Lotro/Turbine in trouble?

Turbine just had layoffs announced and confirmed by Warner bros. You can search on the web and see it but I just wanted to speculate a little. Turbine had 400 employees. They haven't had a new game come out in a  while. They must have been pinning some revenue hopes on the Rohan expansion which got good reviews on Gamespy and such but Only people who have already spent a LOT of time recently n the game are even at the level to buy that AND I don't have most characters near big enough, my biggest is lvl 71. My brother quit playing Lotro because of the expansion. He said that it was stupid to release a level cap raiser this early since people were still grinding up levels to get to the last cap and hadn't really run the dungeons to their fullest yet. I think Turbine might be desperate for cash. Which is sad since they could have created a new MMO by now with their resources, or greatly expanded the low and mid game of Lotro which would have helped them retain people better. They aren't getting money from many of the people like me who have been around a while also because of the lifetime account deal and the free points we get, which I guess makes the business unfeasible unless we evangelize enough others who are actually paying monthly or for content additions to play. DnD Online was a mini turnaround success that I wasn't terribly interested in playing. I wonder if they will come out with a new game before they belly up as a studio.... I knew they were in trouble once Warner bought them though. Warner and other big companies have no soul, and no compunctions about firing and hiring massive swaths of people at a drop of a margin.

Public quests are now in Lotro

They've added public questing to Lotro, and rewritten the Ettenmoors. Might be fun. Details below torn from their changes page:

Hytbold

Hytbold is a new soloable endgame experience being delivered with Riders of Rohan. It focuses on rebuilding a razed Rohirrim village by aiding the people of the Eastemnet through a large suite of rotating, randomized daily quests. It heavily employs phasing and utilizes three new technologies: Instanced Public Questing Areas, Open Tapping and Remote Looting. Its rewards are class specific, trait line specific armour sets with raid level set bonuses that are bind to account. Upon completing the town, players will be able to take part in a capstone experience that culminates the storylines of Eastern Rohan. If successful they will be named as Thane and considered an honorary noble of Rohan. Learn more about Hytbold.

Beat Super Swing golf 2, played BlazeJam games

I got an email a couple weeks ago from a nice fellow name Dave Calabrese who sent me the fun little BlazeJam game pack of games created by some developers in a 48 hour fund raiser for donating to a Waldo canyon fire or something like that. Well I'm glad not everything on the web is a scam. These were kind of cute games. I particularly liked the kitty rescue one.Anyways, I of course scanned the files for viruses and there were none detected so I'm pretty sure they are safe. On another piece of good news, I beat Super Swing Golf 2 and have gotten really good at fake golf. I wonder if that helps at all in real golf.. I may never know... :)

Lastly, I'm downloading Riders of Rohan right now. My hope is that they somehow add mounted combat to the other parts of the game but more importantly, that they enable creep vs freeps battlegrounds or skirmishes so that you can get a real pvp challenge by fighting an even number on each side. If they don't see how this would increase excitement in their games, I think they should play Warhammer or WoW, or Rift, or Starcraft, or anything other than Turbine games.

Lastly I did buy the Baldur's gate enhanced edition and I'm still waiting eagerly and I am playing Terraria with my brothers and the crafting and building aspect is really becoming quite interesting.

Two pieces of actual gaming news

From the depths of the internet I bring you two pieces of actual gaming news.

The first is that I have bought Baldur's gate from Overhauls Games/Beamdog early a few days before it launched and was pretty excited to play ti with my brothers but they promptly delayed its release until November 30. I view this as annoying but a good move if it results in better plot, less bugs, and more language versions since it will bring more revenue for them and enable them to overhaul the other old obsidian games.

Secondly and not less interesting to people like me, Obsidian is planning a new tactical RPG wth new graphics and modern systems. Maybe they will use the new DnD Tobold has been talking about I dunno. Anyways you can read about it at this link here:

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/368712/obsidian-reveals-project-eternity/

But I can tell you I will definitely be buying it if it isn't rated M, or worse...

I have enjoyed all their games like this style though and I think they should be given more shots at doing what they are good at. I really like that Kickstarter is working for them and so many others. I think Kickstarter really was enabled by Steam (at least initally, I know there are other digital download services like Gamers Gate, Gamefly, Beamdog, etc...) but I believe Steam came first. And without a digital download service, the sheer business viability of starting up things with brick and mortar stores and physical media was too expensive. This assertion of correlation is of course impossible to prove or disprove, but I think there was one. At any rate its good to be blogging about something excitedly again. The video game scene has been too boring as of late, with MOTS games poping up all over the place (MoreOfTheSame) Innovation = risk though and risk adverseness is what made EA the biggest, most financially successful game company on the planet. Incidentally I now work near EA. I found it on accident while exploring in some side streets near my office in RL (Real Life). They have a huge multi floor parking garage.

Anton Here!

I don't check in very often, but just a few game recommendations...

I'm still playing League of Legends regularly after a year and a half since starting. I enjoy its competitive and team-oriented play. It's also very fast-paced--a match lasts 20-60 minutes typically. You just need a thick skin for internet smack-talk, because people on your team will verbablly abuse you every time you make a mistake.

Been playing Terraria with my 5-year-old son. I put the game on my laptop and he plays on the desktop. We have been finding all kinds of hidden secrets in Terraria's randomly-generated worlds and becoming very powerful.

My dream in a CNN post

http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/23/tech/gaming-gadgets/rebirth-turn-based-strategy-games/index.html?hpt=hp_c3

The rebirth of turn base strategy games. I love turn based games! We need some more turn based strategy type action in games instead of frenzied button clicking and unfair gear advantage. But it wouldn't have to be MMO just any game with a chat room making you able to hook up with people to fight with or against would be cool. Still can you imagine an MMO with a progressive campaign that you can fight for and make a difference on? WAR tried this a little but and individual's effort felt like an ant's. It needs to be scaled better. Maybe something more like you can make a difference if the other side doesn't move to stop you fast enough, and you can actually be a threat alone by building armies or rallying npcs or something. Food for thought. I love building games so I'm going to be trying Terraria this weekend. (My brother gave it to me for my birthday)

You should watch Secret of Kells

You should watch Secret of Kells. Its a great little piece of work with an Irish mythological flavor, and if you have Netflix you can watch it any time.  Here's a trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMPhHTtKZ8Q

I love the hand drawn aesthetic.

Aislings song is pretty too.

Umm in video game news, I've been working to death for my job, but I am at the giant squid boss at the end of whale island in Rune Factory, I'm stuck on a bridge to Daien in hard mode on Fire Emblem, and on Lotro I'm stuck at lvl 67 or something like that cuz I've been playing my hunter instead, doing the Epic quests solo that I could never get anyone to do with me before (I'm on book 14 I think). I still want to try out Guild Wars 2.

Lastly, My new baby, Luke, is so cute when he laughs, and he laughs whenever I make farting noises, how cool is that?

Hmm....

Hmm seems to still be working...

If this post shows up it means I can still make posts, which is good...

Google is going to terminate my blog

Google has dropped support for legacy blog migration so they won't respond to emails and their broken system doesn't recognize my user id, so due to them being incompetent, our blog is going to be terminated on may 2012 sometime. I will try to get a post up with a link to a new blog before that happens so that we can continue to create new posts. Maybe I will use a different company with better policies than Google the next time around.

An MMO you can actually BEAT!

Ever get tired of MMO's that you can never ever win in a thousand years? Just want to pummel the boss of the game and be done with it? Well now you can! Play Browser Quest, the MMO powered by HTML 5. Or use its source code to make your own mmo!

Have fun. Here's a screen shot of me after I beat the boss in under 30 minutes and got the best armor and best sword.

Dungeon Defenders for 3 bucks on amazon

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=amb_link_360016442_2?ie=UTF8&docId=1000771881&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=0TKV8G15YJ49KFB5M146&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1346663642&pf_rd_i=979455011

Dungeon Defenders for 3 bucks on amazon. Playing with my brothers right now. More later. Over and out.

Edit: Ok I played it and its fun. Only four player but good for some fun together on a Saturday. Will need to try playing this in solo mode. I like tower defense when it's well done. This one might make the cut. Although I'm not sure if it balances more towards tower placement strategy or twitchy combat yet.

Star Trek Online and Vindictus

Star Trek Online - Verdict: Slow, could not find players to join groups, good visuals, will be free to play soon, good potential if you get into it.

Vindicuts - Verdict: Try it out. Intense multiplayer action for free!

UPDATE! Cryptic Studios refunded my 2 months I was charged when I was not playing after I threatened to write this post that I have already written. Well, cut them some slack. They do care after all. I will say, to give them some positives, that the visuals of the game are awesome, character creation is very fun, and I did not play long enough to get into it, but I imagine further into the game it gets more interesting. There is also something called the Mission Architect that lets you write your own Star Trek episodes and invite other players to try them out. They are doing some interesting things. The game's site says will be free to play later this month, I believe, though originally it was said to be free to play a month or two ago.

I bought STO for $10 and planned to use the first 30 day included time to try it out, then most likely just be done. They tricked me, though...Even if you want to use just the free 30 days, you have to enter a credit card. And then you have to wait 24 hours to remove the card, in which time I forgot and ended up paying $30 for 2 months before realizing I was still subscribed.

*Rage comments removed after being refunded

Vindictus, however, was a total surprise. Combat is action-hack-n-slash, the graphics are fantastic--I would compare the character and environment art to the Monster Hunter series, though the computer has an extra couple layers of rendering polish which surprisingly my 5-year-old machine seemed to handle incredibly well. Quests are queued up from a shipyard in the hub town area, and you can set party size and join parties for certain levels. Check out a youTube video of gameplay and you might be swayed to dowload it.