I'm surprised by the offended. I thought it was fairly well known that we all play extremely sadistic, vampiric beings in MMOs, wherein gameplay revolves around slaughtering to increase your power, Elric of Melniboné-style. Nothing sanctimonious about pointing out objective fact.

'Mass murderer' is inaccurate when there is usually a convenient war (or twenty) on, but I'm pretty sure you all know what is meant by it. We certainly don't play soldiers. Sociopathic mercenaries, at best. Mercenaries with not only a job to kill, but a need to.

In recent years, I've come to consider guild websites almost completely redundant, considering the guild tools in the games I play, namely EVE. I can't think of anything websites offer that isn't available in-game, unlike back in EverQuest's days. With the exception of truly enormous super-guilds, I suppose.

Has anyone ever tried even the most state-of-the-art voice changers? They are not convincing, in my experience. I can't imagine any serious confusion being a problem for a few years to come.

And when it does occur, why care?

Originally posted by PizziJQ

There is a point of playing RP in a game but i am Judge for being female because someone plays a female toon and does not make it clear to the world he is not female... there for whenever i say im female im seen a liar this is not fair to me ... or any  other true female that plays video games

Many people think my characters 'look gay' and conclude that I'm gay. If I decide to assert that I'm not, people demand proof, and more often than not are dissatisfied with it.

When I was around 13 and people saw my posts or heard my voice, many people insisted that I sounded and typed like a 30-year-old professor, declaring that a 13-year-old could not possibly type with proper spelling and grammar or speak with a fully developed voice. This led to people thinking that I was going about claiming to be younger in order to hook up with kids, so you can imagine where that led.

When people see my YouTube videos, I'm either gay or a virgin (or British, which is the strangest to me). Evidence to the contrary never withstanding.

Many people are ignorant assholes. That's their problem, not yours, and not the male playing a female character.

It reads like a low-budget attempt to pre-empt CCP's World of Darkness MMO.

Nice concept art, though.

EDIT: Oh, free-to-play. That would do it, eh?

I've always felt that the Creative Director is woefully underappreciated. While Paul Barnett brought the role briefly to a rockstar-like status, it has otherwise been practically unknown.

I know it's entirely about personal taste, but I think the characters look at least twice as good as what we're seeing from TOR, as ecstatic as I am about the latter. It's ironic that TOR went the superhero route while STO took a more realistic (if still highly idealized) direction, considering Cryptic's past versus BioWare's.

It's the space shots that make me cringe, mainly the starships. They just don't seem to be utilizing the engine even half as well as the asteroids, planets and characters. In the vast majority of screenshots, the starships look like they were pasted into the scene rather than being a part of it, yet then there stunning exceptions like these beauties:

startrekonline.com/dyncontent/startrek/uploads/Star_Trek_Online-PCScreenshots25128sto_022609_01.jpg

startrekonline.com/dyncontent/startrek/uploads/Star_Trek_Online-PCScreenshots25144sto_042709_01.jpg

startrekonline.com/dyncontent/startrek/uploads/Star_Trek_Online-PCScreenshots25424sto_screen_081709_03.jpg

startrekonline.com/dyncontent/startrek/uploads/Star_Trek_Online-PCScreenshots25463sto_screen_092509_37.jpg

Which easily give EVE a run for its graphics budget. Stop confusing me! 

Fair enough. I wouldn't really know about this site. I don't generally engage in discussions on already-released games here, but rather in more focused communities.

Originally posted by Zorndorf

Your attitude is the only correct one.

Of course there are things that bother you and me and .... that's constructive.

A guy who just happens to jump a bit in Beta can't speak about "insulting gameplay" and "unbearable community".

Random cheap conclusions of something he can pick up in any WOW hating forum without actually playing the operationel game in ... 2004, let alone in 2009.

Correct ? 

The nature of its gameplay was evident in beta. Of course it wasn't nearly as beautifully streamlined as it is today, a mere skeleton of the beast it has become, but one can identify an animal by its skeleton. It was clear what they were aiming for, and I wasn't interested. I've given it chances since its release, and it's wonderful how it has developed, and Blizzard is rightfully very highly praised for the ever-so-polished experience, but it is the same game I was introduced to way-back-when.

Analogy: I don't like death metal music. It's just a style that doesn't work with me, I find it abrasive and in no way pleasantly or even interestingly stimulating. Tomorrow there could come the best death metal band to ever grace its fan's ears, the epitome of everything they love about the genre, refined to the raw essence of awesome, and I'd give it a shot, but I'm very unlikely to develop a liking for death metal. Improve, refine, perfect it all you can, it's just not a direction I'm interested in, and I needn't listen to every minute of every album to realize this. It doesn't exactly disguise itself.

Anyway, its gameplay is also made clear by the reviews, by the descriptions given by even the many people who love it, by gameplay videos—seriously, it is so outstandingly popular that it's practically impossible for a gamer on the Internet to not know what it's like. This is no obscure subject.

As for the community, are its extremely active official fora not fairly representative? Because I lurked there for much of 2007, at least, and to this day often find myself reading threads there, and it's even worse than MMORPG.com! Ahem.

@Zorndorf:

Yes, I did. It was irrelevant to my point, though, which was that the majority of my dislike for it was formed very early on, based on very fundamental choices by the development team that very evidently have not (and couldn't have, regardless) changed since the beta. I don't need an end-game experience to show me how it plays, how it looks, who plays it and what its values are.

I don't give a rat's ass about server stability, bugs, raids or class balance, so a beta experience tells me all I need to know. What I dislike about it hasn't changed since the beta: the basic principles underlying its design.

And again, despite graphics being far from the top of my priorities in gaming, they are at the top of my conflict of taste with WoW. That has very obviously not changed, either.

I congratulate Blizzard on their success and all, wishing them the best. I don't 'hate' WoW in the sense that I wish it to go away. I just don't want to play it. Comprende?

Originally posted by skarwolf

 To begin with no this isn't a pro WOW thread, and no I'm not a WOW fanboy.  I did play it for a time but don't anymore.

I notice many people seem to hate WOW.  Why ?

Did you play it and something piss you off ?

Is it some attempt at validating having played another game for 4-5 years when everyone else went to WOW ?

Do you hate it just to hate it and be emo because the majority seem to like it ?

Or is it simply some aspect of the game itself, graphics, community... ?

Lastly, if you haven't played it how can you judge a game unless you base your opinion on assumptions and heresay.  

I'm not crazy about its extremely (in my opinion insultingly) simplistic gameplay or unbearable community, but I'll freely admit that it is mostly the visuals.

I began disliking it during its development, prior to the beta, simply due to the art style. I had been disenfranchised by what WarCraft III had done, visually, to the WarCraft world I'd once loved, and to see World of WarCraft taking that same direction further was certainly no selling point for me.

Due to some friend-of-a-friend connections and my search for game industry employment, I was given a tour of Blizzard's headquarters in Irvine just after the beta began. I talked with Lead Artist Justin Thavirat (who was giving me the tour) and two other artists briefly about the art style and I was very critical of it. I had to be honest. I assumed that I had offended them, but a week later I received an offer to enter into the early beta personally from Justin Thavirat.

Unfortunately, and in spite of Mr. Thavirat's intentions, my experience in the beta didn't help. From the moment I first logged in, I couldn't stop scowling and twitching at how visually unappealing it all was. Sexually mouthwatering Night Elf females aside.

It's just taste.

Originally posted by archer75

 It won't be EQ3. In fact they said making EQ2 was a mistake. They said MMO's don't need sequels, the whole nature of the genre and the games is that they continue to grow and evolve through patches and expansion packs. 

We know they are working on planetside 2, which has not been officially announced. 

Who said that, and when? Because 'EverQuest Next' (just Google the phrase) is something they have at least in conceptual stages along with 'PlanetSide Next'. In both cases, the hints coming out of SOE point to a console MMO push. Unfortunately.

My console hate aside, they're letting out all this rhetoric that suggests they want to seriously reboot the way they approach MMOs, which sounds great, except for the fact that what they mean by it is probably just going more pop culture. Broad appeal makes sense, but I'd rather see it achieved via a broad selection of precisely targeted games, not a few games that try to take in everybody.

He will press that button with great muscular force. That button is his bitch.

Cracks me up more than Captain Robau.

He probably means because sex is a strange thing to segregate gamers by. We'd collectively shout down male-only guilds as misogynistic, so....

Anyway, I don't personally have a problem with it. If I played World of WarCraft, I might even encourage my girlfriend to join such a guild, as male gamers aware of her sex seldom treat her in a way that is conducive to teamwork. Ventrilo is particularly fun:

'Hello, people!'
'What? Whose girl is that?'

Not 'Hey, who are you?' Not even, 'Who's the girl?' but, 'Whose girl is that?' Good times.

Even if a great percentage of people were having issues with Dragon Age, which I don't see evidence of, you'd have to note that The Old Republic is being developed by an entirely different team within the company, as is Mass Effect 2.

If I wasn't so put-off by the mixture of realistic graphics with very cartoonish races, I might be more inclined to pay attention to it....

I don't say this as an anti-anime dickhead, for the record; I like anime styles just fine. But having the graphics as realistic as they are when you have races that look like Jim Henson puppets, I'm uncomfortable.

Originally posted by otter3370

Originally posted by Saerain

Could someone define for me fail in this context? For some years, we've been talking of games 'failing' despite successfully completing development and profiting from it.

What will The Old Republic fail to do, exactly? Break even? Run for more than a year? Five years? Fulfill your personal expectations? Garner more subscribers than World of WarCraft? Cause a paradigm shift in the genre? Bring peace to the Middle East? Be specific.

 

"Fail" will mean that the individual gamer making the thread doesn't like the game.  That's the gist of all the "fail" threads.  That particular person didn't like the game, so it's a "fail".  It doesn't matter if it's successful.  As a matter of fact, if it's successful, there will be many more "fail" threads than normal.  Look at WoW.  The most successful mmorpg in history, but if you look at sites like these, it's the biggest "fail" in mmorpg history.  At least some people are honest about their biases and say they hate anything they see as mainstream.  Star Wars is a house hold name, so it's got that against it already with the elitists.

That's a shame. I've no affection for World of WarCraft, but I express that directly with comments like 'WoW is the antithesis of what I want from the aspects of MMOs most important to me, and I worry about the direction it has pushed the genre in,' not by projecting my displeasure onto everyone else, thus determining it a failure by some objective definition.

Anyway, point taken.

Could someone define for me fail in this context? For some years, we've been talking of games 'failing' despite successfully completing development and profiting from it.

What will The Old Republic fail to do, exactly? Break even? Run for more than a year? Five years? Fulfill your personal expectations? Garner more subscribers than World of WarCraft? Cause a paradigm shift in the genre? Bring peace to the Middle East? Be specific.

 MMOs are, by and large, extremely low-end games, for better or worse. Precious few MMO developers give a damn about being more advanced than a circa 2001 single-player game. Just how crappy are we talking, here?

I'm interested in the sci-fi aspect much more than the sandbox or PvP aspects, so Mortal Online really doesn't enter into the picture when I think of EVE-killers, although I am looking forward to it.

Star Trek Online, The Old Republic, and Earthrise are the obvious sci-fi MMOs coming up, but I think EVE's is a better sci-fi setting than either of them have embraced, so I don't have any really high expectations therein.

I had high hopes for Infinity, once upon a time, but I have doubts that it will ever see the electromagnetic field of anyone's HDD.