It just keeps getting better and better =) Downed Abilities sound like an excellent addition to the game. That last fighting chance will certainly make things more interesting. And I also love that they're breaking away from the holy trinity mould.

It never ceases to amaze me how the sandbox folk complain and complain about a lack of games appealing to them to the point of it getting utterly annoying, but when a company comes along that tries to give them what they want, they do everything in their power to grind the game to dust. Whether that be forum smear campaigns, sensationalistic polls or the like.

Wizard 101 really is a gem. The combat is addictive and finding people to play with is never a problem.

No better game is on the horizon.

It's sad, really. It's quite a fun game, but trying to play it is a mission. Having to manually replace files etc. I keep getting blue screens trying to run it, so I've given up.

What an attempt at the South African city of Pretoria, lol.

Awesome =) MMO or not, it looks like an awesome city simulator. Sort of what Sim City Societies SHOULD have been.

Excellent. The Guild Wars model is great. Buy to Play FTW.

Dauntis, Entropia is far from dying out. The devs make a killing from it.

From what I understand, its some sort of compression service. Companies seem to reroute their traffic through Pando's servers during downloading/patching.

Though, it's strange that it's at work while you're playing.

Originally posted by Minsc

you can try downloading the full DDO:Unlimited client off of fileplanet. I believe it even includes the hi-res textures. If you do it that way it doesn't require you to have the pando media booster.

Oh, I didn't realise that was available. Thanks!

Originally posted by grimfall

 Are you familiar with the term "strawman"?

Let's focus just on this sentence: The design team have specifically stated that they are placing larger emphasis on effects so that combat will be a more visual experience as opposed to a text-based experience..

Now, I've already twice mentioned a very cool combat scene from a movie (that uses pictures)  not from a book (that uses text),  that didn't involve magical light shooting out  from everything, but you go on to conclude "If you're looking for realism, why are you playing fantasy games that involve sorcery and magical races?"  Oh, you thought Hellboy was a documentary of real life events?

Why are you defending the developer's actions, when I've clearly illustrated , that for my preference stupid graphical effects makes the game less interesting?  My personal hype level for this game went from a 9.5 to a 7, based on those videos.

Is decreasing realism in combat really what the industry should be shooting for?  "Obviously they'll have to differentiate visually between those skills and simple blocking."  So, that's your theory?  There is only one way to show a shield blocking effect.  Any other way must involve light beams shooting of the shield.  They must have the worst animation staff in the market, one way to swing a weapon, one way to block with a shield etc etc.

Your personal preferences are of no consequence to me, hence me ignoring them, but considering you insist on touching on the topic: do you honestly expect developers to accurately translate fight scenes of movies into online games?

Now I haven't exposed myself to such torture as the likes of Hellboy, so I can't comment out of personal experience, but I would imagine that the producers of Hellboy made use of varying camera angles, did they not? I also trust that I can correctly presume that you sat on your butt watching the movie and had no direct control of Hellboy's unfolding storyline, did you not?

Now the purpose of the above is to get the point across that combat scenes in movies and combat scenes in games will always be different unless those games are turn-based. Developers do not have the luxury of being able to pause a non-turn-based online game, and as a result they do not possess the luxury of being able to use dramatic camera angles and the like during combat. Look at Wizard 101. It's a turn-based online mutliplayer game. The combat scenes look dramatic because the developers have the ability to "pause" the game for everyone else and do what they like with the camera and effects for a couple of seconds. In real-time combat that is simply not possible. When running past a couple of people in combat in Wizard 101, the effects look nowhere near as dramatic as they do when in combat yourself, because you have control of the camera. Movies essentially "baby" you. They draw your attention to what the producers want you to focus on, so you don't need to do any thinking for yourself. They also have a set storyline, meaning that they've focussed on making that single scene dramatic. They don't have to deal with millions of players running around with their own ideas. 

That brings me to my second point: as I previously said, when watching a movie you merely sit there absorbing what the creators of it are throwing at you. You do not decide the manner in which Hellboy will fight, the producers do. In an online game, however, you're running around constantly making decisions. You don't have time to sit there trying to differentiate between minute differences in shield stances, nor do you have the aid of the developers with their camera angles drawing your attention to what you should be focussing on. When spells and weapons are flying at you from all directions you need to be able to differentiate quickly and easily between them in order to act quickly. I find it hard to imagine that that is a foreign concept to any person with MMO experience. Plus, you don't know exactly how many skills involving shields are in the game. There's only so many things you can do with a shield before skills begin to looking like each other.

As I said before - if you're looking for realism in combat, you're looking at the wrong genre. It has nothing to do with the industry as a whole. True fantasy always has and always will have unrealistic combat, because the genre itself is unrealistic. That is why it is called fantasy and not realism. I, for one, want to see magic in a game whose storyline revolves around magic. It's obvious they've put a great deal of effort into the effects, regardless of whether you may like them. You clearly haven't played very many games if you think Guild Wars 2's animation is terrible. Many other developers settle for lacklustre so-called realistic (read: lacking) effects, which I find downright lazy.

Originally posted by grimfall

 First of all, learn what a trolling post is before you start accusing people of making them.

Now re-read what you wrote, then watch the video.  Now explain to me this.  The girl goes to block the lizard's fire attack with her shield , and a magical force shield extends up from the top of her shield to offer her more protection than a shield actually would. 

In PVP, if someone hides behind their shield like she is doing - do you really need the unrealistic illustration to show you that she's blocking with a shield?

Go into your garage.  Pick  up your broom.  Jump as high as you can and slam it into the ground.  Let me know if everything in your garage is knocked over.

In the example I gave, you have a cool fight between two people with different fighting styles, and there's no Tekken FightKIng001 physics.  How is that possible?

Quite simply, yes, you do need the "unrealistic illustration" to show that she's blocking with a shield. The developers have mentioned that it is possible to block with one's shield at any time, but that some skills involve blocking too. Obviously they'll have to differentiate visually between those skills and simple blocking.

The design team have specifically stated that they are placing larger emphasis on effects so that combat will be a more visual experience as opposed to a text-based experience. The effects are meant to be overstated so that players can work out what's going on or what is about to happen without having to mouse over target cast bars. They used the Elementalist spell Phoenix as an example. It was easy to work out from the provided video that the phoenix flies out towards a target, hitting all mobs along the way, then flies back to the caster, once again hitting all mobs along the way, and finally heals the caster. We weren't given an ounce of text information about the spell until weeks after the video was first released, but we could easily work that out.

If you're looking for realism, why are you playing fantasy games that involve sorcery and magical races? I, for one, appreciate the fact that they're trying to stop us from having to sit there reading walls of text and instead are encouraging people to simply have fun.

It's still broke...for me at least.

Most likely.

People forget just how many millions of people play WoW. Blizzard can literally lose 90% of its WoW playerbase and it will still have many more subscribers than most P2P MMO's that have regular expansions have.

Lol, I immediately read "Lord of the Rings Online."

Erm, pass =D

Good decision on their part. If only more companies did that instead of releasing garbage they aren't happy with.

Haha, how convenient.

I'm glad there'll be so many of them. The system itself definitely makes up for any customization players may feel they have lost by weapons taking up skill slots.

I'm loving how gory Sever Artery is =P