Welcome to today’s Bookahneer’s Geekwatch! The place about LotRO, Guild Wars 2 and any other interesting news related to gaming.
First things first: As the readers of our blog will have noticed by now, Turbine has/had a security issue with their forums. Changing of your password is recommended. I have written about the problem in my previous entry.
I don’t have the source right now (Lotro forums are down) but one Turbine member said that they are working on a bug fix patch which will come soon (as in: Before Update 5 in December). Hopefully, we’ll finally get the last quest in Trum Dreng. ;) What will be in there wasn’t said. Only that there will be one. Let’s hope it’ll be fast.
Also, the fall festival will start soon… probably this week (Monday or Tuesday even?).
Guild Wars 2 will be at Paris Games Week which is starting on October 21 (and ends on October 25). Maybe they’ll announce something new then? At least, it’s been really quiet since GamesCom and PAX ended. On the other hand, we did get lots of news then and maybe there just isn’t much more to announce right now (except, hopefully, the last class! ^^). Anyway, the game’s demo will be playable there!
And the last bit for today is Fallen Earth which went “free to play” a few days ago. I’d looked forward to trying it when I first heard about it becoming f2p and so far, I’ve had lots of fun. Of course, I haven’t actually played much yet. ;) The bad thing first: It doesn’t seem like they expected that many people to check out the game as the server’s having a few hiccups. If that’s something that annoys you, then I’d suggest waiting a few more days before you give the game a try. It’s definitely different than the usual fantasy MMOs I’ve played recently (first of all: It’s not fantasy but post-apocalyptic or something like that). It reminds me a little bit of Star Wars Galaxies and I’ve seen this comparison in the chat more often. If people asked me, I’d guess it’s somewhere between a sandbox and a themepark game. At least, it doesn’t have classes. You spend skill points on skills that you want to use (and on attributes!) and you can make a crafter class that focuses on crafting and not on combat. Also, the best gear etc. is apparently crafted and not something you get from a raid. There is PvP in pre-defined zones, so if you don’t care about PvP at all, then you won’t have to do that. Combat isn’t done by tab-targetting. You have to “aim” with your cursor (done in third person or first person, depending on what you prefer). The graphics look a bit outdated but I found the game to be charming nonetheless. Although it certainly doesn’t look like the game’s only 2 years old.
If you want to download the game, make sure to click on “direct download”! The GamersFirst-launcher will install Pando Media Booster (and, like in other games as well – Lotro, LOL,… – the user isn’t noticed about this) which will make your internet connection very slow. At least, it always does this for me and I hate that. So I prefer to stay free of that programme on my PC. No hassle then. Syp posted some tips for beginners when the game first released. I’d assume that quite some of those tips are still helpful. They were for me, at least. ;)
Gamefluke.com has the matrix which shows you what you get for free and what you have to pay for. The $10 subscription is apparently the “regular subscription” that existed before they switched to f2p. So the two more expensive ones are basically “extras” and on top of what existed before the switch.