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MMO Family: Winter roundup of kid-friendly MMOs
Winter is always my favorite time of year for family-friendly MMOs. Holiday events tend to be the norm now in most MMOs, but they're tailor-made for games with a younger audience. Winter also seems to usher in lots of new changes and updates as well, so it's time again to revisit some popular titles to play catch up. Over the past year, we've looked at several new titles and visited veteran MMOs titles to see what's changed. From Club Penguin to Pirate101, we'll look at recent updates and upcoming news in MMO Family's winter roundup!
Quests added to mob tooltips on the PTR
The Godmother over at ALT:ernative ducked into the PTR recently, and noticed something new: Blizzard is apparently testing adding Questhelper-style notes to tooltips of the quest-related mobs you come across. This looks so familiar that I thought it was an addon, but no, apparently Blizzard really is planning to tell you when a mob you're looking at happens to be the target of a quest.It shocked me for a second -- not only is this dumbing down the questing game even further (maybe someday we will have a large red arrow pointing out a quest target from zones away), but it seems to be an awfully big break in immersion. Blizzard is basically telling you that "this is the mob you need, right here," and actually reading the quest text becomes even less necessary.But then I realized that tooltips themselves aren't exactly paragons of game immersion -- it's already a little jump in the reality of the game to see a box with a mob's name and level whenever you mouse over it. Tooltips are already where the UI meets the road, so to speak. And as for the "dumbing down" of the game, most experienced players already had this functionality through addons like Questhelper and MonkeyQuest anyway (and if you do plan to complain that this makes things way too easy, make sure Questhelper is out of your Addon directory before you start typing). But if the tips stay in the game when the patch goes live, questing will be that much easier for people who stick to the basic UI.
WoW Rookie: Quest wrangling 101
It's no coincidence (just in case you thought it was) that when you first log into the game, the first thing you see is an NPC in front of you with a golden exclamation point above their head. Quests are a fundamental part of this game, not just in terms of lore and story, but also in character advancement (and earning all of that gold and XP that you're going to be doing). A good part of the game (in fact, the major part of the game up to level 70) is just handling all the quests and tasks you've got to do. From FedEx to kill quests, and from huge multi-part quest chains to simple fetch quests, handling all of those tasks is extremely important from the moment you enter the world of Azeroth.So today on WoW Rookie, we're going to give you a few tips on how to handle this most important of missions: figuring out where, who, and what's up with all the missions you get in the game. Keeping track of what you're supposed to do is sometimes just as important as doing it, and so after the jump, we've compiled a few tips for getting your Azerothian to-dos done.
Essential Addons for the Discerning Level 60
Seeing as my Shaman (Shamanic on Thunderhorn, by the way, in case you want to say hi) is finally about to hit 60 and start raiding, I figured that now might be a good time to sit down and update and refresh my UI addons, something I haven't done for a patch or two now. So I monitored my play habits for a little while, checked in with guildies for their recommendations, and in the end, these are the five addons I decided were necessary to put in my /Interface folder. -Titan Panel: If I was only going to put one addon in, this would be the one I use. Titan creates an extra bar at the top or bottom of your screen (on my setup, I actually have it in both places) that tracks all kinds of things for you: time played, XP/hour, Durability, stat buffs, FPS, game memory usage-- pretty much everything about your WoW experience you'd ever want to know (it also will tell you the coordinates of your position in the game-- extremely useful for getting around Azeroth). Titan, like the famous CTmod (which I tried but didn't like as much), is so complex there's even addons for the addon. If you've never tried a meta-addon like Titan, definitely give it a try. Four more after the jump...
