To be honest, there’s nothing going on right now. So don’t worry about it. The game world is incredibly dull, except for Warhammer.

And the Fracture and Mercenaries 2 demos are lackluster, if not terrible.

I’m working on a game right now, so I don’t have much time to talk. Yes, a game. I’ll be uploading my portfolio with my work (finally) at some point soon and then I’ll keep posting about progress with this thing. It’s actually rather exciting. I’m just nervous.

Work is slowly taking over my life. And then there’s World of Warcraft and Monster Hunter, which are viruses. Not to mention I’m giving Beyond Good and Evil a full playthrough, and I still need to get Eye of Judgment to work (why is it so hard to make the cards readable?). My time is nonexistent. In theory. So give me a few more days, maybe a week, and I’ll give you guys the scoop.

God I need sleep.

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Wait, or Monster Hunter. (*finds PSP*)

Someone who is not successful said something that is completely a lie and irrelevant. If exclusives didn’t exist, practically nothing would turn games to one title or the other. It’s getting to the point where everything has the same features and abilities. If exclusives didn’t exist, people would have no reason to buy one console over another, and they’d all end up buying the cheapest one.

They’d buy the Wii. Can you imagine the horror?

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Now, there’s a big principle of game design that is “make your players feel like what they’re doing is meaningful”. You want to have a balance to difficulty and skill and make sure that the stretch to the end of the game is a challenging but rewarding one.

With this new promotion, a newly recruited player playing grouped with a friend earn triple experience on all quests and monsters, allowing them level up almost insanely fast, ensuring that well within the 90 days of the promotion they will have hit at least level 60. And their bluebar is unaffected, simply pushed back constantly as they gain more group XP. Also, for every two levels they gain, they can grant one level to any grouped character one level below them, which pushes their XP bar all the way to the same spot on the next level. Yes. It’s unbelievable.

After having started several WoW characters I can safely say the climb to 70 is a long, ardous one that takes several months of hard work–but as a friend and I started up another account to see how this promotion worked, we realized that in the span of three days of casual play (under ten hours total) we were already close to hitting level 25. That’s unheard of. That’s practically a World of Warcraft record. Our quests would gray out before we even turned some of them in.

Safe to say, I will finally get a character to level 70 now.

I understand Blizzard wants to push people out of levels 1-60 and into the Outlands and the Burning Crusade Expansion (not to mention Wrath of the Lich King levels 70-80 which comes out later this year) but seriously, breaking well over half the game for the sake of encouraging people to level up? I can see the near distant future filled with level 60s, all running around the fields of Azeroth and massacring new enemy characters trying to level a character to 70.

It’s retarded. And insane.

My friends and I have agreed that this has to be a temporary promotion. 90 days of triple the experience on Iquests and monsters is ungodly. The game is almost not fun anymore, it’s so easy. The only reason we’re relishing it so much is because we’ve gone through these initial quests multiple times, and now being able to breeze through them is relieving. However, I’m sure any new WoW players will not find this experience as comforting; rather, disconcerting.

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