All Posts by Arioc

Graphics = Easy? You ARE a programmer...

I predict this project will crash and burn, burn in a grand inferno. But then, when everyone is weeping, prostrating themselves to false gods to understand why, it shall be reborn from it's own ashes, more glorious and amazing then it ever was. I bet a stick of chewing gum, some pocket lint, and 2 rusty pennies on it.

(I'd love to participate but it'd be a conflict of interest with where I work and they'd hunt me down and eat my liver. Then they'd hurt me. I wish you the best of luck!)

Ditto. I think part of it is the linier feel to the zones. Maybe the tiny detail on the characters makes them unremarkable and unnoticable. Every building is a fascade with no interior. I don't know if it's art per say, but the lack of energy in the animations also lends itself to the rather bland feeling I get also. Wish i could enjoy it, so many people are, but it just lacks some sort of visceral quality.

Maybe it's the small shapes and busy textures, or lack of radial flora in some areas. Maybe it's the lack of large details on the characters to make one pop from the other.

I'd like to pipe in on the budget issue. It's not true that small budgets create poor quality games. I've been part of teams with big budgets behind them that just didn't have the visual direction or art staff. Sometimes it's staffing, sometimes it's flaws in leadership. A small team with strong art and strong code and strong design and leadership can do more on a smaller budget then a big company with money to burn. So it's not the money but the staff. My 2 cents from my experience working in the industry.

I've tried the 14 day trial (or is it 7?) twice and both times tried differant classes, races etc to varry my experience but each time I just couldn't feel the urge to log on and play. Something was lacking and I can't put my finger on it. It just dosn't have the same energy in the animations, the same depth of contrast or something as other games like EQ2, WoW, GW... actually it reminds me alot of GW but.. Dang I can't even articulate what it is but something about the look and feel of the game just reads as "blah" to me. Maybe I've played too many MMO's but I just can't get drawn into this world at all.

Reading up on the game, I realize it's been out for a while in Korea and gone through several game updates where zones, classes and two player races have already been added. This american beta is simply a port of the existing korean game, with some changes made for the american version such as the Sharp Mind skill.

After playing this game for about a week I realize that level 1-15 is deceptivly easy and quick. Through courior quests, talk-to's and simple steps you are given a well balanced series of quests to level you up quickly with minimal actuall combat. As you work your way through the quests which train you the fundamental skills you begin to realize that each time you level you get AP points (Advancment Points) which go into your pool to be spent on increasing the rank of individual abilities like combat arts, spells etc. But that number is finite and you quickly invest your AP, spreading them thin rather then focusing, unaware that as you level your earlier levels provide you with 5AP, then 3AP, then 1AP per level..

At 15 you hit a wall, suddenly you've accomplished the menial quests and gained the basic attacks, and now are asked to fight creatures which wipe the floor with you. The magic quest which grants you your first spell isn't till after level 15, so unless you have cash to burn and know where to buy the spellbook you won't even know you should save AP for it.

After my first character I felt I must have spent my points poorly and gimped my character. So I rerolled and ran throught he newbie quests again, (easily done in a few hours). Once more from 15 on you get a few "kill 5 of X mob" quests but X mob either kills you or you win by the skin of your teeth. After you kill 5 of X you're left with the brilliant quest.. "Make level 20".

So from 15-20 you're grinding exp, cash for the insanly expensive novice armor and equipment sold at the blacksmith and generally grinding away in hopes of improving yourself.

As I spoke with other players and read up on the forums and on wiki's I realized that once you get the inital skills by 15, there aren't realy anymore skills to get. Sure there's maybe 1 or 2 more attacks, achieved through long quests much later on near level 25-30, however once you have your abilities you're stuck with it.

It does have sandbox elements but too few for my taste, and the world is much smaller then I suspected. Once I ran around the zones I realized how tiny the world was, made to feel distant only by the constant crawl speed they call a run.

I was disappointed at the lack of depth the game had. I would have chalked the sudden wall I hit at 15 to simply a bit of numbers imbalance, but would have toiled through it had I believed that getting some better gear through hours of grinding famor scrolls (rare drops off creatures -- specific to their type -- which can be turned in 10 at a time for sums of cash) if I felt there was alot more to discover and advance in.

However the american version is still Gen1, which means only humans, no paladins or dark knights, and fewer zones. I am not as familure with the asian mmo player base and perhaps this is simply the degree of depth they prefer in titles, not alot to achieve but get it all quick then choose what to do with it.

Sadly this isn't the game for me and dispiute it's cute nature, the camera collision was obnoxious, the limited view distance really made me feel a bit claustraphobic at times, as well as the need to run everywhere unless you luck out and the moongates are open to it at that time (something which only occures at night to a location based on the day of the week, not exactly something you'd wait for...)

Man I hope the bumps are specific to the color map and not a global coverage map like in Vanguard. I dislike how the coverage bump blends grass and stone together in the mid-ground and distance as if it were one material. Makes the world feel flat. If the bumps between snow and grass and rock and dirt differ you'll retain the seperation of elements. Of course that means more batch's and passes. But hell if WoW can do 4 layers with a spec map on each, they can do 4 with a bump on each.

I think the best example I can provide for how the UI is cumbersome is in agent missions. Once you recieve a mission (quest) you need to jump through both the missions windows and the agents window to navagate to the destination and back to the source. This seems to me like it could easily be simplified or all the waypoints given to you in the mission window (some simple ones they do, others you need to toggle between the agent window and the mission window to find the destinations).

Sure it's not a game breaker, but does it make the game better to have the player juggle several windows rather then simplify it into one location with clear links and buttons? Deffinitly a programmer inspired UI (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE! Damn analytical left brainers.

I made it to level 18 and hit a wall. Grey wolves go down in 3 hits. Yet white wolves and thusly dire anything are a fight that near kills me. There's no middle ground. Often I'll use a skill such as counter-attack only to have the mob stay at a distance also sitting in counterattack till one of ours fades or our stamina runs out.

I guess I find the combat too erratic, either the AI rushes you and you can use skills stratigicly, or you are being owned by the AI who is countering every skill you use. I've spoken with other melee players who echo my sentiments. Also there's no way to tell how hard a mob is without engaging it, and having it kill you in 2 hits. It seems like every mob even a weak spiderling knocks you down. And with EXP loss on death that's not too cool. I've run from mobs and they never break chase untill I zone into a house or into another zone. I really liked the game and it's sandbox feel at first but the wall of slow exp and no quests I can accomplish till 20, lack of cash comming in unless I grind the same 10 scroll quest over and over so I can't get any armor.. lets just say I'm thinikin of uninstalling. Or deleting and going magic user or archer. Melee seems to be pretty broked.

(Totally Offsubject here so ignore me if yer not into MMO art)

There's two differant types of height field types. One is called image atlasing, which creates tilesheets of tiles which are used on a grid to create blocky curves and pieces which fit together to create the illusion of no grid. Best example of this is in the War3 or Starcraft map editors. They have a tileset with several "corner" pieces as well as length pieces and blends. When painting the map the brush randomly picks 1 of 4 blend tiles to use to go from dirt/grass and grass/rock. Etc...  This method is very low requirments as you only load the atlas into ram and source from it. Each ZONE in Mabinogi has 1 or 2 atlas sheets based on the zones pallet.

The other type is called alpha masks, where you have a height field which is again broken into tiles but when painting it's more like photoshop layers. You are usualy limited to 4 layers per tile (depending how fine the tiles are chopped up, and how far out the programmers allow you to view) so it dosn't hurt performance with too many maps. Each texture is a color map, and each tile has it's own alpha mask. You ignore the tiles and just paint freehand, later going back to make sure you didn't accidentally paint into the edge of a tile with a 5th texture needlessly.

An example of this is World of Warcraft, notice that if the road runs by rocks, a common texture like the accent grass or something drops away in that tile. This is to maintain the 4 texture limit per tile for performance reasons.

Since you're i class for this stuff OP I thought you might find this interesting, it has nothing to do with the topic. :D

So far I've been playing for 4 days and enjoying myself. It does have a charm. However the limited view range (you can only see a few feet around you, then it fades to a 2d background) is a bit annoying.

1. I want to be able to click into the distance and have my toon run not have to use the minimap like an RTS becase it only renders whats immediatly around me.

2. There's really no way to duel-class in some aspects. Like I can't pull with a bow and switch to melee. Even when the creature gets into melee range my character auto-ranges each attack. Hitting W to swap to my melee set dosn't seem to work. Its a bit of a let down. Best way seems to either rush with smash or use ice bolt to pull.

3. I invested some AP earlier on into some skills I wish I hadent' as I didn't then realize that the skills got more AP expensive as they raised in rank, plus leveling was so fast the AP was flooding in. Then I seemed to hit a wall where I couldn't kill mobs above a certain type. I didn't know where to go next or why I was getting owned by 1 mob and could breeze through another.  This might just be class/mob balance so it's not a big deal. But money seems to come slowly and noobie armor is really expensive.

4. There is ALOT of clicking, even talking to 1 NPC they chop every bit of into into 12 pages of text I need to click through. I just want to advance the quest but I had to click through 20 pages during the magic lession quest. Yeesh. I'd rather have more text per page for less clicking.

5. The UI is very spartan, and limited to 10 hotkeys. Balance issues aside (like heal kits healing you for 1HP, woot). It is a charming game, just seems very raw still.

(On a side note I dunno what the OP is so jazzed about the terrain for, it's a low-rez tile system just like diablo2 but on a low-rez height field. Many of the terrain textures have obvious seems which make the ground look tiley. This is par for the asian MMO course, simmilarly found in Flyff, PrisonTale and other asian MMO's of that same calibur.)

Side note, I don't see any motion blurr or anti-aliasing options in the UI settings. There's dither but it dosn't create any sort of motion blurr effect as far as I can tell. All the models are very very low rez so it runs well on low-end systems as is common for asian games (lots of PC's in asia but many are 4-6 years older then todays standards, so to have a big user base the game companies over there tend to target lower specs).

On a side note I haven't counted how many "pages" my documents are, they're extensive and broken down into a intera-web to help cross-link information, names and references between glosseries, historical sheets, concept art, etc.. but it's gotta be up there. Anyone working on a mega doc like this I highly suggest making it into a web site with a branching tree to help you maintain your outline. When I kept it all in a word doc it got to the point where the doc took 3 min to open. It was kinda unweildy.

You should see how much documentation there is for each NPC race, their history and culture for mmo's you've played. Beastiaries, legends and stories. Hero's and towns, villages, their conflicts. When you  have only a vauge idea to sell it's harder to get it published. Back it up with a wealth of details for designers to draw from and you have a coheisive world to sell. Of course you do need lots of concept art. Hell I've worked in this industry over 10 years now and have been building up my own pitch doc.

Ultimatly you're going to present a 2 page bullet point pitch sheet with the major selling points of your game (harder to focus your title into just 2 pages then it sounds). Include some concept art and if interested during a pitch meeting you can even use the fact that you have 1k+ pages of lore written for the game as a selling point in the pitch. Dev's know it's chancy to take on a new IP without an established art style or solid design to back it up. Without going into a lecture that touches on alot of the same stuff already stated, there is not such a thing as being too detailed. Plus, this is a labor of passion, without a time limit. Even once you've gotten the pitch approved and contract signed (at this point yer already a company employee, like it's been said people who don't work for companies already as designers don't pitch games, there's a wealth of creative people with game ideas inside the company chomping at the bit to pitch them.)

Then the real work of tools design, server code, choosing an engine, or developing one of yer own. Picking an AI package or developing yer own, pathing data, server stuff, art style, high end or low end? There's alot of technical factors which influence what you can and can't do. And as a designer you need to be ready to trim the fat of your magnum opus to deal with them.

It looks cool, but (and don't hate me for this) the textures and overall look feel a bit dated? Or maybe it's the general color pallet that feels weird. Anyways overall I do dig it. But the giant weapon trails, giant spell effects, added to twitch gaming is gonna be a pain when I can't see the mob cuz my group is attacking it and it's moving around, and there's tons of spell effects and weapon trails. When EQ2 first came out it's spells were over the top with particle effects and when 4+ people fought one mob it was blinding you couldn't see the mobs. I worry this might have the same issue when it comes out.

I'm pretty sure most of the "expansions" are just number tweaks. The addition of a new ship type using an older model, or the addition of a weapon type. So no new art, but you should already have the new ship models. Both downloads should be up to date, the only differance is the graphics (normal maps/color maps)

Probably just lack of user-base to support the cost of running the servers, paying the support, energy bill, renewing licences and paying for it's maintenence. Even a skeleton crew requires a few hundred grand per year. 

If you're asking why I think the game didn't do well, I'd have to say that it had a very interesting setting, but very little happened and the great foe was a swarm of mindless giant insects which occasionally attacked towns. All in all you didn't feel like you were fighting a evil foe, just pushing back a hill of ants. Ryzom was very interesting and a skill based game I really enjoyed in beta and early on. But I found that a strong lack of quests, a lack of dungeons or varrying environments made the world feel small. The outdoor areas were hunting fields of roaming mobs, but there wasn't a strong sense of progression or character growth.

Plus the four races (or was it 3?) seemed to be at peace with one another. There was a deffinit lack of conflict or foe to overcome. No unique items to seek, no epic content. After a while of walking around the same zones farming animal parts to craft people got bored. The developers couldn't produce enough interesting content to keep the game alive so they made a tool to allow users to create instances and tailor the story (which would have been cool if there was already a large ammount of game content but there was a vast lack, so this felt like a bandaid measure). It was well received but the already dwindling player base was not enought o draw in new players and over time the player base atrophied and they had to shut down the servers.

First off let me say that EVE is awsome for what it is. A large PVP Sandbox that's largly player driven and tactical.

Unfortunatly there isn't alot of PVE. There are "Agents (NPCS)" who give you missions you must complete. Sometimes these are as simple as fly to x instance, kill 12 pirate ships, fly back. Get cash. 

Unfortunatly these are akin to the Kill 10 wolves and bring me back their hides quests from fantasy MMO's. THe Agent missions occasionally have a story to them, linking several back to back for a unique reward. But these are far apart and few. The majority of NPC interaction you'd do is running these missions over and over and over killing pirates to farm ISK (cash). This becomes a necessity because you really can't do much else to improve your character except farm ISK while your skills train.

EVE is PVP centric, and no one can really argue that as a PVP sandbox the game is amazing, but if you want PVE this game really lacks it. It's not designed for PVE it's PVP with a PVE element thrown in to provide some illusion of story while players farm ISK through mining, running missions, or killing pirate ships for bounties (trust me this is far less entertaining then it sounds).

If like me you find you generally enjoy the sense of advancement to bigger and better armor, harder areas vs harder NPC's with more visually appealing rewards, then you may find yourself feeling the game lacks something. But if you're cool with just jumping in, getting oriented with the massive overload of number data and math (I mean seriously the noobie tutorial for weapons includes sliding scale graphs which ARE rocket science). 

The major fun of the game is in getting to a acceptable level of skills/ship quickly, stock it up and go out and pvp. Join a corp (guild) and pvp with them. There are long-term goals in EVE like building a HQ for your corp and defending it, enhancing it, but they really do take forever to do and mostly it's "farm ISK".

I know my reply sounds negative but I highly suggest you try this game for yourself, I found that PVP was not enough to hold my interest alone, but I also can't get into counterstrike over and over like other people can. So differant games for different folks. Give it a try and you might find this is exactly what you like. I on the other hand just dig a immursive world, with NPC's stories, ever increasing creatures of power and challange. I like to see spells going off, hero standing toe to toe with a foe. Eve has you watching your ship, or your target, what i feel it lacks is a view to frame both so you can see the dog-fight. That'd make fights a bit more dramatic.

Actually the expansions are in the trial you've downloaded. The download page had 2 download choices. DX8 and DX9. The DX9 version was about 1gig and contained the new normal maps and color maps for the ships. The DX8 was about 600 megs and had the older art (still good) but I suppose there for lower end systems.

So you should have all the latest stuff.

I was talking with some friends and we realized we had differing opinions on the play experience that voice chat creates. Now I'm 29 and have been playing MMO's for a long time (I won't bore you with a litany of games I've played but I was playing online back when they were MUDD's).

My friend however is 24 and began playing MMO's not too long ago, starting with World of Warcraft. When we talked about our play experience he described the qualities he liked and viewed the game as a video game, talking about the MMO as if it's a console game. He loves voice chat, can't see himself typing and although he agrees that bad mic's, soft talkers, loud rooms, and poor connections irritate him about voice chat, he just expects chatter to be part of the multiplayer experience.

Now from my perspective voice chatter is noise, I prefer typing because I can ignore the chat box if the group is prattling about sports or the color to paint the baby-room, anything I'm not really interested in. I can focus on the game play, what’s going on, and remain immersed in the game world. If that same conversation is blasting in my ear I can't ignore it, sure I can mute the people but then they’re offended when they're conversation is done and they tell me something game related and find out they're muted. I am not anti-social, quote the opposite I love MMO's for the guild banter, group chat and social dynamics. I just value the ability to ignore conversations I have no interest in by not looking at the chat box. With voice that's not really an option.

Ok that being said, I want to get to the point. My friend views MMO's like he views FPS's, the smack talk; random conversation and blather are part of the Halo 3 online play experience he's accustomed to. He doesn’t view MMO's as immersion, he loves Oblivion a and Morrowind and really gets into those games, sometimes lamenting that he wishes that MMO's were more immersive. When we spoke about how his expectations on what a MMO feels like were affected by the presence of voice chat, while mine began with typing we realized that we ultimately wanted the same thing out of the game. Socialization, immersion and banter, but our initial exposures to the games were so different due to the presence of voice chat and its immersion breaking presence that he was never able to really stop and notice things.

For a while I tried to play with voice chat and he with text, we both had some interesting results. I found my irritation with people went up fast, the chat tends to convey mockery and sarcasm well, and even some glee, but it's not the same as hearing the inflections in people's voices. I found that allot of people were a bit crueler when they can say it, rather then type it.

My friend found that without the constant sound of talking in his ear he payed more attention to the world the game was set in. He didn't have to watch chat like a hawk, but was able to pick out the phrases quickly he had interest in and ignore the others.

I can't say either of us has changed our preference in game play but it was an interesting experiment and we both agree that the presence of immersion breaking elements have a strong factor in conditioning players and establishing their expectations for how a game should "feel". Almost like a child under the age of 5 who rely heavily on the opinions of his parents to mold his own values and opinions.

Just interesting, thought I'd post to get other people's views. This is not an anti-VoIP post, nor an anti-chat post, just an interesting little experiment we did.

Wow, some of you guys are really friggin bitter. I expected tons of excited posts but even TES fans are demonizing the MMO before they learn anything of it. Oh well the nice part is, the same people who yell and rant that it'll be crap will see a good product and immediatly become it's strongest defenders. That's the joy of forums, loyalties shift constantly and everyone has a short term memmory.