Posted by Spooner | 1 Comment

Nov. 9th 2009 – For the Lore tonight! Pre-show starts at 6:45 EST

Tune in tonight at 6:30PM EST for the pre-show and enjoy our For the Lore Podcast. We do this every Monday and the show itself is available for download on Wednesdays (typically) via iTunes.

Today we’re going over the Star Trek and Star Wars MMORPGS. We’ll talk a bit about WoW and Dragon Age Originas as well as the ending to Borderlands.

Finally the round out the show’s live broadcast is a big round table debate, which really means lots of cursing and nerd raging, about Aion.

Now for some links!

THE SHOW PAGE

THE LIVE BROADCAST

A PICTURE OF MY DOG

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Posted by Spooner | 16 Comments

This just in! Hard modes are Hard

Welcome to hard mode 25man Iron Council:

That about sums it up, thanks for reading.

There really isn’t much left to say but for those that miss the point entirely I’ll spell it out plain and simple. The World of Warcraft has evolved into an MMO that caters to all walks of life. For better or worse we’re stuck with a game that panders to the mainstream audience, not so much gamers. Gamers as a sub-culture have been growing up, and ultimately the target audience has changed. In the end, one can surmise that WoW’s learning curve has dropped off to nothing short of elementary, however.

There’s very little in the way of punishment or truly unimaginative grind sessions (and don’t lie to yourself reader, WoW is an MMO and all MMOs essentially revolve around grinding as the core mechanic. If it isn’t XP or PvP honor points or Arena points or quests or raids or GEAR which WoW is fucking infamous for) which makes the game addictive enough yet open and very non-intimidating.

Possibly the very last bastion of this game that truley feels like a challenge would be the hard mode content and even that isn’t immune to the cries of the average player looking to get his slice of the pie and demanding that yet again, the game change to fit his needs. Its a little too utopian to think that everybody is going to be viable. But all the same if Blizzard wants hard modes to be where gamers go for their challenges, they succeeded.

For now, I see WoW as a game that has no idea whether its coming or going, and I can’t ascertain the direction it will take in the next expansion. Personally, it’ll either be the breath of life this game so desperately needs or the death knell of an amazing MMO.

Either way it’s a good thing because as this game will eventually rot and die, the land will be fertile and ready for Blizzard’s new MMO that will hopefully have learned from the mistakes of Wrath.

This all went downhill when Morhaime left development to work with the new MMO.

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