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Path of Exile patches in guilds, classes, and balance changes for launch
It's not fair to call Path of Exile's pre-launch patch a kitchen sink patch; this is big enough to include the sink, dishwasher, fridge, and probably a good chunk of the dining room besides. It's a big patch, and when it goes fully live tomorrow, you'll have a chance to play around with the enormous list of features, starting with the addition of an entire system for guilds that didn't exist before. Yes, the patch includes a guild system. And that's not even the biggest part of the patch. It includes a new character class for players who have cleared the game on Normal difficulty, six new world areas, achievements, new skills, new items, and an assortment of balance tweaks and improvements. That's not even touching upon new challenge leagues and the like. The point is that even if you know the game inside and out, you might want to hop in tomorrow and try out the huge array of new options available to you because... really. There's lots of stuff here.
The Art of Wushu: Launching into Age of Wushu
Age of Wushu just launched publicly today, and as you read this, thousands of players are getting into the game for the very first time. For a lot of you first-time readers, you might be wondering what the heck is this game, why should you play it, and what are some of the community resources for the game? Age of Wushu is an open-world PvP sandbox set in a fictional Ming Dynasty China where traditional MMO elements like sorcery and character levels are eschewed for martial arts and proficiency in a wide variety of different skills. I'm fond of saying that Wushu is "like EVE in China." Many of AoW's features are similar to EVE's systems, including an emphasis on leveling breadth versus depth, a true player economy, and social maneuvering and backstabbing. At the same time, Wushu is a fundamentally different creature, with skill-based gameplay and a much clunkier interface. It's also a bit simpler than EVE, but the barrier of entry is still pretty high. The Art of Wushu column is about lowering that bar a bit, and I'm simultaneously proud and sad to say that the English fan-made wiki still currently provides much less in-depth information than this column does. If you're already playing the game, check out some of the previous articles as they are pretty useful things that I link people to regularly. If you're not a new player yet, well... this one's for you.
The failure of the beta defense
There are always people willing to defend a game, no matter what its flaws. You could have a game where the fundamental means of communication was broken for two months straight, and it would still have fans piping up and explaining why that isn't such a big deal. But with one high-profile game (Star Trek Online) finishing its beta, and several others slated to finish or start theirs, one of the classic defenses for a game's problems is losing much of its strengths: "well, it's still in beta." Some of you may well recall our recent feature on betas, in which several developers alternately lamented and stated that the "open beta" is now essentially nothing more than a preview. Bio Break expounds on this point, noting that more often than not the defense of "it's just a beta" would only be valid if there was some large launch-day patch on deck to fix everything. Those patches, it's worth noting, occupy the same space as unicorns and fairies. Broken parts of a game in open beta, more often than not, now mean that there will be something broken in the game at launch. That doesn't mean that the developers aren't working on fixing things, but it does mean that defending the beta as sacrosanct is lacking validity.
