I just watched this video which is beta footage of Warhammer Online. You can't be serious EA/Mythic, I mean really. Tell me this is not a WOW clone graphically. In fact when I was watching the video I got the impression this was what WOW 1 looked like and the version of WOW that got over 7 million users is WOW 2.

Combat in the footage is absolutely abysmal and the cartoon environment looks already out dated against WOW. I can't believe you are serious and am dumbfounded that Mark Jacobs would even be associated with this project. It is safe to say I wont be bothering with Warhammer Online, which pleases me, as EA has had by gaming dollar for the last 10 years with UO. UO unfortunately is more fondly remembered for being at its best not long after it launched and has been on a down hill slide ever since.

Good luck to those that give it a go, remember its EA and they are fucking hopeless at running MMO's.

I know, this is getting a little bit obsessive in that I keep posting decapitation shots. Ok this is the last one, unless I get a better one. Here is the money shot as I call it, my sword cutting through the neck and taking the head off, the massive amounts of blood and the then the corpse without arms and a head. Even notice the shield laying next to the corpse.

Here is an additional screeny for today as I managed to capture my fine axe taking the head of a victim. You may notice she no longer has any arms either, they came off before the head

Today's screen shots are of the guild I am in and us raiding some of the dungeon instances. One thing I have to say I am really impressed with is the implementation of horses in AOC. They handle like you would think a horse will and they provide a travel boost that is well worth the gold investment.

My character hit level 57 last night and is still powering along. For the casual gamer AOC is friendly from a leveling perspective. Some levels can be a grind if you don't have a guild or your not interested in pick up groups to complete the group quests that are available as you level. If you dont mind grouping or are in a guild then leveling can be a breeze. The only issue in leveling to fast is that at 80 there's not a lot to do currently. Funcom are fleshing out the upper end of the game and therefore those that have powerleveled can either level another character or on the PVP servers go and grief lower levels than them.

Personally I am enjoying the game and think by the time I hit 80, Funcom will have addressed some of the concerns. The game is still only two months old since release. Yet if you read the Funcom forums you can get a glimpse into the truly mentally challenged in life. The general forum has at least 30 percent of posts complaining Funcom have removed boobies and the ability for more hard core adult themes. It really is a sad reflection when that's your biggest complaint.

This weeks screen shots capture the "M" rating in Age of Conan. The first couple of shots are of people being decapitated by my axe. The fatalities sequences in AOC are very entertaining. I have one where I cut the victims arms off and then their head.

The last three screen shots are of myself and two guild mates as we did a 6-8man instance with the three of us. Also considering I was apprenticed up for this little killing spree, it was a good effort as we managed to kill all three bosses.

I am currently in the process of switching hosting providers due to the extreme lack of professionalism with my old provider. As you may have noticed the site was down for three days. The response I got from the hosting provider was these things are complex and therefore take time to resolve. Well if you can't keep a web server up and think that its a complex task then maybe you should not be in the hosting business.

So those looking for hosting, my advice is stay away from these guys as they are flat out spelling the words web hosting let alone provide it five nines.

The podcasts are currently still being moved and therefore if you click a link to listen to a podcast, it will error. This will be resolved over the next 24 hours.

Cheers
Shane

When I started AOC I thought the game client was excellent and I couldn’t understand all the problems people kept complaining about. Now that Im in my mid 50’s I have an appreciation of the problems people are complaining about. So for the last week or so my client experience has deteriorated to the point I can understand why the less technically savvy would quit the game in disgust.

Until I was finally forced to deal with the issue, my client was crashing nearly hourly. If I zoned more than five times, it would crash or I would restart the client so it didn’t crash. However speaking in guild chat a few of the guys mentioned this wasn’t their experience and that they only have the occasional crash and the odd memory allocation crash.

The other big problem was and is the cause to my previous post was that after a crash the bloody client could decide it needed to download anywhere from 1 meg to 1 gig of files. This can happen extremely randomly and is the source of much angst and gnashing of teeth. However there is a solution and those prepared to take the time the majority of problems I have found can be resolved.

Today I was playing AOC happily enough. I logged off to do some other things and when I returned I get an error with the client loading. The fix for that error is this: