This is my E3 wishlist, let’s see how many of my wishes will be granted next week!

• SOE shows an alpha version of Everquest Next
• EQ2 is getting a graphics update
• Minecraft is also getting a graphics update
• ArcheAge has found a European publisher and the game will be released here in a couple of months
• Blizzard announces a Diablo 3 expansion. It will include offline single player, and the option to play D3 with D2 graphics.
• Blizzard announces Warcraft IV. It will be done when it’s done, fortunately it’s almost done!
• Sacred III is playable on E3 and will also be released in a couple of months

Console to Closet is a great blog, providing nice outfits every day inspired by games or game characters. I have almost 100 blogs on my Netvibes page (yes, I still use Netvibes!), and this is the only fashion blog that I follow.

As a little tribute to it, I made an outfit inspired by Firiona Vie from Everquest. Forgot to save the designers and prices though… Oh well. Blue is not my color anyway ;-)

Yay! It’s Diablo launch week! I bought the game (hasn’t everybody?), played it for a couple of hours already, and had lots of fun. It’s a good game, of course it’s a good game, it’s Diablo! There is one thing that bothers me a bit about it and that’s the graphics. I liked the Diablo II graphics much better: darker, less cartoony, much more fitting with the theme of the game. Diablo III looks like WoW. Meh.

But let’s talk about something else! Path of Exile, a Diablo clone held its second open beta weekend and I’m so impressed by this game! The gameplay is fun, the story is good, the areas are well-designed. The graphics are perfect. And I really love the huge skill tree: it makes you feel like you can try out dozens of builds with the same class.

The game is free to download and free to play with a cosmetic cash shop. I have never heard of a co-op dungeon crawler with this business model so it should be interesting to see how well they do. I like the game, so I wouldn’t mind spending some Euros for a pretty dress for my character, if only to support this awesome indie game. 

The industry is changing so fast. I remember how just a couple of years ago, lots of people just hated the free-to-play model. It stood for low-quality, asian, grind and pay-to-win. The big MMO forums were full of posts stating that people would NEVER play a F2P game.

And now Tera has launched and all I’m hearing is: “It’s a great game, but WHY did they not make it free-to-play like all the other games?”

I would actually love it if Tera were free-to-play. I only want to pay for one subscription at a time and at the moment, that’s EQ2 (which ironically is positioned as a F2P game). 

Oh well, I’m sure that Tera will change its payment model in a year or so. I’ll just try it then.

The Iron Realms games are quite controversial. I’ve never played one myself, even though they seem like a lot of fun.

One reason is that they have the image of being pay-to-win. The second reason however is a much more important barrier for me, namely that if you want to be at least a bit competitive in combat, you need to have a “system”, which is basically a whole bunch of triggers and scripts that cure afflictions automatically and help you fight, because everything just happens too fast for a normal person to read and react to.

Now you could try to create your own system, with some basic knowledge of scripting and coding, but it’s a neverending task. Some players have worked on their systems for hundreds and even thousands of hours. There are people who make their systems available for other players to download, but if you want to get a good one, you’ll have to pay for it. 

Ultimately, it’s not that expensive to buy a good system from another player, and it even could be fun to start writing you own, but that’s not the point. It’s a matter of principle. If developers don’t even bother to make the game accessible enough to play without a 3rd-party-system, I don’t think the game deserves to be played - no matter how awesome the gameplay, lore and roleplaying is. 

In a time where text-based games are dying, accessibility is more important than ever. No MUD can afford to miss out on players because the entry barrier is just to high. There’s quite some discussion on the Iron Realms forums about whether combat should be made easier in order to attract more new players, and I think this would be a great move.