Issue 95: The 2014 Winter Olympics are over. A big congrats to all the Olympians that received a medal this year. Congrats to Russia for winning the most medals this year, it’s pretty cool that they won the medal count when the Olympics were on their home soil. Congrats to Canada for winning the Hockey Gold Medal!! All right, enough with the Olympics, this is an MMO blog post for crying out loud!
I have a couple of World of Warcraft posts available this time. Mostly expansion related but there is a really cool transmog post I would encourage you to read if you’re interested. I found an interesting FFXIV post regarding its port to the PS4, plus some RIFT news. So now that we have all that Curling out of our system, lets check out whats happening in the MMO games. Enjoy!
Issue 94: Hello Gamers! I know the MMO Times has been missing all year but that is mostly the result of the site relocation efforts that were taking place over the past couple of months. I hope you all are still interested to read about what new things are coming up in the MMO genre and that you haven’t developed any bad habits of looking the news up yourself! I hope there won’t be any more interruptions for a while so I can keep bringing you the latest MMO headlines! So on with the show!
The latest news entails mostly details about Blizzard titles, including two upcoming titles (Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm). Bioware has some news for SWTOR players that they hope will spark more interest. There is also a possible new MMO title coming. Also, if you hadn’t heard yet, the official release date for Elder Scrolls Online is set for April 4th and the game is still sending out beta invites. I have not participated but I would be interested in hearing what your impressions are if you are in the beta.
Issue 93: Greetings Gamers! I hope everyone had a safe and happy Thanksgiving (for those that were celebrating it). Hopefully all of you have recovered from your tryptophan-induced comas. It’s not uncommon for me to be a week late around the major holidays so my apologies for a delayed post but my RL schedule didn’t really allow much research time over the past week. Be that as it may, here are some headlines that you may, or may not have missed.
This issue has some shocking World of Warcraft news (which you may already know about if you follow any WoW news). A preview of the upcoming SWTOR expansion, a new hero in Marvel Heroes, what Trion meant by “Trove” and much more. So if you’re waiting for a realm restart or your MMO-of-choice is performing maintenance today, perhaps the following articles will help to pass the time. Gobble, Gobble Gamers!
Issue 92: Sorry for the lengthy delay; between work, the website becoming compromised and various other IRL stuff I haven’t been able to post a recent MMO Times. The hidden benefit though is that now that Blizzcon is over you know there should be plenty to talk about *cough*garrisons*cough*. MMO-Champion is probably going to get a lot of love in this issue because they seem to have the best overview of all that came out of Blizzcon this year. Therefore, if you are curious about what is new with World of Warcraft then I would recommend reading the headlines/posts in this issue from MMO-Champion.
I didn’t just find articles about what Blizzard announced and revealed at Blizzcon so don’t go anywhere. There are plenty of other things happening to read about. In fact if you stick around you will see that a new event will be starting for Final Fantasy XIV players as well as the next iteration for Marvel Heroes (which provides some godly, and demi-godly, additions). Plus Trion teases players with some recent domain registration activity. Read on and game on, friends.
Blizzcon 2013 is this weekend (if you didn’t know). I didn’t get a virtual ticket this year, we have to save some money but the opening ceremonies are free to watch. If you watched it then you might not find anything in this post that you didn’t already know. It has been two years since the last BlizzCon so I know everyone is pretty excited about what they are announcing (even if you’re not playing WoW anymore).
Heroes of the Storm – The video introducing Dustin Browser was pretty cool. All the different heroes fighting each other. They showed some content of Heroes of the Storm. It pretty much looks like League of Legends with all the Blizzard heroes. Based on the glimpses of the videos you can play as Arthas (as the Lich King), Carrigan, Diablo, etc. I’m not much of a LoL fan but the game does look cool and I’m sure if you are a fan of both games then you’re going to really love this game.
HearthStone – Rob Pardo. Originally a stealth/experimental project at Blizzard. Despite how “geeky” a battle card game seemed to be, when they were playing the game internally they logged so many hours they decided that they must have something pretty good, and thus HearthStone was born. This is Blizzards first tablet game and there will be iPhone and Android versions (haha, no Windows Phone!). Honestly, I can actually see myself playing HearthStone on my tablet more then on my computer.
**Big News** Going into beta next month.
If you went to the show or ordered a virtual ticket then you will get a special Blizzcon card called the Elite Tauren Chieftain and when you play the card, yea, its pretty awesome! Adding golden player cards, like the golden cards, which are fully animated. It looks kind of cool.
World of WarCraft – Of course the illustrious Chris Metzen talked to us about the WoW expansion. We all kind of knew it was called Warlods of Draenor – Metzen predicated the announcement by talking a lot of origins. He called the Alliance the “Captain America Faction” … love it! It sounds like we might be fighting some pretty old school villians which will be kind of cool to see (some names Metzen through out were Gul’dan, Hellscream, Blackmoore, etc. So it’ll be interesting. After building up the Alliance and giving some love to the Horde, the next expansion video debuts:
Warlods of Draenor – It will contain a new zone called Draenor (kind of obvious) The video said you will be able to build and upgrade garrisons so that might mean some kind of player housing. I’m sure the details of garrisons will come out in future panels, I will have to watch some of the other live blogs to learn more. Obviously the new level cap is 100. All the existing character models are getting new looks and upgrades and, of course, new items and loots. You can see the video below:
Please feel free to share anything you saw and your thoughts, positive and negative.
Issue 91: Greetings Ghoulish Gamers! Halloween is just around the corner, do you have all your ghoulish plans ready to go? Perhaps your plans involve a little gaming while the kids are out getting their trick-or-treating on; or perhaps you have to man the door waiting for the arrival of this years lot of cosplay potentials? If sugar-seeking rugrats are keeping you from your favorite MMO, perhaps you will be able to check out these headlines (from your handy smart phone or tablet) while you wait.
There is an update coming to SWTOR that many players have been talking about since the games launch. There are also a couple of Blizzard announcements that pertain to more then just World of Warcraft. Some updates coming for FFXIV, Neverwinter’s first event, and other news. So eat some of that candy you’re handing out (you paid for it anyway) and read on! And try not to scare the kiddies!
Issue 95: The 2014 Winter Olympics are over. A big congrats to all the Olympians that received a medal this year. Congrats to Russia for winning the most medals this year, it’s pretty cool that they won the medal count when the Olympics were on their home soil. Congrats to Canada for winning the Hockey Gold Medal!! All right, enough with the Olympics, this is an MMO blog post for crying out loud!
Blizzcon 2013 is this weekend (if you didn’t know). I didn’t get a virtual ticket this year, we have to save some money but the opening ceremonies are free to watch. If you watched it then you might not find anything in this post that you didn’t already know. It has been two years since the last BlizzCon so I know everyone is pretty excited about what they are announcing (even if you’re not playing WoW anymore).