WAR Returns and Nintendo Remains Awesome

Sorry for the slow updates! I’ve had a busy week with work projects, and I haven’t had much time to game or write. I need to catch up on a couple of things I missed.

return of reckoning
Well this is a thing, I guess. Someone decided to emulate Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. I’m all for these kinds of projects. I’ve played on many of them ranging from Star Wars Galaxies to Dark Age of Camelot, EverQuest, etc. I wish someone would make an EverQuest Online Adventures emu… yeah, get on that would you?  Anyway, WAR is back and alive. What they should honestly do is fix the stuff that sucked in WAR and try to tweak it until it’s fun.

Nintendo Doesn’t Want Whales

This is one of the many reasons why Nintendo remains one of my favorite companies. They’re not after the few people who spend lots of money in their game; they won’t analyze those whales and figure out how to get them to spend more. If they did that, Iwata says, “I don’t think we would be able to entertain hundreds of millions of consumers all around the world or to produce large and long-lasting achievements.” Mr. Iwata, I salute you sir. That’s a great way of saying that those who hunt whales are a flash in the pan. Nintendo focuses on making games fun and available to children and adults of all ages while staying true to their brand. Has it always been profitable? Not in the past couple of years, but that changed in their recent earnings report. Why can’t more companies emulate Nintendo?

Nintendo is also launching a new service in the near future all about bridging the gap across platforms. They want one single login for multiple devices that will link communities and create an ecosystem of tracking and rewarding players. Seems like it has potential. Oh, and they have this secret NX project coming soon… what could it be?

I’m excited for Splatoon to come out on May 29! Can’t wait to play with Graev and have another great game on my Wii U.

  • Can somebody explain how this works because I seriously have no idea. I get that the artwork is probably stored on your local pc so they can just grab that for the emulation. But isn’t the combat mechanics and the loot tables stored on the server? So how do they emulate any of that without recoding from scratch?

    There must be a trick I’m missing.

  • Isn’t GW somewhat notoriously aggressive about protecting their IP? I don’t see it going for this server for some reason…

  • Honestly, I am more interested in the Total War franchise getting rights to make a Warhammer variant. Even though Creative Assembly is notorious for utterly appalling launches of the Total War series, the games eventually become playable and fun after months of patches.

    So it will definitely be something fun and exciting to try…. many months after it releases of course. 😉

  • The WAR emu is interesting. I looked around after it closed down to see if anyone was working on one and there was no sign of anything. I might have a look at that – WAR had my favorite instanced battlegrounds of any MMO so far and I liked the PVE too. As Balthazar says though, GW is notoriously obsessive about its IP so I can’t see this going far, not that there is likely to be enough interest to make that a problem anyway.

    As for you not posting often enough, what’s happened to Graev? Seems like a very long time since I read anything from him, which is a shame because his stuff is a nice contrast and often very funny..

  • It’s been going on for over a year and they don’t take money, so maybe they’ll stay under the radar. I hope they do, it is actually pretty playable. Tier 1, quests, 2 scenarios. I enjoy it, still great PvP 🙂

  • @Bhagpuss: Graev got really busy. I’m enticing him to come back. I’m managing to post almost every week day, but I too love his contributions. He’s a behind-the-scenes contributor to ideas we have.

    @FreshFromHell: We took Mother’s Day off but will be resuming tomorrow. The post should be up on Monday’ish.