Aion's seasonal event, the Harvest Revel, was also announced this week. The annual solar eclipse has different effects on the two playable factions in the game; The sun-kissed Elyos have to deal with undead creatures rising from their graves, whereas the Asmodians relish the darkness and celebrate the period with special dishes and hunting parties. Harvest Revel begins on 25 October and ends on Halloween, see screenshots of the festivities in our Aion gallery.

But that's not the only reason Aion was in the headlines over the last few days; PC game sales figures revealed that Aion was the best-selling PC game in September, despite only being on sale for the last week of the month. It's likely that the reported 400,000 pre-orders that Aion received helped towards its chart position, though. Champions Online, which launched at the start of September, took third position in the chart.

Finally, NCsoft released a video of the Elysean zone of Heiron for players to check out. If you're wondering what all the fuss is about with Aion, you might want to take a look at this video to get an idea of the graphics quality. Despite what some people say about the game's grind factor, there's no doubt Aion is a beauty to behold.

World of Warcraft's own Hallow's End event began at the weekend, sparking off another mad rush by players to get the achievement completed. Activities remain unchanged from last year, these include killing the headless horseman, opening all the candy buckets in the Eastern Kingdoms, Kalimdor and Outland (it takes about 3 hours to do it in one go, I speak from experience), and collecting a number of items such as the Hallowed Helm and the Sinister Squashling pet. This event also ends on Halloween.

WoW's huge Patch 3.3 is on the public test realms right now, and players are currently trying out the first few encounters inside Icecrown Citadel, the home of the Lich King. This week, our WoW reporter Medievaldragon tried out Lord Marrowgar and the revolting-looking Festergut. So far, the fights look to be extremely challenging. You can see videos of each encounter on our WoW channel, Lord Marrowgar here and Festergut here.

Another new feature that will hit WoW in 3.3 is the new Looking For Group tool. The current system requires players to indicate which role they can fill in an instance, healer, DPS or tank. Then they select three instances they would like to take part in and either allow WoW to match them up with others looking for one of their chosen instances automatically, or they manually group with others also looking to run those instances. The new system allows players to sign up for as many instances as they want, and they're not limited to instances suited to their own level either – you can sign up for dungeons designed for lower level characters too, handy if you have achievements you want to complete.

The way groups are formed has changed too. Players can no longer see who else is looking for a group to specific dungeons, the tool automatically matches them up with others. When everyone is ready, the whole group is teleported to the instance – no more waiting around for people to make their way to the summoning stone. Read more about this exciting new system in our article. There's also a video and screenshots of the new tool on our WoW channel.

In two other WoW news chunks, it emerged on Wednesday that The9, WoW's former operator in China, is being sued by investors for leading them to believe the company's financial future was all rosy, while allegedly knowing that it was about to lose the WoW contract. NetEase took over the running of WoW in China in the summer, resulting in a massive drop in revenue for The9. Apparently, The9 never even began negotiations with Blizzard to renew the contract. Lastly, users of the SteelSeries WoW gaming mouse will be pleased to hear that the latest WoW patch, 3.2.2, introduced some new features. The game now recognises the mouse as a unique peripheral and each of the 15 buttons can be programmed in-game, doing away with the need for extra software and improving response time.

Things are moving forward with Star Trek Online now that Cryptic Studios has released Champions Online. The first glimpse of life as a Klingon was released this week in the form of a trailer, showing the game from the other perspective. So far, we've mostly only heard about the Federation's ships, but Cryptic seem to be gearing up to release a lot of new information about the other playable faction in the upcoming MMO.

Cryptic also confirmed this week that STO is scheduled to be released in the first quarter of 2010. The company had already said that the closed beta would be sometime before the end of this year, and earlier today it was announced that the CBT has indeed started. Stay tuned for more on that over the coming weeks. In the mean time, check out the 24 new screenshots that were released yesterday.

That's all for now, be sure to catch our podcast later today where the IncGamers team chat about the games we've been playing, the big headlines this past week and, of course, the bull (cough) story of the week.

Comment

Add a comment using your Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Google or OpenID accounts.
blog comments powered by Disqus