One thinng mmorpg.com's writers lack is humor. Nice to read something I can laugh about, instead of the usual vein of  "SW:TOR doesn't excite me."  Well done Mr. Coyote.

Like saying that in 3 years all cars will be hybrids. What a clown.

Not only was it the dumbing down and the arcade-izing of the combat, it was the extreme reuse of environments and graphics. You play through the same city map three times and the same outdoor maps twice, which makes the game feel tedious, claustrophobic, and shorter in duration than it actually is. Laziness or cost cutting, either way it was a terrible decision. Not only is DA2 an on the rails game, you travel over the same rails multiple times, which is inexcusable.

Originally posted by MrBoots

I like how the author forgets the MMOs that came before Evercrap. If anyone kick-started the industry, it was Origin. If anything, SOE came along and made the experience more generic and less fun. They set the standard for all "on rails" mmos to come. Their popularity came from being the only modern 3d mmo in town. (Sorry but m59 was like colored blocks rubbing together.)

Can Planetside 2 fix SoE? I doubt it. It doesn't look like they learned from their mistakes in PS1. There still doesnt seem to be anything to the Planetside world other than capturing random buildings (that all look almost identical)over and over again. I got bored of capturing random building X after a dozen times. I'm going to use an old school word here. Planetside lacks immersion, and Planetside 2 is going down the same road.

 

 

As a long time player of Planetside, I can say that the genericness of the bases and towers was something that the community wanted improved from nearly the beginning. What did we get instead? Overpowered mechs and the worst expansion pack I have ever seen (core combat).

This is what SOE does though. Instead of listening to their communities and making obvious improvements and fixes, SOE for some reason goes off the rails and does crazy sh*t that is neither needed or asked for.

Planetside's Core Combat and BFRs, SWG's Combat Upgrade and NGE, starving Vanguard of resources despite all its promise, I just don't get SOE as a company. It seems SOE goes out of its way to do things that will harm its games.

Mortal Online and way back in the day Roma Victor. Both were unplayable at their "launch". I'm a paying customer and I have to use slash commands because your interface isn't finished, are you f**king kidding me?

I loved the original Planetside. The trailer got me excited for PS2. Unfortunately, I get the sinking feeling that PS2 will be an F2P item mall shooter. Sigh.

First, have servers that have a population larger than WoW's 1000 (per faction). WoW is really on the low end for server pop, Which leads to lots of dead areas. Second, make all major cities fast travel hubs and and don't make one city the main faction hub like Org./SW in WoW with the cata portals. Looking at PreCU SWG, You could expect healthy populations in probably 5 to 10 cities. Bestine/Anchorhead were PvP cities, Mos Eisley had roleplayers and newbs, Coronet was 'the' transit hub, Dantooine had a grinding/leveling hub, and of course another major city was Theed.

Casual players want to accomplish the exact same things with the exact same difficulty as hardcore players do, but playing 5-10 hours a week instead of a hardcore's 30-40.

The combat reminded me a lot of Fable III. Playable but not great, I'll wait until it hits $20.

Warband is a good game, but I can't really get into Fire and Sword. Something about sinking 20 hours into building your character and still getting one shotted by lucky musket hits. Instakilling isn't good in FPSs, and Fire and Sword is no exception. I'll stick to cracking skulls in Warband.

Originally posted by Palebane

Originally posted by SBE1

This just confirms that you cannot fundamentally change a game after launch and expect it to work, even if developers think it makes it a better game.  DAOC failed with Trials of Atlantis + New Frontiers, a total redesign that was an epic failure. Similar to SWG, DAOC still has a fanbase but it's a far cry from what it was. 

 What about WoW? It's had several complete class overhauls. Most other game mechanics have been significantly altered at one time or another as well. This is a bad example for me since the changes have caused me to quit, but there seem to be a lot of players who don't mind. Maybe there simply isn't anyone left who used to play at launch.

It was so much more than class overhauls and mechanics changes. I'll try to apply the NGE idea to WoW.

A WoW NGE would remove half the classes, say Druid, Warlock, Shaman, and Rogue. If you played and loved one of those classes, tough sh**. Now you must pick between  Warrior, Priest, DK, Mage, Hunter. Also, instead of classic WoW's tab targeting, WoW would now have a twitch FPS combat system (that functioned terribly in practice). All or nearly all achievements and gear would be wiped. Spent 100 hours getting your raid gear set? Tough Sh**, it's now worthless.

All these changes would be made with no more than two weeks' notice to the players, and on the same day that a major expansion pack was released (that many players have already pre-ordered, expecting more of the same WoW) That is what the NGE was.

Granted, SWG had a lot of problems, chief among them tons of bugs, class imbalances, and a lack of content and structure for players. The way to make SWG thrive was to fix those problems. Indeed, SOE swore up and down that they were doing just that (smuggler and squad leader revamps, anyone?), before springing the NGE on the playerbase with two weeks notice.

WIth SWG, SOE burned down the barn to get rid of the rats. Not only was it unethical, it was monumentally stupid.

SWG was my first MMO experience and I will always remember it fondly. SWG had problems but it was a great experience. Still, 300k subscribers was excellent in the preWoW world and is still pretty good.

Instead of balancing classes, fixing the rampant bugs, and giving the players more structure, SOE replaced a decent but tflawed game with a terrible game. Talk about burning down the barn to get rid of the rats.  RIP SWG.

At low levels, the dungeon finder is a necessity. What happens when nearly everyone is level 85 but you want to do a level 30 dungeon on your alt? Or god forbid you are actually a new player. Part of the problem is the small population per server in WoW. At an average of what, 800 people each alliance/horde on a server, 2/3 will be max level. Most of the time it would literally be impossible to find a group of low level players in a given range that all want to do a certain dungeon and fulfill the tank/healer/dps requirements.

Without the dungeon finder, you would never be able to find a group for a low level dungeon, and you would never see the content.

At max level, I didn't enjoy sitting in Shattrath spamming LFG for 30 minutes, then making the 10 minute trip to the dungeon, only to have the group fall apart because one of the members is undergeared or is an idiot or has to leave halfway through. It could get downright ridiculous if you wanted to do a specific dungeon.  For sure, there is a loss of a sense of community, but the benefits more than make up for that imo. If you really miss a sense of community, just join a guild that does group runs and you won't miss out.

Alganon is literally and factually a WoW clone. The term may have its limits, but such a thing does exist.

Morrowind is probably in my top 3 of PC games ever. There was just so much to do, you could play for a hundred hours and not see half the content. Probably the most "sandbox" RPG that had mainstream popularity. I especially liked that you weren't shackled to the main quest like you are in so many other games.

Oblivion was almost as good, but I hated the scaled leveling and Oblivion had a lot less content. In Morrowind, you could join the mages, fighters, and thieves guilds, the assassins guild, one of the great houses, one of the vampire clans, the imperial legion, imperial cult, and tribunal temple. Oblivion only had mages/fighters/thieves guilds and the assassin guild. 

Compare Morrowind to Dragon Age II. It's actually hard to fathom that they are in the same genre; they have so little in common besides an RPG character system and a fantasy setting.

Definitely a step back from DA:O. The lazy reuse and lack of variety in the locations is the biggest thing for me. You go through the exact same city environments three times, and most of the outside locations are reused too. Carbon copies of the same caves/outside areas, and it isn't like these are open areas with lots of room to explore, they are on the rails, tunnel style levels. It's either laziness or budget cutbacks in level design, probably a combination of both.

I like DA2's faster paced combat, but I hate how enemies spawn right out of the ground in waves. Not even an attempt at immersion. Lame.

Even with all the gimmicks to stretch things out, DA2 is still shorter than DA:O.

The story and party members are meh, but I do think the skill trees are an improvement over DA:O's, and offer more replayability.

DA2 is still a decent game (especially when you consider the lack of decent single player RPGS), but this is the first time I"ve been disappointed by a Bioware game. Looks like they are focusing their resources on SW:TOR and half assed DA2 in the process. I only hope that they don't do the same thing with ME2, which is my favorite RPG franchise.

"I refer to online poker, where it's possible - and not all that unusual - to amass thousands of dollars without ever putting a cent at risk.  There's are many more cases of seeming abuse by apparently unscrupulous operators who, for example, went out of business without returning the players' money.  What's more, quite a number of reports I've seen have involved far more than $1500."

Where on earth are you playing online poker that you can "amass thousands of dollars without ever putting a cent at risk"? Screams scam to me.

I've played at both of the largest and most reputable sites (pokerstars and fulltilt, they even advertise on TV) and they and both have real and play money options, but you have to risk real money to win real money....

As for the F2P adds targetting children...yeah, its shady as hell, but it isn't much different than other products that target kids. Don't give your kids your CC info or lock it into anything they have access to FFS.

I think that even if SW:TOR is just a glorified single player RPG (ala KOTOR or Mass Effect) that you can play with a friend, it will still be worth buying - it's just that if that's the type of game it is, I can't really see myself paying for a subscription for multiple months. I play through Mass Effect, KOTOR and DA:O two or three times and then never play  again.

My concern is the end-game play (after the storyline and leveling to the top). Will there be enough there to keep people interested, and above all, subscribing?

That's where games like WoW and the EQ series really shine. There are lots of people that have been playing and subscribing since the launch of those games, in many cases 5+ years of subscriptions.

Evidence that a sucker really IS born every minute.

WAR was a PvP game that didn't have good PvP. That is the reason it didn't meet expectations. The day WAR launched, WoW had better PvP, not to mention an infinitely more polished and deep PvE and crafting system. Why would anyone choose WAR?

Some other, more minor reasons:

Too many public quests requiring too many players - due to population shortages, you mostly had to skip these, which were supposed to be the game's main PvE focus.

Dungeons were few and far between and generally underwhelming.

Crafting was beyond terrible. WAR would have been better if it had been released without it.

Items and Itemization were lackluster. There was pretty much no economy.

Segmenting of population into three different maps, then leaving out the capital cities for the other two factions. Seriously, you have six racial factions on a not-to-big server, why would you split the questing into six different paths? Poor design.