Transmogrification

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/3309048
It looks like blizzard will be bringing back the old school raid sets in the next patch, not in the same way they've done before (ahem...naxx, cough cough) but by allowing you to "transmogify" the stats from a new set of armor onto any older piece. 

I enjoy running around Orgrimmar as the only paladin in T2 with my finkle's lava dredger.  It was fun while it lasted Blizzard, until everyone and their mother go out and farm BWL for sweet new lewts.  I would urge Blizzard to implement some sort of restriction that wouldn't allow everyone to be running around with little effort in some of the most amazing looking sets in the game but alas, i guess they want to legitimize old content instead of releasing the new stuff...yet again. 

In the mean time I guess I'll have to settle for my sparkle kitty, until they put it on their blizzard store for $3.50.  At least it's cheaper than a fully geared max lvl necromancer for 49.95... ;)

This is me being happy, please don't ruin it for the people that still play.

If you're interested in some actual news minus the ranting, MMOchampion just put up some info about patch 4.3 other than this new transmofail thing thats going to ruin my fun and laughing at my raid group as we pull nef and i'm still in T2 and supposed to be tanking adds...as ret,  Ah, good times. Otherwise i have cliffs of the 4.3 changes so far with excellent commentary below.

More BF3 Awesomeness

DICE announced at Gamescom germany that they'll feature something never before seen in the battlefield series, Co-op.  Now, don't get me wrong but I was always under the assumption that co-op dictated that(in the vidya game world at least) you're going through the campaign with your best buddy on the hardest difficulty while you're on his guest account only to make it harder on yourselves because you're going to have to do it again on your account, breaking controllers due to nerd rage, hating that one mission where you have to plant a device in a cabin and make it out through a field of random unlimited bad guys(i know that's a single player mission and not in the battlefield series, but i hated it that much), all the while trying to beat the game.

This is glorified spec-ops.  "Co-op" missions with point values and a leader board that you can do with your friends. I'm going to hope it can be 4 player co-op as a redeeming factor, and I'm happy that they at least put a mode where you can fight wave after wave of bad guys with your best bud, but I am disappointed with that implementation. 

Back to the good old "it would ruin immersion of single player" excuse i guess. Nothing gets me more immersed in a game than yelling expletives at my friend when i reach the objective first and kill all the bad guys and look at him raise my eyebrows and ask "you mad?"

It's Fanboy time

I was going to avoid going full retard love affair for any games but BF3 right about now. One thing to say mind=blown. Their new video of the map Caspian Border is godly amazing, the new frostbite 2 engine is looking like it will live up to it's name, and I was a BF2 nerd forever that despised BF2142 and played BF1943 for all of 5 minutes.  I'm pulling for you DICE, this is the game I've been waiting for and I really hope it doesn't go the way of most productions by EA with it's pre-order shenanigans offering maps that easily could be released with the full game to anyone whether they pre-order or not.

And this new Origin deal, I don't really mind them releasing their own distribution software that's earily similar to Valve's Steam, but really?  The same overlay ingame, friend chat system, not allowing your games to be distributed on Steam because of a "TOS Disagreement" with valve's Steam is BS, just say you want to pull an extra 5 dollars per sale because you know you can.  I enjoy having all my games in one centralized location and Valve beat EA to the punch by a longshot.  Unfortunately with EAs backing and pull in the industry, we'll probably end up seeing more than EA exclusive games up for sale on Origin in the near future. 

Guessing games, or cold hard facts

I just read an article that says Cowen and Company are saying SWTOR has the potential to ship 3million units at release.  The article also informed that at this point in development that TOR has the same number of pre orders as cataclysm and Starcraft2 did at the same point in time on their development calendars.  Thats saying something as the article didn't say anything about how SC2 and Cata didn't have any incentive for pre-ordering while SWTOR has a number of interesting items for each of their pre-order levels ranging from unique mounts to power crystals to an entire in game store for their overpriced drivel they call the "collectors edition" at 149.99 which I believe is sold out on a number of online retailers.

whether that says anything about it's popularity or not, i'll let you decide but while i don't particularly care for that giant darth malgus statue i'm sure there are a lot of hardcore SW fans that ordered it exclusively to add that to their doll...er "action figure" collection.



the article if you're interested-

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6328785/star-wars-the-old-republic-could-sell-3m-analysts 

I'm a rantaholic

So I've been ranting and less raving, more raging about Game developers to a few of my buddies IRL and I've come to the decision that I can make a difference.  A crusader on a mission, not for god and country, but for my fellow gamer.  To point out both sides of a decision with a balanced and maybe even respectful viewpoint from the gamers perspective, for my fellow gamers.  In all honesty if I really get angry it could get very NSFW very quick, that is if you're 5 or you work in a kindergarten where the children are reading the same blogs you are and their parents get offended by bad words. 

Protip: Pizza is fracking delicious.

Diablo 3

So I never played Diablo 2.  My friends all tell me it was amazing back in the day and I'm inclined to believe them.  I went and tried it and just couldn't play with all those pixels all over the place. It was like playing GTA 4 and going back to GTA 3 and looking at their awesome glob hands again.  But Hopefully Diablo 3 will be a new page in blizzards books, especially with having lost 600k subscribers from WoW over the last few months.  Beta in Q3 2011...we shall see.  I would however like some info on project Titan.  If it's gonna be farmville with a 15 dollar a month price tag I would like to know now so I can go ahead and pass on it before i start getting interested. 

oh look, 4.1 is here

Looks like the trolls over at blizzard have finally gone and figured out how their system works to patch over from the PTR to live servers.  They're gonna be putting 4.1 out tomorrow unless something goes horribly awry.  I think my account is still active for another week or so.  I guess i'll go check out ZG and ZA and then wave goodbye to what was formerly a great game.  I'm estimating 2 months until firelands has a release candidate on the PTR and July before it's released on live servers. 

-oh yeah, apologies for taking a few weeks off without telling anyone, not that my ramblings about the evil video game industrial complex is in the least bit interesting, we can all pretend it is.  I might start rambling about SWTOR if anyone wants to start hating a game that'll probably be great despite having little to no information out on it atm.  I'll have to come up with cool pictures though as i can't just take screen shots anymore...