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Hitting the Books: Domestication brought about our best fuzzy friends
In Our Oldest Companions: The Story of the First Dogs, Pat Shipman explores the early days of domestication and how transforming wolves into dogs made something more out of humanity.
The Perfect Ten: Stock fantasy enemies from lamest to coolest
One theory of MMOs is that they represent several parallel universes, each with similarities and differences. This may explain why so many of them claim to be boldly original and yet carry the same monster DNA that exists everywhere else. Today we're going to carefully unpack our ancient collector's edition of stock fantasy enemies. Blow off the dust and smell that nostaglia, mhmm. Sure, they've seen better days, but they're still good, right? Still solid. Still capable of entertaining us, even if we've slaughtered their kin a thousand times over. Let me show you my collection of 10 stock fantasy enemies that we encounter all the time in MMOs. Just for fun, I'm going to order them from lamest to coolest. I would be number 11, by the way.
Minecraft beta 1.4 goes live, adds wolves, cookies and a new logo
Mojang's world-designing blockbuster Minecraft received a rather eccentric mix of new additions today with the launch of beta 1.4. As promised, wolves can now be encountered and tamed in your homespun world -- however, a less-advertised part of the update is the addition of cookies. What do these cookies do? We're not entirely sure, but we'd recommend keeping them away from your pet wolves. Those little bastards will eat the cookies right out of your hand. Other changes include the ability to reset your spawn point by sleeping in a bed, a fresh new logo (pictured above), and a few infrastructure tweaks to prepare for the arrival of achievements. Check out the full list of updates after the jump!
The OverAchiever: Combining The Ambassador and Mountain o' Mounts
Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, we contribute to Azeroth's obesity epidemic by refusing to walk. Mounts: They get your ass from point A to point B, and if you're lucky, they'll do it as stylishly as possible. They're the most immediately visible status symbol in WoW and often give you a one-glance note on the kind of player at whom you're looking. People astride Invincible can be counted upon to be hardcore raiders from the Wrath of the Lich King era, someone riding a Violet Proto-Drake is never new to the game, and players rocking a White Stallion are seriously old school. Players who have been around for any length of time almost inevitably accrue a stable's worth of beasties to cart them around, but some folks go the extra mile for the Leading the Cavalry and Mountain o' Mounts achievements. In Cataclysm, these are a lot easier than they once were, although you should still be prepared to dump a ton of gold and time into them no matter what. Fortunately, the first part of the Mountain o' Mounts trek should also net you The Ambassador achievement and title.
The best of WoW.com: October 20-27, 2009
It's a great time to be a WoW player -- Hallow's End is in the air, patch 3.3 is being tested, and the Cataclysm expansion is slowly revealing its secrets to us. Heck, Eliza Dushku is playing World of Warcraft, why aren't you? After the break, ten of the most popular stories from Joystiq's Azeroth-obsessed sister site, WoW.com. If you haven't ever visited the biggest MMO around yet, now might be the time to finally take the leap.
Mining the armory for Hunter pet statistics
With Hunter pet information recently added to the armory, Data Miner Zardoz has wasted no time getting his hands on the raw Hunter pet data and breaking it down. The data is only for level 80 Hunters, and only 10,000 of those at that, but it still gives a very interesting snapshot of what's going with the Hunter's best friends. It might not be too big a surprise that Cats are far and away the most popular pet at a count of around 9500, nearly doubling again the amount of Wolves, who come in just under 5000, which are in turn used in numbers over twice as much as the next popular choice, Gorillas, who are just above 2800 in number. Now mind you, this information does take into account pets that are in the stables as well, and there's certainly the possibility that a lot of them have just stayed in the stables for a long time.
Gaze into LotRO Book 2.8's Hall of Mirrors with six new screenshots
Turbine continues to shower us with imagery of their next free content update Volume II, Book 8: Scourge of Khazad-dûm. This go-around we've been treated to a look at the Hall of Mirrors, a place where giant expensive looking mirrors shine light into the otherwise dark, vast caves.Look, we're not sure it's so wise to have all these mirrors where things like giant wolves and bat monsters live, especially when adventurers seem to think it's fun to stomp through the place and fight everything in sight. Sooner or later, you know one of those giant mirrors is going to break. And what's the cost do you think? Probably several platinum pieces that frankly, we don't have.%Gallery-64288%
Runes of Magic takes up the warhammer with their version of public quests
When dealing with a game that's already known for incorporating the best features of many different MMOs into its core design, it was only a matter of time until some aspect of Warhammer Online showed up inside of Runes of Magic. And now, that piece of design has revealed itself -- public quests in the form of new "public encounters." Runes of Magic has announced their first encounter, "Attack on Segarth Outpost," as a battle between the defenders of Segarth Outpost and the wolves of the forest. The setup for the encounter is a classic public quest setup featuring 3 waves of wolf attackers that concludes with the appearance of Axis, the wolf king. If players should be successful in destroying Axis, he will leave behind a treasure box filled with all sorts of goodies for players to collect.This is only the first of the public encounters, and Runewaker Entertainment's Tony Tang has hinted at more coming in the future, possibly even involving the Demon Lord himself!
The Queue: Cats rule, dogs drool
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.Today's edition of The Queue will be pretty short and sweet. Many of the questions that were asked yesterday have since been answered in other places around the site, so I just went ahead and skimmed over those ones to answer what hasn't been addressed already. Ready? Set? Let's go!Becky asked..."I may be wrong but it seems to me of all the in-game non-combat pets, there are no dogs but plenty of cats. What's with the lack of dogs? My mage wants a puppy."
Petaholics Anonymous releases a pet name generator
About a month ago, we posted in anticipation of a pet name generator that Petaholics Anonymous was working on (especially of interest to me, since I've been playing my Hunter like crazy lately), and now the Pet-o-licious Namerator is now up and running. Right now, I've got a raptor that I've named Jumpy, but I very well could have named it "Bahir" or "Claws," both good names out of the Namerator. As was decided back on the poll, PA has apparently put the names into Silly and Serious categories, so you choose your pet's family and whether you want a silly or serious name, and you can choose from the ones that pop out (and if you don't like any of them, you can click Generate again and you'll get more).If you've got a great pet name that's not in there, you can submit some more, as well, and apparently Bats are the most needed category (though I really love "Guano" as a silly Bat name, and "Vlad" as serious -- why would you need anything else?). Definitely some fun ideas in there for Hunters to choose from. Unfortunately, we'll probably still see Hunters going around with their pet "Cat" following them (so boring!), but maybe this will help.
New pets from the Wrath beta
Our favorite Hunter (although BRK comes close), Mania, has had some help from the Wrath beta, and has now updated the great Petopia with all the new pets seen in Northrend so far. No penguins yet, but there are some great new bears in there, and some awesome wolves (is it just me, or are wolves underrated as pets?). Unfortunately, there are no new families up yet, but Mania says updates are coming, and of course Wrath is still in beta anyway.She's also got a Beta pet FAQ up, with everything you'd ever want to know about being a Hunter in the beta, from pet talents to "exotic pets" (the real ones, not the ones BRK dreamed up for us).It's going to be an exciting time to be a Hunter in Northrend. Pet versatility makes Hunters one of the most interesting classes in the game, and it looks like Blizzard is set to open it up wide in the expansion.
The expanded pet system of Lineage 2's Hellbound
The newest Lineage 2 expansion, Hellbound, is currently in test, and with its improvements and new content come changes to the pet system that fans will love. For example, people who have wolves as pets will be able to evolve it to a mountable form called a Fenrir. This change isn't merely cosmetic -- it will get special attacks and more powerful skills, and also confers its power to its owner while mounted. Clan members have further customization available to them, able to upgrade their wolves to Great Snow Wolves, Red Striders, and Snow Fenrirs.For the other pets, the level caps have been raised to 85, concomitant with players' level caps. Once the Baby Buffalo, Baby Kookaburra, and Baby Cougar pets have exceeded level 55, they, too, can evolve into more powerful forms. Each one is geared toward a particular class, and grants buffs accordingly. Visit the Lineage 2 site for more information, and check out these evolved pet screenshots!%Gallery-20677%[Thanks, Cynthia!]
