Casey

@Taawa agreed 100%, as soon as I saw OSC was involved with this I crossed it off my list, looks like a good game but he's a bad guy.

I'm on my second tour with AoC, and I really enjoy it. I haven't experienced the end game grind yet, but I am having a ton of fun on my early 30s barbarian. It's a treat to look at and I find the combat visceral and action packed. It's too bad Funcom can't seem to get behind this more, I think this game is a lot better than it's reputation.

AoC has an excellent soundtrack, those themes get stuck in my head for days on end.

Most of the time if I am gaming with friends I listen to the in game music at a low volume so I can hear people talking on vent, but if I am just grinding mobs by myself I will roll up some metal on Pandora and get in a zone. I don't normally listen to metal, but it gets the blood going if I have to grind XP or currency for a few hours.

I am sure ToR will make truck loads of money. I do wonder though if it will be the last AAA full on subscription game that makes a dent in the market.

I've had fun playing around with PL on my iPhone. I agree that it's more of a multiplayer Diablo than an EQ contender, but it's a great step towards a real mobile MMO. A few years ago I would have thought the idea of a phone as a gaming platform was a joke for anything outside of arcade type stuff, but games like PL and stuff like the Epic Citadel demo have made me a believer. At the rate it's growing, it wouldn't surprise me if in five years the next WoW type behemoth is a mobile game.

The success of Second Life despite endless missteps by Linden Lab and the user unfriendly client and steep learning curve shows what people can and will create if you give them the tools. SL is 7 years old now, and I don't understand why someone hasn't just done a better version of it yet. Blue Mars is trying I suppose, but I wouldn't say that they've built a better version of SL, more a better looking, harder to use version. If SL was as accessible to the average person as Facebook or WoW, virtual worlds and avatar based interaction would explode. It's only a matter of time I think.

They're both on my hard drive for the foreseeable future, but I was kind of disappointed in how limited the classes were in EQ2. I also agree that the graphics are showing their age. On the plus side, there's a LOT to do in EQ2.

I just started playing f2p LOTRO, it seems good so far, standard quest/kill repeat but I'm a sucker for that as long as there are cool environments to run around in.

The reason you effing eff need crafting or some sort of downtime activity in an MMO is it gives players something to do besides quests and combat. You don't have to call it 'crafting'. It sounds like the collection and detective systems will fill this gap a bit, but it would be cool to build equipment, weapons, vehicles, costume pieces etc.

It's a tough sell for a superhero game, because a comic hero's costume doesn't change much. It might be cool to go through a golden age/silver age/modern age progression, but seems like it would be hard to do something like that in an MMO and account for all the customization options.

I think a big part of the appeal to an MMO is your character is, in most games, visibly much more of a badass at level cap than freshly rolled. It's interesting that DCU seems to be trying to build a hook here that the other superhero MMOs don't have.

Even more so since I guess they've bailed on that other MMO staple, crafting. I'm interested enough to plunk down my $50 and play for a month, but I'm not sure how they're going to be able to hold on to the $15/mo subscriber on a game that seems like it's going to be even more casual than CO.