Okay, so it's Friday finally. There's about half a day of work left. All I can think about is playing DAoC's (Dark Age of Camelot, it's a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game) newest expansion, New Frontiers.
Before I can explain what New Frontiers is, I must first explain what DAoC is all about. In some ways, it's just like every other MMORPG out there. You make your wizard, paladin, ranger, etc... run around and kill the bad monsters. The element of DAoC that's different is it's RvR. Most games, DAoC included, have some sort of PvP (Player vs Player) where you can run around and just kill anyone else who happens to be logged in. Most games, just like DAoC, create special servers for this, so that people who DON'T want to be kill randomly don't have to worry about it. On normal DAoC servers, there is no PvP, instead there is Realm versus Realm. There are three very different "realms" in DAoC: Hibernia, Midgard, and Albion. Each of these realms has different races, classes, and completely different worlds to run around and fight the bad guys in. Each realm also has a "frontier" that can be access by enemy players from other realms. When you meet other players from other realms in these frontiers, they're no different than any other kind of monster. You can't talk to them or reason with them... they're barbarians after all. Your only chose is to kill them and defend your realm!
Okay, so the old RvR mostly consisted of roaming around with herds of people from your same realm hoping to run into enemies so that you can kill them and gain "realm points". Every once and awhile groups would get together to take enemy keeps, or attempt to take an enemy relic. This could get kind of boring sometimes though, because finding a fight in these large frontiers could take some time.
Well New Frontiers fixed all that!! They added kind of a 'war map' feature that allows you to see where fights are happening, and what keeps are under attack via a popup window. They also allow you to teleport quickly to any keep still in your 'supply chain' to quickly get to your front lines. They also made the keeps look a TON better, and totally revamped the siege equipment. Balistas, trebuchet, battering rams, boiling oil, etc... all look extremely cool, and work WAY better than they did in the past. You also gain the magical realm points from defending and taking keeps now.
I'm mostly just rambling here, but I'm basically just really exciting about how great this newest expansion is!
Go Mythic!