In case you were interested in trying out EVE’s new expansion Dominion and didn’t have an account already, you can buy one for $5.00 on Steam. It’s a good deal in my opinion, well worth the five bucks, and hell, you might even like the game.

Ok so I’m a week late on this one. Cryptic is now promoting a free demo of their game, Champions Online.

Starting today, new players can create an account and play the beginning zone of Champions Online for as long as they want, completely free of charge.

The Champions Online demo offers unlimited playtime in the game’s first zone (Millennium City under alien attack), two character slots, and the ability to play up to level 15. Meet other Champions and help save Millennium City from a Qularr invasion.

I always like free. I got to play this game in late beta any it wasn’t for me personally since I’m not into Super Heros, but the character creator was pretty cool.

Just a heads up link:

PC Gamer Magazine has written an article detailing the a few character classes, but mainly the Sith Inquisitor . Follow the link for the PDF file.

After the break:

Watch Developer Dispatch: Designing the Dark Side, and learn how Star Warsâ„¢: The Old Republicâ„¢ developers created this dominating force.

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Here’s wishing to all our readers a safe and very Merry Christmas. To those that don’t celebrate, Happy Festivus.

I liked it…

The easiest way I can describe Alganon is calling it a “Custom CircleMUD”. Now I doubt very many people will understand what I mean by this so I’m going to give you a quick history lesson from my early years of online gaming.

Back in the ’90s most people playing online RPGs were probably playing MUDs. There were a couple of big MUDs (Sojourn, Toril, Duris, Aardwolf, Medievia) and there were hundreds if not thousands of smaller MUDs that were people’s pet projects. People who wanted to make their own MUD with a few of their friends usually picked a base code. The most prevalent was CircleMUD with a prepacked world and four classes. We called these games “Stock MUDs” because the world was always the same but maybe it had a different name. They were always shitty MUDs and with almost nothing different to it.

The next level of MUDs were “Custom CircleMUDs” that always had potential to be fun games. Usually the owners ripped out the stock world and created their own. Sometimes they tweaked the classes and maybe added a new one. Depending on the skill of the people running the game; you could potentially have a good game.

The last level of MUDs were in a realm of their own. The most prevalent that I remember was SojournMUD (Or Duris/Toril). It had a completely original world and a complete customization of classes and mechanics but was still rooted, or was started in, the root stock code base even though it was hardly recognizable unless you knew what to look for.

Now how does this compare to today? Well the big boy on the block would be Warcraft. Complete customization with differing mechanics etc. Alganon would be the “Custom CircleMUD”. And here’s why.

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