The main city of Hawksmouth and the Quarterstone Fountain, Statue and Pit District all share a common architecture and I'm quite satisfied with the appearance of Hawksmouth with its market, the back alley next to High House Torque and the intimidating statue of a tamed Vhelgar at its centre. The whole city has a dense atmosphere and looks finished and well thought out. Quarter Stone on the other hand, capital for that matter has been disappointing and couldn't stand a chance comparing it to Hawksmouth. The first time you'll set foot on Quarterstone you will do so entering it by the docks next to the palace. The palace as seen on early screen shots as a collection of the High Houses built around a round plaza with a fountain is no more. At some point someone had the strange idea to replace it with some sort of building that looks like its been taken right from the East German hinterland. Not only does it give the Palace some sort of rather prison-like, I'd almost say boring look, it fails to create easily distinguishable wings for each of the High Houses. The only superficial recognisable difference between the five wings, besides ...

According to the official Acclaim forums they sorted out the game guard issues and the Acclaim version of TCoS is finally on it's way. I wonder if we're still going to see a closed beta in their territories or if they're going to start with the real deal right away. It'd probably a good  idea to start with a CB to sort out possible server or client issues and I expect hope they know what they're doing.

Next big content update being two weeks away I'm sad to hear rumours of Banshee, English Community Manager leaving TCoS for personal reasons in march not prolonging her contract. It's sad to see her quit being a valuable member of the community for some time now.

I'm still alive, I just wasn't in the mood to blog and now I'm back and this time I bring some good news, kinda. The community managers announced that a new content patch is on its way that will bring new content, yet to be announced content and bugfixes. Here's what Banshee had to say:

Christmas time is over, people are going back to work and TCoS is still well alive, or is it? I'm going to to summarise what happened in the last couple of days while that guy with the funny hat and bear flew around the world. Unscheduled server downtimes and failed advertisement in Germany.

Forum member Hinx just announced a new updated version of his popular Avatar and Signature Builder. This nifty piece of software it's a breeze giving any of your avatar pictures a little more of a TCoS themed look. It's easy to use and it's free!

If you aren't a skin shifter and aren't inside a town or a city you're probably just being attacked by one of the gazillions of mobs or denizens of one of the various regions of TCoS. Killing them doesn't give you as much experience points, or fame, like you're used to other games. So you're doing your very best to avoid as much of them as you can while they're doing their best exactly doing the opposite and they got help...

I know people don't like to get spoiled so I'm trying to keep this as spoiler free as possible. The first and apparently the second boss encounter in the new group dungeon are bugged. Well we assume they're because there was no official statement concerning possible bugs in the Citadel of Ail at this point.

Just as for any other out there, there are communities build around The Chronicles of Spellborn. And every now and then you might actually stumble across one of them where people gather in discussion outside the rigid rule set of the official forums. But to be honest I'm not that kind of guy to regularly engage in discussion on community sites. I might end up reading them though.

People paying some attention to the forums lately have probably noticed it getting rough about the publishers' marketing strategy and advertisement campaign which seemed non-existent. It wasn't all that bad in the end with some TV time in Germany and being one of the Christmas gift reccomendations of Der Spiegel, Europe's biggest and most influential weekly magazine. But nonetheless, all of this doesn't change a fact and whether we like it or not, we need more advertisement,