Been playing a bit of AoC recently and liking Tortage; soundtrack is nice; be interesting to see how the game syncs with the new movie!  

AO looks interesting -- that graphics update has been a long time coming it seems -- knocking on wood and hope it makes it live soon.  Thanks Joel.

Originally posted by Theocritus
 Quests?.....The AO mission system is one of the best quest producers out there...You pick the difficulty, monster type, area, reward, and just about everything else you could want from a quest...Either you didnt play past the tutorial or you were just unaware of how it worked.....There is no reason in AO to go out in the wild and just kill non-stop.

You conveniently forgot to mention that you need to let a 3rd party tool click for anything between 15 min to hours if you want to actually pick the reward you want. God forbid you also select the area you want, you'll need to wait between months and decades to get the item you want. Also you forgot to mention all the weapons/pieces of armour you can get as reward are less than garbage. Or that you get no xp at all if you're 201+, even if you run a lvl250 mission. Unless you're doing a sl mission whose reward can't be picked using the said 3rd party tool. Because it has no reward except xp.

Insert coin, try again.

Originally posted by burmese

AO is not a Quest-based MMO, never was, and doesn't need all that 'WoW-standard'  stuff.  AO does have a few questlines at various stages, but they are just 1 component of many in the game.  There are ample ways to level, especially with the recent addition of Daily missions.

It does need all that. WoW changed the scene forever. Look at any generic quest based korean mmorpg's playerbase. Look at AO's playerbase. This is one of the reasons 10-100 times more people play some random korean game. Average Joe expects doing more stuff than bashing monsters in a mmorpg.

As for those ample ways of leveling, you are joking, right? You have dailies and you have killing some metric tonnes of monsters. Or are you counting afk'ing at kite hill as another leveling method? Or are you talking about AO's missions? Aren't those basically just "kill everything inside"?

Loving TSW and hope it only gets better (and creepier and scarier) under Joel's watch.

As others have stated, he's one of the few "good guys" in MMO game development. After living under the opressive regime of Smedley with Everquest 1 and Star Wars Galaxies; the evil empire of Blizzard with World of Warcraft and the cluelessness of dstahl of Star Trek Online, Joel is a breath of fresh air (drifting out of some just opened tomb with who knows what horrors lurking inside).

Think i do fine in ao without twinking implants, sure i do mostly missions and dailys with some static dungeons but still.

Just hope they don't do a nge type of change with the new engine, i like ao the way it is today, and graphics well i have no problem with the current looks.

Moving to modern linear progression would destroy AO for old players. AO is rather special in it's skill/equipment system and as such doesn't really work with linear progression and quest rewards.  Increasing the XP rewards for mobs and mission on later levels might do some help. Still the game is also about improving your character while on the way to max level.

I do agree that it needs rebalancing(nerf crat's init debuffs...) and rework some of the usable skills and nanoprograms. Though no one should touch the skill/ability and equipment system.

The wait is over. Just read on another "massively" sized gaming site that Issue 1.6 is being patched in later today, the 14th. Can't wait!

Originally posted by rojo6934

Originally posted by DaSpack

Originally posted by rojo6934
 

First thing you need to ask for when you look for the game with the optimum animations is the number of bones in the body of the characters. AoC have the record high number 218. No other MMO can match that. TSW floats down in the 120 range. TSW can therefore never match AoCs animations. Hell no game can match AoC, till someone start from scratch with same or better motion capture tech with more than 218 bones in the characters.

TSW is the game for intelectual puzzles, insanely well written stories, the X files feel and other consipiracy stuff. development of your character is special in that you develop skills not levels. Aoc is the game for fast paced gory/violent PvP and PvE battle with insanely good graphics and animations. Still now, in 2013, noone can match Dx10 or Dx11 AoC graphic quality. Love the game (just for the record TSW graphics are also very good, but animationwise it can never match AoC)

didnt know that about the bones. Its understandable and i agree with everything else you said about both games, but there could be a way to improve big time TSW character animations even if they cant be as good as AoC's, they still need a lot of work. I dont think its harder than updating an entire engine (they did that to AoC once and did it very well). I like everything else in TSW, but the animations kill it for me (specially after playing a sesion of AoC).

I know. You do not see many gaming sites talk about number of bones in the animated characters for some reason, even though this is one of the primary differentiators between fluid and fantastic animations and more stiff animations that you do not like. For me the stiff syndrome is not that important, but I totally get that other people might think it is very important. Anyway, animations can always be redone in TSW... redone in a way that makes the stiffness less apparent... But bottom line they can never improve the number of bones (that is at least what I think).

Now on the other side low number of bones buy you faster FPS and fewer latency issues. This is all important in Mass PvP. Remember that TSW has 3 faction PvP and can become one of the most PvP heavy games later inn it's life.  I believe TSW solutions has something with this to do. Right now TSW has 150 people mass PvP in Fusang. At it all runs very smoothly (even at launch). Been a while since I played TSW now, but technically that game works well.

well, the whole 72 hour lockout thing is FAIL.

In a game with lacking content to begin with, crappy pvp, dungeons with lockouts, issue missions (which we pay extra for) with lockouts.

What can you do?

Log out since there is no endgame, and what little of it is, you are locked out of 3 days a pop.

Content lead designer; go f yourself.