The Facebook article is pure junk. You'd think with a title like "The Fallacy of Facebook Privacy" they'd do a little investigating on how Facebook's privacy settings can fail, and how "locked" profiles can still be peeked into. They don't. Another blogosphere opinion piece that tells us nothing new and falls back on the shopworn "nothing is private on the internet" adage. Ugh.

This is unfortunate news. I do not play WAR (I did play for about 2 months, at launch), but I welcome competition in the MMO market. WoW is sitting pretty, which is fine, but competition is what truly spurs innovation. Or, at the very least,encourages the betterment of competing products.

And as Joe Napalm said... Blizzard has pretty shamelessly retooled Warhammer and Warhammer 40k into Warcraft and Starcraft respectively.

Dragon Age: On Rails? I'd say yes and no. There is a plotline you are following, of course. You cannot choose not to be a Grey Warden, you cannot choose not to fight the Blight. You're nudged in a singular direction. How you get there, well... that's where a few of the options come in.

It's not full freedom, nor can it be. It's unrealistic to expect this game to be a Sandbox.

Interesting article. I find it strange that Blizzard has not brought a similar sort of interaction into WoW. They obviously have the GM teams, why not train and certify a GM or GM Supervisor to occasionally take.. say.. Thrall out for a spin on Realm_X and have him walk the streets of Orgrimmar? That alone would be interesting. Add in some ad-libbed dialogue, perhaps with Saurfang joining him, and I think players would really appreciate it.

Refreshing. I like his take on it... piracy is more a movement of necessity and not malice. They want <insert movie, game, etc. here> but their local release faces some ridiculous delay, so... yeah, piracy.

Ugh. Valve + PS3 reminds me of Bungie + XBox. :/

Whether this is to head off Warhammer or not... the timing certainly is suspect Warhammer's release date is tomorrow.

WoW may not HAVE to compete, but that doesn't mean they won't take a shot at the competition here and there.

I'll be playing both, with an obvious bias toward Wrath (been a WoW subscriber since launch).

I love the irony of pirating a product with draconian DRM methods built-in to curb piracy. These publishers need to learn to stop treating their customers like criminals. Activation limitations, phone-home rootkits, CDs required to be in the drive to play... blah, blah, and blah.

I intended to purchase it, not pirate it. Now, I think I'll just skip it altogether.

Patch or not, I'd hardly called Age of Conan "fixed." Even to this day.

This is revenge for Age of Conan. The European crowd received much more Funcom love and attention (at least on the forums) than US/NA did. So there! :p

True, the graphics aren't Conan, but they're at a much higher resolution than WoW. And the client overall is a lot more stable than Conan's was at launch.

kxmode, did we play the same World of Warcraft?

For months after release, the only "PVP" in sight was world PVP skirmishes in places like Southshore/Tarren Mill. Fun, but hardly classifiable as real PVP Content. Battlegrounds came later, and Arenas came MUCH later. Truly meaningful World PVP is just being introduced in WotLK (TBC incarnations have always felt a bit lacking). Aside from hardware issues (authentication, database and general server pop overload), WoW launch was otherwise decent.

Turbine gets big points for a solid LotRO launch and the content updates, plus their work on AC, indeed.

Funcom... well, the first twenty levels of Age of Conan were fun. At least when you could get past the system requirements and if the bloated client didn't crash to desktop on you.

Boooo.

It's one thing when an actor chooses not to reprise their role, and entirely something else when they aren't even given the opportunity. Why not have "Jim Raynor" portray Jim Raynor? Sad, really.

I can understand them panning the fan-altered screenshots of Diablo III... those were just a little silly. But this?

I think BioShock was very important to the genre, but it was not quite as significant as Levine would like to think. Valve still has Episode 3 to release, and I'm certain that will shake things up. id is running late but should make a bold showing, and Epic has Gears of War 2 in the works. Granted, RAGE and GoW may not be as atmospheric or story-driven as BioShock, but they remain FPS Shooters. Call of Duty and Halo-anything are practically licenses to print money these days... so yeah, I think the genre won't be going belly-up anytime soon. Though it could use a little new blood.

AoC is a classic example of how hype will get you quick cash, but will not keep customers. After 5+ years of development and testing, this game released in a buggy, unfinished state. The early content (levels 1-20) were polished enough to wow newcomers, but later levels and zones were anything but. Patches to the game have right along fixed a handful of issues while creating new glitches. The engine has been plagued by memory leaks and poor performance on ATI cards, not to mention lousy optimization across the board.

I don't regret giving the game a try, but I've had enough. The issues here are elementary but Funcom is showing incompetence in their development. AoC has lots of potential, but I'm not paying for an ongoing test of an MMO and their sloppy coding. Funcom has some of my money - 2 paid months plus the initial cost of the box - and that's all they'll get.