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Originally posted by MikeB

Now,

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Cool story and all but Robin changed his name to Nightwing twenty-five years ago. :|

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Originally posted by Drachasor

It's not like Bruce is going to stay dead.  Seriously.

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WHAT!?

Is nothing sacred? Who's next, Superman? Elektra? Jean Grey??
 

Fast travel is never bad simply because it irks people or feels inappropriate to the setting. This is a selective and peevish response and developers would be fools to heed it.

What's concretely bad about fast travel is it empties out population centers and outposts, destroying the experience of people who like those places by making them easy to avoid. It may not seem very nice to force anyone to hang out in a city they don't like, but more often than not they really just like another place better - because the auction house is there, for instance. The vibe of the game is thereby destroyed for some people just so others can enjoy some minor benefit they wouldn't knowingly want if they knew the tradeoff. You're hanging out, you're making money and having a great time, and then one day you ride through Qeynos or Shattrath and notice it's empty.

"Well that's a shame," you think. "Guess that's what happens when an MMO gets old."

But it's not. It's what happens when the population is pampered, especially when that pampering is focused on the vocal, loot-hungry endgame crowd while little attention goes to the outpost dwellers who don't even know what they're missing.

It's not as though every possible fast travel idea has been invented and they could never conceivably come up with some new solution. Since that's the case it follows there's probably a solution that doesn't carry the negative baggage of most that have been tried in other games.

Whether we're going to see it from a game that is essentially a patchwork of commonplace MMO features, that's another question.

To me the sensible thing seems to be figure out how you want players to behave, and then ease into conveniences in a way that protects this. Then back out of them if player behavior changes in a negative way and deal with the nerf complaints as per the standard forum rage playbook.

So what you want to do is start out with considerable costs. Just for an example, you could eliminate the ridiculous quantum entanglement banks and stables that also don't belong in a realistic setting. The player who wants to fast travel can then do it as a favor to someone else, or for the simply joy of grouping (in FE, not bloody likely), but not for his own convenience.

Another way to go about this might be with PvP flags and faction favor that changes as you move through the worldmap. When you leave an area, you can acquire the flightpath / lifestone / waypoint for it, but as a consequence you'll permanently aggro the local population and become PvP flagged whenever you approach town.

But the simplest way about this is simply to make it very, very expensive. This has worked nicely for Anarchy Online, where the equivalent of hearthstones cost about 10 billions caps, and have one & two hour cooldowns.

From what I understand, the ID thing is simply something that is required of them by the government, and they're actually happy we're doing it because a lot of those involved are subscribing. The chances of you using someone's ID who would like to play themselves are pretty slim, and if that person wants to create an account he should have little trouble proving his identity since his billing information will be married to his ID.

Disclaimer: I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, just trying to make you feel better.

I don't really mind not being able to play this, as I play too many MMOs already, but now and then I get in a mood to try out some F2P and it had been years since I gave Silkroad a chance so figured why not.

I've played at least 50 F2P games and have never seen or heard of a situation where a game was completely handed over to the gold farming industry. You'd think they would notice their customer base disappearing with no one able to play the game. How the hell did this happen? The Asian MMO industry has been dealing with RMT botters for coming up on a decade now, and they're getting better and better at it. Did someone at Joymax run off with an nProtect exec's girlfriend?

Well, condolences to my fellow F2P suckers. I may not give much of a damn about this game, but as an RF Online fan I know what it's like. :(

At the risk of being unkind about the translation, I cannot tell what the hell is going on at the login screen when the servers are full, or what I am supposed to do.

1. A panel comes up which reads, "Auto login will begin. Waiting peroid will be based on time line." There is a progress bar which completes about once every two seconds. In the lower left hand corner, periodically: "...Requesting user confirmation..." The only things I can do are click "Exit" or just wait, which seems to do nothing.

2. Clicking "Exit" changes the panel text to "Cancel Auto Login and close the game. Waiting peroid will be reset." My options here are "Confim," which quits out, and "Cancel," which takes me back to the other screen.

Am I supposed to just sit there doing nothing while the game repeatedly requests my confirmation? Is it requesting some other user's confirmation? I understand this game is full of bots and have no intention of immersing myself in it, but if I could try it out without feeling like an asshat that would be pretty cool.

Champions and the DC game both look to me like the same mistake CoH made: These guys either never read superhero comics or never liked them very much.

A superhero fight is FAST. Cars get thrown around, buildings are destroyed, our heroes find themselves flung not yards but blocks away. Those members of our team who can fly zoom around buildings in seconds, and not the sort of buildings where the windows are the size of your head and each floor has room for one hallway & one set of offices. A respectable superhero fight makes a big, fast mech fight look small and slow by comparison.

It seems to me there's no speed here, no destruction, no room for individual initiative, no vertical anything. Our team hovers in a circle around the boss, and we punch, and we root and mez and stun and heal, and it's just another MMO. And please don't tell me any of you honestly think it's not just going to be another damned MMO.

I'm being unfairly demanding, but it's just not time yet for a superhero game. The technology isn't here, the ideas won't be here for years and years, and all the love is for money.

If you never ever gave a damn about comic books, this might be the game for you.

One word? SAFARI.

This is the first game since Anarchy Online and AC2 where I've needed a team for outdoor questing and hunting and we've still managed to wipe now and then. The main thing I hate about modern MMOs is how I find myself mostly soloing except underground or in instances. There have been exceptions. Jintha'Alor in WoW's Hinterlands, some of the orc camps in EQ2.

I've grown so tired of having to choose between instances and solo play, and then not being able to team with people because of level differences or quest chains. Something about Aion makes that stuff (so far) not matter too much. I off-healed for a much higher level group, we weren't all on the same quest, no one gave a shit - probably in large part because for once the ordinary outdoor fare is actually challenging and dangerous.

There are a lot of things that aren't up my alley about this game, but I'm sold on it. If I want to play with just my friends, I've got Left 4 Dead and Starcraft for that. When I play an MMO, I want to play with everyone, and thus far that's very much the flavor of this game.

The OP is irrelevant, because the worldwide channels aren't turned on yet, and because comparatively few players are maxed out & looking for something to do. With only 3 days at a time to play people want to see as much of the game as they can or get a head start forming guilds, making friends, etc. Right now, gankers are shooting fish in a barrel.

As a result, you get the sort of people ganking who enjoy shooting fish in a barrel. What made ganking fun in WoW is it was dangerous. You did it to provoke a hunt against you, and in my lowbie days most of the people who ganked me were good sports rather than sadists. When the world becomes connected, and inevitably responding to ganking situations becomes a popular endgame activity, you probably won't see these situations cause more misery than they would in any other game with a modern chat system and a healthy guild culture.

Do you really think the game could spring up this quickly to challenge WoW in Asia, and more or less put Lineage 2 in its grave, by being another Darkfall or another Age of Conan?

Originally posted by Nadril

And I'm sure you could make up some bullshit lore reason why they can't swim if you really wanted to.

I've got one! Feathers.

I really like game where you can swim, and would like nothing more than a bunch of dungeons where the majority of deaths are caused by drowning. So from my persective, Aion is no worse when it comes to water than most MMOs where you can swim. WoW with its ridiculous lung capacities and nothing important whatsoever down there. LotRO where you can't go underwater at all and lakes or rivers are barely more than a minor hindrance. AoC where water is actually a place of safety, as though the first place you'd hide when pursued by enemies wielding ranged weapons is in a shoulder-deep creek. EQ 1+2 both have underwater dungeons but to play in them I'd have to level for dozens of hours by myself.

Given that, I actually prefer water as an obstacle such as you see in Guild Wars and RuneScape. It acts as another element cutting the landscape up into a maze, which on a good day can be about dilemmas and even traps.

The other day I played an MMO in which other players told me there are a lot of underwater areas including dungeons. Or did I dream this? What games out there feature a lot of underwater peril? My kingdom for Tomb Raider Online.

Originally posted by FastTx

Originally posted by einexile

 

[snip]

 

Is control over your character as quick and precise as it looks in some of the newer movies?

Quickest response time I've seen in any game.

Is the game full of stock sound effects, or are they mostly original? Is there a nice music system, or does the game just trigger certain songs to play at particular times? I apologize if this comes across as pedantic, but new and quality sound effects along with an interesting music system are what sells me a game these days. If you can convince me those two answers are enthusiastically yes, I will preorder the game immediately and even pretend to like it for a month. God the music is awful, though. The flute, the seventh chords, the porn vocals - like something out of a Michael Ninn or Andrew Blake movie. Romance and fantasy indeed. Have they changed any of this sentimental pastorale shit for Western audiences? Please?

Yes and no. The music is eastern in theme, somewhat like a Final Fantasy game. The game does trigger certain songs to play at certain times. Theres background music for each region and battle music. You can turn off battle music or the background music entirely but the music quality is top notch. The soundtrack will be shipped with the CE edition. I think the quality of music is one of the great things about this game. However apparently you don't like it however they did change the voices.

Damn you, you just cost me $60. I want to follow up on the sound thing because I know I came across as a little bit hostile.

I wasn't terribly fair to the music, because I'd been listening to the foreign release soundtrack rather than what you can hear in the few North American or European movies out there which leave the sound untouched. I'm inclined to believe they made some changes, because so far the music is quite good. The two excellent FFXI-sounding songs from the title screen and promotional material are prominent, and otherwise most of the background music so far is less bombastic and overly romantic than I expected.

Sound design is the best I've heard since Age of Conan and before that Asheron's Call 2. All original, as far as I can tell. Strong, sudden sounds that lend a feeling of force and precision to the combat. Crisp, satisfying interface sounds like nothing that comes to mind since Diablo II, or maybe WoW and EQ2 forgiving a few bugaboos.

I cannot stand the stock sounds and the weak, imprecise, and just plain wrong sound effects so common in the MMO industry, and I am very pleased about all of this.

Ryzom is actually a pretty good little game. How stupid to make fun of a - by all accounts - unique and beautiful game which is respected even by people who hate it, and purely on grounds of its popularity. It was free for the past year, for god's sake. How can someone who mocks things they've never tried sake themselves seriously?

No one bought Blueberry Garden. No one watched Arrested Development or went to see Idiocracy or bought the first two Peter Murphy albums. It's weird how we have to point this out over and over again, month after month, year after year.

The problem with GameGuard is it's incredibly touchy when it comes to Aion in particular. Over the course of my graduate work in Korean Fluff, I've grown used to it, and never had a problem with it in the past except for its bitching about Process Monitor, and some excellent games (Bioshock comes to mind) are guilty of this so it was hard to hold a grudge. Reading over some of the other forums, it's interesting how many different conflicts and odd workarounds people have written about. For my part, simply disabling the damned thing under Services did the trick, go figure. Which leads me to suspect it could just be poorly implemented, or maybe even partly disabled out of consideration for Aion's arguably more touchy new Western audience.

If it's a sticking point for you, the only thing to do is wait until release and find out then just how intrusive it is in Aion's case. We've got two months to go, and as near as I can tell every other aspect of the game is already in very, very good shape. Your grandkids aren't going to look down on you because you missed the three day headstart or lost out on some fancy wings.

Originally posted by tlbabs

When was the last time YOU were able to swim in your full body armor , backpack and carrying a weapon?

It's not the armor, backpack, or weapon that makes it so tough. It's all those dinosaur heads.

I don't like giving my money to publishers that close their game servers then refuse to let players host their own games. But my hands are already bloody from DDO and LotRO, and I'm a little curious about this one.

Does the death penalty apply to deaths by PK?

Is there any reason not to attack someone you don't know? Any kind of standings they can set or the game sets? A permanent kill log, perhaps - or is it all RVR?

Are there any kind of level restrictions on PVP?

Was quixadhal dropped on his head as an infant? Dude we should totally pretend to be his friends then steal his retainer at lunch.

Are there limits to flight that come with any sort of hazard? I'm thinking Tribes or Giants: Citizen Kabuto. Are the maps ever set up in a vertical way so that flight amounts to something more than mere convenience and spectacle, as it did in Burning Crusade? Are there places you can't fly? How do flying and non-flying players interact?

How deep are the dungeons, and are they chopped up into layers or do you physically descend them? Roughly what percentages of dungeons and boss encounters are instanced?

Is control over your character as quick and precise as it looks in some of the newer movies?

Is the game full of stock sound effects, or are they mostly original? Is there a nice music system, or does the game just trigger certain songs to play at particular times? I apologize if this comes across as pedantic, but new and quality sound effects along with an interesting music system are what sells me a game these days. If you can convince me those two answers are enthusiastically yes, I will preorder the game immediately and even pretend to like it for a month. God the music is awful, though. The flute, the seventh chords, the porn vocals - like something out of a Michael Ninn or Andrew Blake movie. Romance and fantasy indeed. Have they changed any of this sentimental pastorale shit for Western audiences? Please?

Lastly I would like to know about the guild and contacts system. Can you send items in the mail? Can you send messages to people who are offline? Can you add people to contacts while they are offline or at least not in direct sight? Can you pick names off the chat or do you need to type them out? What sort of permissions can be set in a guild? Is there any sort of no-confidence or impeachment system for disappearing leadership? Can you see what area of the world people your level are playing in? Can you search guild names? Most importantly, is it any fun to use? Scratch that, the most important thing is can I resize the chat box, put it where I want on the screen, and set the opacity levels I prefer?

Sooner or later I'm going to have to sell my soul for Guild Wars 2, so maybe an early start isn't such a terrible idea.

The base game in Anarchy Online has been free for years, but up until recently there was no way to pay Funcom for the game except with a $15 subscription. A $5 option is now available as well, but as with the full subscription option this means never being able to play free again except by creating a second account.

Shadowbane was supposed to be funded with advertising. After losing its one advertiser, the game continued to be free for about two years, even with large segments of the community requesting it go pay again. This month it went belly up. Even the website and forums have been taken down.

Ryzom reopened a year ago. Not until this May did the billing system come back up. Again, players overwhelmingly sympathetic and even grateful to its new owners begged in the meantime for some way to support the game they loved, and were brushed off.

Unauthorized private servers often operate at a profit. They do it with a simple PayPal button on their front page. The model works for MMOs because paying customers would rather play alongside freeloaders than play alone. Why have so few legitimate operations learned from the example?

One thing to bear in mind is that the player base for this game is very, very European. I have been logging on during in the evenings from NYC and the level of activity would make me a little sad. Yesterday I logged in during the afternoon and there were a lot of people around, and the global chat was plenty active. If you are in North America and finding the game dead, try logging in as early as possible.

I'm on Silverlode, and judging just from the free week the cities seem to have emptied out pretty badly. If you have a high level character this might not matter depending on where the endgame folks hang out, but they sure as hell aren't in Bree. More importantly to me, the people in the low and mid level areas are a lot quieter than they used to be, even considering their numbers. I get the sense they are trying to level out of there as quickly as possible.

The Ettenmoors are also very quiet, people seem bored and the mood is negative in the extreme, even compared to this time last year.

What makes us hardcore is not that we're killers, but that we're flagged vulnerable to killers. We play the same carrot-stick game as the rest of you, but you only have to contend with robots who are designed from birth to die for your entertainment and vindication. Some of you have serious problems with the notion of fighting opponents that can defend themselves, or heaven forbid pick their battles and surprise you when you'd prefer to be doing something else.

None of this would matter much, and no one would consider themselves hardcore - because for many years we didn't - were it not for the fact that some of you are so grotesquely addicted to the thrill of murdering stuffed animals, and take such pride in the imaginary treasure rationed to you from your designated vending machines, that you not only become angry at a surprise attack by a human opponent but have long since ceased to question whether this is a rational response. You even base your purchasing decisions on this and grant it more weight than the setting of the game, the pacing of its action, or the quality of its writing.

We didn't used to get a thrill out of sneaking up on you and giving you a scare, and we didn't used to hope it bothered you. Hell, we would go hours at a stretch without even considering violence against another player. But now it's different! Now, if I see you hunting in a ruin, and it looks like I can get the jump on you, I'm going to do it. And it's not because I'm mean or because my penis is so small; it's because either you're insane and an asshole, or you're going to enjoy it and we're going to become friends.

I like to think that at the end of the day most of you aren't half as horrid as you let on, and that we'll all have a jolly laugh about these things sometime soon.

I am confused about this "wait for the digital download" business. I have seen this mentioned a few time now, but from the shop page it looks like the download will be made available during beta. What am I missing here?

I can understand someone being willing to pay more for a box, and maybe charging more for one is justifiable since the print run might be small compared to other releases, but surely by now we all view any boxed copy of an MMO as a collector's curiosity, no?

It's surprising they would even consider € = $ pricing since that has generated so much negative publicity in the past year on Steam and in a few other cases. What's the justification for this? Someone in another thread remarked that $20 is a standard price to pay for a subscription fee. Who the hell (other than Darkfall, I would hazard a guess) is actually charging this to European customers right now?

Originally posted by Jackdog

I find the combos in AoC are pretty easy to execute. The little hint buttons light up on the screen and all you have to do is hit whichever one it keys you to hit.  No memorization is needed, just paint by numbers.

I played for a few weeks at launch, and a few days just now, and I honestly still have no idea what any of this is about. Except for the combat rose's simple acknowledgment that I've pressed a key, the interface gives me no feedback whatsoever on what I'm doing. On very rare occasion an EQ2 style box pops up with an icon I don't recognize, I click it, and nothing happens.

I probably missed something important back in Tortage while mashing my 1 key to death during the cutscenes. In all seriousness, what the hell am I supposed to be looking for, and more importantly what's it called in the options settings?

The only game I know of that meets all your requirements is seriously Runescape. The pet system is pretty involved, the crafting system is complex (though arguably pointless), lately it honestly doesn't look too bad, and it's cheap, or free. Unlike some games, moving from a pay account back to the free version is relatively painless, so you can still log in occasionally for shits and giggles after it's mostly run its course.

I've been playing on the members RP server, and though it's (mercifully) devoid of actual roleplaying, it's (more importantly) very light on the old "can i be ur bf lol" for which many of us lovingly remember this game. Spamming is also mostly nonexistent now because of the new trading rules.