some good news and not so good news....I have one thing to say in response....

Hab SoSlI' Quch!

I heard about it yesterday and was actually a little sad when I first heard it, another legend gone for me. Then as I sat here at work and thought about it I started thking back to that first game way back in 7th grade when my rought this new game to school called Chainmail. We loved board games but all that was ever around back then was monopoly or clue and stuff like that. This was something new and cool. We played that 1st weekend for hours and hours, loving it. For those that don't know it, Chainmail was his first minature wargame and D&D rules were based off that game. Gary was co-maker of Chainmail but all that got me thinking about my friends back then and what they were doing now. We used to spend weekends over someone's house and just roll up characters and play and play for hours on end, sometimes days. I was that nerdy little pale ng mountain dew like on the Doctor Demento show (google it if you've never heard it).

My character was always the rough and tumble drunken dwarf leading with his axe or head and not so much his wits. God I loved those days....we're all old now of course but man that really brings back memories. I'm now working on a mmorpg myself, and my old cronies also work in the IT industry, some of you might know of us but i'll leave out names to protect the guilty parties.

To the man, the myth and the legend!  /roll   *stands with out falling during the wake

"G'on ye Gary, may yer cup be filt n n'er empty'

Now-Do you have any mountain dew? Where's the Cheetos?

Since this is actually a civil discussion about SWG, a rareity itself on most boards, I would like to add in my 2 cents. I was a day 2 SWG vet (only cause I couldn't log on on day 1) and I played for roughly 4 yrs with 5 active accounts, mastering every profession, developing businesses on both Kauri and Chimera and having max level characters on 8 slots of 4 accounts and 4 on the 5th account.

I "loved", the game, my kids loved it, it was a family game. I'm a huge Star Wars nut and have been since seeing Episode 4 in the movies as a youngster (all 16 saturday matinee's straight).  I stuck with it through all of the bugs, the changes, the content holocron fiasco, the GCW, the village until I just could no longer take the fact that all of my friends of those 4yrs finally left. I hated the changes made during the NGE to the base game play mechanics but I still worked through them mostly and only stayed due to my friends and guild. Of a guild of nearly 450, only 3 would be on typically over a 24hr period during the last week I had active accounts. I still miss them alot, they were also real life friends, we would have guild events at peoples houses etc yearly. I cancelled all 5 accounts Sept 1, 2006.

But, as it goes, game play did change. It changed drastically to the point that it was no long the game I had originally purchased and the community I had enjoyed it with, even with all its quirks and bugs just evaporated as the NGE hit. I could no long live my saga. So in this discussion I saw a lot of valid points and even some legalese thrown around, I was just wondering about a few things.

What if we, like other groups, could help regulate the industry by proposing bills to our government to help protect consumers from the likes of things like this happening again. God forbid it would be even more disasterous if RMT were involved but I was thinking about what other industries have done and have included the patient Bill of Rights here (in u.s.) as an example. What if something like this was submitted to congress and passed, changed of course to reflect the issues with gaming so that we could prevent such things from happening to us agani (it is to late for SWG imho). I just don't think any of us want others to have to go through what all of us SWG vets did indeed endure. Especially look at items 4, 5, 7 and 8.

Taken from wikipedia:

The following summarizes eight areas of consumer rights and responsibilities adopted by the President's Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry in 1998 [1]. Many health plans have adopted these principles:

1. Information Disclosure. Consumers have the right to receive accurate, easily understood information and some require assistance in making informed health care decisions about their health plans, professionals, and facilities.
2. Choice of Providers and Plans. Consumers have the right to a choice of health care providers that is sufficient to ensure access to appropriate high-quality health care.
3. Access to Emergency Services. Consumers have the right to access emergency health care services when and where the need arises. Health plans should provide payment when a consumer presents to an emergency department with acute symptoms of sufficient severity -- including severe pain -- such that a "prudent layperson" could reasonably expect the absence of medical attention to result in placing that consumer's health in serious jeopardy, serious impairment to bodily functions, or serious dysfunction of any bodily organ or part.
4. Participation in Treatment Decisions. Consumers have the right and responsibility to fully participate in all decisions related to their health care. Consumers who are unable to fully participate in treatment decisions have the right to be represented by parents, guardians, family members, or other conservators.
5. Respect and Nondiscrimination. Consumers have the right to considerate, respectful care from all members of the health care system at all times and under all circumstances. An environment of mutual respect is essential to maintain a quality health care system.
6. Confidentiality of Health Information. Consumers have the right to communicate with health care providers in confidence and to have the confidentiality of their individually identifiable health care information protected. Consumers also have the right to review and copy their own medical records and request amendments to their records.
7. Complaints and Appeals. All consumers have the right to a fair and efficient process for resolving differences with their health plans, health care providers, and the institutions that serve them, including a rigorous system of internal review and an independent system of external review.
8. Consumer Responsibilities. In a health care system that protects consumers' rights, it is reasonable to expect and encourage consumers to assume reasonable responsibilities. Greater individual involvement by consumers in their care increases the likelihood of achieving the best outcomes and helps support a quality improvement, cost-conscious environment.

A "real" mech mmorpg, oh wait, i'm already making that....ok then, uhm...in order of preference.

1. Dune -For obvious reasons, a pvp intensive game, great guild game. If only I could get the IP rights.

2. Cave man (Cave men-hunter gatherers, huge sabercats and wooly mammoths). Could form small groups in caves, go hunt build a civilization, quest for fire.

3. Bug War (This one is actually for my daughter more then me and If I could fund it it would be a kids game, with kids graphics) You'd start out as an ant in a colony and have to pick a class, drone, worker, army ant and then go do what they do, hunt gather build and protect the queen). Could be lots of quests to go and get such and such gum drop in the park or assault on the picnic basket raid for guilds only). This one would be more cartoony graphics though similar to a bugs life.

a few others, but i'm going to save those ones for myself and possibly make them eventually.

Hopefully Jack Thompson doesn't hear about this. There may be another lawsuit against games since now they are putting people in RL danger from moose, the boy using the WoW skills could have been seriously injured or even killed due to the game company's negligence. I'm sure there's another lawsuit in there somewhere.

Good guess....but as far as developers go, and I am one I can say we have 2 vista boxes in our test environement, one is my laptop and the other a desktop. New systems coming out of walmart or HP's or what not almost all have vista come as the "stock" package on a built out box it seems. So we have to test to make sure the software is at least compatible with vista even though a VAST majority of gamers out there are still using xp and it is the staple.

Some are using even older OS's though, but if a game being developed now is 2 years into production of a 5yr production cycle they are most likely going to build for the high end gamer boxes of today and the 3yr life cycle boxes of tomorrow. If you get what I mean. People upgrade there boxes normally every few years or so, or at least parts of their boxes and gamers are at the forefront of this army. By the time a 5yr prodcution game goes gold those people who are at the Bleeding edge today will most likely have the average or low-end specced boxes 3yrs down the road.

You can see this by all of the specs of current games out there, even this site's forum posts constantly are asking about system requirements for such and such game. There are minimums no matter what system or specs though. Like specifically shader technology 2.0, many companies are using better but at a minimum companies are dev'g at 2.0 so vid cards not up to spec with that just simply won't work no matter what drivers you've updated to, they won't work. DX10 same story, it's a whole other realm of the same thing.

Quite true, I also played DnD and other PnP games all the way back to Chainmail...hehe yeah showing my age. I must just be getting old I guess.

Well I am, and I'm damn near close enough to being a grandfather and am a solid TREKKIE from watching the original series on TV when I was a kid through the T'pol nekkidness experience ;-). In my opinion, the screenshot/pic/makeover shot whatever they want to call it is fine. It looks ok for a game in alpha, but it does worry me. Key things stick out to me about the shot, which is things like.

The ship: It looks familiar, it looks trek but for the life of me I have not and cannot identify this class of vessel with my the cells in my noggin. It's almost a voyager/reliant mixer upper. It confuses me. Again i'm pretty much a trekkie and if this is a ship for a mmo game thats fine, but if its a ship for a trek game, i'm concerned. I'm concerned cause its only a ship, am I only a ship, why? Trek is about people not ships, ships are things. I hate EVE for that same reason. Am I going to hate STO as well because i'm ONLY a ship an not an avatar. When/what do I get to see on the ground as opposed to this? I'm just not getting a good feeling on it right now, I am worried for the IP. What i'm seeing doesn't seem right to me, not trek enough, no people in space....wagon train to the stars as it was first sold to the studios.

The Alien: Looks kinda cool, but what is it? I've been around the alpha, delta quadrants as much as the next guy but i've never seen that thing. Not to say that it doesn't look cool but what's its background? Where's it from, where's the lore? What the hell am was I talking about? Oh yeah, it looks fine, but there's no information on what/who/how this thing is lets get more info before we get shocked with a non-familiar trek species. Speaking of which, Klingons. Can I play as a klingon and fly a bird of prey old school? Do I follow the Council or am I a worf woopingboy?

Environment: Not bad, we got space. We got some planets, we got some astroids, can those be mined for dilithium? If I run into them do I take damage or do I pass through them or bounce off them like Jump to Lightspeed.. The other part of this where i'm clicking on planets, starbases and astroids comment leads me to think that I can't even get close enough to them to actually physically do those things other then just interact with it in a interface manner.

Speaking of interface, it seems a little on the light side to me. I'm thinking those are phasers, shields, comms at the bottom and i'm kinda lost on the rest. Doesn't seem to be to much at the 3yr mark for what'd I'd expect to see but its ok I guess. Just not up to speed for what normal mmo's have nowadays. The alien interface screen seems a little under done IMHO though, what am I looking at just a picture of an alien with his mouth open or is that an actual video? They can do that in games now you know, put interactive video streaming content into the applet. Just wondering what i'm looking at.

So, I guess I CAN say that I'm a trek fan but I don't know if i'd play this. I don't want to be a ship, I want to be part of a crew on a ship. I don't want to be a wuss in a SF uniform. I want to be a Klingon warrior on a mission from the council as a gunner on a BOP. I might even want to be a Romulan spy or how bout a preatorian can I? I don't visit STO at all so no use for me going there, but at 3yrs this is not what I'd expect for a TREK mmoprg......but ....maybe I'm just old.

Baldur's Gate

Icewind Dale

BG2

ID2

Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2

KotoR's

+ all the expansions

Bioware has my vote for best RPGs not Square. I think they'll give Blizz a good run for their money.

Ah I agree with that previous post. I also roleplay in all of the mmorpg games I have played. I find it becoming more and more difficult as time has progressed over the last 5 yrs. In Wow it was neigh inpossible to even roleplay, even on the roleplay servers without ridicule or just plain annoying people breaking my immersive atmosphere with their chuck norris antecdotes etc.

It really has devolved in my opinion over the last several years especially. I don't know if its the influx of non-mmo players brought in, in huge numbers from the wow phenomenon or just me getting older and crotchety. I have been playing as well since the old EQ, albeit not much there, and really got heavy into it during SWG. By the time EQ2 rolled out I had macros for my spell casting which included Aranic mumblings of lost magic from my wizard, to the brutal bad mouth of a barbarians tongue lashing (in scottish dialect).

Even voice/Ventrillo/TS has not escaped my roleplay escapades as I have been known to jump into my dwarf or maiden voice with the help of a handy voice morpher so as to not to break the immersian. I just feel most can't be bothered nowadays to go to that level, which I only hold myself to and not others. Roleplay to me isn't the thee's and thou's but the interaction your character would be having with others, however it may be. In swg my wookiee smuggler would hardly ever speak and was known to just start a brawl(duel) for no reason, and scream horrifically even when others could understand wookiee.

I am taking it even further as I now develop these games and hope to help the roleplay community not only through GM'g events, but providing the tools to make for better roleplay within game. Having character customization being the highest priority but things like naming conventions and even thwarting hecklers with bad karma for horrid roleplay while promoting it in the roleplay community. I feel we must take back the genre for the good of all, chuck norris has no place in the future, he would long be dead and buried, I hope in my rendition of a mmorpg.

see below

Originally posted by chaintm

Definitely interested,

There is an obvious following for this sort of game and I am (as many) am surprised to not see a mech type game coming to light.

, thou I am concerned with what you are offering (IE , is it very feasible in your current build is this more of a wish list?) So many titles in the past that haven’t come to light even today have promised this or that to build the hype of a community to then be shadowed by closure or discontinued or on-hold of production because they couldn't find the publisher to back up their idea or ran out of funds.

So with a blunt remark I ask "Are you guys just trying to hype your game in hopes of getting a community that you can sell to a publisher?" While this is a very blunt and almost rude comment, I ask it for the previous reason. We the players have seen this over and over again lately and hope this is not the case here. Is there any response you would care to give or comment on that might enlighten some of us that are a bit doubtful? I really would love to see this title hit the shelves so to speak, god a good Mech game is WAYY over due.. But I have my doubts.

Then that sums up the first question in wondering if having such cool features in the game, is it a bit more then you can chew? Or is this really what the team is after? Really submersion and game play that we have been looking for sense the days of miniature playing thinking "man wouldn't it be cool if we could make a game that does this?!"

A hopeful fan,

 

Thanks for the interest, we knew there was a following for the Mech genre and were surprised at first as well. Then, we learned a bit more on how they operate at the big corporate offices, and weren't so surprised anymore.

We understand the community's fear with newer companies, given the dismal results of things like DnL or Mourning. One of the problems with mmo development these days though is not due to how small a company is, even larger companies like Sigil who have $30 million to spend run into "snags".

We have a rather large wish list, we also have a vision that we will see completed. As you said many others have built their own hype, DnL, VSOH, both did this and once the players realized what it was they were getting they left. We understand that, listened and learned from it. I personally followed both of those games' development closely.

What we have planned is a phased approach so it will not happen all at once, as we have said from the beginning. Not one indy team in existence should even consider trying to do similar without a thorough plan in place. We are currently in Alpha, it took a few years and our own personal blood, sweat and tears of commitment and self-funding to get us here. Large or small companies don't normally make it this far without millions of publisher dollars already at hand, we have creatively done so without a publisher.

That is where we differ from them, we are not looking for a publisher. We have partnered with Multiverse to develop on their middleware, in a way we consider them our publisher and they have and will be involved with us post release. Will our numbers be WOW numbers?, most likely not, but that is not what we set out to achieve. If it happens, fine but we are making our game what we envisioned it to be, our own IP and we are not tied to a publisher or IP owner. It is a game set to our market-base, one which currently there is none....

Although we like the hype and excitement, the questions/interview were not an attempt at anything sly. We recently demo'd at AGDC again this year and were scheduled to have a one on one interview with Jon Wood. Due to scheduling conflicts on our side, we didn't make it to the conference until the last day. I suspect MMORPG.COM was still interested in speaking with us when they sent the interview questions which you are reading here and discussing on the site. We are not marketing on any large scale, word of mouth does that just fine at this stage for us, were just happy to answer questions when any one is interested. We like our game and like talking about it. 

Originally posted by impulsebooks

 

Originally posted by Hamilton-WDS

We haven't made a firm decision about whether or not Legs can be blown off or just left intact, but non-functional.  There are pro's and con's for both sides.

I hope bits can get blown off to be honest. It doesn't have to be legs, because that would present a serious problem if a mech was lamed that way but not killed outright--how would it get back to a hangar for repairs for instance.

 

But yes, I would like weapons and equipment to be blown off, arms maybe, bits of armour... just think, we could salvage battle fields and use the junk to upgrade our own mechs, or maybe recycle it to build new ones. That would be fantastic.

All this does bring to mind how the Resurrection system will work however. If my mech gets blown to bits (God for-fend!) and my avatar dies, how is he resurrected, or is he even resurrected? Perma death is right out in my opinion, but maybe not in others' opinions. Anyway, if I die and my mech is destroyed, do I wake up in a clone tank or something with a basic mech in a hangar somewhere to start over? Tat would be one hell of a death penalty!! Perhaps I have insurance on my mech as I would on my ships in Eve?

 

Just something I wanted to drudge up since it had some relevancy, an exert from a post  from our forum boards we like to call...

"The Mech Commandments"

When thy mech is immobilized, thou shall become a pillbox.

When thy mech is disarmed, thou shall become a bunker.

When thy time has run out, thou shall become a hero.

Originally posted by impulsebooks

I read that the barren planet that force of arms is based upon, will over time change as the terraforming takes hold. Is this part of the game, or is it server controlled? What I mean is this... will players have an impact upon the terraforming? Will their be player decision making in the process, and will they have quests/things to do that speed up, slow down, or change the process and planet in some manner?

I can chime in a bit here, as some of this was my brain child, but it will likely open up more questions that we would not like to answer at the moment, for story control's sake. I will reveal all that I can to you, though.

K-9WD is barren, we suspect near-lifeless world (as far as we know). They are stuck on this rock with not much to work with. They WILL have to terraform if they are to survive here.  The terraforming process however takes time, huge amounts of resources and player dedication and interaction as well as corporate support for the efforts.

Players will have a direct impact on the terraforming process, and in phase 2 moreso then phase 1, will be a MAJOR part of the crafter/engineering game. If I could compare my vision, it would be SWG's crafting game on steroids. Corporates, guilds and engineers will have to work together, determine a plan of action and implement it. This may entail quests, gathering of resources and random events that occur over the course of game play. Things might not always work as planned, i.e. alternate ideas implemented and there's always one bad apple in a group trying to buck the system.

Nanotechnology ....I cannot discuss as it involves technology levels I don' t think we want to get into at the moment...but for your question:

Originally posted by impulsebooks

 Back to terraforming... I don't know the real theories on this sort of thing, but in FOA lore is there nanotech? If there is, you could have player input in sculpting their home regions.

We do have and are accepting settlement petitions, cities ideas, POI's etc and are going to try to create many of those environments within the game based on player input, stop by our public forums to check it out...

Hamilton did mention the possiblitly of an ice comet though..

Thanks for the comments everyone, I think he had a lot of fun making it. We should be having a few more ..."official" ones posted up to the public website/forums fairly soon.

This was created from beginning to end by one of our modellers, Captain Hammur also including his own personal touches of storyline and added soundtrack. It's an early demo, no particle effects and a little flair for effect. Thought mmorpg.com'rs would like to have a look at just one of our many designs, this one being somewhat transformable.

http://www.forceofarms.com/movies/pitviper2_0003.wmv

Or stop by and visit us in the forums at www.forceofarms.com to comment or say hello. We recently added in a new Lorescape (#12) as well.

I am EXTREMELY happy to see all of the Mechwarrior(tm)/Battletech(tm) fans answer up in this thread. Hopefully, we can live up to our own and your expectations with our view/version of those worlds.

Can't wait to get you in my gun sights.....stop by our Force of Arms booth at AGDC if any of you are visiting Austin next week.

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Didn't really care all that much for armored core myself, liked MW/BT much better but even it had its limitations and issues.

I went another route, creating my own. Check out Force of Arms if you're looking for mech mmorpg's in the works. We're listed here on the site as well as clicky my signature. If you are out west, we'll be at AGDC again this year in a couple of weeks.

Let me start off by saying I have not followed AOC at all other then the occasional look at videos or screenshots here. So far everything I've seen about the game has looked fabulous, that is if you like that fantasy crap, just my personal opinion however.

As for the game demo they did, I have demo'd at shows and I can tell you, take heed to Jon's last post. There are many factors when demo'g a game at a show that most of you don't have a clue about and will and does impact demos and videos for that matter. I think they did a really great job of the demo and the game looks "somewhat" interesting to me, even if it is fantasy. They were certainly not unprofessional in anyway, more likely they were highly skilled and professional and very good at demo'g the product after many many interviews of the shows.

Some things that impact shows:

• Wireless internet, many don't have lan cable but wireless networks.
• Single shared networks.
• Demo's run on the demo show providers machines and not development machines, So they a probably sub-par to most gamer rigs you would have in your home.
• Demo's machines that don't have internet access may contain both the server code, the client code and any other databases (mysql) running simultaneously on 1 machine and trying to demo all of that data at once (This looks most like to me what happened in this case).
• Scripts and non-optimized code running on dev boxes (still tempermental code) trying to show off the latest and greatest builds can often result in crashed desktops, scripts failing, processes timing out of stopping in mid stream etc etc...

So long story short, I think they did a good job showing off this demo even advising the audience that it was expected to crash due to the amount of content they were working with (building complete fortresses in seconds, full 200 on 200 pvp simulated script battles, and still using high end graphics-it is a show after all). Like I said, I haven't followed AOC closely at all in the past but I think I might keep my eye on it a bit closer, i'm not a fantasy guy but it looks rather well done t me when I think of Conan, I think they got it right.