steeds
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Bless Online adds mounts in closed beta
It's disheartening to play an MMO that forces your character to walk everywhere like an animal. Much better to get an actual animal to do all the walking for you, yes? Thankfully Bless Online will allow players to do exactly that, with the game's current closed beta test adding 30 mounts for players to use as their personal transport tools. Mounts in the game can be obtained via NPC trainers, via quests, or via finding and taming certain creatures out in the wild. They're also not meant as mere cosmetic variations, as each one supposedly has unique skills and attributes once you climb on its back. It looks as if flying mounts will be available in the future, giving players all sorts of different ways to get from point A to point B without having to rely on something so undignified as actually walking there.
LotRO hands over war-steed reins in dev diary
The Lord of the Rings Online team is hard at work putting the final touches on next month's Riders of Rohan, and a new dev diary shines a spotlight on the expansion's star attraction: trainable war-steeds. The article gives a brief overview of the types of mounts -- light, medium, and heavy -- as well as the trait trees that accompany them. According to the devs, each war-steed will have 32 potential traits to unlock. The good news, they say, is that retraiting a mount is easily accomplished on the fly for the cost of a few coins. The devs round out the post by sharing a few of their favorite traits and skills that war-steeds boast. These include feigning injury to dump threat, trampling enemies, giving additional damage to attacking from behind, and boosting crit chance by a whopping 25%.
Peter Molyneux on WoW's reward system
You probably know Peter Molyneux's name if you've been playing video games for any significant amount of time -- he's the mind behind such classics as Populous and Dungeon Keeper, all the way up to Black and White and the current Fable series. He recently gave a talk to the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and early on his talk (part 1 is here, part 2 and part 3 are also online), he speaks out about our favorite game, World of Warcraft. Specifically, he mentions it as an influence on his game design, and says the most brilliant thing about the game are "the steeds," or the mounts you could pick up at level 40 (nowadays, of course, they're available at level 20). He says that in his own games, he tries to give everything out to the player as soon as possible, but the fact that Blizzard made you wait to ride a mount around, made you work up a few levels for it, really stuck with him. Now, of course, he's taking away his own lessons here -- Blizzard's philosophy with the game as a whole seems to reward the player as much as possible, and especially lately, with emblems and the different modes and all of the other daily and weekly quests they've come up with, they're making you do less waiting for prizes than they ever have before (in fact, compared to MMOs when they first started, much, much less waiting). And Molyneux's own games are very "rewarding" -- I don't think more than two minutes went by in Fable without me getting a level or a new spell or a new item to play around with. But his point is still good, even after all that: anticipation of a reward can be just as strong a motivator as the reward itself.
