I have now had the change to play the new Rise of Kunark expansion for most of Tuesday night, and a good portion of the day on Wednesday. I wanted to talk about some of my first thoughts, and problems / issues that I think may arise as this expansion continues.

To start with the expansion seems really good so far. The artwork appears pretty top notch, and I have really enjoyed what I have played of the expansion. The only real problem with this, is that most of the expansion that I have played has been soloing and questing, and a tiny bit of grouping. So where exactly is the problem again? Well let me try and explain. I am currently level 72.5, and I have 109 Achievement points. This is from 5 collection quests that I managed to store up before the expansion, quests, solo named mobs, and exploration. On top of which I took a good 3 hour break from the game to spend time with my wife, and took at least another 4 hours to do things like run guild writs with a group to gain status, and to help out guild mates with quests that I had already completed.

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Over at MMOG Nation, Michael Zenke took some shots at a review of Rise of Kunark posted by Karen “Shayalyn” Hertzberg over at Ten Ton Hammer:

Hey Hammer … this piece on Kunark, that you call a review? The ‘review’ that has a score on it and has review as part of the title? It’s not a review. Not only is it impossible to review a MMOG expansion that just went live yesterday, the reviewer makes it sound like her exposure to the expansion content was just via the guided tour. That’s not a review. That’s a ‘preview’ or ‘first impressions’. Not a review.

His position is that it’s virtually impossible to review an MMO at release.  Read through his comments and you see that his entry apparently touched the right buttons as Coyote, Savanja, and Boomjack all come out of the TTH corner swinging.

All of which leads me to wonder, when is it ok to review an MMO?  What makes a good review as opposed to a poor one?  Is this review really a review or not?  And does this even matter to anyone who doesn’t actually write about video games?

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Kunark:  First Field Report

It’s been 48 hours since I picked up my copy of Rise of Kunark and loaded it up. 

On Tuesday, the servers were down - really down.  Expecting to see significant downtime as this is a major release, I only took a half day off of work on release day.  Even so, I still had to wait till roughly 3PM here in Minneapolis before the servers finally came up.  Luckily, we were able to patch our primary accounts in my house before Guk actually came online, so once the locks were dropped, we were in and running.

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