Tag: game design
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World of Warcraft: Flexible Raid System Announced for Patch 5.4
Today, Blizzard announced yet another raiding format and difficulty, labeling it Flexible Raiding. The idea for Flexible Raiding is to allow for a variable number of people to join in between 10-25 and introduce a new difficulty tier that will sit in between LFR and Normal mode, where encounters will adjust in difficulty (probably meaning…
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World of Warcraft: Why LFR and “Welfare Epics” Will Stay
There’s been an incredible amount of heated debate on the World of Warcraft forums where two factions have essentially created two stances around terms of LFR and the notion of “welfare epics.” The issue here is that one group (also known as “casuals”) are the ones that, of course, want these items while the other…
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World of Warcraft: The Absolute Necessary Feature for LFR
Today, I experienced a rather disheartening DC where the servers just randomly shutdown while I was in an instance. At first, I thought it was my cable modem or router freaking out again, but it turned out that the problem was Blizzard’s server instability issue. The thing though was that I was at Dark Animous…
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World of Warcraft: More Patch 5.4 Speculation with Potential Spoilers
Someone on the forums mentioned that he managed to get into some pre-PTR testing of the 5.4 patch. It was a fairly interesting read as he told it from the alliance side of things to come. The main issue wasn’t the storyline specifically surrounding the alliance but the actual raid on Ogrimmar. Like anything, quite…
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Baldur’s Gate 2: Two More Party Slots?
After writing my previous commentary on party composition (which I did in the past from a different blog), I mourned the fact that the game did not allow for a slightly bigger party. While there are other issues in having such large parties, the thing about games like Baldur’s Gate is the fun factor in…
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Baldur’s Gate 2: Class/Party Composition Re-Roll Thoughts
I just busted out my Baldur’s Gate 2 disc (although my reader isn’t working for some reason) as I have been thinking quite a bit about this subject lately. Nothing excites me more than character creation in an RPG. Baldur’s Gate 2 satisfies this craving by allowing one to create up to 6 different characters…
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World of Warcraft: 1.3 Million Subscribers Down
That’s a pretty large number and is comparable to the population of Burning Crusade, except that it’s getting lower. The two main things people seem to point to are game age and Asia. However, I know that saying the game’s age is a common issue, but I feel that it’s too high level and generic…
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World of Warcraft: First Patch 5.3 Official Notes Released (PTR)
Patch 5.3 looks to be more of a major game issues fix with some content oriented elements thrown in. I already addressed the earlier noted valor/justice point upgrade system returning. From a gearing point of view, the two biggest things that impact myself are: Addressing bad luck streaks for re-rolls. This is HUGE for me.…
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Starcraft 2 Heart of the Swarm and World of Warcraft Pontifications of the Day
Last night I spent finishing up most of Heart of the Swarm. I’m either at the final or next to final campaign, having done all the sub-missions and only missing one objective thus far (at least from what I’m aware of). I ended up switching after getting frustrated from World of Warcraft’s inexplicable lagginess that…
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World of Warcraft: No New 5 Mans Heroics for Mist of Pandaria Announced
Dave Kosak announced on Twitter that there are no new planned Heroic 5 man instances currently planned for Mist of Pandaria. I discovered this after seeing a Mike Preach video where he discusses the issue and shares his views on the subject. From my point of view, this is going to end up being a…