Originally posted by Zylaxx

I really would love to get excited by AA but I just cant for 2 reasons.

 

1. its an Asian game at heart with anime looks i.e. characters running hunched over in a very unrealistic animation, huge round eyes, cell shaded, and character animations that look weird.  (I loath anime)

2. the combat is stylized with a street fighter feel i.e. weapon swings that show the swooshing through the air of a weapon, colorful and rapid attacks which convey the sense of kung-fu more then actual swordplay.

 

 

the features sound great but I will be unable to get psat those 2 points.

I'll admit as an avid anime fan I really don't see the resemblance of AA to anime but if you see it then you see it.

I will not debate any further with you whether it looks anime or not, that's really not my point here. I will say that I can relate to your feelings on how something so seemingly arbitrary can ruin your gaming experience. When I first logged into WoW I felt like I had just landed on a world full of cartoon characters and the odd shapes, bright colors, and the lack of any attempt to make it look realistic was a gigantic turn off for me.

I'm not sure at this point how I feel about open world bosses. As an avid ffxi player for years I am very familiar with the concept and understand the merits of it and even vehemotly protested on it's behalf to others. It feels more realistic having the bosses out in the open world with other people running by or watching the fight. It also performs as a buffer for the market being over flooded with certain sought after items.

Even with all it's possitives though, it can still just be a giant pain in the butt. Many a time I stood in Dragon's Aery, Behemoth's dominion, King Ramperes toom, Attowha Casm and similar places just to not even get a claim. So not only did I spend hours waiting for the pop, we then had to get the claim, if we got the claim, we then had to defeat the monster (after a while this was a given though), after defeating the boss we only had a certain chance of getting the desired drop(s), and finally if we did get the desired drop, one would have to have the correct amount of points or meet other criteria to able to lot and obtain on said drop.

This system proved to be extremely time consuming and after about the 20th time your LS killed Fafnir or similar bosses it wasn't even remotely fun anymore.

I'll probably play similar to how I played Morrowind and somewhat Oblivion. I usually role about 5-6 different characters at first trying out the various guilds, races, given classes and custom classes. After a lot of trial and error and I mean A LOT, plus some death and destruction I end up picking my favorite character. Then I move on  to power up that character and finish whatever respective guild quests I'm involved with and finally I work on the story mode in between going around and raping and killing all those who decided to dwell in the dungeons that are scattered across the land.

My biggest thing is to treat it as much as an offline game as I can. I don't like to copy how anyone else is playing or take any advice on how to progress in the game. My methods sometimes might not be the most efficient but I enjoy knowing that everything from skills, gear use, and quest completion is all figured out by myself without any help.

Too much in MMOs I find myself following the advice of others, usually it's good advice but with damage calculators and the like occasionally it's hard to break from the most efficient setups and strategies without being ridiculed. I like to take a break from this when playing my offline RPGs and Elder Scrolls allows me to do this the most. Mainly because a lot of other RPGs are so linear. in comparison.

If this game is able to capture the great parts of L2 I will be on board. Other than the fact that it took an insane amount of time to level, L2 was one of the most amazing games ever. Now don't get me wrong, I don't want the opposite where you can max level in a month of even in 3-4 months but anyone who played L2 knows it had one of the most intense leveling curves out there.

I waisted my money on the collectors edition and only played for a short while, gave it six months then didn't return. I will not make the same mistake of waisting any money on this game again.

I don't think it's too far fetched for people to have the same mindset as me either. In all honesty I'm shocked people still continue to defend this game, I am a huge FF fan and even defended FFXII and FFXIII to people, yet I knew this game was beyond poor quality. Even with all the fixes and updates this game is still far from level it should have had upon release and it's a year after release.

Maybe (I really mean maybe) if a ton of my old ffxi buddies jump on after the PS3 release I might consider giving it a go again. Having really good friends to play with and socialize with would be the only thing that would make this game remotely appealing.

I don't really understand the issue or at least I cannot relate. When I had a 45+ hour work week is when I played the most. I worked from 5 am -  2:30ish and was home by 4, so I had at least 3 hours of play time each night and ample time on weekend. Now that I am in school I can't even play at all, my studies take up all my freetime and any freetime I do have is spent working out and as far away from a computer as possible. Well except for this anyway. You'll be surprised I think that with a job you will be able to play plenty of hours.

I can relate to this as many others seem to as well. I used to spend hours upon hours in the virtual world and even made friends that I keep in contact with moreso then some of my lifelong RL friends.

At the same time if games were of the caliber they used to be or if I was as interested in them the way I used to be, I would probably still be single and working a crappy dead end job. That was the case when I was at my peek in the MMO world. So even though I do miss an amazing MMO experience, I am enjoying the fact that I will be getting married soon and that I'm going back to school to finish my degree in a field that I find interesting and has great job opportunities and future growth.

25 here but dealing with going back to school has severely cut down on the amount of time I have to play MMOs. Actually that's an understatement I haven't logged on to any game in almost 8 months. Sad I know, but I'm an addict so it's either all or nothing for me and school + my addiction to MMOs was a disaster my first semester.

I'm really looking forward to this summer because I will in an internship program and be back on a regular 40 hour a week schedule again. Hopefully something good will be out by then to grab my interest for a few months.

It's a case study and all the info I have is on that link. If you would like to know more you'll have to get in touch with them.

If you don't live in the DC area, mainly northern virginia, there is no need to bother though.

Check out this link if you play Guild Wars and live in the DC area. I don't play but my friend sent me this link.

http://www.saic.com/vwstudy/

I don't know if a lot of people in the DC area play Aion but if you do check out this link my friend sent me.

I don't play anymore but I was almost considering re-activating my account because of this.http://www.saic.com/vwstudy/

There may or may not be monetary compensation.

Love raiding. It is hands down my favorite part of MMORPGs. Yes it has flaws, yes it can become tedious after you have completed that raid for the 50th time but that first time fighting a new boss when there is no known strategy and your guild beats the boss after almost wiping multiple times but somehow you make it all work and defeat the boss brings a high I have not found in any other aspect of gaming.

I also think around here it has become trendy to bash on raiding. If you're not a hardcore PvPer what else should be the most sought after fun experience in an MMORPG?

Originally posted by Tridian

Oops lets try this again

 

I'm sick of badly done comic book movies

Thor was kinda awful. He never really had a big fight while he had his powers. Hes a god. Who can beat a god?

If they can make a really good action flick comic book movie then that would be ok. Lets just hope the avengers is good

Thor has lost his powers before. It's not something new at all. If you read the comic books you would know that the storyline in the movie followed Thors orgininal plot line very well. Although I will admit parts were rushed and the love affair in particular was rushed. It was almost as if when Jane Foster saw him with his shirt off she fell in love with him.

Also even though he is a god he's not the most powerful being in the Marvel Universe, that would arguably be Sentry, silver surfer, or the phoenix. Another example is the hulk is physically stronger then Thor. Plus he doesn't get his true godly powers until he inherits the Odinforce, which is when he becomes truly awesome and more godlike.

Originally posted by Mr.Coyote

Absolutely.

I would LOVE to do a column on how MMORPG's are missing RP, quests, storylines, and are basically mutliplayer first person shooters with zero risk or real feelings of investment.

Corpse runs.

REAL death penalties.

REAL consequences for the poorly thoughout zerg attack or lack of planning.

But man.

The forums would all but explode.

Heh.

Maybe next week.

Umm you should do it. Your writing style is probably my favorite on this site and this is something that would speak to the masses here at MMORPG.

But on the topic; I love comic book movies. I don't know why everyone hates on the Thor, my only issue was it was too short and the little love affair thing was stupid and short. Captain America was pretty good.

I really enjoyed X-men the first class but I think that it's funny that even if your powers are to "Adapt to survive" you can't survive the hollywood stereotype that when there is a group you must kill the black guy.

Didn't watch green lantern but it's DC so why would I?

Even my fiance who hates movies liked most of the hero movies this year and she has over 2k comic books that take up half of a giant book shelf.

Also if you want a good pulse on what superhero movies are good go visit your local comic book shop. If they tend to give a good review of the movie then it's probably worth seeing. The one dude at the store we visit weekly loved First Class but hated Green Lantern which was another reason why we didn't see it.

OH and WTF I hated what they did to Dead Pool in the X-men Origins movie. He's a cocky talk all the time jerk mercenary not some mouth sown shut freek with swords that pop out of his arms.

Also for anyone that reads comic books. Wouldn't it be so insanely awesome if they made a movie based on the "House of M" storyling? I would love it.

Wow that was a long post and I only read it during commercials so it seemed even longer to finish it. I agree though, when I was reading about FFXIV about a year ago I was super excited. Then I played in Open Beta and it was ok but I had hopes that they would fix things. After Open Beta it was release and it was basically unchanged...

Fast forward to now and not enough significant changes have been made for me to consider going back for more then an hour or two. If it released with that poor of quality and it has taken them this long to make such a small amount of changes I'm gonna stop watching for a long enough time that another game that deserves my attention will come out.

Originally posted by Gabby-air

I personally hate fps games where I have to think about conserving ammo, it detracts from the fun for me personally. I get the whole you have to think of alternatives thing but it's more tedious than challenging. Every now and then, let's say in a boss fight or something I think this might work but I don't want to be looking for ammo every 5 minutes.

My thoughts exactly. There has to be another way to make things challenging, this just makes games frustrating.

I would prefer they did Fallout because out of the two I love Elder Scrolls a lot more and don't want it ruined.

Also, if they just implemented some sort of co-op mode where you can join in your friends world or vise versa I would love that. Up to 4 would be amazing but really co-op would be fine.

Yeah I don't know why everyone is so concerned with balance these days. They said that some of the builds will be extremely unproductive and kind of pointless (or something to that effect). For me, as long as one or two builds aren't insanely powerful over all the others I'm cool with an unbalanced approach. Additionally, I would like the less "powerful" yet logical builds to still be effective in some way.

Reading this post kind of reminded me of how Galka were the least used characters in FFXI. Why? Because they had a tail, and no females didn't help either. Yet I often heard people make remarks that they would have rolled Galka but they didn't like the tail. So because this big guy with a tail was so unrelatable they decided to make the same exact race in FFXIV but without the tail. For some reason if it's a cat race with a tail though people love it but anything else is bad.

If people have that much issue with a tail I can only imagine them having even more issue with a non-bipedal race.

easy EMPIRE STRIKES BACK!

"Luke I am your Father"

"NNOOOOOOOOO!!!!!"

........awesome