All Posts by zantax

You know I feel your pain, with so many games comming out and wanting to play so many I have a tough time choosing a game let alone balancing my life with my gaming addiction.  In my opinion the first 15 minutes of the game after the intro/training should grab your attention, if it doesn't then my past experiance is the rest of the game won't either.  I have being proven wrong one or two times, Anarchy online was one of those games.  The first hour was plagued with crashes and world issues I quit for a month untill they seperated into multiple servers and then I tried again.  After that I loved the game and played it for a year.  My review of it would have being a crappy one if my first 15 minutes of it had being all that I played.  When I picked it up and tried it again I found an immersive game and after about 30 in game hours I think I would have being qualified to write a basic review of the game.  Of course no end game content but I would have enough idea of how the game is progressing.

Reviewers have it tough on MMO's like you said but to write a semi-balanced review I think about 30 in game hours should be enough.  That would be 10 days play time at 3 hours a night so I think you could get a good enough feel for the game to write a general review.  A comprehensive review though would require 30 hours of in game play PER class and possibly PER race depending on the racial traits of each.  Not to mention end game content yet, but in some cases this is just not possible.

So my general rule of thumb is this, if a game grabs my attention in 15 minutes it is worth putting in more time, if not in 15 minutes I move on.  Games that failed on this for me, DAOC, SWG (original release), POTBS, AOC, FIESTA, LOTRO, Tabula Rasa, Fury and Guld wars.  In all of these games the first 15 minutes showed me what to expect from the game and it didn't improve even though I give game a 10-20 game hours of play time before I completely give up on them.

only reason I am posting here is because I see alot of people mentioning that collision detection requires alot of power from the servers, and that it is difficult to do in games with lots of people let alone creatures...etc.  I saw a few people mention EQ1 had Collision detection, well so did Asheron's Call and the thing with AC was that in a few dungeons(not instanced by the way) you could go into them and get swarmed by 30-50 even more creatures in some cases, I name the olthoi hord nests as an example.  in some cases you got surrounded and couldn't move you had to fight your way out.  Characters were the same way go to the marketplace when it was real busy and you had 100+ people easy in there at any one time + the bots selling there wares.  You had to run around all of these people.  Lets see that was 10 years ago, are people no saying computing power has gone down??  I myself won't play AOC I was dissapointed right from beta.  i won't get into why but the biggest thing was the instancing, and that is all i will say. 

I have to agree with the OP, you know I started on Asherons Call, and as much as I hated the death penalty I loved it as well.  I remember getting all pimped out in Black Plate armor, my character look great, and could take a beating.  I would see a creature and attack it most times just to see if I could win the battle, the armor gave me the ability to run away if the battle didn't go the way I wanted it to.  If I died well of course I spawned at the lifestone pretty much naked.  Why naked you say well in AC the death penalty was simple, 5% loss to all stats(I believe) and you lost x number of random objects that you were carrying starting with the most expensive items.  Although this seems to be a horrible thing it made you think about attacking that tusker or Olthoi when you were to low of level.  It made you decide if going into the flame dungeon was worth it or not.  Not to mention in PVP if you killed someone you could look those juicy expensive items from his body, or they could loot yours, say bye bye to your precious armor.  This made the game fun to me, it made me weigh the ability of my character and my equipment, against the rewards of the battle.

For those of you who think that losing your armor is a bad thing, in AC you could technically fully buff up a starter weapon and a robe and be able to compete to get your body back.  That was the beauty of AC's system, your equipment didn't define your character it just added to your basic skills.

OMG come on guys, we can't forget the best launch title of all times.  The one that had nearly no flaws at all, thats right I am talking about....

Anarchy Online   

ROTFL, sorry that was just being sarcastic, this was actually the worst launch of all time.  Hell the beta was one of the worst of all times as well.  Anyways, best launch that I can think of would be a tie between,

Asherons Call and Cabal Online

I just never had any issues right from day one.

I don't completely dissagree with you but personally my first impression of AOC sucked.  I just don't like it that much, yes the graphics are nice but the implementation of the systems seems to be poor.  I don't know it could just be me but I would rather play AC rather then AoC, the graphics are crapier but the game seems more in depth to me.  However I am the kind of guy that will buy a game and force myself to play it for a month and get at least 1 full week game play in to see what it is like before I cancel my account.  I hope it can redeem itself.

Well I would have to say it is your connection personally.  Don't get me wrong haveing a 100ms ping to a server is great if that ping is updated every second for you to view.  It is my experiance that the ping is taken at random times and then updated, an example of this is in WOW, I had many times when I played that game where it would pause then suddenly I would catch up to the game and my ping remained at a constant for the whole time.  But occasionally I would get this same type of problem and the ping would be updated rought the same time and show 700ms or higher but then 10-15 seconds after things normalized the ping would go back down to 90.

Remember your only as fast as your slowest connection, for you the slowest connection will be your ISP or the internet.

Good luck.

I is not dumb from playing WOW.  Iz know how to kill U in pvp and rox U.  U only b1tch cause Ur a n3wb, I rox U meet me in game I will show U smrt, my 70 rogue will pwn U.

OMG I can't believe I just wrote that...LOL.  I really don't think WOW dumbs people down but I do think it attracts a certain mind set for the game.  The simplicity of WOW attracts everyone, being shown the yellow brick road to 70 by quests just gives people a guide, but that guide is the exact thing that annoys the people who enjoy games that make you use your mind as well as your button pushing skills.  Anyone who denies that the maturity level in WOW is better then most MMO's should just log on and watch Barrons Chat for like an hour or 2.  Some will make you laugh most will make you just say, WTF who let these kiddies play this game.

I completely dissagree with the OP, the reason being is we are seeing CRAP being created for F2P MMO's.  Like one of the above posters said "Guild wars isn't really an MMO".  The reason people think every game should be F2P is because the quality of MMORPG's has gone down hill in a dramatic way.  When EQ was released it was polished quite a bit for the time, I am not saying it didn't have it's problems but being the only REAL choice out there untill Asheron's Call Came out helped its popularity.  You pay so that there is balancing in the game, new content...etc.  EQ lost this focus and started releasing expansion packs for sale, and this is where I think they shot themselves in the foot.  It is fine to release an expansion pack but not one a year come on?  Your updates should do that, that is why you pay 15$/month.  The only game with consistant monthly updates, content add ins and fixes to systems that were not working is Asherons Call.  Pretty much 10 years have passed since release and 1 update EVERY month, otherwise known as PATCH DAY.

Now don't get me wrong LOTRO and DDO are good as well, not really my cup of tea though.  Not as free flowing as AC was, too scripted and path orientated.  I always like the idea that I could go anywhere and do anything at any level, as long as the monsters would alow it.  Not to mention the random loot drops...ahhh the good old days.  Anyways...

I think P2P is still a good thing IF the game warrents it.  Otherwise the games should all be F2P with cash shops.  Either way I only thing P2P is stagnent because of the crap that is out there now.

Well I have being running vista pretty much since release.  Here are my suggestions for you and you won't have many if any issues.  If you have a dual core processor and 2Gigs of ram, upgrade it to 4 Gigs even if you aren't useing the 64bit version of Vista.  That extra 1.5 Gigs will help out ALOT, if you choose to go the 64bit route as I have you will have a couple little glitches here and there but overall nothing to terrible.

I was running a core 2 with a 7950GT and 2 Gigs of ram, with vista x64 ultimate and I did see about a 10% hit in performance in games like HL2, CS:S, WOW, ...etc.  However I upgraded to a quad with 4 Gigs of ram and a 8800gt 512MB card and the differances are negligable.  Please understand that there are still performace changes you can perform to vista to help get back all the performance you need.  Look those up they are a great help, changing the secure desktop, and UAC are the first things I look at.

If you choose to do this upgrade for DX10, which is a good reason to me, remember that Vista is a power house.  Just like the upgrade from 98 to xp was back in the day, you have to tweak vista just like you had to tweak xp back then.  However once you get used to it, you won't want to go back to XP.

Either way good luck, let us know how it all turns out.

Well I am not going to go into alot of detail today, just some short simple points.  First off let me give my configuration so that people understand what I was looking at.

Intel Quad, 4GB of Ram, Vista X64, Nvidia 8800 GT 512MB, 10Mb Cable line

Settings for the game for video are 1280 x 1024, Highest settings

First off graphics - Wow not impressed at all, Cabal has just as good of graphics as AOC.  I realize the models are greater polys but come on this looks HORRIBLE, I prefer LOTRO graphics over this.

Gameplay - What is there to say about this, the game plays as a standard MMO, when I say that I am being sarcastic.  The "Standard" MMO is a cookie cutter path based system now a days that AOC takes to a new level.  There is no OPEN world to run around in, invisible walls everywhere to stop you from getting off the path to the next area.  Oh and lets not talk about the instancing, this is a MMO, not a single player game.  If I wanted this level of instancing I would go pick up Oblivion and play it by myself.  Games that surpass AOC for game play, EQ, EQ2, AC, AO, WOW, SWG, ... wow this could be a long list.

Combat - I will admit the showing of protection with the < on a side is kinda neat.  Is it revolutionary no, the ability to block more on one side then the other, ok that is a new thing and I will give it props there.  The ability to use your shield on angles to block has being around for awhile, but the ability to say, "I want to block right, left or middle more" is a new technique. Games with a similar gameplay but not exactly, AC, when fighting more then 1 monster you always lined up the mosters so the second one is attacking you on your shield side, you took alot less damage.

Sound - The voice acting is good, I like that, it makes it more personalized.

Load times - Pathetic, nothing better I can say about this, 4 minutes for some sections to load, and why so many load screens can't people make a large area with no load screens, SWG did it, AC did it, hell even AO did it.

Overall First impressions of this game are very poor for me, I can honestly say this game is nothing like the hype it was ment to be.

3/10

You know the only time I have problems with fileplanet are when I download off of servers that are in the current buisness day.  I am in MST, so I usually download off a server that is in the middle of its time zones night time.  I seem to do pretty good like that, I get anywhere from 400k-1100k.  Oh well maybe its just me.

Honestly this sounds like an over heat issue.  If you say the sytem runs vanguard and other games perfectly, do any of those use DX10?  If not try lowering the ability of your card, turn down all the frill, don't use the max graphics, try running it at 1024x768 with everything on Medium.  This should not be an issue for your card at all, and I can't remember I have to look again but I believe you can turn off the DX10 support in LOTRO, if you can turn that off as well.  All these things will decrease how much work your card has to do, then see how long it lasts in LOTRO, if it fixes the issue, then I would check my heatsink make sure it is snug, if you can tighten it then do that.  Next if the heatsink is good check the temp inside your case, make sure you have good airflow.  The next step is to decrease your clock speed on your card down to a normal frequency, and any of that works then great.  If it doesn't work then simply take the card back and get it replaced, tell them the card keeps over heating during DX10 games.  Get a new one and hopefully your problem will be fixed.

Computer should be fine for anything that is out right now, in XP.  If you want to take advantage of DX10 you will have to change that video card, which you know, and beef up the memory to at least 4GB.  Other then that, for what you paid that will be good.

Originally posted by DragonOak

Something finite like an MMORPG with borders, edges, and limited will NEVER replace something infinite to include the unlimited freedom of a good imagination.  Because AC was your first "real" experience with an MMORPG and your imagination at that time had not experienced such wonder, once that imagination had time to catch up to that "first experience" with an MMORPG nothing will ever come close again. 

Don't get me wrong DragonOak, AC wasn't perfect, but by the MMO's out today it is still a great game.  I just recently went back to it for the 3rd time after being stolen away by MMO's that were comming out.  The excitement was still there, the exilieration of seeing a Titas Lugian again...LOL.  Man it was fun, but I do agree there can always be improvements to it and you are right ever MMORPG has borders/edges but in AC those borders were only in the water because swimming was not part of the game back then.  However with Turbine releasing content every month the game has evolved alot and increased its land mass probably by 1/3 easy.  Either way you are not guided, it is your choice on how to proceed.  In most MMO's now you are handed each quest like a trail of bread crumbs to advance.  I agree that nothing will probably bring the child like sensation back like AC did, but with the right sets of ideas I believe that MMO's could evolve alot more from these games that didn't get alot of credit back in the day.

You know I have played alot of MMO's, unfortunatly I missed the MUD's from the day but I played alot of D&D games like pools of radiance back on the Tandy 1000TX.  Anyways my first real MMO was Asheron's Call, and I will tell you to date NOTHING compares to that game.  I know alot of people don't like AC, or won't look at it because it is almost 10 years old now but DAMN was it a good game.  I played alot since then, AC2, Anarchy Online, Starwars Galaxies, Eve, WOW, Cabal, Shaiya, COH, and COV, LOTRO, Pirates Online, and countless betas and f2p's.

You know what MMORPG means to me, a game where I am not limited, a Sandbox style game with interesting random encounters.  Equipment that means something, a community that you can interact with, a story line that you feel a part of.  Random Loot, No real classes but instead a skill based system.  The heart of an MMO is the RPG, and how many people have played a real RPG, no on a computer but instead the old paper and pencil style with dice?  A group of 5 friends or more getting together for a night of fun, and excitement.  In most cases the GM's edited certain rules for games so that you could make the character you wanted.  Most RPGs were class based, but a few expanded on the class sytem even more and turned RPGs into a skill based system, not a feats system, a true skill based system.  Paladium did it with there games, Robotech, Rifts, Heros unlimited, villans unlimited, etc.  You could choose a class in these games then you had a basic set of skills that you got but you were always given choices for Extra skills.  Example:  TO be a destroid pilot you could choose x amount of primary skills but you needed to have Pilot destroid as one of those skills.  Other then the very basics you were not limited, a destroid pilot could take pilot Vertitech if they wished, or could take Cooking.  Either way your character developed and grew to your expectations, also your attributes were random all dice rolls to start but after that you could raise them with skills and each level.  This is an RPG your taking over the role of a character you created, not an all powerful god that can destroy anything.

Now to add MMO into the RPG all you do is have a corporate GM, and they hold a strict set of rules for everything that can't be bent.  So as a result most MMO's follow the cookie cutter system, you choose your class and go, all skill decided for you.  Your character is the same as every other character out there, one paladin is the same as the next.  Individuality is only defined by feats, Talents or any other stupid name you want to give them.  In reality you are VERY limited even in this sense, there are only so many permatations for talent trees.  In a game like wow you are bound to find thousands of people with the exact same talent build.  SO where is your individuality?  In most cases your quests are handed to you on a gold platter, and you are to go from A-B-C kill x of monster y - head back to A in order to get quest z, till you have no quests left.

I know alot of people want a pure skill based MMO and I think EVE was a good attempt at this but the game is dry for most, including myself.  Where are the random Alien encounters?  Why do I have to fight the same pirates over and over again?  What is really the excitement of going to some far off galaxy?  There isn't one the same pirates will be there in an asteroid belt.  I will admit the economy is great in EVE but it still lacks alot.  The skill system is ok, I don't like the training while you are offline, its the only MMO that I can pay for, for the next 10 years and only log in 5 minutes a day to change what skills I am training.  I never have to use them at all, just click a skill and hit train.  10 years later I have all the skills but I haven't done a damn thing really.

So this is why I go back to OLD school mmo's like Asheron's Call, which to myself is the last true sandbox MMO out there.  One that puts the RPG into MMORPG, you assume control of a character that is your creation from the start.  From stats to skills to equipment your character is your creation and yours alone.  I know that alot of people follow a template but the OPTION is there to go outside of the box.  This is the equivilant of the GM saying, if you want here are some premade templates, but choose the skills that you want, essencially make your own creation.  Assign your own stats, and skills from trained to specialized, and lets begin.  Over the course of your characters life you gain experiance for levels but every point of experiance can be distributed into your stats or skills, and you can see the effects each stat has on each skill.  With the logarithmic incriments of cost per point, it makes it so you have to decide efficiantly on how to develop your character.  Anyways I can go on here for DAYS about AC's system and why it is good but let me touch on one more point.

In your characters life you choose where to go, no quests that you HAVE to do to level, you just decide I want to explore this or that, and go out and do it.  If you want to go out to the Obsidian plains Great but you will have to become a bit powerful, how do you do that?  Well you have to go kill things, complete some quests possibly.  Nothing guides you down a path, the path is yours to create for yourself, and along the way you have fun meeting people, facing hordes of ORIGINAL creatures, picking up random loot from everything, heck I remember when a drudge level 30 dropped a yumi(bow) that was max damage and max percentage on it for me.  That was clearly a level 60 or 70 weapon but it dropped it, random loot drops, the question of what was over that next hill, and the ability to overcome the problems that arise.

Has WOW ruined what people belie is a MMORPG, no it wasn't just wow there were alot of games leading up to WOW that slowly erroded away at what an MMO was.  WOW is just the culmination of all of these things dissapearing and it is in the spotlight more then any other game on the planet.  I would really like to see a new MMORPG that goes back to being original like AC was, but that is just me I guess.

For those of you out there who want to step out of the box, try out AC, the graphics are very dated, hell the game has being out for 10 years now I think, but they still update the game EVERY MONTH, content updates and fixes.  Now that is a good GM.  Before you try it though remember please this is not your cookie cutter MMO this is a COMPLETELY different experiance, but in the end I believe you will love it.

Originally posted by ChinwaKneeHo

 

Originally posted by LiquidWolf

I see AoC as being the first game of it's type on the PC.

Consoles had the "high punch, low punch, middle punch" button mashing already, but they took that and seemed to have adapted it for a PC audience.... or just made sure it worked on XBOX and decided to port it to PC. Whatever their reasons it will be interesting to see if it works out. It will also affect future MMO releases on control schemes.

Problems I see: Beta works, but I don't think that has an bearing on what thousands of clients, (All running Windows Vista to get DX10) will do in sieges, quests, and bar brawls. What happens if the problem isn't the client, but Windows Vista itself? Doubtful, but there are plenty of times when Nvidia pointed at Windows and stated: It isn't our driver, it's the OS -  and Windows pointed at Nvidia and said: It isn't the OS, it's the driver. 

In the end it was the customer that suffered until the problem was smoothed out.

It is the first MMO to do this, and so I hope for the best so that others can learn from them, fix what they do wrong, and improve.

Much of it is just so untested and unproven I will have to wait a few weeks to try it out and see how things go.

I am glad it is releasing in May though, it gives WAR the ability to watch their launch and tweak their own. Let's people try AoC to see if they like it, and prevents the two games from having a huge conflict with acquiring subs.

High punch, middle punch, low punch only on consoles and first time on PC MMO?   Didn't AC do that and had a separate block command?   You could even alter the amount of speed you put into something that inturn regulated the power of your attack.    Very fast-little power, very slow-big power

 

 Tuskers loved to bash you in the head when you didn't wear a helm if I remember correctly...*sigh*....so long ago.

Anyway, I am sure AoC has a much more elaborate system than AC ever did.    Would love something like that old sega gensis game.....what was that fighting game with the different characters and they all did a different fighting style like wrestling, kung fu, karate, and stuff....

VIrtual Fighter!  1 and 2!   Ha Ha now THAT will be exciting one day to have those responses online.    My son and I had many good times playing that......he always killed me using the ninja guy!     

Chinwakneeho, you are very right, from what I have read here the OP hasn't played a truely innovative MMO before.  Your right and I know from experiance again, just went back to AC, that if you didn't wear a piece of armor lets say your hands, an Olthoi had a chance to hit you in the hand and do MASSIVE damages.  Also AC had the protection system where if you had a shield equiped and you kept the second mob off to your shield side he wouldn't hit you as hard because he has this big shield to hit around.  Then there was the combat, although it was an auto attack where you "select target" and go you had other choices, and they were,  "High, Med, Low" and power rating of attack.  If you had a sword you could put it on max power or anything over about 1/8th power and you would take big slow swings at your target and expend a tremendous amount of Stamina.  However if you put the power below the 1/8th mark you would pierce your target with the tip of your sword causing pierce damages.

AOC will be a great game I think but it is not the first game to have alot of the things talked about by the OP.  Back in the day AC had I think it was a maximum of 3000 people per server and the server was full, but if you wanted you could have almost all of them show up somewhere and the game was still playable.  It just goes to show that if they program somethign right it will work, not like a game like Anarchy online, *shudders at release day*.

Also Chinwakneeho, I just went back to AC, and So far it is such a retro thing now that I love it...LOL. 

With Vista you shouldn't be asking if it runs better on Vista or on XP.  The fact is most games will run just as good on Vista as they do in XP if you have the hardware to back it up.  As one of the posters stated, 4GB or RAM is a starting point.  If you have any hardware pre dual core don't even bother with Vista to start off with, stick with XP, and if you have a dual core or up CPU then make sure you have the memory to handle Vista plus anything else you do.  My recommended system right now to run Vista with most games running just fine would be...

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600, 4GM RAM, 8800GT 512MB

With that as a starting point of a system you will finally start seeing Vista run good with your games.  I currently run a Quad processor with the above specs and everything includeing AOC looks great and runs perfect.  Oh and I am running Vista Ultimate x64.

Inevitably there will be someone on here that flames me for saying the above, with something like, "The same hardware the games run better in XP you NOOB!!".  I won't deny this however the argument has being beat to death, and the same argument is used when going from ANY Windows OS to a newer Version, 98se-XP, DOS-Win, Windows 3.11 - 95, 95-98...etc.  The fact remains that in order to enjoy DX10 or 11 XP has to be shelved, and in Microshafts infinate wisdom they released Vista a full year to early in my opinion.  However finally like XP was, Vista is starting to come into its own, it took XP almost a full year before people STOPPED turning off all the frill so they could play there games.  I remember turning off all the nice desktop effects just so my games would run, and so XP would run better, then formatting and going back to 98 or ME for the speed.  Then one day hardware caught up to the OS and poof I didn't look back. 

Anyways to answer the OP question, it worked fine on Vista...LOL

Originally posted by alacres

Sorry, I should have used "build" instead of class.

I'm still experiencing side-effects of class based games I guess hehe.

Originally posted by alacres

Well, every class is important and each has it's strength and weakness but mages are just a heck of a lot more fun imo. Also, they're much more survivable, so if you plan to solo a bit I'd say they would be the best choice.

You should search "Asheron's call" on youtube and watch some vids of the different builds in action. The mage was always the most entertaining to watch for me, atleast when it comes to pvp.