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

Lots of New Screenshots!

Vault Network has posted a preview of Age of Conan today. It includes lots of new screenshots as well as a look at the upcoming game.

It appears that the game will begin in a traditional fashion, with an extensive character-creation editor for shaping the look of your in-game persona. Sliders enable minute changes to your character’s appearance, and the results are quite realistic—certainly more lifelike than most current-day MMOs.

Interestingly enough, there’s not a lot of early determination of your character’s “history” or attributes. After you choose a gender and craft your character’s appearance, you only have the option to select a class from Aquilonian, Cimmerian or Stygian. No skill-point allocations or other determinations are thrown at you. It’s only when you achieve Level 5 that you can choose from an archetype: Mage, Priest, Rogue or Soldier.

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Hit or Miss?

GamerZines has posted their preview of the Burning Crusades. You'll want to see what they have to say about the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion.

World of Warcraft is quite popular, apparently. So the developers have this expansion pack that a few people will probably be interested in.

OK, we can't type any more with a straight face. The Burning Crusade is of course the most hotly anticipated expansion to the unbelievably huge World of Warcraft. Raising the level cap to 70, introducing new races, new quests, new areas and so much more, The Burning Crusade is so close and yet so achingly far away still.

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An In Depth Look At Age of Conan

The Game Musketeers has posted an interview with Erling Ellingsen about Age of Conan...

With an original system of single-player game merging into a MMO environment. How will the single-player experience enhance the MMO game?

The way we see it, MMOs can be very intimidating at first. They lack many of the gameplay mechanics that draw the player in from the start of most games, such as story that really takes you by the hand and gets you going. Stories that can shake your world and it feel like you are really something other than just another peasant out to kill rabbits. We wanted to incorporate that into the MMO genre, and thus we created what we refer to as Age of Conan's single-player part. Actually, though, it is not truly single-player all the time.

Get clicking to learn more. What is it about this upcoming MMO that has you counting the days to launch? Share your thoughts in the Ten Ton Hammer Forums today!

Hands On Impressions of Burning Crusade

Pro-G has posted their hands on impressions of the Burning Crusades. Keep reading to see what they think of the upcoming expansion to World of Warcraft.

The Burning Crusade presents an interesting conundrum for World of Warcraft players: drop your existing high level character for the allure of starting one of two new races, or keep on with your uber-equipped killing machine and brave the shattered realm of Outland.

So far, most beta players have opted for the high level rewards of Outland over starting a new character. But this isn't to the detriment of TBC's two new races, the manga-esque Blood Elves and the big blue aliens the Draenei - both have aspects that have drawn concern from the typically vocal WoW fan base, but overall are shaping up nicely.

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