My F5 is almost broke from all the refreshing of WHA and guild page while waiting for GOA to decide if we who have ordered the CE in EU will get access to CB, so I thought it was best to find something to do.

I looked at my old games to see if there was something for me to play while waiting and, behold, there was. :P

Haven't played Heroes of Might and Magic III for a while but it's one of those games you never really get tired of. It's one of my first games, bought it in 1998 when I was 7 years old, together with Baldur's Gate (which is THE game). ;)

Now, that screen really brings back the memories. :)

A guild mate found this hilarious thread this morning and I thought I'd share it with you. Here's the thread and it's made of 100% pure win! xD

5) Regarding the pre-order, Collector’s Edition and the Standard Edition, we are pleased to announce that we will also be inviting our pre-order CE buyers into our Closed Beta test starting next week. There will still be some hardware spec requirements (but they are much lower than our current requirements) since we are still in Closed Beta but we expect that the vast majority of our PO CE buyers will meet the lowered requirements. We gotten a lot of feedback from the community on this point over the last few weeks asking for this and we are now going to make it happen. -MBJ

I don't know yet what the situation for the EU will be regarding this. To be honest this announcement was a surprise to us as well and so we'll need to talk to Mythic, our other partners and our various internal teams to see what is possible under the circumstances. The timetable we were working to appears to have changed dramatically so we'll need to re-evaluate a lot of things and look at where our resources are at the moment. It's Mythic's prerogative to change things - in fact there have been many changes prior to this that we've worked through together - we just need to see if it's possible to adapt our plans to bring things back into line again. As always our intention will be to try and give the same opportunities to European fans as Mythic give to NA fans but we need to see if it is possible to shuffle our timetable to match given the fact that everything is pretty much committed at the moment to gearing up for launch.

I expect we'll be able to announce what we will be doing for the European fans within the next few days. -IainC Goa

*crosses fingers, toes and everything else*

I'm so excited right now! Mythic has now officially released a date for when WAR will launch! The Age of Reckoning will start on the 18th of September, a date not so far away and a lot sooner than I thought a few weeks ago!

With the headstart and OB, I might be playing WAR in just 3-4 weeks. That's nothing after more than 2 years of waiting and I'm more hyped than ever!

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!

The press are now allowed into closed beta and GameSpy are writing about their experience here. I advise you to check it out, it's a great read.

If I didn't already know how important a game's community is and how it can make or break a game, spoiled as I am by having an awesome guild to play with, I definitely realized it yesterday when I encountered one of the worst ones out there - the community in Warcraft III DoTA. I recalled why I had decided to only play DoTA at LANs a few years ago - it's filled with elitist, rascist jerks throwing hatred at anyone not as "skilled" as them, using programs to determine which country everyone are from and kicking russians and everyone else who doesn't meet their standards.

Even though they didn't flame me personally, I've played my fair share of DoTA after all ;), it got to the point where the game just didn't feel fun anymore. Not everyone are like this of course but there's certainly enough of them.

When they banned my mate, who is a real newbie on DoTA and whom I was trying to learn, I decided that I'd had enough of this and told them to fuck off before I left the game. I'm probably banned now but I couldn't care less.

Now on to some more positive things: GamesRadar had a hands-on preview featuring the PvE dungeons in WAR. Well, PvE and PvE, in WAR rules the line "WAR is everywhere" and it holds true even in (most of) their dungeons which are so called "open-world dungeons" where you possibly could encounter groups of the opposite realm. I don't know how many dungeons are located in the RvR area of the zones but I bet there's quite a few, especially in the higher tiers. That the dungeons are divided into several wings, just like SM, Naxx and the BC dungeons are in WoW, are great news as well.

Often, in other MMOs, the company will spend a lot of time making sure the beginning of the game is wonderful, but the rest of it can sort of peter off. But we haven’t done that with Warhammer. From start to finish, all the way through, we’ve spent the time and resources necessary to make the entire game compelling.

Hmm, AoC anyone? Hope they mean it as well and not just trying to pick on AoC for their own benefit, which they obiously are but I don't mind as long as they do it right themselves. :P

Everything seems to come together now and hopefully we will see a NDA-lift later this week or next which really would show that a release is drawing near.

Mythic has created some sort of mini-game to produce hype and up their beta sign-ups. Seems to be pretty fun, you collect gold and battle with and against other fans for your realm. Something to do while waiting for open beta to start I thought, made me really happy tbh and as I was eager to try it out I began typing my beta info in the login fields but stopped as I saw the text below.

Start the Realm War now. Join Order or Destruction, Earn Gold to win battles in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. The Winning Realm will be rewarded with Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning in-game prizes.

Woot! You can earn in-game prizes as well! But wait now just a second...

...North America, Australia, and New Zealand.

There ain't any EU version!!! WTF!? Alright, calm down now. There has to be a EU site as well somewhere, right? Apparantly, no, there are no EU version to be found. After realizing this, some more nerd-rage arouse and I have to leave the computer to grab something to eat and calm down.

I really, really, hope that this doesn't show how things will be done in the future. With that I mean that customers from NA will be the privileged ones and that the EU will be considered as second-grade customers. Sort of how I've heard it was in DAoC. Since it has something to do with beta maybe it's just GOA that are slow as usual, they haven't even fixed their site yet. Let's just hope their new one doesn't use the ridiculous amount of flash their current one does and that it gets updated at a reasonable speed. Flash is evil and it shouldn't be several days between the NA site and GOA's, imo.

/rant off

Alright, it got delivered today and after I've played it a few hours I have to say that it's definitely an ok game. Though you have to play it on delta (hardest) if you don't want to rush through the entire game in a few hours, at least from what I've seen so far. Maybe it gets harder later. That the koreans actually speak korean and not english is a big plus as well. Why they don't do that below delta is beyond me, really.

The best part is without a doubt the explosions. We all know explosions are fun, but this game with its graphics makes them more enjoyable than ever. It's a shame my computer can't manage more than medium graphics with a few high settings. It still looks amazing though. The biggest problems with games like this (singleplayer games) are, and has always been, their longevity. Especially singleplayer fps games. Crysis may have some more replayability than most of them though, because of the fact that you can destroy most things and that the explosions are awesome. Two things that are gold for people like me who enjoys bashing stuff beyond recognition. :P