Rift: Planes of Telara

One of the newest entrants to the MMO market – RIFT: Places of Telara is opening its servers for the Head Start to players who have pre-ordered today – with the official launch taking place on March 1 (NA servers) and 4 March (EU servers) – full details of the Head Start is available here.

RIFT throws players into the world of Telara – which after a recent magic war is experiencing rifts which appear – seemingly at random – these rifts connect to other planes, allowing the denizens of those planes to invade Telara, putting the inhabitants and lands at risk of destruction.

Stepping into the breach to protect the world are two factions – the Defiant and the Guardians – who from the get go are at odds about how exactly to go about saving the world. Clever of them. So the players will be spending a fair bit of time fighting each other along with the invaders. No lack of targets then

RIFT features a dynamic world, two factions, and a host of different races and four base classes – each of these classes have a number of specialisations, granting the players a greatly varying experience. The races included in the game are, on the Guardian side: Dwarves, High Elves and Mathosians – and on the Defiant side the Bahmi, Eth and Kelari. Immediately you can see the light/dark contrast – and while 2 of the races are familiar to most people, the addition of 4 different races give the players something to explore.

The four base classes are: the Warrior, the Mage, the Cleric and the Rogue. As classes go, these are very familiar to most RPG players – but, each of these classes have 7 different specialisations, and it looks like Trion have left space to add more at a later date.

I’d love to go into the detail, but there is simply too much – so I suggest visiting the classes page itself to get an overview.

RIFT has all the ingredients to become an epic MMO title – while it may not be a WoW killer (it’s really too early to say), it may leech some players away, and if it lives up to its promise, it may very well put NCSoft’s Aion in some trouble – with Aion having had difficulty in retaining it’s players; while NCSoft has been getting progressively better at keeping their players happy – RIFT seems to contain features that may make it appealing to players of both the aforementioned games.

RIFT is a subscription-based game – with a monthly subscription of US$14.99 – although it becomes somewhat less if you opt for the 3-month or 6-month payment plans. However, you have until the 15th of March to subscribe on one of the Founder’s Subscription Plans – which will save you some additional dosh … you can end up paying as little as $9.99/month – and you keep that price for as long as you maintain an active subscription.

For those wanting to up their game and get ahead – Xerxes has released their Ultimate Rift Mastery Guide – featuring a Beginners’ Guide, a Comprehensive Leveling guide for both factions, Skills Builds Guides for both PvP and PvE – and it will be constantly updated with new tips and information. Ordering grants immediate access to the members’ area on the site – there are no monthly membership fees for this access; you get lifetime access to all the content.

For more details -Click Here!

A new life

Greetings all.

This poor blog has been neglected for quite a long while now. Amber has pretty much given up writing – as you can probably see – and I’ve taken over Gadgetdevils as from today.

It is very likely that you will see quite a few changes taking place over the course of the next few months – I’ll be moving away from the current (pretty default) theme – redesigning and rebuilding the layout of the site, among other things.

As yet – I have a few other projects that are keeping me engaged, so don’t expect everything to jump to life just yet. There’s a fair bit of work that needs to happen in the background still. While my interests do tend to align with Amber’s for the most part – I’m a little more of a gaming junkie, so while some technology and gadget articles are still likely to make their appearance, Gadgetdevils will very likely be leaning in more of a gaming direction from this point forward.

Okay, so the name will be a little misrepresentative, but no worries, right?

I’m a big anime fan as well, so this site will – gradually – be integrated into the rest of my network. I’ll update you on that as it happens.

Keep an eye on this space.

Guildwars 2 Trailer premieres

The chaps over at NCSoft are quite the group of teasers.

As some of you may have gathered from my Aion write-up, I’m a huge fan of Guildwars. Not only of the gameplay, which is awesome, but it has an pretty decent soundtrack, the graphics and animation are quite pleasing to the eye – however, for me, this wasn’t what set it apart from the competition.

It was free. I got the box, which was pretty good looking; I also got all sorts of goodies inside, which, sadly, are missing from a lot of games nowadays – the purchase value hinges all on the gameplay rather than what’s in the box. Fair enough, I have four boxes (I bought each of the campaigns seperately), but that was the only money I had to spend on the game.

So, I’ve been playing Guildwars for about 2 years now. I’m far from the most experienced player out there, but that does come to a fair amount of game-time.

In any case, it wasn’t long after I started playing first that rumours of Guildwars 2 started making the rounds, and was confirmed by NCSoft. Back then, we were at least expecting a Beta to be available by September (2008), which, as you may know, never happened. And at this point, no one has been able to pin NCSoft down on a definite date of any kind.

Today however, NCSoft took some steps to provide the world with a new route to dehydration, by premiering the official Guildwars 2 Trailer. The video is a mixture of CG and gameplay footage, and if you get your joy from good visuals, it may just have been worth the wait.

In order to whet your appetite a bit, I’m including some screenshots of the video below, but I’d advice you to hop over to the Guildwars 2 site and have a look for yourself. You won’t regret it. While you’re there, sign up for the newsletter so you can stay up to date.

I don’t really have any definite information on what gameplay and character customisation options will be available, but if Aion was any indication – I don’t see NCSoft going without – so there will be a lot of unique looking folks running about … gleefully killing things.

We do know for certain that there will be five playable races (rather than only humans):

• The Charr
• Humans
• Asura
• Norn
• Silvari (new race)

For more info on the game itself, you might also want to visit the Guildwars 2 Wiki

NCSoft have repeatedly said that they’re holding back on release because they want to blow our socks off. Consider my socks blown. So, guys, give me my game now please.

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Facebook Lite to challenge Twitter

Facebook yesterday started testing a light-weight version of their social service in a move that could unseat rival microblogging service, Twitter.

Facebook recently acquired FriendFeed, following their failed attempt to purchase Twitter last year. FriendFeed is a service that allows users to see what their friends are doing online and share content; it has  also been described as a possible rival to Twitter in it’s ability to conduct real-time searches.

Facebook caused a buzz around the internet, when, late on Tuesday, the URL lite.facebook.com was briefly and accidentally opened to an expanded audience. Facebook caught on pretty quickly, and the URL was redirected to the standard Facebook login page.

The initial test was started in India, with initial impressions being that it’s a lot faster than Facebook. Some are referring to it as Twitter with friends, and also doesn’t have the 140 character limit that Twitter enforces.

In a reply to a question by AFP, Facebook stated that “We are currently testing a simplified alternative to Facebook.com that loads a specific set of features quickly and efficiently,” the Internet star said in reply to an AFP inquiry.

“Similar to the Facebook experience you get on your mobile phones, Facebook Lite is a fast-loading, simplified version of Facebook that enables people to make comments, accept Friend requests, write on people’s Walls, and look at photos and Status updates.”

It’s basically a stripped down version of Facebook, and the guys over at DeviceMag provide us with some early screenshots. For the full story, see this link

Social sites under attack

Social sites Facebook and Twitter yesterday stumbled as they became the targets of a massive DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack. In fact, Twitter did more than stumble; the social tool was actually offline for an extended period of time – no doubt causing large amounts of panic amongst Twitter addicts.

Apparently, Google itself was also targeted by these attacks, but the internet giant was able to fend it off.

At this point in time, Facebook seems to be running without problems, although Twitter is still experiencing intermittent failures throughout the day. Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone, had the following to say on the company blog: “The continuing denial of service attack is being mitigated, although there is still degraded service for some folks while we recover completely.”

According to the Internet Advertising Bureau, the attacks were thought to be targeted against one individual blogger who has been an outspoken critic of the conflict between Russia and Georgia. Other theories include a simple stunt pulled by a hacker to prove he could or an attack against Twitter due to software that blocks tweets with malicious links.

Facebook and Twitter have now both teamed up with Google in order to investigate the cyber-assault.

DDoS attacks are typically carried out by large botnets, networks of infected PC’s that send simultaneous requests to the targeted server, effectively overloading it so that it can’t respond to legitimate requests.