Monthly Archives: April 2009

2000 Free Copies of LOTRO

Codemasters Online – The Lord of the Rings Online, will be celebrating its second anniversary next week on April 24th, 2009. The celebrations will include a series of exciting in-game events, competitions and giveaways.

To mark this special occasion, Eurogamer is teaming up with Codemasters Online to give away two thousand LOTRO digital keys totally free! The first 2000 lucky individuals to claim a key when the giveaway goes live at 3pm UK time (2pm GMT) on April 24th can grab the full, original game (no retail box required) as part of an exclusive promotion.

These are not free trials – these are 2000 a fully paid-up download copies of The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar, complete with 30 days’ free play.

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Volume II Book 7 Patch 2 Release Notes

Volume II Book 7 Patch 2 is currently scheduled for next week. We’ll announce the exact date and downtime as soon as the schedule is firm.

The following release notes cover what is included in Volume II Book 7 Patch 2

Gameplay

  • The Quest Guide system is now out of Beta! The system will automatically be turned on for all players by default. If you would not like to use the system, you can toggle the system off in the options panel under the UI settings page.

Quests and Epic Story

  • If you had Volume II, Book 2, Chapter 4, ‘Enemies in the Ever Dark’ underway in your quest journal, it has been removed to correct an issue with the quest automatically completing before you return to the bestower.

Raids and Instances

  • The Strange Happenings raid is once again available. Turtle is back on the menu!
  • We have made a number of changes to the resource instances. This required they be versioned. If you currently have these underway they will be removed from your quest journal during the update.
  • “Kill Boss” quests must be underway in order to enter their associated instances.
  • “Kill Boss” quests can no longer be cancelled.
  • “Kill Boss” quests now have a 1 hour failure timer attached. If the quest fails, there is a 2 hour retry cooldown before you can accept the quest again.
  • All “Kill 20” and “Collect” quests now require the appropriate “Kill Boss” quest to be active in your quest journal before they are made available.
  • “Kill Boss” quests are exclusive and players will only be able to have one of the six active at any given time.

General

  • Several changes have been made to address server performance and stability.


Source

Cities XL – City building MMOG?

Want to step out of the same old fantasy/sci-fi niche into a different kind of Massively online experience? You spent days creating your SimCities back in the day? Monte Cristo, a French developer, might just have the right thing for you and its called Cities XL. It’s a city creation sim that will allow thousands of players to create their cities on the same planet and connect them and share the experience. They are promising some unique features that will surely bring a breath of fresh air to the genre that’s been lacking in recent years (Will Wright and Maxis just had to produce them Sims games and make gazillions dropping the SimCity franchise…).

Why are we talking about this at all? Well, Massively.com joined forces with Mote Cristo and are offering closed beta promotional codes. If you visit this page on Massively you can find in the artcle the link to the closed beta registration page along with the promo code that will make your chances of entering the closed beta much higher. There are videos and further information on the game so head on over to massively for your city building sim goodness.

Ulduar lands

World of Warcraft patch 3.1 has landed on the live servers after months of testing. It brings a whole new raid instance called Ulduar – prison and home to an ancient evil God that titans imprisoned. The patch also brings a lot of changes to the classes and the famous dual spec where you have two sets of talents and can switch between them whenever you like. Finally my priest can heal and melt faces at the same time (they just CBB™ (couldn’t be bothered) to tweak it or balance it anymore). Timing is impeccable as always. Everyone already did everything there is to do (or they wanted to do) and almost 90% of my guild hasn’t been online for weeks now. Now everyone will come back in a big tidal wave. You can read the full patch notes at the official WoW site and below you can enjoy the official trailer for patch 3.1:

TOROcast episode 3

Guys at http://theoldrepublic-online.com/ released the 3rd installment of their weekly SW:TOR podcast. The dynamic duo, Musco and SammMoney, get into a few debates having to do with last week’s race discussion, open world, or linear gaming, they cover the announcement of Ord Mantell, and sound very excited about Threat of Peace Issue 4. You can listen to their podcasts at their site or subscribe to their feed here. We’ll also continue to follow their podcast and let you know when new ones become available, the guys are just that interesting (oh yeah and they still play Warcraft 3, which is a big plus in my book ).