MMO News Reactions 5
318 words.
A series of short reactions to the week’s MMORPG stories, otherwise known as “just about giving up on blogging” because I can’t be bothered to write long posts lately.
Sorry about last week’s post. I was scrolling through Twitter last Friday and much to my own surprise I found that I’d posted something to my blog without even looking at it or setting a header image or anything. This time I will refrain from scheduling this to post right after creating the draft!_
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Camelot Unchained to announce beta date. An announcement to announce an upcoming announcement… funny stuff. The beta date will have been released by the time this post publishes, but I’m not going to include it just to be spiteful. It’s unlikely I will be playing the beta anyway. I’m curious to see the game but it’s obviously not a game meant for people like me, who don’t want other people to be the main content in their games.
Ashes of Creation released some alpha gameplay video. My first draft of this post had a whole lot more negative words here, but I’m editing it way down to just this: I didn’t think the game looked very good, and I’m shocked that they released that video. (I watched it with the sound off, so that the streamers’ enthusiasm wouldn’t influence me-take that, influencers!)
Project Gorgon will only be playable through Steam. Bummer. Still waiting to hear the price.
Hawaii congressman talks about regulating loot boxes. This news seems to be generating some excitement in the blogosphere. My reaction is as before. It’s either a) feel-good legislation that has no impact (labels, which puts the enforcement burden on parents, where it should already be), or b) unenforceable laws that have no impact (can’t sell loot boxes to minors-publishers will simply add an “are you over 21?” checkbox to the purchase page to absolve themselves of liability).
Archived Comments
bhagpuss 2018-02-16T19:40:40Z
I’m curious what you thought was so bad about the Ashes of Creation footage. I thought it looked pretty good. Not as good as Pantheon’s pre-alpha or alpha or whatever they’re calling it, which looks perfectly ready to play right now, but pretty good all the same.
The best part for me was that you can very clearly see the mouse pointer being used in some of the shots. I saw the pov player target a mob with the mouse and the mob’s nameplate appeared and at one point I am 99% sure you can see him/her trigger an ability/attack from the hotbar with the muse pointer. This suggests AoC has traditional MMO controls, something I was not sure about before from previous video.
That is the single most important factor to me. If AoC has hotbars and a free mouse pointer as an option rather than mandatory action-rpg controls, there is a better than even chance it will be my next MMO home because it means Mrs Bhagpuss will not only try it (she has tried previous MMos with action gaming controls like ESO or BD) but if she likes it she will go on playing it. I can play either kind but I hugely prefer the traditional controls.
That said, I’d still rather move to Pantheon as my next “full time” MMO home but now it looks like a question of which (if either) gets to the starting post first.
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