, Eudemons Online just launched an expansion in June, bringing the new Vampire class into Eudemons world. The new terror has just uncovered, and again, there will be another exciting new expansion released this year, Trumpet of the Legionnaire! This new expansion will be officially released in December.
It has been a long time since we last heard some news about Guild Wars 2. What's the state of Guild Wars 2? What is ArenaNet busy working on recently? All you can find in the new update post written by Game Designer Jon Peters who gives us an inside look at several aspects of gameplay, including the new Engineer toolkit system, the redesign of Ranger pets and the cool cross-profession combos.
Actually, alongside high freedom and awesome graphics, ArcheAge also has good combat. Many melee moves and spell casting animations appear in the video, either the flying crabs or tree monsters is impressive.
The Darkmoon Faire is offering outdated armor sets. Vendors Barum and Baruma sell replica armor sets -- these items don't have any stats, but you can buy them for Transmogrification purposes. Currently, only dungeon set one and dungeon set two models are available to choose from, but perhaps we'll see other models added to the vendors' inventory one day.
We've created a truly high-quality AAA title with World of Tanks already wildly successful in Russia and in the West," said Wargaming.net CEO Victor Kislyi. "Now we are looking forward to promoting our product on the mature and competitive Korean market.
MGAME USA, the owner of Netgame.com, recently made public a new dragon-based fantasy MMORPG Rise of Dragonian Era Online which is set to go global soon. Originally name War of Dragon in Korea, R.O.D.E Online set in a world where tribes around the world have allied with the great dragons Firean and Azurian to fight against the dark dragon Devilo and each other. During game play, NPCs may not always act as players' helper.
The Darkmoon Faire is getting a complete revamp in the upcoming patch 4.3 of Cataclysm, giving the Faire its own island secretly hidden away within the mists. The old ticket system from the Faire of last year is being replaced by new quests, new games to play for tickets.
Sad news for LEGO Universe fans. Right after the shut down news of Troy Online, the LEGO Group has also announced that LEGO Universe, which has been in operation since the autumn of 2010, will shut down on January 31st, 2012.
I really love how much dedication was given into Blade & Soul cosmetics especially the Costume Designs. We all know that it is only one aspect of the game that we should look forward to most likely in the late game.
The impact of flooding in Thailand on PC inventories going into the holiday has been widely reported, but an obvious connection we've been missing has been raised by the New York Times, and it's an important one. According to interviews conducted by Nick Bilton, cloud computing could grind to a halt early next year as storage prices skyrocket, and supply reaches historic lows. Flooding in the region has shuttered more than 1,000 factories, including several which are responsible for pumping out a significant percentage of the world's mechanical hard drives.
"You really can't grow and expand the Internet without the expansion of storage hard drives," explained John Monroe, research vice president at Gartner. "There are an awful a lot of ramifying impacts that are being incompletely considered here." Google and Facebook are noted by Monroe as examples of companies that consume an immense amount of data, and the cost of storing it could become exponentially more expensive in the coming months.
It is estimated by analysts that hard drive manufacturers will ship 50 million fewer drives than usual over the next two quarters, and Seagate has suggested it might be even higher. "By the first quarter of next year, all worldwide inventories of hard drives will be sucked dry," Monroe warned. "This is a crisis of escalating dimension for many I.T. revenue streams." Monroe said that the impact from the flooding are yet to be felt across the industry.
You could argue that PC makers should transition more aggressively to SSD's for storage, even though these prices will likely also spike due to increased demand, but datacenters don't have that luxury. Backup plants in the Philippines, Malaysia, and China won't be much help either. Almost every facility surveyed is already operating at 90% capacity or more.
Gigabyte lead the initial charge with early support for boot drivers bigger than 2.2TB, but while others worked on fixing this with UEFI implementations, they instead kept plugging away on the bios. The company claimed to be using a "HybridEFI", but let's be clear here. HybridEFI is a marketing term; it actually has nothing to do with EFI as we know it. When asked about the obvious oversight, Gigabyte claimed they wanted to do it right, and we finally have a chance to see what they have in mind.
The company has released a short 3 minute video showing off its new glasses free 3D Bios, demonstrated on a board equipped 3D power. This description suggests the marketing folks over at Gigabyte are still alive and well, just in case you were worried. Silly made up buzzwords aside, the concepts shown are somewhat interesting, and we certainly can't fault them for not being original. Users for example can hover over components on the board to learn more about them, and even left click to access specific configuration settings for the highlighted component. To expand on this a bit, clicking on the SATA ports would allow you to configure a RAID setup, while clicking on the CPU brings up overclocking options.
The UEFI shown will debut on its upcoming X79 boards using Intel's Patsburg chipset, and is expected to release within the next few months. Gigabyte will also to offer a "non-3D" version of the UEFI it is calling "advanced mode", which it claims will be more suitable for power users. From the looks of it most power users could probably make do with the 3D interface alone, but we have always been big fans of choice.
Gigabyte may be late to the party, but based on the video, it's an impressive first showing.
Google's ex-CEO turned executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, was on Capital Hill recently to defend his company against anti-competitive allegations, and the details are finally beginning to trickle out. We wouldn't begin to consider ourselves qualified to pass judgment on the charges, though we can say that some of the statements made in his company's defense might be a bit of a stretch.
When asked to explain why Google should not be characterized as a monopoly despite its "overwhelmingly dominate" position, Schmidt claims they were blessed with "good luck". "I am confident that Google competes vigorously with a broad range of companies that go well beyond just Microsoft's Bing and Yahoo, and that Google has none of the characteristics that I associate with market power." He went on to claim that in just two years, Bing has reached the size of Google in 2007.
The partial transcript reveals similar responses with regards to Android, search engine optimizations, and the controversy surrounding the possible misuse of content from Yelp. The theme Schmidt seems to be establishing is a resounding "not guilty". Opponents seemed content to hear him out, but when given the opportunity to respond they seemed pretty unconvinced. "Unfortunately, Eric Schmidt's answers avoid answering the key questions while continuing to deny facts that are becoming obvious to early everyone else," American Consumer Institute president Steve Pociask said in a statement. Schmidt's "responses today are in keeping with Google's 'trust us' attitude and disdain for anyone who dares question Google's motives and practices," said Ben Hammer, a spokesman for the FairSearch.org coalition
Google has always claimed that competition is just one mouse click away, and though that may be true, you could also make the argument that the barrier to entry from a technical stand point is at an all-time high. To beat Google the competition not only needs to be twice as good as the established brand, but it needs to hit a moving target. Google has literally thousands of engineers working to improve the service, some of the brightest minds of our time, and an almost bottomless pit of resources to pump into R&D.
Investigators have a difficult task ahead of them, and the stakes are high. Where do you fall on the issue?
The supply of AOL free trial CD's at your local grocery store may have dried up long ago, though believe it or not, the service itself is still going relatively strong. According to the company's most recent earnings release, AOL still has over 3.5 million subscribers to its dialup internet service, and the decline seems to be slowing. Q3 represented the company's smallest decline yet, even though the company lost just over 630,000 subscribers over the past 12 months.
Want another amazing statistic? According to AOL the average paid tenure of its subscribers is up to a whopping 10.6 years. This would suggest that the company's remaining subscribers are either fiercely loyal, or many simply haven't checked their credit card statements recently. Either way it's a strong reminder that our governments need to work harder to provide proper broadband to all at reasonable prices.
Weekly MMO News summary for the week ended November 6 (Oct 31 – Nov 6). A quick look and discussion for every major announcement and update during the week! This week we discussed updates from the following games: Mechwarrior Online, Lego Universe Online, Cosmicbreak, Mabinogi, World of Tanks, Perfect World, Avalon Heroes, Tribes: ascend, Project Blackout, Ace Online, Brawl Busters, and DC Universe Online. Mechwarrior Online looks particularly awesome, but it’s still nearly a year away from release. You can view all the individual news articles mention over at the MMOHut.com News section.
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Welcome to this week's Global Chat! We love hearing what you have to say at Massively, and we love it even more when we can share the best comments with all of our readers. Massively staffers will be contributing some of their favorite comments every week, so keep an eye out every Sunday for more Global Chat!
Global Chat this week touches on some of our most reliable hot topics: free-to-play and game design. Business models, as well as how games are created and whom they're created for, are always good for discussion, so follow along after the jump to see what a few of our readers had to say.
They lurk in the dark corners of every MMO, sometimes farming gold, sometimes just taking care of tasks that actual players feel are too tedious to bother with. Bots have been a part of the MMO sphere for years now, and while games like RuneScape have recently brought them back to the foreground of attention, nothing has ever managed to push them completely out of the limelight. If you play an MMO, you have to work around them.
Development teams, of course, regard bots as fundamental problems, and usually a great deal of time is devoted to trying to quash bots for farming or repetitive tasks. But do you feel enough is done to try and stop them? Do you believe they're a result of game systems that are designed for too much grind and not enough fun? Or do you think they're just another face of cheating and deserve no special attention?
Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Massively Speaking Episode 172 returns this week as Shawn and Rubi purge their inboxes to read (almost) every remaining email from the last two weeks. That's right, it's an entire show of reading email! We laugh; we cry; we mention Tabula Rasa. Or, at least Shawn does.
Have a comment for the podcasters? Shoot an email to shawn@massively.com. We may just read your email on the air! Get the podcast: [iTunes] Subscribe to Massively Speaking directly in iTunes. [RSS] Add Massively Speaking to your RSS aggregator. [MP3] Download the MP3 directly. Listen here on the page:
Read below the cut for the full show notes.
Massively Speaking is the official podcast of Massively.com. Hosted by Editor-in-Chief Shawn Schuster and Community Manager Rubi Bayer, Massively Speaking takes on the week's biggest news and dev interviews with plenty of opinion, rants, and laughs thrown in for good measure. Join us every Wednesday afternoon to listen in and see what we'll say next!
The march to the level cap in Final Fantasy XIV is nothing like that of its predecessor, but it's still an undertaking. The fact of the matter is that leveling shouldn't have taken me nearly as long as it did. The game has been out for over a year, after all. But between my usual inability to pick a class and stick with it, natural disasters, and various other circumstances, it was only a couple of weeks ago that I finally hit level 50 on my Gladiator.
Receiving the full red cobalt set a level earlier did mean that the level was a bit anticlimactic at the end, but it all balances out.
But now that I'm here at max level, I can look back on the path as a whole and have a different perspective on several parts of the game's structure, both the good and the bad. Especially since it's the first time around that really matters.
Aion fans rejoice! The near-mythical 3.0 update is coming to Korea inside of a week (which means it's a few months removed from the American servers, of course). If the new Korean trailer is any indication, though, it should be well worth the wait.
The four-minute clip takes us inside the Promised Land patch's player housing mechanics, not to mention six new instanced areas and a variety of open world locales. You can also glimpse the patch's assorted air and ground mounts. We reported on some early looks at the 3.0 content last month, but the new trailer is even more extensive. Head past the cut to view it in full, and then mosey over to MMO Culture for a few new screenshots.
You can say a lot of things about EverQuest II's past year, but I'm sure everyone will agree that it's been memorable. A year ago, I had just begun my turn at the helm of this column, and it seems like the game is in a similar position now as it was back then, with a lot accomplished but even more unanswered questions. For a look back at the first six years, be sure to check out my retrospective column from last year. In this week's Tattered Notebook, we'll play catch up and look back at the past year in EverQuest II and the events that shaped the game.
I honestly have no idea how many quests we're up to in Lord of the Rings Online at this point. Thousands, for sure. And as with many other facets in life, 90% of these quests are fated to be unmemorable tasks that blur together with all the rest. However, I've always felt that LotROhas a decently high cool quest-to-forgettable chore ratio, at least compared to other MMOs.
What makes a memorable quest? Here's my litmus test: When I sat down first thing in the morning, all bleary-eyed, to write this article, these quests bubbled up to the forefront of my mind. They've "stuck," for lack of a more precise term, in my head. They've made an impression, and because of that I feel they're among the cream of the crop in LotRO's repertoire.
For today's Road to Mordor, I'm going to simply list the first 10 most memorable quests that came to me. I actually was going to just do six, but couldn't stop myself there; I could barely halt at 10, if that gives you an indication. These might not be your most favorite quests or even the best in the game, but they've been the ones that have stuck with me through thick and thin.'
Warning: Past this point thar be spoilers! Beware!
Steampunk continues to be a source of fascination for both game geeks and game developers, and the latest example of the phenomenon in MMO circles is a new title called City of Steam.
An interview at Light Speed Gaming spills the beans on the browser-based title, which is being developed by a Chinese firm called Mechanist Games. If you've ever wanted to play a mechanical dwarf, or explore a world that is literally a giant machine, City of Steam may be your game. The setting is borrowed from a series of RPG books and incorporates all the elements of fantastical steampunk (plus a few novel twists) that fans of the genre have come to expect.
"The world itself is a giant machine, and is, in fact flat. The elemental planes aren't found by mystical methods -- you can literally walk across the teeth of the world to reach them. The sun and stars are actually tethered to the world, orbiting as gyroscopic pieces of the superstructure of existence," according to the designers. Head to Light Speed Gaming for more on the setting and the game mechanics, and don't forget to view the video embed after the break.
For the past several months, Trion Worlds and Massively have been bringing you installments of Drowning in Snow, a special fiction piece for RIFT following two Defiants as they trek across frozen tundra on a rescue mission. We've waited a bit longer than normal since the last chapter, and it's been a wait made all the worse because the last chapter ended on quite a cliffhanger, implying that Uriel and Kira had a traitor to contend with.
The wait for the next part is over as of today, however, and we can promise you that this installment will indeed answer the question of who the traitor is. But it might very well not be who you had expected. Take a look past the cut for the fifth chapter of Drowning in Snow, and keep your eyes open for the next installment.
The title "Super Mario 3D Land" might be a bit misleading; sure, the game stars Mario, exists on a platform capable of displaying 3D graphics, and presumably features land of some sort, but this new portable adventure in The Mushroom Kingdom really doesn't have much in common with the Land-branded titles of the past. 3D Land is still in capable hands, though, with the talented folks of Nintendo EAD Tokyo heading up development -- specifically, the uber-talented team behind the Super Mario Galaxy series. Those who've demoed the game at trade shows can tell you Mario's newest portable outing stands as a tightly-designed mashup of his greatest moments over the past 25 years, with some new elements thrown in to take advantage of the hardware.
Despite 3D Land's apparent quality, one important element implied by its title seems to be missing: the balls-out game-changing weirdness of Nintendo Research & Development 1 -- now known as SPD Group No. 1 -- the in-house development studio responsible for Super Mario Land, Wario Land, WarioWare, Rhythm Heaven, and many other Nintendo classics. While their games didn't take an explicitly revolutionary tack from the very beginning, subverting expectations eventually became the studio's M.O., all thanks to the creative minds of directors like Hiroji Kiyotuke (Super Mario Land 2 and 3), Takehiko Hosokawa (Wario Land 2 and 3), and Hirofumi Matsuoka (Wario Land 4 and the original WarioWare.
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Wargaming.net announces their presence at the G-Star 2011 exhibition, the largest game show in Asia, taking place at BEXCO in Busan, Korea, from November 10 to November 13.
To Learn More about the game check out ourS4 LeaguePage.
S4 League is a fast paced 3D Sci-fi themed MMO shooter published by Alaplaya – the same company behind Avalon Heroes, Land of Chaos Online, Florensia, Audition Online, Argo Online, Fantasy Tennis, Forsakia and numerous other F2P titles. The game is brightly colored and is one of the most unique MMO shooters out there. Gameplay wise S4 League plays a lot like GunZ from ijji. This is yet another gameplay video for S4 League. I found myself playing the game earlier and decided I might as well record! To learn more about S4 League check out the official MMOHut S4 League page which includes a detailed review, tons of screenshots, and additional videos.
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The impact of flooding in Thailand on PC inventories going into the holiday has been widely reported, but an obvious connection we've been missing has been raised by the New York Times, and it's an important one. According to 
Gigabyte lead the initial charge with early support for boot drivers bigger than 2.2TB, but while others worked on fixing this with UEFI implementations, they instead kept plugging away on the bios. The company claimed to be using a "HybridEFI", but let's be clear here. HybridEFI is a marketing term; it actually has nothing to do with EFI as we know it. When asked about the obvious oversight, Gigabyte claimed they wanted to do it right, and we finally have a chance to 
The supply of AOL 
Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's 
