Endgame

Pyramids aren't just for ancient pharaohs or Mayans. In Allods Online, a pyramid is the site of one of the game's newest dungeons coming out with the upcoming Lords of Destiny expansion. Of course, this pyramid is also covered in magical runes and filled with the sort of enemies that require a strong level 55 raid to defeat, but isn't that always the way? Pyramids never wind up being summer bungalows for retirees.

All joking aside, the Pyramid is a construction of the ancient Tep, a necromancer who studied the essence of life itself and tried to capture it inside of his stronghold. His work led to the origin of the Arisen, but he still waits within his stronghold as a vengeful shade intent on harvesting more life. Allods Online players can find more information on the dungeon layout and bosses in the full rundown on the official site.

The Oscars were given out two nights ago. Celebrities, actors, and film crews dressed in their red-carpet best to be handed a 13.5-inch golden statue of a naked bald man. As I heard these writers and directors give thanks to various loved-ones and talent agencies, I thought about Star Wars: The Old Republic. (Sad. I know.) SWTOR contains some of the best writing and storytelling in all of MMOs. In my opinion, it's better than some of movies represented on that stage. Sure, it didn't impact the world like Zero Dark Thirty, but it did impact my world, and I'd like to recognize some of the best parts of this MMORPG.

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Blizzard revealed this week that Diablo III will be coming to both the PlayStation 3 and Sony's new PlayStation 4 console and will be shown off at PAX. Torchlight II developer Runic Games announced that the game will soon be localised to Japanese and Chinese for its upcoming release in Asia; a free DLC is on the way with three new Asian-themed pets. Path of Exile revealed the schedule for its first full season of ladder-style race events and announced new account security options along with its new policy to never restore items from hacked accounts.

League of Legends unveiled its new champion duo, Quinn and Valor, a dynamic pair of characters that work together as a single champion to dominate teamfights. Heroes of Newerth revealed its own new hero with a video spotlight on Saloman, a melee support hero who gains power from movement and can heal and shield his allies.

Dota 2 added a new Hero Build feature to its beta this week, giving players access to community-produced skill and item builds for all heroes. Console MOBA Guardians of Middle-Earth showed off its new goblin DLC character Snaga, and online FPS Blacklight: Retribution detailed its upcoming Onslaught expansion, which comes with three new game modes.

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We've known for a while that the first digital expansion for Star Wars: The Old Republic will be releasing in the spring. Those waiting eagerly for Rise of the Hutt Cartel won't have too much longer to wait, it seems, as the expansion has been put up for testing on the game's public test server. This build includes gear, operations, and flashpoints for characters at the new level cap of 55, as well as the extra abilities and skills you'd expect from an extra five levels.

Notably not included is all of the content from Makeb that would allow players to actually reach level 55, which necessitates the addition of a special NPC to boost player levels and allow corresponding equipment unlocks. Still, if you're looking to take your main characters for a test drive in the post-expansion world, head over to the public test server and start seeing what changes with five more levels under your belt. And even if you'd rather wait for the release, this round of testing means the expansion can't be too far off.

While MMO characters typically fall into specialised tank, healer, and damage-dealing roles, most ships in EVE Online are a combination of all three. Fitting a ship for PvP is a careful balancing act between survivability and damage, as it doesn't matter how much damage you can deal if you don't stay alive long enough to apply it. Active tanking setups that focus on repairing damage have unfortunately seen very limited use in PvP, being effective only in solo fights and very small-scale gang warfare. In most fights, a passive buffer tank that just maximises effective hitpoints will last longer than any active setup.

The Inferno expansion helped to solve this problem with its new Ancillary Shield Boosters that consume cap booster charges for a huge burst of shield hitpoints. Tuesday's Retribution 1.1 patch now aims to level the playing field for armour users with the introduction of new Ancillary Armor Repairers and a series of balance changes to armour plates, rigs, and standard repairers. The patch should hopefully give gank battlecruisers and tech 2 cruisers the speed they need to compete in PvP and may even make some interesting active armour tanking setups viable.

In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at the role of tanking in PvP today and the tanking changes coming in Tuesday's Retribution 1.1 patch.

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There are times I both love and hate being a journalist. Case in point: the recent WildStar hands-on that Bree got to play with. I knew about it a while ago, and got a peek at most of the reveals, which was great. But I had to sit on that knowledge, which was not so great. Also I couldn't go myself, which comes down less to the job of a journalist and more to the fact that I live on the other coast, but I still didn't like that.

But we aren't here to talk about that. We're here to talk about a groundswell of new information that we got from that experience, and while I don't want to step on Bree's toes at all, there's a lot of stuff that deserves further discussion. And we know that the developers want this game to launch in 2013, which means that as of right now we are looking at a ticking clock. I'll talk about that later.

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Jeremy Gaffney runs on Diet Coke. A lot of it. He's boundless energy, and he's got boundless ambition to match. "We are trying to be the biggest game on the planet," the executive producer of Carbine Studios declared boldly to the handful of people in my WildStar demo in San Francisco last month.

But he's clearly no fool: "Our goal is to have the biggest game on the planet, not to have a crappy game that we shove out early." He's at ease when discussing the studio's two-year live plan, PAX East demo (there will be one), and the upcoming business model reveal ("fairly soon"), but even with closed beta coming in the next three months or so and a launch window targeted for the end of 2013, he clings to the mantra he must have learned from fellow NCsoft studio ArenaNet: "It's ready when it's ready."

It's not completely ready yet, but I did get a little tour of what is.

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This week saw another landmark event in EVE Online grab the gaming community's attention as over 3,000 players from dozens of alliances battled it out in the lowsec system of Asakai on the Caldari border. The battle reached 2,800 concurrent players at peak, falling just short of 2011's record-breaking siege of LXQ2-T which hit 3,110 simultaneous combatants at its peak. There were livestreams, tons of after-action reports, and the story of this immense battle started by one man clicking the wrong button really captured our imaginations.

EVE is one of those rare cases in which a lot of people find the media that surrounds the game more fun than the game itself. News of big in-game events like scams, heists, and huge battles spreads across the internet like wildfire, even among people who hate the game or have never tried it. When news of the Asakai battle emerged, someone on Reddit suggested that people should play EVE for only a few months to get some background and then quit and just read the stories. I've seen a lot of similar comments over the years saying that EVE is more fun to watch and read about than play, and it makes me wonder if the game is becoming a bit of a spectator sport.

In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at why stories like the Battle of Asakai are so pervasive and explain why I think EVE should embrace its role as a spectator sport.

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It's no secret that I'm nuts about wormholes! Last week I looked at the reasons why EVE Online's Apocrypha expansion was such a big success and rejoiced at the recent announcement that CCP will be developing similar laterally designed expansions from now on. In the announcement, developers wrote that they would ideally have liked to iterate on Apocrypha's wormhole gameplay for several releases, which got me thinking about how that gameplay could be expanded on now. Wormholes were a massive catalyst for exploration, small-scale colonisation, industry and PvP, but would it be possible to recapture that magic in an expansion?

The Sleeper storyline certainly evolved with the Incursion expansion as it became known that Sansha forces were able to control wormholes and had invaded Jovian space, but that story sadly didn't translate into gameplay for people living inside wormholes. There's no risk of running into the Sansha home system on your travels, and Sansha forces will never lock down a wormhole system and attack your starbase. That feels like a bit of a wasted opportunity to me, and I worry that a new wormhole expansion could similarly pass up the opportunity to add interesting new gameplay. Adding more hidden wormhole systems and combat sites would be fun for a while, but the underlying wormhole mechanics and NPC capabilities are already common knowledge.

In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at various ways that a future wormhole expansion for EVE could recapture the magic of Sleeper space.

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What started out as a few EVE Online alliances forming up PvP fleets last night rapidly evolved into one of the largest PvP battles in the game's history. Reports indicate that a total of over 3,000 players may have been involved in the colossal battle in the lowsec system of Asakai in the early hours of this morning, with hundreds of corporations taking sides in the conflict. The battle officially centred around a Liandri Covenant staging starbase in the Caldari faction warfare system of Asakai, but things rapidly got out of control as practically every major alliance with a capital fleet threw its own forces into the mix for a bit of fun and the chance to kill a titan or two.

The system peaked at around 2,800 players fighting simultaneously, just 300 short of beating 2010's world record battle in LXQ2-T. Lag set in with around 700 players in the system, but EVE's Time Dilation feature kept the server running amicably up into the thousands of players. At the peak of the battle, the system was running at just 10% normal speed and people were experiencing several-minute delays on module activations. Dozens of valuable capital ships and supercapitals were destroyed, in addition to several titans worth several thousand dollars each. A few players filmed parts of the action and have shared footage of the slow-motion battle on YouTube.

[Thanks to BobFromMarketing for the tip!]

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MMOs are games of repetition. Advancing past a certain point is always a matter of doing the same thing over and over, whether it's repeating raids in World of Warcraft, playing the market in EVE Online, or taking part in the same event to clear daily achievements in Guild Wars 2. Whether or not you enjoy these repeat performances can make the difference between the grind from hell and a pleasant upward climb, but it's still a game of repetition.

It's not exactly the ideal state of being. Nearly every new game seems to recognize this and advertise itself as free from grinding, which at best is true in a very narrow sense. You won't be grinding daily quests, but you'll be grinding events or PvP maps or dungeons. So why don't we have a game out there that rewards fun instead of persistence? Is it possible to create a game that's free of repetition and focused on enjoyable experiences?

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Last week was crazily newsy in the world of Guild Wars 2. One might even call it newsilicious. Between a look at the next handful of months, an announcement about guesting and paid world transfers, and a developer livestream about rewards, WvW, and other stuff, last week was just ridiculously full of information.

We'll be seeing the first bits of all that prophecy come into being on the 28th, when January's patch officially hits, bringing with it, among other things, guesting. The guesting announcement was fairly ill-received, due almost entirely to the news that it wouldn't work between North American and European servers. Up 'til now, you could always talk to folks from the other data center, but you couldn't actually play with them without transferring. Now you still can't play with them without transferring (and you can still talk to them), and people were really hoping we'd be able to do the whole guesting across regions thing. I'm hopeful that it will come in at some point, but I still can't see guesting as a net loss in any way.

There's a lot of digesting to do with all that news, though, so let's start things off by not talking about any of it.

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