MWO - Mech no5 revealed

The Catapult, one of the absolute classic Battletech mechs, gets brought BANG up to date with it's redesign for Mechwarrior Online.

click to enlarge

I've always liked the style of the Catapult, but it was one that I was a little doubtful on how good it would look today, as much of the older Battletech artwork has dated very badly. Thankfully and once again, I'm very impressed with how Piranha are making the old mech designs relevant.

Can't wait to see some in-game screenshots!

For reference here's how the Catapult looked in Mechwarrior 4, screenie thanks to gamespot.

Holidays and stuff

Yeah sorry, I've not been posting due to Christmas holiday mentalness and stuff. Normal posting shall resume shortly, quite a lot to talk about with SWTOR obviously, but also WAR, MWO, DMO and other games.

Back soon :) Oh and Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and so on and so forth.

In the meantime, Durtbocks just posted this on the KF shoutbox

 :) lol

WAR Producer update

Whilst most of us are SWTORing away, there's still life in the old WAR dog and James Casey has posted a Producer update over on the official WAR forums. Should be some more developer discussion posts going up soon too. Whilst we may bemoan delays with 1.4.5, it is a sensible reason to delay putting the patch on the PTS for sure and I'm sure people would prefer to test something not totally FUBAR.

Now I shall return to sticking lightsabers up Jawa arse.

For those averse to link clicking, I've copy pasted the info below:

Greetings all


With the holidays looming, I wanted to give you a quick update on where we stand for our latest patch and what to expect over the next few weeks.


The goal going towards the holidays was to finalize the1.4.5 patch enough to get it on PTS for testing purposes before we left for break. We wanted to have a week or so and then leave it up.


Unfortunately, we had some technical issues on our internal test server that serves as the testing environment between our development servers and the live environment where PTS resides. Given the amount of time that it took to resolve those issues, it pushed back on the testing that is required there before we can push it up to PTS.


With time running out before the holidays are upon us, I’d rather not just cram in that testing and throw it untested to the wolves with no one here over the break we have next week. I’d rather be able to respond and get fixes up in a timely manner to your testing.


That’s the ‘bad news’. The ‘good news’ is that we’re still going to give you something for the break. Actually we’ll be doing three things.


First, we’ll post a dev discussion with the bulk of the Relic/Fortress information from the patch notes in a digest format for you guys to give some feedback over our break so we can respond to it immediately when we get back.


Second, we’ll be pushing up our scenario changes (minus Grovod Caverns) for the next patch early, as in this week! That means you’ll get fresh new scenarios as well as the much anticipated 6v6 Gates of Ekrund and Caledor Woods.


Finally, even though we have Keg End running until the new year, I’m going to throw up some holiday bonuses through the new year as well.


I know it’s not getting to play with the latest and greatest on PTS, but it does mean you can get some great rewards, try out a new rotation of scenarios, and get to chime in on the new changes so that when we get back from break we’ll have tons of feedback and then you can see it in action.


I apologize that it was delayed some, but we want it to be a great PTS and patch.


Thanks for your patience and understanding.


James Casey


The new scenario rotation and bonuses will go up tomorrow! The dev discussion will go up soon as well.

Nar Shaddaa - How rude!!

When my little KF group first arrived in SWTOR's Nar Shaddaa we were immediately struck by the impressive skyline. However this was quickly followed by many lols; partly because we were surprised Bioware didn't notice, but mainly because we're childish twats.

To be fair, I'm regularly called a lot worse.

SWTOR 2 days later

Ahoy me hearties! Since I've been playing SWTOR for a couple of days now, it's time for a few words on SWTOR client and server performance in comparison with beta, identified bugs and whatever other random thoughts pop in there...

Client performance was pretty good prior to launch and I'm pleased to report it has improved further. I'm running on high settings and get a more than comfortable 30-60 frames per second, only occasionally dipping to around 25 when I'm a particularly manic situation. There are still moments of that memory leak style problem where the game starts chugging and stuttering, but this has only happened twice so far and a reboot cleared everything and sorted everything out. Seriously though I must stress this is a minor gripe and I am extremely happy with how the game runs.

BTW to make those fps numbers mean more, my PC spec is a mere:
Q6600 processor
4gb RAM
GTX260 graphics card
Vista 32 (yes I know.. :P )

The servers have been very stable, I've hardly had any issues other than things getting a little spikey now and again, but compared with other MMO launches it has been very good indeed. Connections to the servers are pretty solid, lag hasn't been much of an issue for me, but obviously since I recently recommended people try out WTFast Lagkiller IF they have problems with lag, I figured I should report my results from the SWTOR live servers. Without Lagkiller running I have a latency fluctuating between 46 and 87ms (which is quite reasonable), but with it on my ping lowers a little and the range stabilises to between 35 and 52ms. So not a monumental change or an urgent requirement in my case, but I'll continue with it as it makes a huge difference for my connection to Star Trek Online (Yes I am still dabbling with that and plan to continue) and since I play SWTOR on a PvP server obviously a slightly smoother connection is nothing to complain about.

There has clearly been a fair bit of work put into how smooth things are with the storyline conversations when grouped and I've hardly had any issues. In fact there's a general sensation that almost everything has been smoothed out and given a little glean of polish, it's hard to list exactly what has changed, it just feels smooth and effortless if that makes sense.

The only real bugs and annoyance I've encountered has been with the guild system. The rosters are broken, randomly listing different amounts of people from one moment to the next. For example at one point last night I know we had 24 people in the guild total and 15 people online, yet the roster listed 2 people, when I checked the show offline box it went up to 5. When i then tried sorting the list by name it went up to 7 people... Five minutes later it showed us as having 3 people. This is a right pain in the arse as I can't set people's guild ranks up because I can't see them in the bloody roster! :P Also officer and member notes do not show up at all for anyone, regardless of changing settings or not. Unfortunately Bioware have done what every developer seems to do when launching an MMORPG and left the guild functionality until last. It's very basic and quite broken. However, with guild capital ships on the way and the promise of other stuff, I'm expecting this to get dramatically improved and to be honest if the only serious bugs are to do with the guild roster, well... that's not too shabby!

So all told it's looking very good. I shall amend my previous "worst MMO launch ever" statement to be:

"The worst organised MMO pre-launch ever, but so far one of the best technically and a joy to play once you're in."

I could also use the word smooth a few more times. Smooth smooth smoothy smooth.

If you make a forum post threatening Bioware with legal action over early game access...

...then you must be an utter twat.

That is all.

Almost there! (lol as if somebody hasn't already used that for a post title)

:P

So for some folks it starts tomorrow! I say "some folks" because due to the bizarre staggered launch nonsense (nonsense for customers, but probably great for Bioware's log-in server stability...) nobody actually has a clue when they'll get to play and won't until they get an email sent at the time their access begins! Personally, thanks to this utter bollocks and the date mix up, I honestly see SWTOR by default as having the worst MMO launch in history, regardless of how great anything else might turn out to be. Sorry for the negative vibe there, but I expect clarity with any product or service that I have paid for and so should you. Don't accept it as ok just because you're excited for the game, it's total bollocks and there's simply no excuse for it, since as customers it's just not our problem. :P

Anyway, mini rant over and on to what is just a very brief post! 

SWTOR must be the most anticipated MMORPG launch since World of Warcraft, I can't think of anything that's compared on the hype factor or had such monumental development costs. Yet we've heard claims of WoW killer so many times before... Seriously, could SWTOR really be the game that rivals World of Warcraft's subscriber numbers? Or will it be just another brief blip on Blizzard's radar, a blip soon to be annihilated with one wu shu style kick from a Panda's bamboo bloated paws?

I suspect it will be somewhere in the middle. The Star Wars IP has a big enough draw to keep a lot of people happy and SWTOR is a much more "friendly to the masses" game than Star Wars Galaxies is (soon to be was). But for SWTOR to rival WoW I think it really needs to steal players in bulk from the WoW player base itself, as I'm just not convinced it's different enough from WoW to pull everyone else in from all the other MMORPGs out there and make us all want to stay. I'm not saying SWTOR is a wow clone, but I'm not convinced it's different enough to be the MMO messiah. 

However I remain confident in having a cracking few months ramming lightsabers up jedi arses. And really that's all that matters; having some fun until you get bored. And actually when it comes to deciding if I enjoy the game or not, well... I don't give 2 turds if it competes with WoW. I just want to have a laugh.