LeMU.waterbottle

龙年快乐！

I was won­der­ing whether I came out of closet–of being a fan­boy of Are­naNet.  Look­ing back to my last Guild Wars post, the answer is yes.  Oh and, in case you won­der, this post is about Guild Wars 2 release date! (True Story!)

We recently fin­ished our first closed beta test, and we’re now ready to hold pro­gres­sively larger events. In Feb­ru­ary we’ll invite select press to par­tic­i­pate in beta test­ing, and in March and April we’ll aggres­sively ramp up the size of our beta test events so that many of you will have a chance to par­tic­i­pate. And of course, this all leads to the release of Guild Wars 2 later this year.

Source: Are­naNet blog

Any­way, I’m pretty sure I won’t be part of the “select press” (read: var­i­ous MMO news/review sites), so I’ll bet my luck on March and April of 2012… to say “bet my luck” is accu­rate since this is not an announce­ment of an open beta.  It is cleared up in this thread on GW2 Guru forum by the devel­oper guy who wrote the post: the term “open beta” is pur­posely avoid as cur­rently Are­naNet are not arrang­ing a play ses­sion open for “any­body on the inter­webs”.  The spec­u­la­tion seems to be that there will be pre­view week­ends where the game opens up a selected area for a greater audi­ence to participate.

This of course does not mean there will be no open beta (in its con­tem­po­rary mean­ing) for GW2.  It is pos­si­ble the OB will come shortly before the game releases.

con­tinue reading…

Guild Wars is one of the rare online games that I main­tained a long-term, recur­ring rela­tion­ship with.  As my cur­rent iter­a­tion of obses­sion with this game com­ing to an end, I’d like to ded­i­cate a rave on how great this game is.

It’s awe­some. Try it if you haven’t already!

con­tinue reading…

My inter­est in Aion was always kept in a spe­cial place ever since I was still play­ing Lin­eage II, the first MMORPG I spent a sub­stan­tial amount of time on.  Much like Lin­eage II being a good look­ing game among its peers five years ago or so, Aion is one of the pret­ti­est game in today’s mar­ket.  Any­way, once I was bored and got my hands on an Aion pri­vate server… It wasn’t all that bad; so I bought the game’s boxed edi­tion on eBay and let it sit on my shelf until a few weeks ago.  Recent events and buzz around this game have finally given me enough moti­va­tion to try this game which has been accused of a grind­fest and con­tributed to the stereo­type of the “Korean grinder” genre.

A Bit of His­tory and Beyond… 

I don’t know why people’s obses­sion in search of a “WoW killer” game, but when they found out that Aion wasn’t “the one”, dis­sat­is­fac­tion ensued.  To be fair, though; yes the game is grindy, but it is no where near the level of grind Lin­eage II offers.  More impor­tantly than what peo­ple say about the game, sub­scrip­tion num­bers show that Aion has retained its pop­u­lar­ity in the inter­na­tional market.  The Drama of the Old revolv­ing its launch and “failed promises” ended in July: 33 servers in NA and EU have merged into 13 servers.  Although server merge is even­tual for the after-hype real­ity, it can also be viewed as a start of an new era that–hopefully is head­ing to a bet­ter future–once con­tro­ver­sies such as the char­ac­ter trans­fer and name change have sub­sided.

con­tinue reading…