As you may have noticed there is a slightly new look here. This is actually a cut and paste of the work of 3 different blogsters and I will be crediting them with links as soon as possible. Unfortunately I am sitting here freezing my ass off and I wont be doing it tonight.
Southern Armada has left Vanguard as you may have guessed. I still think its the best game no one ever played but, probably unsurprisingly, I feel deeply betrayed by both the game and its makers. I think the new guys have done really well to get VG to where it is and in 12-18 months its really going to be superb, but I wont be there.
Currently I'm in EVE, I'm playing a little bit of WoW. Oddly enough I'm really enjoying the current run through WoW. I have a regular group Sundays and Wednesdays and we are playing through the classic content and just taking our time with it. Its actually a lot of fun to not be blasting through content as fast as I can just to reach 'raid' level.
I have also been seriously looking at WAR the soon to be released Warhammer MMO from Mythic Entertainment. I have never been a big fan of PvP ever since the days of getting repeatedly ganked by 12 year olds in the early days of UO. Two reasons really, there has never been a game (apart from EVE and Lineage2) where PvP actually mattered. In most mainstream games, EQ, WoW are the two main ones I am thinking of, there is no real point to PvP. Its simply something that has been thrown in to keep a certain portion of the populace happy. WoW definitely has done PvP better than EQ ever did and EVE and L2 have proved that you can provide meaningful PvP in a mostly controlled fashion.
Now the chaps who are making WAR are the same people who really introduced structured PvP to MMO gaming. Mythic Entertainment built a little game called "Dark Age of Camelot" (still around by the way) which encouraged players to PvP in a structured way using an architecture which they called Realm vs Realm (RvR). The idea was that you would join a side and battle other sides for control of points throughout the world. Even in DAOC there was no early point to the RvR apart from the glory of owning a control point, little by little they added in reasons to fight with buffs and gear which could be gained from PvP in the world.
WAR uses the same RvR structure but has taken the lessons learned by Mythic as well as incorporating the Iron Grip(tm) that Games Workshop maintains over their IP and built a game where PvP and RvR matters, where every single thing that you do contributes in some fashion to the war effort and the 25 years of Warhammer history and backstory is honored. They have built a game where you are introduced to PvP right from the start instead of racing to the top levels and finding 'Oh now is when I start to PvP'. Its not out yet and the NDA hasn't lifted so all this is pure speculation, but from what I am seeing so far in the various public utterances of fans and Mythic is that the game is fun!.
WAR won IGN best game of E3 2008, Gamespy top ten game of E3 2008, Voodoo Extreme best game of E3 2008 so it seems like its not complete crap and what the devs are telling us is true.
The proof is of course, in the playing.
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