Anticipation is 9/10ths of the fun, right?

Wait  for years for the next 'big' MMO. Play it for a few weeks, maybe months. Then it's back to hardcore waiting. That sums up almost seven years of MMOs for me.

But it's different now. I don't wait. I don't sign up for closed betas. I don't rabidly track every post on the 'official' forums. When a game hits the shelves, then I consider it... after I read the first impression reviews.

Between games, I focus on going out with friends, avoiding games in general.  It's all about balance.

I play less games that way, but probably enjoy them more when I do.

/psych 101 :))

Didn't get in, but I love the topic headline. :))

They said UO could never be matched.

They said EQ could never be surpassed.

They were wrong.

Wow has been out for almost five years now.  That's a millenium in MMO years.

Time will kill WoW, not SWOR.

Figures. I didn't get one of the emails by accident... :(

Oh well, next time!

Long live Bill Roper!

Twas a sad day when he left the Blizzard team.

Although... I will admit his post-Blizard efforts have been underwhelming to say the least.

Maybe it has more to do with throwing a heap of money at a game, and a whole lot of time to do it right?

Darkfall launched, true.

There was a time, not too long ago, when that seemed highly unlikely.

Someday it might even be available to everyone who wants to sign up.

Very impressive.

This game is further along in the development process than I thought it was.

Originally posted by Master_Razor

So what can developers do? How can they prevent making incomplete games? Everyone needs to work together. The designers have to know the limits of their development team and set realistic goals for them. The company as a whole needs to make sure they can develop the game in a time frame that will please the investors. The marketing team needs to know what is going to be in the game for sure and not go around making promises they can't keep. The game might not come out as big and bad as you might have hoped, but when it comes out neat and polished with minimal bugs, it'll all be worth it once you start getting players that want to stay.

All valid points.

It only takes a couple days to burn through what took developers years to build. Developers cannot keep up!! How can they?

They are constantly re-inventing the wheel, the tools they're using constantly evolvie, and expectations grow after every release.

 Don't design something completely different, you get slapped with 'clone'. Fail.

Try something radically new or unexpected and you really have NO CLUE whether it will actually work, or how well, or how long it will take. Fail.

Throw in unrealistic expectations from consumers (us), and it's a mess. We don't want to believe a game takes 5 years to develop. A highly-anticipated game is announced and we want to PLAY it within 12 months. And one or two months later, we want something NEW.

It's a no-win situation.

(Unless you're name is Blizzard)

April 2010 seems logical, therefore the realistic release date is late 2011. November 2011, likely.

Lots of time for me to upgrade. :)

Shadowbane had 30k subs to start. It started to decline rapidly after the first month, but was still decent in the first year.

Darkfall will do well to match that.

Funniest ever!

This should be permanently linked on the DFO forums.

Originally posted by SignusM

"Ultima Online was at least fun to play at the beginning and allowed all who wanted to join in. "

Hmm, spoken like someone who was not there for UO's release, which was very, very rocky. Lag up the wazoo. Virtually unplayable in the first couple weeks. In fact, PC Gamer trashed it with a 60% conditional review (allowing that it would likely improve if they could fix the lag and balance issues).

People have short memories.

Originally posted by ougarit

Originally posted by hoopty

 

I cant wait to see when Taoes and Company over charge the players..Hang on i feel it coming..

It is going to be fun when all subscribers are going to pay the 1st month of subscribe and when some/many of them are going to try to cancel their account and sub. 

How can you cancel a sub if the account's webpage is always down ? You can't

How can you contact customer's service if the official forum is always down ? You can't
 

I don't know if people are going to be overcharged but I'm sure it's gonna be hard to cancel a sub.That's why I WON'T take a sub to DFO.

That's exactly what happened when I tried to cancel my Horizons account (after two weeks). They kept billing my CC for another 4 months until I finally got a response from the CEO, who manually cancelled it and refunded me in full.

Still, it was a real pain in the ass.

Hope DF is better!

Donate money to AV? 

OMG that's funny!  Who would be that *stupid*?

Originally posted by Chubbyjesus

They're given rough estimates and due to the lack of maturity in the followers, they rarely even give those. Because people call them LIARS and MURDERERS and RAPISTS...

~Chubby

I just want to go on record saying I never called Tasos a rapist. Thanks, 

Good call.

Have to respect Aventurine for this. A greedier company would have just grabbed the over-capacity subs and then threw their hands up in the air on the 25th.

If I recall correctly, this is what happened to Blizzard in the first week of WoW release. Waaaay too many people, queues that lasted 45-60 minutes to log in. Doubled the number of servers within a week.

Otherwise you end up with a gross overestimation of servers, and have to merge within a couple of months. Eg. PotBS, etc, etc, etc. PotBS was absolutely comical in their estimation of subs.

Aventurine may screw up a lot of things, but this was the right decision.

Eight years to make a game that will fall as hard as Shadowbane? Yeah, good job guys.

We so sorry! lol

Graphics may get people in the door, but it's the gameplay that makes them stay.

Originally posted by heartless

Originally posted by kedoremos 

 His truth is worth exactly 27 posts. That's not much.

 

I guess this guy is lying too, right?

Taken from Forumfall.

The game as it stands right now is a mere shadow of what we were promised over 7 years of development

* No player housing

* No Weather

* No Trading system

* Harvesting only viable through macroing, very poorly designed

* No local banks

* No trade caravans

* There ARE safezones

* Buggy UI

* Lack of intuitive chat commands

* Total lack of LFG system, and lack of intuitive group formation systems

* Extremely boring, unimaginative and grindy harvesting and crafting system

* Boring badly designed click fest melee combat, with no variation in weapon skill sets

* No penalties or bonuses on armor types so everyone will wear full plate - why wouldn't they?

* No penalties or bonuses on weapon styles so everyone will use the polearm - why wouldn't they?

* Effectively 1 class because there will be 10k clones of exactly the same build, because the devs have NO CLUE about making skill based diversification, as has been explained to them hundreds of times

* Extremely solo and red unfriendly from minute one of logging in

The shine lasts approximately a week - which isn't too bad for a new game, most new games shine lasts for around 2 weeks max, then you can objectively analyze the game without every 5 seconds gasping 'OMG NEW SHINEY'

And after analyzing it, post-shine, it is not ready for release. That is my solid opinion. It needs another 3 months MINIMUM to be ready for a release

Just be aware that you will be PTB (paying to beta) for the first 3 months

Or this guy:

1) Magic - There will be people who say its worthwhile but honestly its mostly crap until ALOT later on, and really pure mage builds are not currently viable. The magic schools as well are not diverse they usually contain the same sorts of spells just with different names and flavours.

2) Crafting - Utterly sucky, its not at all worthwhile as a career. In eve a player could be a pure crafter and never fight such is the system, in DF crafting is something most people will learn to some degree to make cheap decent armour and weapons but not many will bother getting to high levels as its really not worth while at the moment.
It takes to long to grind mats and gold needed compared to grinding mobs which drop similar level items, and to add insult to injury there is no in game economy or market system to sell stuff, its literally as crude as standing in town spamming "WTS XXXX" in chat all day long.

3) Economy - A continuation of the above, I understand that perhaps the devs though players would use their own time and means to sell goods but the reality will be shit. It will be 10000 odd noob players spamming chat selling crap left right and centre, some form on in game localised market system needs to be implemented very quickly if the game is to endure for any period of time.

4) Mobs - If anyone (like me) got really excited when they read about how the AI is really clever, how its like a quake bot, how the mobs will loot players and band together in dynamic spawns and fight each other. Then prepare to be REALLY dissapointed.
By intelligent they mean, a mob will reach X hits and run around like a demented 100m sprinter, thats it, they will not stalk you or use tactics like even the most basic AI in some other games, they are often downright bizarre and will while systematically beating your ass suddenly sprint away and break agro for no good reason, equally every mob i met (and it was alot) can be outwitted by sprinting in a straight line for about 8 seconds.
The mobs are the single most dissapointing aspect of the whole game for me.

They are exactly like games like Anarchy Online, retarded AI static spawns which can be farmed by any half wit and rely purely on having ridiculous amounts of hits to survive.
Many mobs are bugged and easy to trick into cheap deaths (acid/water) and many were already identified as easy to farm and were camped 24/7.

Also there is a huge lack of wildlife (animal mobs) I saw not one in my 3 weeks of beta, and i never saw one dynamic (wandering) spawn though a few were reported (nut never confirmed)
And they dont loot players, which i thought was a key feature, but doesnt happen ever.

5) Map - While the game world is really well designed and at times beautiful, it is IMO way to small, contrary to the 8hrs across you can run on foot from one side of the main continent to the other in around 2hrs.
If you factor in the islands it takes a bit longer as swimming is slower, but travel is nowhere near as slow as it should be, and thats mainly down to sprinting, which bring me to my main 3 gripes.

6) Sprinting - Absolutely the most annoying and irritating game ruining feature of DF in my opinion. Combat is not exactly deep but it could be ok if it werent for the fact that every fight (even with the AI) descends into farce within seconds due to sprinting.
Sprinting is used all the time in combat and it makes every fight resemble a scene from Benny Hill, factor in lag and ping and sometimes fights are just downright painful, and no it wasnt cause i sucked at pvp, in fact i won more fights than i lost but thats besides the point, even when i won i felt no sense of achievment, no sense that id beaten someone with superior skill.
I had won cause i had managed to time my swings in a slightly more lucky fashion as we lagged and sprinted around in random directions attempting to hit each other.
Sprinting turns all combat into bizarre jousting competitions and is frankly bloody awful
Sprinting also totally devalues exploration and makes mobs a joke.

I read about people wanting to do exploration in big groups to avoid danger, well dont bother just stock up some cooked fish for stamina and you can run away from any mob you meet making all exploration just a matter of time rather than skill.
I could write about sprinting all day but i wont. Numerous 'fixes' have already been suggested and i can only hope the devs use them

7) Stamina - a bizarre system which often decides who wins a fight rather than health. Again this issue is linked to sprinting and whole threads have been devoted to it, it needs fixing imo

8) Combat - Due to a combination of the two above and lack of weapon diversity and balance combat is often one sided and bland, its frenetic and fun at times but really shallow and NOTHING Like Mount & blade or similar games.
More like CS on crack.

9) Racial balance - Is currently non existant for numerous reasons not least of all being stat inbalance and size making orks and mahirim totally pointless in melee.
Alfar are so small maharim have to fight looking at the floor to hit them, factor in players sprinting around like idiots and you can imagine what im getting at.
Alfar females are the powergamers choice for pvp

10) Rogue alignment system - needs to be totally scrapped, achieves nothing except allowing griefing. Would be better off with no system at all.

11) Solo play - Is basically boring and pointless after about 3 sessions of play

12) Builds - No one is different, everyone is just a variation on the same hybrid melee/archer/mage build, nothing else is currently viable.

Hell, everyone in that post is lying, right? 12 pages filled with liars, freaking Forumfall.

Good to see someone posting the truth for a change.

Nope.

They need to prove its not another Dark and Light.