I miss the old mob grinding. Not because mob grinding is necessarily fun, but because we did it in groups. We grouped up, socialized, and even though we were doing a fairly boring task, we were doing it together and had fun because of it. Group mob grinds were and still are 100x more fun than a solo quest grind. I could grind in SWG all day because of the socialization aspect, yet I quit WoW because the quest grind was so boring I couldn't take it any more.

I don't miss the grind per say, I miss the social interactions and social inter-dependence, two of the biggest things today's developers seem to have forgotten.

How about Guild Wars? Good PvP there.

Polish, quality and content play their part, but I really don't think it plays that big of a part. My favorite MMO was Star Wars Galaxies, and it severely lacked on polish, quality, and content, yet I would play that game over WoW any day. There are much bigger factors at work here than those mentioned above.

Soloing and Grouping shouldn't be that hard to balance out, yet developers can't seem to get it right.

Here's a few things that I think are needed to make a nice, balanced game:

1) There should be group only, and solo only content.

2) Grouping should offer the progression advantage as the extra effort required to establish, prepare, and execute the group should be given extra rewards. For the love of god eliminate XP sharing.

3) There most certainly must be solo things to do to continue play even when not grouped.

The pure soloist won't be happy unless they can achieve and defeat everything in the game by themselves. The pure grouper won't be happy until kill a level 1 boar takes a full raid. If you plan to make a game that caters to the most people, you must forget about these two types of players.

There must be content for both crowds, but groupers must get the progressive advantage, because if they don't, like electricity people will take the path of least resistance and forming a group is the resistance they will avoid. If grouping and soloing offer the same rewards, no one will go through the hassle of forming a group if they can achieve it by themselves, even the groupers. Give XP BONUSES for being in a group, not penalties or sharing. Make the XP available so that soloers can definitely  progress on their own, but grouping is faster, which isn't the case in most MMOs today.

Offer rewards only available through soloing, and other rewards only available through grouping.

Any violence committed by a person "due" to a video game is more the fault of stupidity than the video game itself. They should be banning stupidity before they ban video games, but if stupidity was banned, the world would be a lot less populated.

Well to start, I'm fairly certain that Vista is Longhorn, and Longhorn was just it's project name.

Your system might not like gaming on Vista with only 2gb of ram. I would recommend upgrading that, but ram is really cheap these days. I skipped Vista and gamed solely on XP for the last 7 years, but I recently  just upgraded to Windows 7 Pro and I love it. The graphics are flashy, but those can be turned down. Gaming is relatively stable, the only issue I have had so far is Counter-Strike Source crashing on launch when running dual monitors, but unplugging the second monitor fixes that issue for now.

Windows 7 launch is just around the corner, and it is basically a more efficient, more stable Vista. If you are looking to upgrade, I would wait a month for 7 to come out.

Originally posted by templarga

And the author pulls his info from FAQ that says "there are currently 200 servers" or something like that.

There is no date on that FAQ so who knows how many servers there are now. I know recently it was said that there are like 13,000+ server blades but I do not know what that means.

That really doesn't tell you anything as we have no idea how many server blades they allocate to each individual server, not to mention cross realm BG's and Arenas.

I definitely agree. I think the art style is terrible and not fitting of the Star Wars universe at all. The textures look like they are hand drawn in. I think SWG has a much better art style, even if the poly count is lower.

Honestly, the game is just falling in line with the rest of the current Star Wars art style that is oriented towards kids.

I don't like their decision to go this route or it's look, but hopefully they can make up for it with game play.

Originally posted by TheHatter

Originally posted by Axehilt

Are you really calling WAR a WOW clone, Hatter?  Between the PVP focus, public quests, and class design, it's significantly different from WOW (certainly moreso than a lot of other games.)

It was a bad game, with shallow combat and very shallow PVE, but it wasn't really a WOW clone.  The moment-to-moment gameplay of WAR was dominated by RVR for me (after resubbing, at least; near launch RVR wasn't very profitable.)  The moment-to-moment gameplay of leveling in WOW was almost purely solo PVE.

 

Pretty much. To me, it was a complete copy with a few extra elements thrown in and the rest just a half assed ("shallow" is the word you used) version of WoW. 

Despite RVR (which could be used in the same way FVF.... almost) mechanically the work in almost the exact same way. Just in a slightly different setting.

 

(Please don't pick apart my post. I could easily write 5 pages on what I mean about who did what first and when did how who what when china cheese monkey juice. Just read it for what it is)

Pretty much. I was just burning out on WoW when WAR was coming out, so I gave it a try and quit after a couple of days because it felt just like WoW, and I was already burnt out on it.

Originally posted by Darth_Pete

If allowed it might lead to people changing sides like socks.

Putting limits on the rate of switching isn't difficult.

I think they have already decided that you can't change factions(judging by the separate classes for each faction, which I think is a mistake), and I think that not being able to change factions is a huge mistake seeing as changing factions was kind of a big deal in Star Wars.

I too have all 3 of my characters on Kauri. Sad to see our great world and everything we built up destroyed, but it was destroyed to me 4 years ago anyway.

Only SOE could squeeze the words "overwhelming success" into the beginning of a statement about closing down half of the games servers.

While this game is one step closer to being put out of it's misery, it is sad to see my home server on the list of ones being shut down. I might have to take one more depressing stroll through everything we built and remember all of the good times before they were ripped away from us.

Originally posted by Kelador

Originally posted by Abrahmm

This game sounds awesome. This tidbit caught my eye:

 

"The main difference in Guild Wars 2 is that it will all be a single, persistent world."

 

This gives me the hint that they are attempting to make single server ala Guild Wars, but add persistence to it? If this is so, this sounds amazing and I can't wait to see it.

 

Can't wait for this one.

 

That just means its like your standard MMO (wow/ etc) where the world is open and not made up of private instances like Guild wars is now. Im sure it will have more than one server or might just have shards. Only game i know that has one server is eve online.

Well, it was the "single" part that gave me this impression. Having a single "shard" in Guild Wars one was a great feature, and they said they are keeping everything that is great about it. I really hope they try and keep only having one shard, and I hope they can pull it off.

This game sounds awesome. This tidbit caught my eye:

"The main difference in Guild Wars 2 is that it will all be a single, persistent world."

This gives me the hint that they are attempting to make single server ala Guild Wars, but add persistence to it? If this is so, this sounds amazing and I can't wait to see it.

Can't wait for this one.

I saw the light, and realized what an epic waste of time the game really was. I realized the entire game was just a pointless gear grind that would be reset with every expansion. I found the game fun while I played, but having to grind a million different things to get good enough gear to compete was just stupid. I found that the only challenge in the game was in fact "gear checks", and since you could always get better gear, the challenge was overcome by sinking time into grinding, instead of strategy or becoming a better player.

I've wasted a lot of time in my life playing video games, but the time wasted playing WoW is the only time I regret.

They have been made, and they work quite well. Guild Wars has gear, but the stats on gear are hard capped, and getting max stat gear is incredibly easy. With 20 quick levels, you can have max armor by level 2 and max weapons by level 10-12ish(And leveling to max takes a day at the most). It's a great system that focuses on actually playing the game instead of grinding for items that will make you strong enough to play the next part of the game.

SWG had gear, and gear made a difference, but because it was all player made there wasn't a big gear grind.

Frankly, I'm surprised there are so many stu... err "simple" people that actually enjoy mindlessly grinding for gear over and over again. They use a false conclusion that somehow grinding for gear equals "progression" or adds "role play" into the game to justify these dated mechanics, when in reality it is just a pointless time sink that allows people that put the time in to feel "special" and powerful in situations that, if they relied on the player's skill, they wouldn't be special or powerful at all.

But hey, look at the popularity of WoW, apparently these people are abundant.

None, as I don't think any of those are worth $15 a month to be honest.

Originally posted by Fortenc

It doesn't really increase graphics but it does push some game options more than Blizzard bothered to.

 

More foliage, more shadows allowed, blah blah.

 

It's neat, certainly.  Wonder how much it would lag with more than 15x the normal amount of foliage (which is what they put it to), probably not too much since they're planes but still, lol.  Big difference.

Your ability to increase the graphics is limited by your graphics hardware. If your hardware can handle it, it should be no problem. But it is all client side, so there is no "lag" involved.

That is really cool. Nice find.