I WASN’T INITIALLY OVERWHELMED with WoW’s 4.3 patch, released one week ago today. But as I’ve been playing through the new Hour of Twilight dungeons and Dragon Soul raid, I think I’m on board.
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TODAY IS AN UNOFFICIAL HOLIDAY for WoW players: the release of the v4.3 “Deathwing” patch. There’s a fair amount of cool stuff in this patch: the new “Dragon Soul” raid; three new 5-man dungeons, a “Transmogrification” feature that lets you customize the look of your armor; a “Void Storage” system that offers 80 extra bank slots for random junk; a Raid Finder system that will act much like LFD; and a Darkmoon Faire overhaul that should roll out next week. Good stuff, and I’m especially happy for the extra storage space, even if it costs 25g a slot (yes, really).
And yet, even now, as the patched servers have barely come back online, I find myself wondering: what’s next?
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IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE it’s been over a decade since Diablo II came out. How is that possible? I remember so many nights at the GameSpy offices where we had a regular crew playing the beta for weeks on end, and then who knows how much more time we spent hacking and slashing through the final game. So naturally I was excited when I got a chance to take a whack at the Diablo III beta.
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FOR THE LAST WEEK, all my reviewer buddies have been telling me how awesome The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is. How open the world is, how much stuff there is to do, how time seems to vanish while you’re playing it. I’ve just started playing myself — I’ve barely logged a few hours — but after some false starts and weird issues, I’m rapidly grasping why so many people are putting Skyrim on a shortlist for Game of the Year.
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I FINISHED MODERN WARFARE 3′s CAMPAIGN this week, and can’t help but feel I’ve done all this before. Which isn’t to say it wasn’t fun – there’s something comfortable and enjoyable about the combat that most shooters lack – but despite the game’s many attempts to create over-the-top battles in famous locations, I feel like it’s a watered-down version of a game I’ve played five or six times before.
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ROCKSMITH is a fascinating game, if it’s even fair to call it that. Ubisoft’s new entry into the rhythm-music genre ditches our trusty plastic 5-button controllers in favor of real guitars, and is arguably more of a teacher than a videogame. For a first installment, it gets a surprising amount of stuff right, probably more than anyone should rightfully have expected for an undertaking this complex. But with a steep learning curve and not a whole lot of “game,” it’s hard not to worry about how much longevity this new franchise will have.
THE BIG NEWS AT BLIZZCON 2011 today, by a wide margin, was the unveiling of the Mists of Pandaria expansion for World of Warcraft. Due “when it’s finished” (assumedly the second half of 2012), the expansion will raise the level cap to 90, introduce a new Pandaren race, a new Monk class, and a new 5-zone continent called Pandaria.
WoW v4.3: Fixing LFR Loot
I STARTED WRITING A POST about this a few days ago, since which time Blizzard added a small hotfix to how loot is distributed via the new Looking For Raid (LFR) system. Which is a good thing, because it’s a system desperately in need of tweaking. The good news is that there are some relatively straightforward solutions, if Blizzard is willing to go that route.
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