Originally posted by bobfish

So why does Edward Andercheck still claim to be a major investor in Horizons?

• It looks good on the resume'?
• It looks good on credit applications?
• He'll remove the claim as soon as he learns MS Word?
• He's putting together a development team to assess the issue before attempting removal from his resume'?
• He'll correct the mis-statement, Real Soon Now.
• Virtrium's ownership is a vicious lie spread by unmoderated explayers who hate lovable him for no reason whatsoever? 
• It's really the fault of the billing service company? 

In December, when players of one of his new games, Immortals, found out about the EI thing, he told his staff after it had calmed down that he was still heavily involved Horizons and things were fine there now, and it wasn't his fault in the first place, but one of the other investors in his company who he now doesn't let have that much control over things.

Bobfish, are you a member of his staff?  Is that how you know this?  Because thus far what I'm seeing are unsubstantiated claims made by you.  You can't back up what you're saying with a link that shows where he's saying this,  nor do I see any other proof.

Compare that to the current owner of the company very clearly posting on the Horizons forums that this is not the case.  Compare this to interviews done with the current owner on this site, and others, stating not only who he is in connection to the game, but why and how he invested in it.

Until I see some real proof, my feeling is "nothing to see here".

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Originally posted by bobfish
So why does Edward Andercheck still claim to be a major investor in Horizons?

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That's a good question, but you should ask it of Ed Andercheck himself. As Orlena notes, you have not provided any proof that Ed actually made those claims. The claims themselves have been shown to be false, regardless of who originated them, and that's all that matters as far as Horizons is concerned.

I just signed up on the horizons forum a little while ago and am glad to see it's still alive.  This game definitely had the best community out of any mmo.

Horizons, even with its prehistoric graphics and load times, is a pretty decent game. I'd be playing it right now if not for a disagreement I had with one of their customer support people.

Dragons are obviously a draw card, as is the housing. I loved playing my dragon and building my lair. And the bipeds were pretty cool too. Generally good community, too.

Where the game is really weak, imo, is the current biped multiclassing arrangement. While it's kinda cool for solo'ing, it makes teaming up complicated and effectively kills what in other mmos is a big part of the 'social' element of gameplay.

Funny thing is, Cabal Online has worse graphics than Horizons - almost as bad as Anarchy Online's - and it's relatively new.

Horizons gets something right with its graphics that many MMOs fail to:
SHARP, HIGH-DETAIL TEXTURES (on most things). ^_^

No amount of bumpmapping, shine, fancy particle effects, high polygon counts, or high budget *glances at WoW* will compensate for rampant blurrily low-res textures.

I've never tried Cabal, but I think Horizons graphics is something that might turn away eg. players of newer mmos.

It's a lot better now than it was a few years ago - but still.... I have a fairly good computer and most of the time had to play with the graphics settings right down, or I had to restart my computer every hour, as opposed to every four. And I have never had to do that running any other program on my machine.

And the load times take a bit of adjusting to. I used to use the time to go get a drink or something, but zoning in most mmos takes a matter of seconds, not minutes.

I think it's fair to say Horizons is an old game running on an old graphics engine that's performing below par compared to the competition - and that's definitely a hurdle when it comes to attracting and keeping new players.

I played horizons for a week when it first hit gold.  Maybe two weeks.  Even back then it couldn't hold up against the competition.  It was one of the first MMOs to horribly undeliver on promises.  Shadowbane was sort of an underperformer, and it got a lot of flack for it back then, but Shadowbane was a shining bar of gold compared to the way Horizons was released.  Every system in the game was horribly unfinished, right down to the empty world.

To bad though cause back then I was really looking forward to the sub-component style crafting system promised on the box.  You know.  Pommel, hilt, blade, tassle, runes on hilt.  All those and more were supposed to go into the creation of a sword.

Oh well.

I really want everybody to know that the player base fell and continued to fall until some major changes were made. Dragons were originally frustrating to play, due to errors and bad design decisions, and the new player experience was not good.