News

Podcast 81 is here!

Listen in to hear all about EverQuest’s 11th Anniversary activities, an interview about FanFaire 2010 and news from many SOE titles!

You can tune in by going to the Official SOE Podcast site. Once you get there, click on your preferred bandwidth.

Another way to tune in is with iTunes. If you have iTunes installed, select iTunes store, type SOE into the search box and click Subscribe!

An Egg-hunter Is Hatched (03/18/2010)

Do you wish you could take your main character's subclass and turn it into an alt? Now you can! NCSoft has enabled a subclass separation feature for Lineage 2. What does this mean? For a fee (varies by country - $49.99 in the US) you can take a subclass from one of your characters and split it into a completely separate character. The original character will keep the main class, and the new character will have the subclass. The price might be a bit steep, but it sure beats having to level up another character from scratch.

Want to know more? See the full details on the Lineage 2 site.

A skilled Death Knight player claimed Shadowmourne earlier today, becoming the first player to complete the difficult and lengthy quest line to rebuild the legendary weapon. Considering it's one of the toughest items to get in the game, it's only natural that its stats be absolutely insane, increasing strength by 228 and critical strike by 114, among other things. Definitely something to drool over.

Riding on the coattails of updated 3.3.3 notes, Blizzard gave some details today about their plans for future content additions, including quests designed to ease players into Cataclysm's storyline.

Patch 3.9, according to the post, will contain the quest line that will neatly set everything in motion for Cataclysm's introduction. In a way, that gives us a timeframe; given the rate at which Blizzard has been deploying the 3.x patches, we'll be seeing this content relatively soon!

Next update: Freya
Many in the Lineage 2 community have been waiting for the next update in hopes of getting some fresh content for the game.
While solid details are still scarce, it appears the next update we'll be getting will introduce Freya. The actual patch notes
aren't available yet since the update is still in the works even in Korea, but we have managed to scrounge some details
together from Korean sources.
Please note that since the update isn't final, details might well change by the time we get the patch on the North American
servers - however, here are some details that we have deciphered:

• The update will introduce Armor Augmentation. Different grades of armor will be able to receive different properties.

Patch 3.3.3 brings a host of UI and under-the-hood game changes, but the biggest news is what it does to the current Battlegrounds system.

PC Gamer UK's special April issue - the MMO issue - is about to hit shelves in England, and apparently has a plethora of info on World of Warcraft's next expansion, Cataclysm. While not officially endorsed by Blizzard, the article should at least contain some good detective work that may at least bring some new speculation forth.

We'll get our hands on a copy and give you details as soon as we can!

Alright, so it's not anything Earth-shattering... or is it? Blizzard let slip the fact that the ever-sought-after Frozen Orbs will become a greed roll only in 3.3.3 - meaning that, finally, everyone will get a fair chance at the useful drop, as opposed to stacking the roll with "need" selections. Check out Blizzard's official comment and thank the heavens here.

See, we told you! It's nearly the end of the week, and patch 3.3.3 is still languishing in PTR purgatory, waiting to be perfected before being pushed live sometime soon (hopefully). There's a reason this update isn't live, though, because changes are still being made to the effects 3.3.3 will bring.

After giving us a rundown of the new Mastery system planned for Cataclysm, World of Warcraft developers answered a few burning questions that players had asked. Naturally, most people seem to be worried about what this means for hybrid classes.

While the patch itself probably won't go live just yet, the initial download for 3.3.3 is now showing up on the Blizzard launcher. We're one step closer to 3.3.3, folks!

Cataclysm's new statistic, Mastery, got a bit of a reveal today. After teasing the new gameplay mechanic a few days ago, Blizzard has outlined some of the changes Cataclysm will bring to the game in greater detail.

 Are you excited for 3.3.5's Ruby Sanctum? Or perhaps just anxious to give 3.3.3's UI and move updates a whirl? It'll have to wait, sadly, because so far the PTR servers for 3.3.3 have been less than successful.

Well, alright, that's a little harsh - better things go wonky on PTR servers than actual realms - but it definitely looks like we'll be waiting a little bit longer for the next patch. So far, 3.3.3 has been undergoing numerous problems and changes on the test realms, with moves being added and removed, and UI tweaks causing issues for testers. 

Patch 3.3.5 might be a little ways away, but that doesn't mean Blizzard isn't ready to talk Ruby Sanctum, the new raid that will become available when the update drops.

Be advised: if it matters to you, this post will contain spoilers.

The Story

Assault on Ruby Sanctum chronicles the Black Dragonflight's attack on the Red Dragonflight's Wyrmrest Temple. Led by a fearsome new foe, Twilight dragon Halion, the Black Dragonflight forces will be a formidable set of opponents as they fight to free their master.

Another day, another tweak. A month after the raid became available, the Icecrown dungeon has received a few more minor updates to fix things up a bit. While there's nothing major, there are a few changes to the Lord Marrowgar and Sindragosa raids that will make things a little easier on tanks. We'll make sure to update our guide to reflect these fixes.

The full list of changes can be found here.

World of Warcraft has been out for almost six years now, and graphics technology has improved vastly since release. That's why many users were shocked the other day when, after installing the latest drivers for Nvidia graphics cards, WoW suddenly slowed to a crawl.

As well as the technical changes we've been seeing on the PTR servers recently, patch 3.3.3 looks to contain some slightly bigger additions to World of Warcraft. As well as a few drastic changes to moves, it appears to contain a couple of new mounts - one of which, dare we say it, looks quite... explosive.

 
The test version of patch 3.3.3 has been updated again today, tweaking a few of the changes the patch makes to a few under-the-hood areas of the game.

Just when it seemed like things were looking to be settling down in China's surprisingly convoluted World of Warcraft experience, everything grinds to a halt.

Shortly after the announcement that The Burning Crusade would once again be playable after new publisher Netease's struggle to get it approved by China's strict media screening board, the president of the company has stepped down. No reason has actually been given, and to make matters worse, no successor has been appointed yet, throwing a spanner in the whole works.