So here's my 2 cents as a guy who makes games for a living:

All I see are several high voxel instanciated objects repeated over and over. Sure it's cool that grain of dirt is so detailed, or that tree is so organic but there's a reason the demo's they show always copy/paste the same objects over and over. It's not about the time to make them, it's that the engine works with very limited resources and instances them (they get loaded into memmory and drawn all at once rather then many draw calls). 

The detail in our virtual worlds comes from variety as well as detail. Show me this engine with 32 unique tree's and rocks arranged to create a realistic look and I'll be impressed. But not the same 4 objects copied around a cube of land and then copy/pasted and rotated to look diverse.

You can already render 1000's of the same tree in Unity and Unreal through instancing with little effort or strain on the video card. But who the hell wants the same tree 1000 times to make up the forest.

Plus, how do you animate voxels? There is no animation system made that is designed to allow for real-time 3d space updates for voxel animation.

Yeah I pretty much agree with the other posters. If you use a Macbook for schoolwork and just want to occasionally game, that'll work but cutting edge games won't run great on it, passable, but not great. Most cases you'll have to turn down settings to get a good frame rate.

However if you're buying a computer for gaming, there's no reason to have a laptop at all. Desktops are far better since you can swap out video cards or add better components. Laptops are limited to upgrading ram or swapping out a hard drive.

If you MUST have a laptop, AND you plan to game allot. Then you'll want a gaming laptop, which often is expensive but has pretty high end stuff in it. Down side, is those laptops are heavy.

Not sure, but I ran rift beta via bootcamp on the latest 15" MBP hardware from late 2010. I was able to run on high settings in all places with a decent framerate except during rifts which dropped my fps (and do so for everyone not just lower spec systems). So I dropped my settings to medium and turned bloom back on and everything was swell.

I wasn't getting 60fps but for a high end game like this on a normal laptop (not a gameing laptop which gets so heavy it might as well be a desktop imho) an avg fps of 22 was fine for me during rifts and big battles. If you plan to crank everything up yer gonna want a gaming rig or gaming laptop which means a bulkier rig.

That's odd, the return carriage add's a line-break in the editor... Sorry for the lack of spacing between paragraphs folks, it looked different in the feedback box.

It's less the developers then the Executives and PR department who monitor the feedback of the playerbase and influence the development of a title. When the executive from your production company (e.g. Microsoft) says Make all the girls pink to cater to the 12-16 demographic in your post apocolyptic sci-fi MMO, it's hard to fight back when they bring out marketing research boards and graphs provided by expensive research firms. 

It's a bit of a trickle-down effect I think, where the people on top are more influenced by the communities feedback during development then the actual developers. But the developers are at the mercy of the people who fund the development. At the end of the day you're not always able to make the game YOU want to make, you end up making the game that a collaborative team of people determined was the best combination of current industry features which would appeal to the largest market to garner the largest revenue. 

But as a developer you can't point to your boss's and say, it's his fault because it's not any individuals fault when a poor choice is made, it's a snowball effect from too many chef's.

But when you're dealing with ten's of millions of dollars, no ones gonna go on one guys GUT instinct for what he thinks people will want. They want to do research to insure their choices have data backing them up. But that data comes from a very vocal community, which on occasion is not aware of the influence it has on the development of it's own games.

I get that this post is just marketing hype, but this looks like the exact polar opposite of what I want to play.

That's a screenshot. If it looks as good as concept art, then I guess the game is going to impress.

I really wish FE didn't block it's update notes from users without accounts. Why must I sign up for an account just to see a picture or information on improvments? Those are the very things I want to see to entice me to play/return.

Best thread on these forums in a long time! Bravo OP!

It's fun to dream isn't it? Like what if bunnies and unicorns got merged, floppy eared unicorn bunny horses with big floppy feet! SQEE!!!

Also about as likely...

Originally posted by Digna

Originally posted by Arioc

I think what I am finding is that each soul has a few abilities in it which are themed to the role of the soul. However those are far up the tree and force you to heavily invest in the soul if you want it's "class" abilities. otherwise you get a peppering of minor perks and generic attacks.

I tried a paragon/riftblade combo and found I either found my hotbar with a ton of generic "do dmg and earn an action point" moves with a few finishers which did the same dmg, or focused into one soul and got some flavor but had little to no use for the other souls. 

You're either a bland multiclass without the key abilities of the soul (found near the upper branches of the souls tallent tree) or you focus on the soul and might as well not multispec at all.

Maybe by level 50 I have enough spill over points to get 100% into 1 soul and 25% into a 2nd soul, but I hardly see it viable to distribute points into the lower branches of 3 souls and never get the class defining abilities.\

 This is what I found as well. I realized after a couple of rolls (of characters) that the best (for me) way to play was to go up one tree and put a few points into a second/third. For example, I made a Champion and my 2nd and 3rd souls were the Beastmaster for the pet and the Reaver. Both the BM and the R had a couple of nice 'starter' tank options (I think one was a max of +15% to str and the other was +15% to con?) A few points into Reaver for the armor debuff was good as well. The BM I just got for the pet.

This gave me a tank who could 2Hand or S&B as required, some nice debuffs, and a pet. I was able to easily own groups of PvE mobs my Ranger build got spanked by. Still wiped on rift event mobs unless there was an NPC supporting.

yeah with the new extra point every 3 levels I was able to slowly invest in a 2nd soul over time. So I focused on Marksman for the dps abilities (and if you linger too long in the low branches trying to spread your points among 3 souls you get a hotbar full of almost identical starter abilities which hurt your growth).

And every extra point I put into ranger for the ranger buff (the saboteur abilities seemed very specific to sab attacks so goingup that tree didn't really offer me much as a ranged dps).

So by level 20 with marksman I was doing alot of damage fast, and had the ranger buff and pet to help. It's a decent system, but makes the 3rd soul kinda fluff.

Now I know this might change into release, maybe some key abilities brought lower into the branches to make them more accessable.

<Disclaimer: I don't know what the heck I'm talking about, this is just doom and gloom but it's food for thought and I'm hopeing I'm wrong.>

I'd also like to point out that multiclassing tends to waterdown the core class (soul). I understand that Trion is trying to focus on the player and not the class, but if any fighter archetype can be a paladin, or a riftblade, or a voidknight.. well it makes it hard to feel like my soul is in some way tied into my identity--at least for me.

I am a fan of a skill based classes system, but I also enjoy BEING a shadowknight, or BEING a paladin. These are iconic roles with iconic imagry associated with them that spark our imagination. While I can put 100% of my points into ranger to be a ranger, I am not a ranger in the guild. I am a rogue who at any given moment they might ask me to play a ranger role, or play a bard role.

Imagine being in your guild and asked to come to a dungeon or raid but told to go respec to bard. Well you want to be a ranger, identified to your friends as such, and recognized as such. And yet, you're a blank slate just waiting for a need to fill. You're not a ranger, you're a dps, tank, healer, nuker. I guess I find that concept a bit sad, but also understand the versitility it provides.

Ultimatly guilds will need 3 riftblades to use their core riftblade ability for a speciifc encounter, so all the bards will have to respec to riftblade... loot can't be soul specific.

Eventually Trion will have to utilize their experience from EQ2 and make interesting and complex boss's which require specific abilities to counter their attacks or abilities. This will force specific souls needed to take down the mob. Will it bother anyone that they can't come to that raid with their ranger and have to respec to a melee just to use a key ability at a specific moment?

I think what I am finding is that each soul has a few abilities in it which are themed to the role of the soul. However those are far up the tree and force you to heavily invest in the soul if you want it's "class" abilities. otherwise you get a peppering of minor perks and generic attacks.

I tried a paragon/riftblade combo and found I either found my hotbar with a ton of generic "do dmg and earn an action point" moves with a few finishers which did the same dmg, or focused into one soul and got some flavor but had little to no use for the other souls. 

You're either a bland multiclass without the key abilities of the soul (found near the upper branches of the souls tallent tree) or you focus on the soul and might as well not multispec at all.

Maybe by level 50 I have enough spill over points to get 100% into 1 soul and 25% into a 2nd soul, but I hardly see it viable to distribute points into the lower branches of 3 souls and never get the class defining abilities.

It's also hard to ask for a DPS and get a rogue only to later find he's mostly a bard which is a support role. Without identifying a persons "souls", the group leader has to go by their base archetype which can be decieving. My marksman/ranger was doing crazy good dmg compared to my ranger/bard. I mean like 2:1 dmg, but both were 'rogues'. How could a group know?

I'd love a key!

I'd like a key!

As a MMO developer, I know we spend allot of time creating massive amounts of quest and encounter (read: dungeons, instances, scripted events) into the game prior to initial launch. We spend years creating the world and populating it with a dense blanket of content of variable quality and complexity, but enough to keep most people busy for a fair chunk of time without artifical barriers.

Now once the game is out; we have very little time before people grind through the low to mid content, that's a polish period to discover bugs which slipped through internal QA and evaluate player feedback on the areas of the game which need improvement or attention.

Now I see FFIX out the door with a limited number of quests, most repeditive "tasks" more then quests. I am deeply worried that no matter how hard they try and address the lack of content, the player base will devour the sparce monthly content updates and still be very hungry for more. 

A developer cannot sustain a live game the way they would a game in development, financially it dosn't make sense.

So my big fear is that try as they might to fix the bugs, give the UI an overhaul and add re-do the spawns, item tables, loot, crafting, etc... they're constantly playing catch-up and will never be able to invest enough content into the game AND fix bugs fast enough to make this feel like a fully developed title.

Case in point AC2. Another game which was released prematurly with too much repedative content. The dev's tried hard to fill the game with quests, but each month maybe 6 quests were added (they had to be beefy enough to keep the players busy for that month, as well as fill out the lack of world content). It was an uphill battle, and ultimatly they couldn't keep the staff needed to sustain it so they had to let people go, which slowed down development of live content, which killed the game.

I see the same thing down the road for FFXIV, although I am saddened by this---it was a game I wanted to play.

Doh!

So they updated a texture and it warrents an artical and several before and after screens? I boggle...

I've tried Entropia but never had a clear understanding of the model. So it's a game engine like say Second Life (although seems to support more advanced surface and pixel shaders) and is open for licence by small companies to create virtual worlds under the umbrella of the Universe? Each planet has a theme and art made by the small company who funded it?

Whats the catch? What do people do on the planets? Is it a social game like 2nd life or are there game mechanics and RPG elements?

Screenshot looks about the same as Mortal Online. But I don't know how I feel about an mmo using stock models or textures they get off a commercial site. 

The map on the site has a DAOC vibe (which I dig) but honestly if you can't make an appealing, functional prototype with free tools that looks good and plays well; a commercial engine won't save you. Show us a single player prototype of the combat and a small area to establish the look of the game and it's camera. Only then can you be taken seriously by gamers as well as investers.

Making a prototype is small fries compaired to a full scale MMO project. It's not just about throwing people at it, you need to start with a core team which can achive the vision with the tools available to them.

Using Ogre or Unreal I can make a very cool environment, something I'd toss up onto polycount. But if you can't get that far, you've lost before you started.