Welcome to this week’s MMO’s Tavern. I hope you all had productive weeks. Between crashes in Orgrimmar and heated matches of Conflict at the Mill, my productivity has just shy of plummeted. That’s enough of that, on with the show!
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, Pet Battles are coming to World of Warcraft with Mists of Pandaria. This week’s beta patch saw the initial implementation of the new system and let me tell you, it’s great! Well, that’s what I imagine I would be saying if the game didn’t crash on me every three minutes. The Beta Client is having several stability issues at present which I think are being caused by too many people being in the same place at once. At least that was the commonality I saw between the several crashes I had. Since there isn’t much that I feel I can effectively test if I can’t get out of a major population center I’m giving Blizzard time to fix this one before I jump back in. This may all have something to do with the last wave of beta invites that went out to the remaining Annual Pass members. Estimates put the total number of Annual Pass members around a million people and as of the other day they have all been invited to the beta. One million players spread across four servers. This can only end in tears. There is a fun new feature that was added to the Beta client that I was able to test though. Template characters have been streamlined and improved. Players can now create custom level 85 characters of any available race/class combination that’s available in game in the character creation screen. So once the client is patched or the servers are beefed up, I’ll have a fresh level 85 Pandaren Warrior to play around with. So here’s hoping it’s back up for next week because I’d really like to put together another video for you all.
In other news, Lord of the Rings Online has extended their anniversary celebration until May 9, 2012. The festival was originally slated to the end this weekend but Turbine decided to extend the festival to give players more time to fully enjoy the spectacle. An MMO only turns five once, might as well celebrate for as long as you can, am I right?
Starting today in Europe and tomorrow in North America, people who preordered upcoming MMO TERA will get early access to the game. Early players will be able to level up to level 38 and enjoy a mostly empty world devoid of those who are still on the fence concerning the game. TERA launches in North America on May 1 and in Europe on May 3. TERA originally launched in South Korea in January of last year.
The upcoming MMO Neverwinter is a sore subject for the management here at MMO’s Tavern. When it was first brought to our attention at E3 last year, it was a virtual D&D game centered around bringing the table-top experience to the online space. Since then, Neverwinter has become a traditional MMO being developed by Cryptic Studios, the team behind Star Trek: Online, Champions Online, and City of Heroes/Villains. I was deeply disappointed to hear this but at the same time, Cryptic does some good work in the MMO space so I’ll give the game a shot when it comes out. So here’s the news about it that’s actually news. Anyone who preorders the upcoming action-RPG Torchlight II through their publisher, Perfect Worlds, will get beta access to Neverwinter. Perfect Worlds is the parent company for both Cryptic Studios and Runic Games and this sounds like a pretty decent cross promotion and a good way to build some hype for Neverwinter.
I think that’s about enough for this week. I’ll be back with more news from MMO’s Tavern next week, so until then keep them vorpal blades swinging but not in here. I don’t like fights in my tavern.
