MMO news, guides, reviews, features, interviews and more at Ten Ton Hammer

Before I get into the lore news, I have to tell you about the paladin change. I got an email from Necrolis who is a reader. (Much to my appreciation) You probably read about my unease with calling the cleric class, paladins. He was kind enough to explain their take on this class. If you're having visions of shining armor you're off base. I'll ask him if I can post the email on the site and you'll get an idea of where they're coming from. It's pretty exciting.

Ok back to the Lore! Get the new lore right here!

More Dusktreader news.

There's a new peek of Hero's Journey up at RPG Vault.

Urwir and the Triad

In Elanthia's theology, the Triad can be viewed less as a well-defined triumvirate and more as a balance of ideologies within the cycle of life.

For instance, Temsyne exemplifies the natural progression from birth to death, a progression in which Urwir and Takut operate. Neither god is less important than Temsyne, but there are boundaries that must be respected... or at least diplomatically circumvented when the need arises.

Ethec and I saw this at GDC and we're going to be checking it out again at E3. I cannot tell you how good this game looks. You can bet that I'll be taking a stab at it as soon as I can get my hands on an exe!

More Hero's Journey news.

ToTheGame has an interview with an undetermined Funcom employee about their upcoming MMORPG Age of Conan.

3. Funcom is responsible for breaching the MMORPG world with Anarchy Online, the first massive online game focusing on the future instead of the traditional medieval genre. Now, with Hyborian Adventures, you’re taking a step back into a lost civilization. What made the team consider such an idea?

Well, we are just about to complete our take on the ages, with Age of Conan being at the end of the fourth age, Anarchy Online being in the sixth age, and our next online RPG being in the fifth age?. No, seriously, we had always wanted to make a fantasy RPG, and once we could start to free resources of Anarchy Online and Shadowlands, fantasy was the direction we first started looking towards. Not only did we have lots of internal motivation for such a project, but we were also “lucky” enough to get hold of a great license. And the more we dived into the Hyborian age, the more we understood how incredibly diverse the license was. It’s a far shout from the run-of-the-mill Elves, Orcs and Dwarves fantasy universes which surrounds us everywhere these days. In Conan almost everything is twisted and dark, and more than anything humankind itself is at the centre. True, there are evil demons, gods and monsters lurking everywhere, but the humans are the “rulers” of the world. This allows us to make a very different and more brutal and realistic fantasy experience, far from what you have experienced in any Online RPG before.

You can bet that anything that Funcom makes will be good. I still stand by my statement that Anarchy Online was one of the best MMORPGs ever designed.

More Age of Conan News.

Blizzard gets specific with planned hardware improvements

It seems attention from Cnet and InformationWeek has paid off, and normally tight-lipped World of Warcraft Lead Producer Shane Dabiri goes to pains to list all the hardware changes in store to improve login and in-game performance. Also in the latest "Battle Plan" posted on the WoW official forums: new options for fee-based character transfers across realms and between accounts (but only if the accounts in question are in the same household).

We recently brought a new World of Warcraft site online in North America -- the 5th one in this region. This not only allowed us to open new realms -- each site can hold approximately 40 -- it also allowed us to migrate existing realms over to the new, top-of-the-line hardware we used to build the site. As with previous migrations, this relieved pressure on our shared-database backend infrastructure, resulting in noticeable improvements in loot, auction house, mail, and instance lag and general realm stability for the players who we're moved to the new realms as well those who remained at the original site.

Beyond this 5th World of Warcraft site, we are preparing to bring up a 6th site before the end of May, and we have plans to build additional sites in order to handle any increase in population we experience after the release of The Burning Crusade. All of our future sites will be built using the latest hardware and will give us the capacity to support new players and perform additional migrations and character transfers as needed.

(...)

On top of our efforts to evenly disperse our player population through coordinated realm transfers and migrations, we've begun testing our paid character-transfer feature. Scheduled to go live this summer, this feature will allow players to move their characters, within certain restrictions, to a realm of their choosing. This means that player's will now be able to join their friends on other realms without the need to wait for a pre-set mass realm transfer. In addition, this will also contribute to a balancing of the player load from realm to realm, which again is a specific way for us to reduce realm queues and lag. We know that many player's are eager for this service to be implemented, so we'll share further details as soon as more information becomes available.

Battleplan Vol. 3 (at the WoW official forums) is one of the most detailed posts we've seen from the Blizzard crew in the nigh year and a half the blockbuster game's been live. Lots of answers, and more than a few new questions. Hopefully we'll be able to find out more from Blizzard next week at E3.