Originally posted by Flummoxed

Originally posted by Khalathwyr

Any RP minded table-top GM or DM could create a more "fantastic" and unique world that what's being pushed out today.

 

YES!  ABSOLUTELY.  I agree 100%. 

Local Hobby GMs / DMs are FAR MORE SKILLED in creating immersive scenarios and campaigns than the so-called professionals today. 

With the exception of Bioware and a cuople indies, the phony commercial rpg "designers" today are not worth a DAMN.

The so-called professional game designers today aren't fit to stoop down and untie the sandals of the hobby designers.

I'm sorry, but you're absolutely, 100% wrong.

Most professional storytellers are not lacking in imagination or creativity whatsoever. This is only argued by people who have no insight into how the professional creative industries work. First of all, what's being put out there is not determined by the writers' degree of creativity, but by demand. You can come up with some wild stuff nobody's even dreamt of before, and if the money decides there's not enough audience for it, tough luck... It's not going to reach the masses.

Even more importantly, concepts being "fantastic" or "unique" does not mean much in and of themselves. The secret to good storytelling is implementation, not innovation. Originality is volatile, not to mention for the most part insubstantial - if you've read enough and seen enough, almost anything seems like a re-run anyway. Look at the greatest works of film and literature and you'll see most aren't at all original in concept - they're just deep and strong in implementation. Actually, coming up with catchy concepts is the Hollywood way of doing things.

I've been exposed to a lot of amateur stuff, and I've read a lot of pro stuff... and while there's some crossover where a few amateur stories are well implemented and compelling and some of the pros are amateurish, trust me, on the whole, there's absolutely no competition. Most amateurs come up with ideas they think are original (again, most aren't), but cannot make a story get under your skin. So even when interesting, their stuff is usually quite forgettable (Hey, but then  this is true for the majority of pro stories, too).

As a last pointer, fantasy literature as a rule is made of familiars... It's how the genre works. If you try to detach it from its archetypes and thousands of years of structure, it's just going to end up as a sorry attempt at literature (See some of the clueless D&D books). There are tons of books on the structure of fairy tales and epics, anyone going "OMG, it's always the same stuff!!!" would do well to read up on the subject.

A question: When talking about it, did they use the term mmoRPG, or did they just go with MMO?

Really, if evil looks like that, we might as well give up the struggle... we're not going to win. :)

Originally posted by Elikal

I just don't like the Drow, the D&D depiction of Dark Elves, because esentially an evil society is absurd. It could not exist. I like the version of the Tamriel Dark Elves from Elder Scrolls. I still wait for the ideal Dark Elves in some story, a race which is a mix of Romulans and Klingons in Elvish, if you like. Warriors and moody beings, but not evil. (I am just a bit pissed about the racism in the idea all good Elves are blond and white skinned and dark skinned Elves are evil. Thats just rubbish.)

Here's a quote from China Mieville, the British fantasy and sci-fi writer (as well as activist and politician!). Not to be taken too seriously or get aggravated on, but he does have a point:

"If you have a world in which Orcs are evil, and you depict them as evil, I don't know how that maps onto the question of "political correctness." However, the point is not that you're misrepresenting Orcs (if you invented this world, that's how Orcs are), but that you have replicated the logic of racism, which is that large groups of people are "defined" by an abstract supposedly essential element called "race," whatever else you were doing or intended. And that's not an innocent thing to do."

EDIT: Oh, and, by the way, on topic: Terry Pratchett's Discworld elves take the cake as far as how different they are from your run-of-the-mill MMO elves. Heck, they're practically anti-MMO-elves! :)

Actually that's a very informative preview with quite an insight into some game mechanics which - as far as I know - were not revealed before.

Originally posted by metalhead980

The people on this forum are not the majority of mmo gamer.

We make up at most 5% of the overall gamer population.

Ask WoW players if they like to play MMOs. Half of the responses you get will be "what's an MMO?" and the other half will be "No I don't like MMOs only WoW"

These players will all leave for consoles, shooters and blizzard battlenet games.

 

One of those rare times that I will fully agree with metal.

It seems many MMO fans resent the massive WOW playerbase for rewarding what they see as lazy, derivative and "dumbed down" gameplay... among other things. They feel rewarding the WOW route and not even being bothered to check out the more innovative, broader or deeper MMO mechanics in some other games is stagnating the genre.

What they're missing is, as metal so incisively put, a big part of that playerbase does not even have a conception of what an MMO is. To them, WOW is just a game you play with other people, you do stuff that in the end makes you more powerful and allows you to wear new stuff and go to new places in the gameworld. That's it!

I've closely observed what happens when many people who got into the whole MMO thing with WOW try some other MMOs:

a) They mostly can't tell it apart from WOW, because, you know, again you get to slay monsters and do quests and get XP and level up and get new skills and run dungeons and... well, you get my drift.

b) Where they can tell them part, they don't like what the "new" games do that sets them apart!.. Because it throws off that second-nature thing they've developed with WOW.

Now, you may think this is a bit of a dilemma, but I figure it's just because the MMOs in themselves do not have enough breadth to keep luring new customers yet. Many WOW players were introduced not just to massively multiplayer online gaming, but also the RPG genre with WOW, so now any new MMO-RPG seems a bit samey and inconsequential to them, because that wonder and awe is just not there. These are the casual playerbase at large who keep looking for new and exciting gaming experiences and just another fantasy MMORPG with levels and quests probably won't suffice to keep them, however polished it is.

The genre has to diversify. Or it has to make new big products out of the invisible indie diversification that's always going on out there. It has to borrow from the small innovative ones and polish them to the point that it will present a new gameplay experience to the potential gamers (not just MMO players).

Or I agree the ex-WOW players will sooner play Farmville.

Originally posted by hanshotfirst 

Bear in mind the video condensed about 5-10 minutes of fighting into 5-10 seconds of eye candy with oversimplified narration. You were watching a dev in god-mode effectively "one-shotting" crippled NPC opponents. In short, that was the J.J. Abrams version.

Hahaha, nicely put :)

Good-looking planet. I've always had a soft spot for Alderaan - with the you-know-what tragedy looming out there and everything. :)

Hahaha, I hadn't seen the Sith Warrior one before and it's just... wow...

Hmm, he is on a trolling spree, isn't he? :)

Not just WOW apart from this, either - he's also done SW:TOR and Darkfall, too. Mind, though, he lost his cool and went into a racial minefield in one of those, and has probably been duly reported...

Still, this one shows that the trolling on these forums is like the flu virus, it always has yet another mutation to pull out of the bag! :)

Can't say I'm disappointed, now one of my first 3 classes can actually be a force user. :) 

That'd be Jedi Consular, of course - I actually like the fact that he is more of a ranged support character rather than a lightsaber fighter extraordinaire. Though there are a couple of things I'm hoping as to how this class works. First, I'm hoping the healer path will be something other than a standard "stand back and spam heals" affair. And second, I'm hoping the other path will be just as useful and wanted in a group setting.

The SI is just not my cup of caf, Monty Python jokes or no...

Easily Tanaris. Because of: 

1) Surreal desertscape leading  to the sea. Has a wonderful sense of tranquility.

2) Ethereal music. Might be my favourite mood piece in the game.

3) Gadgetzan itself with its no-nonsense goblin inhabitants and mock-Thunderdome. Just the place to come "crashing down" - engineers will know what I'm talking about. ;)

EDIT: Also, the dock in this map is probably my favorite fishing spot in the game. I'd say a good place to learn "alert fishing", heh.

With Matrix Online recently shut down, I'm not aware of an acceptable cyberpunk MMO choice other than Neocron and Anarchy Online (the second of which I did play way back then and enjoyed).

Now that I think of it, I would be really happy to see a Neuromancer / Sprawl trilogy MMO. The only cyberpunk IP that's going to make me happier would be Blade Runner. The Westwood adventure game was so cool, I wish I could run it on my Windows 7 64-bit now and play it again.

You folks saw the digital artwork that a team of three did in Cryengine2 and won a game art contest with? It consists of screenshots of a scene from Blade Runner that they recreated using the engine. I'm well aware it's still way out there even for mainstream single player games now, but I wonder how many years till we actually get to play an MMO like this... :)

(high res pics on this page, along with some recreations of scenes from Aliens and I Am Legend: www.incrysis.com/index.php)

All of what you say seems to be true, but... personally, it's still hard to get over the alarmingly high probability that it's all instanced. Sure, you can invite friends, but if exploration really works like this, it could mean no random player encounters for the dedicated explorer. I'm thinking of being a dedicated explorer, and it's those random encounters that bring the gameworld alive for me, so I'm concerned.

Oh, I too am looking forward to seeing what kind of new worlds the Genesis program comes up with... It's just that it could lose its appeal rather fast if the experience is too boxed-in.

Guess we'll see when the game releases. :)

I'd say the really bad bit of news in that interview is the part about how Genesis works and exploration. I might be mistaken, but from what I understood the exploration will be instanced... And that would mean you would be isolated from the other players when you're doing exploration and the worlds you discover would not be persistant, no?

I'm really into the exploration side of things in MMOs I play, and I was looking forward to see Genesis at work... but I have to admit this is somewhat disheartening.

Sure I could laught at that author... but the way he's looking at the universe, I'm afraid he could actually mistake that for laughing with him, rather than at him.

Well, I'm still laughing at your title. It relates what's bugging you about the game so efficiently that you might as well leave the post itself blank and we'd still get you :)

Originally posted by Cristina1

Originally posted by Nikopol

Originally posted by Ruyn

Originally posted by Tardcore

Originally posted by Ruyn

One thing straight.  It's not a pay to play beta.  It's a pre-order.  With the pre-order you have access to beta and play for free.  When the game releases you will have your free month as well.

 

I'm curious, can anyone get into beta or just people who pre order the game?

 

Pre-order.  It's not a free trial.  It's a beta.

 

So wait a minute, you mean to say any beta you get into without pre-ordering is a free trial?

 

 Pretty much I am afraid, notice how most beta are basically exactly the same on release minus some bugs and maybe a new feature or two. Do you really think devs need thousands of people to test something that can be done with 100 people? Its just a marketing tool these days. With MO it is rather different...

A somewhat good observation, but missing the emphasis and thus the point - because here you're only arguing that a beta is a free trial these days.

Whereas the post I quoted would mean: for any beta to be a real beta, you have to pay the company and buy game the first. And that would just be an odd argument that gets the whole thing backwards.

Originally posted by Tryggvi

 Hey Nikopol, I never got around to Planescape: Torment.  As a BG2 lover, would PS:T do justice for me?  I've heard it's a great game but is it linear or open like BG2?

(I'm just gonna hijack the thread here for a bit to reply to this, folks, my apologies)

In my opinion, if you like the Infinity engine games, you have to play Planescape: Torment. It's not by Bioware, it's by Black Isle, the guys who made the first two Fallout games. It has beautiful 2D artwork (granted it was probably quite low resolution, I have no idea if you can run them in today's high resolutions). It also has the best story I have ever got to play in a computer game.

Seeing as you're a BG2 sort of player, you probably enjoy interesting characters, deep lore, deep story and a lot of choices in how you get through that story. I myself love Baldur's Gate 2 because of these. PS:T has all of that. What I thought it had even better was that the story felt even more engaging, and your interactions with the NPCs in your party seemed to matter more and played more deeply into the game. And you really want to dig into their history, because they're some of the most unforgettable characters in computer RPG games.

One other thing that astounded me about PS:T was how you can avoid most of the combat and find other resolutions to conflicts. Rumour has it that you can complete the game without fighting at all if you really push it, except maybe 1 key encounter. Or you can slay everybody in your path. Sure you still have to follow a story and meet certain people to get to the end, but overall I'd say it gives you more freedom than BG2.

Mind, though, that you can't exactly create a main character in this game. Your main character, the protaganist of the story is set - the Nameless One... But you can make anything out of him - rogue, caster, warrior... I played each and all is good. Though if you're a story person, having high Wisdom and Intelligence helps a great deal. Especially when you reach the end of the game! So I'd probably go a caster with both high in my first run..

The game has a load of dialogue, which is very well-written. Actually, it has to be one of the most quoted games out there - keep Morte, Dak'kon and Nordom in your party for some time and you'll see why :)

Actually, some fans of the game like the story so much they put all the stuff together and made a novel out of it!

Originally posted by skeaser

Originally posted by Tryggvi

 Entropia does have pretty good graphics, but my vote for best graphics goes to Age of Conan.

If they made an MMORPG that looked and played like Baldur's Gate 2, that would be my vote.   But since people think 3d is better because it's newer, I had to pick a 3d game.

Seriously? Entropia is U-G-L-Y.

I think they're talking about the new Cryengine2 version, which is really up there in terms of graphical quality. Of course, you may not like the artwork, but overall I'd say it's way ahead of the competition. Cryengine2 is really impressive but graphics cards still struggle maxin it out and keeping an acceptable frame rate.

As for Infinity engine visuals, I'd rank the art in Planescape: Torment the highest, above BG2.