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

In a city of villains are the heroes the "bad guys"?.

City of Villains got a look-see from both GameZone and IGN with
admirable results.

"You know, MMOs are pretty tough to do successfully.
Instead of crafting
a 10-20 hour experience, the developers are expected to make something
that you'll be coming back to for months and months, with a core crowd
that may sustain the title for years. World of Warcraft, for example,
started with about 1500 quests. That's one thousand five hundred
quests. Granted, the overwhelming majority of those boil down to "kill
this dude" or "get this stuff," but it's still a heck of an
achievement, and the number of quests quickly ballooned. I think what
gives WoW its strength is a combination of the novelty of exploring the
Warcraft universe on foot, the delightful and varied art style, and its
sense of humor. That and hundreds of servers across the world to
satisfy what is probably approaching five million subscribers at this
point."

Still yearning for more?

• More
  City of Villains News

We have ways of making them talk.



Armchair Empire has posted a Tabula
Rasa interview featuring Richard "Lord British" Garriott and
focusing on comparisons between Ultima
Online and the new title.

"It's not often that one has the opportunity to pick the
brain of a person responsible for helping to shape an entire of genre
of games, but the Armchair Empire recently had that chance with Richard
Garriott. In this interview we discuss Mr. Garriott's upcoming MMOG,
Tabula Rasa, while also touching upon getting Ultima Online off the
ground, as well as the MMORPG genre in general. The Armchair Empire
would like to thank Mr. Garriott for taking the time to answer our
questions, and Valerie "Pann" Massey for making this interview happen".

Still yearning for more?

• More
  Tabula Rasa News
  

Jeff "Ethec" Woleslagle trades in his fuzzy dice for the 20-sided
version and tells us about Day
1 at GenCon SoCal. 

"...True Dungeon and True Tavern are running full bore.
True Tavern is a tavern in just about every sense of the word,
including the alcohol, costumes, tales, and wenches (the women to the
right just happened to be really nice wenches... totally un-wenchlike,
actually). True Dungeon puts players in the middle of a true-to-life
RPG; pitting their class abilities and knowledge of the game against
puzzles and monsters in an actual dungeon crawl (click here if you'd
like to find out more). It's really not as geeky as that one Visa
Rewards commercial... well, ok, it is. But geeky is the new cool here
at Gen Con, it's one time and one place these avid gamers can go to let
their hair down (sometimes literally). And that makes Gen Con pretty
cool in my book."

Jeff will be reporting back each day.  Good luck in the jousting
event Jeff!

Irth has been patched. 
Environmentalists infuriated.



The folks at Magic Hat Software have posted the lastest set of
patch notes for Irth Online,
taking the game to version 1.007.

"Irth Online 1.007
Additional Changes Latest Updates

Please see the irthonline.com
forums for more details.

[LAST UPDATE November 16, 2005]

• Faster Save – greatly reduced lags during saves.
• Prevent Creatures walking in place.
• Selling items worth less than 1 copper.
• Combat rates adjust with Agility
• Food consumption rate – messages when hungry, fully healed,
  fully energized.
• login messages for in areas that are guarded, arena, sanctuary
• retains knowledge of highest skill level in forgotten skills.
• Tame timeout - tamed creatures will go wild if you are offline
  or far away.
• Guards attack monsters in town.
• Occlusion problems fixed.
• Teleport and gate effects added.
• monsters avoid guarded areas.
• particle system spheres adjusted so particles systems don’t go
  out of view.
• Adjusted difficulties for herbalism. Individual plant types can
  now have their own difficulties.
• Fixed moving of large stacks from bank and pack"

The recently released title has had its share of complaints, but it
appears that the development team are making good on promises to fix up
the mess.   If you want or need to know more, we have more
Irth Online News for your perusal.