MMO Weekly 28/10

Welcome to this week's issue of MMO Weekly! In this week's episode, we explore the dark underbelly of MMO gaming. Of course, by “dark underbelly”, I mean everything that's odd, strange, and eccentric in a deeply geeky way. It'll be epic.

The big story this week has to be the announcement that surprised absolutely no one. The long rumored Star Wars: The Old Republic was announced by Bioware and LucasArts. This upcoming MMO has a lot going for it. For one, it's being made by Bioware, a company with a long history of making excellent single player RPGs. For another, unlike a certain other Star Wars MMO (*cough* Star Wars Galaxies *cough*) it isn't made by SOE. Confidence among gamers is high that this game, despite the tongue-twisting acronym (SWTOR doesn't exactly roll off the tongue) will be a solid, successful game. Oh, and they have a shiny new super-nifty website, too.

Famous machinimist Oxhorn has been hard at work, this time creating videos that actually aren't about WoW. This time around, they're about Team Fortress 2, with some WoW thrown in. OK, so it's hard to explain, but so is everything Oxhorn makes. In his latest 3-part video series, The Dynamic Action Team, you can watch the Doctor, the Spy, the Heavy and some sorcerers and blood elf hotties all interacting in some sort of mixed up virtual world right here.

In this story, we learned that Retribution Paladins – the whiniest of all Paladins in any virtual world anywhere – were buffed in the WoW Wrath of the Lich King beta. For a time, the forums were peaceful, and the whining was reduced. However, the buffs proved to be a bit too much, so they were nerfed again. This resultant spike in whining nearly shut down the whole internet.

How would you like to see an entire concert by Level 80 Elite Tauren Chieftain? They performed at BlizzCon a few weeks back, and the WanderingGoblin.com staff captured the entire concert on video. It's broken into three convenient parts, which you can see here, here, and here.

Iceland has certainly had its fair share of economic troubles of late – what with their economy collapsing and all – but that won't have any effect on Eve Online. According to CEO Hillmar Petursson, both developer CCP and Iceland in general are full of tough, resilient people. Petursson explains that this is because all the weaker ones died off centuries ago. We assume he's referring to the Viking age in Iceland, and not during the development of Eve Online, which began 8 years ago.

Remember how we talked about the not-at-all surprising announcement of SWTOR this week? Well, the developers couldn't help themselves, and waxing all philosophical with the press. In so doing, they revealed they have some lofty goals for SWTOR. Their confident it'll be bigger than WoW. So yeah, they're both humble and realistic.

Do you like playing WoW? Do you like zombies? Well, all this week, you can have both in one convenient place! In their buildup to the upcoming release of WotLK, Blizzard has designed an event in which zombies have invaded the cities of Azeroth. They not only attack the innocent, they infect them. The newly infected become undead themselves, and attack their former friends and allies. It's a great event (especially considering that Halloween is right around the corner) but, of course, it didn't stop some folks from griping.

Come February 1st, the demons get to take over the Earth. Of course, I'm referring to the ultimate demise of Hellgate: London. Since developer Flagship went out of business several months back, HGL has been owned by Namco Bandai. Namco says they'll keep the game servers up and running for a few more months, but after that, it's all over. It's very sad; HGL was a decent game.