Friday, October 26, 2012

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.

Friday, October 19, 2012

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.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

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.