Halo MMO - It would have been on the list had it ever come out.

Ladies and germs, you’ve likely been following the writers of LoreHound.com for quite some time (If not, welcome aboard!).  We’ve introduced ourselves, talked about our time in World of Warcraft, discussed our past and even revealed the origins behind our now-familiar names.  But what we haven’t done is reveal how we got here.

How is it that we went from players to bloggers?  Was World of Warcraft our first drug, or just the latest taste?  Exactly how long have we been in the MMOG scene?  Are we newcomers with a penchant for deep discussion, or are we long-standing players well-versed in the genre?  Perhaps we’re casual sight seers, whetting our palate with a smorgasbord of flavors and diverse textures.  You’ll gain insight and answers from my personal timeline (dates are when I played). Continue Reading

By now the die-hard Final Fantasy fans are logging in to servers around the world for their first look at the release version of FFXIV Online. In this final of our videos celebrating the release of Final Fantasy XIV Collectors Edition today, I finally get in some good gameplay. The video picks up at the opening cinematic for Gridania, then I play around with the UI and basic commands a bit before engaging in combat and seeing more pretty cut scenes. Lots of good stuff in this one. After the video, continue onward for my critiques of the game based on what I experienced in the Open Beta.

As promised, now I lay into the game itself. As I previously ranted, the Open Beta seemed to be very poorly organized. I had to jump through so, so many hoops just to get the client installed, patched and running properly that part of me was no longer even interested in playing the game. Another part thought, “After going through all that, this BETTER be good.”

And in some ways, it was. The character creation process itself is quite detailed and allows for some relatively in-depth customization. Of course, your character will still look like the race that you choose, but with many, many options for skin tone, facial expressions, voice, eyes and nose, hair, etc. That part was fun.

And I loved the transition of my character from the version I created in the first and second videos I posted to one appearing so vividly in-game. In the cut scenes, I was especially impressed with the graphics. Even during gameplay, the look of the characters and environments is gorgeous.

The class system also seems really interesting, although I didn’t progress very far, and the questing from what I played through seemed decent. I enjoyed the switch back and forth between gameplay and cut scenes, too, and think that overall I would be a fan of the storyline. But, for me, that wasn’t enough to suck me in. Continue Reading

Those of you who partake in daily adventures to our humble site already have caught a glimpse of my amateur video-making abilities. Now I get to use them to show you cool new features of Patch 4.0.1. I took a side step and copied my character to the PTR servers early enough to record some great footage for your viewing and ravenous pleasure. In this video, I discover some kinks and perks of the UI Additions and Class Changes.

What do you think on the changes? Nifty, or just unnecessary and  ineffective time-managing?

Again, please drop a comment criticizing my abilities, and drop suggestions on what you, the viewers, would like to see me do.

In an unrelated note, click through for another opportunity to score some PAX goodies. Continue Reading

Marlboro eats Square Enix's intertube connectionz.

So far, the FFXIV Open Beta has been a huge letdown. Why do I say this? Because despite many days of trying on a system that is more than capable of running the software, I have yet to be able to even connect. In fact, the only thing that has gotten me even close has been the huge fanbase of other players — who also seem to be having a very difficult time connecting — who have built how-to forums and donated their time to helping others navigate what should be a relatively simple process.

Let me start from the beginning.

As previously reported, last week I was happily starting along the path to playing Final Fantasy XIV Open Beta, only to learn that it had been delayed because of “critical bugs.” It turned out that delay only was for about a day, so I was soon able to get back on track. But as it turned out, the delay was the least of my issues.

The next problem I encountered was simply navigating the official beta website. As I suppose should have been somewhat anticipated, Square Enix’s web servers seem to have been slammed those first couple of days of open beta. The site crashed repeatedly, logging in on one part of the site wouldn’t allow me access to other parts of the site, my sign up information did not allow me access to the forums, and the website in general is poorly designed so when I finally did get a page to load, it usually wasn’t the right one.

I gave up in the short term and waited for the servers to recover. A couple days later, I finally was able to successfully download the Open Beta client. I installed it, had it working, and started the patching process. Then that became the problem — the patching was due to take more than 24 hours to complete, sucking up my bandwidth the whole time. My household could not do with craptastic internet in the meantime, so I searched for an alternative. Continue Reading