I remember back when AC first came out, hunting on the beach of eastham,  killing for hours in lugian citidel with hordes of other noobs all banding together in one hallway to kill the lugians as they spawned.     Finding out what the subway was,  running for an hour in one direction and not hitting any invisible walls.

A huge world to explore that wasn't simply divided up into leveling areas.   Man what a ground breaking concept.   HUNDREDS of weird little dungeons, with quests you'd stumble upon,  mysteries to figure out.   Lore scattered here and there everywhere.  

hands down my fav game of all time,  I played it until asheron's call 2 came out then after that huge dissappointment I couldn't go back to AC again and now it's just time for it to get a rebirth.

looks like a 10 year old game, way to be.

The community of this game has always been one of my favorites, and if you flag yourself for RP on an RP server and stay in character yourself others will usually follow your lead.   Be the change you wish to see and all that, really does work on mmo's.

It means themepark with big zones, nothing new here.

That being said it looks great, but long ago I learned to read through developer bullhype, and in your heart you have too.

oh happy day

Lack of meaningful pvp,

Lack of Story telling or immersion,

Hamster Wheel of daily quests and gear races,

Horrible negative communities,  hate breeding hate,  complaining upon whining.

Had the day off today and thought I'd give this game a try, was free afterall.   After a good 8 hours of playing I came away with two main thoughts,  Story telling can be done well in MMO's (even if it's not a truly traditional mmo)  and real time action gameplay can be done in more ways than simple button mashing.  

The gameplay is fantastic, skills don't completely overlap, most have pve, pvp and situational uses making those that use their brains as well as twitch win the day.    Gear helps but not the end all be all, after watching level 40 pvp videos today I saw many of the skilled pvpers beat lesser combatants naked simply because of their skill.  

The story telling was warm and well written, you cannot tell that this is an import,  Nexon is obviously taking time to convert this to our culture and it shows.  My character's responses to the NPC's were comical but in character and even shop keepers showed signs of personality.   The main storyline quests kept my interest, but it was the interaction between the characters that really told the story,  I had the impression that there was more to it than a wall of text to shoo me off to collect boar tails.  

Graphics while not ground breaking are smooth and well done for what they are, you will either warm to them or accept the big heads eventually. 

I really look forward to trying out pvp in the future.

Give it a try, got nothing to lose.

If you actually read the posts you reply to you'd notice that he included the alternate models in his complaining.   Just sayin.

I loved eq2 at launch, last time I tried it however it seemed to be insanely easymoded and I leveled up to 40 in two nights without really trying to.   I understand why they made it easier and faster but hard to enjoy the content at that speed.   Also the core gameplay mechanics are pretty simple  with 10 melee buttons that all do similar things you end up watching cooldowns more than your screen. 

That being said the dungeons and atmosphere in EQ2 have always been SO GOOD,  long dungeon runs that have multiple levels runing deep into the darkness of the unknown.   The stories if you bother to read some of the questlines are also fantastic, a game that can spark my imagination.      

Power to the people!

looks interesting, kind of reminds of of A tale in the desert, perhaps I'll give it a go.

never really liked unstructured FFA pvp it breaks immersion imo and ends up populated by a world of homicidal maniacs.  People don't act like that, they fight over things for a reason and it should be the same in these games.   Like guild wars, city sieges ect,  of course there are thieves and brigands in the world I guess if there were stiff penalties for random pk'ing it can work like it did in L2,, you COUD kill anyone but you'd regret it so you better have a good reason.

Is there some kind of karma system or anything for just randomly slaughtering noobs?  if not, prolly not for me.   That being said I adore faction based pvp and pvp in general just not random meaningless ganking,  always makes for a shit community eventually and a game that never grows because new people are constantly farmed aka darkfall.

Originally posted by Unlight

Originally posted by Tensor25

lame threads are lame.

WoW clone with a SW skin means millions will purchase, subscribe and enjoy the game.

Sorry to you little "indie" gamers out there who are looking for something totally different that hasn't been seen yet.

Its hilarious how the majority of the haters make suggestions like, "this game should be more like X, or more like Y".  yet they bash this game because one of the dev's said they were using WoW as a "touchstone". From a business standpoint in terms of risk, why would you not at least loosely follow the format of the most succesful MMO ever?

WoW deserves respect for what it's accomplished, but it doesn't deserve to be brown-nosed.  BioWare is brown-nosing, and it's rather pathetic.  I expect much, much more from a development house with BW's pedigree, than calling everything that deviates from the WoW standard, dumb.  I expect them to be capable of defining a new standard and hopefully setting the bar higher.  But it seems that they're perfectly happy to have the 'rules of MMOs' handed to them instead of leading the way for others.

Baldur's Gate has disappeared BioWare's rear view mirror -- they're abilty to innovate seems soon to follow.  They've released *nothing* related to SWTOR that looks remotely new and different.  Just more retreaded gameplay with different artwork.  The fact the game will act as an opiate for the masses doesn't necessarily denote quality.  Catering to the lowest common denominator also has that effect.  You may call that caviar, but I call it fish eggs.

I agree 100%,  this dims my hopes in general for the company it seems dollar signs have replaced what was once a ground breaking imaginative studio.  I have no doubts in their ability to mimic and refine the rules set up by blizzard, but years back you'd never hear anything like this come from the mouth of Bioware.  It's bush league talk,  little brother talk,  the talk of a small company that wants to be bigger,  Bioware is big and branded already and should be perfectly capable of making their own genre defining traits.    

Alarmingly their contribution so far is to insult innovation and free thinking.   In his OWN WORDS. 

feh.

I have to agree the soul system is by far Rift's strongest point and the one thing other developers will copy in the future from rift much like rift borrows from other mmo recipies.    I loved the cleric classes all seemed interesting, even had a paladin beast master thing,  full plate wearing tank with a pet.

The dot hack series actually was a mmo simulation.

Fallout 2,  old as hell tho.

Gothic III give that a go, don't get the newest one tho.

Borderlands,  FPS style but has an open world to explore.

replay through the Fable games.

Mount and blade

Sacred II (cheesy but not too shabby)

However I think your idea that oblivion is about story is rediculas,  the story is very short almost added as an afterthought you in no way have to play even one quest in the story aside from the begining escape from prison.

Cash, to add to the pool for a new car.  

Now if we were talking about the warhammer 40k game waay out on the horizon I'd take that game instead!

Releasing too early is almost always a worse idea than releasing a little late.   I say let the koreans pay to beta test so that by the time we get it here all the initial bugs will be patched out.   Tho releasing that late in the year might be bad timing on their part,  a few games including Star wars the old republic are coming out around that time.  Also Firefall a good looking free to play game by red 5 studios.

Thank you for posting a well thought out and informative article, I've been following this game from time to time and am now more excited than ever.  Just wish it's arival was sooner than later.

You could do the same thing with the mmorpg forums, take random posts from all the conversations out there and it would look like one remix convo of crying, trolling, fanboi'ing, boredom posts, hope posts ect.  put them in a shuffle machine you'd never know it wasn't a new thread cause they are all exactly the same.

Remember when Age of Conan was also coming out for the xbox? 

Prolly same thing here unless they can turn things around in a big way,  that said I hope they do, I like the art style.