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Spooncraft does FFXIV: Combat

I won’t lie, I’ve been skeptical but interested for a long time now about FFXIV. My first MMORPG ever was FFXI Online and even though that was the epitome of terrible time sink, it worked. The game played well enough if you didn’t know any better. The story is incredible if not completely inaccessible behind a lot of the game mechanics such as level caps, horrible quests and missions, and more grinding than sex addicts therapy mixer.

Recently there’s been a massive explosion of content on the game on the official NA and JP websites. I’ve partnered up with Samodean from Massive Nerd as well as Joe and Roger from the FTL podcast and we’re putting together a special show next week all about this unique contender in the MMO ring. Consider this post the culmination of a lot of research trying to make sure all the facts are collected in one single spot.

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APB interview with Kitkat & Deum

Well holy shit. I’m finding it pretty hard to find a coherent way of saying this but I’ll try. On Monday the 18th (basically after this coming weekend) I along with joe and Roger from our For the Lore podcast will be interviewing Lead Creative Designer Stephen “Kitkat” Hewitt and Community Manager Chris “Deum” Collins from Realtime Worlds and the upcoming game APB. APB is essentially the most anticipated game to be released in 2010 and if you haven’t yet looked into it, what the fuck are you waiting for?

I’ll give you the best description of the game as possible since it happens to encompass pretty much the most awesome bits of everything we’ve ever played.

It’s a semi-sandboxed persistant world like GTA 4 (and spearheaded by the man who created the original Grand Theft Auto and started this whole thing), but plays as a 3rd person shooter with leveling and different weapons and upgrades but no stats or “gear” so no MMORPG treadmill like the gear grinder games but there’s different factions and extreme PvP with customizeable player owned cars on the level of the Need 4 Speed games with a character creator that makes Aion and Sims 3 look like a fucking joke and it also streams Last.fm coming with 100 songs at ship and you can jack in your own music libraries and customize the music so enemy players can hear what you play for them for example when you kill them.

One sec need to catch my breath. So in short, this game is going to bring the balls back to the MMO.

The game takes place in a modern-day, fictional city where there is a constant battle between “Enforcement” and “Criminals”, and the player will need to decide to which Faction they want to belong. The two sides battle out for control of the city, with territory within the city being contested continually 24 hours a day, so that players must concern themselves with both offensive and defensive moves.

Other activities involving missions within the game allowing the player to earn extra money, which then can be used to upgrade weapons, vehicles, and their character appearances, all that influence the game itself. For example, several Criminal players may rob a convenience store within the game; the game will then seek out one or more Law Enforcement players of equivalent skills and other criteria, and will issue an all-points bulletin for them to stop the robbery.

APB also claims it will be the first Massively multiplayer online game title where the player’s skill determines the character’s progression, as opposed to the normal model of time investment.

At GDC 2009 it was announced that Vivox would be providing voice chat for the game, the software allows players to customize the voice of their characters with voice fronts, and also to communicate using 3D positional audio.

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For the Lore: Last Show of 2009 Tomorrow…

We do our show on Monday nights but because of the holidays, we’re doing the final show of the year tomorrow Wednesday December 30th and it’s kicking off at 8:30 PM EST.

Tonight’s show is our Best of the Decade offering where we go back to the cream of the crop for the past 10 years (which have been mega for the gaming industry). So come and join us and disagree with our selections or laugh as I get ripped into as that is the ongoing theme since episode 1.

Check us out for the live recording here at our U-Stream Page!

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For the Lore “Best of” Show tonight!

Everybody else is doing it so we figured why the hell not, let’s look back at the year of 2009 and converse (rip into) about all the (shitty) games that we’ve played this year!

Odds are we’ll be taking callers to the show as well and you know how downright entertaining (clusterfuck) that gets (since its usually Roger fapping or something) with our awesome audience! But seriously, come on by the chatroom this evening and join us as we revisit the games that made 2009 survivable and less of an economic downturn shit-storm. As always you can find us Monday nights at 6:45PM EST on our-

USTREAM PAGE

Or just subscribe via iTunes and follow directly here on Spooncraft.com or at Forthelore.com!

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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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