There are changes being made...though very slowly. Things like Wow's auction house, and in game mail system are pretty much staples of newer games. As games come out with things like DDo's active combat(i.e. being able to roll to avoid attacks, etc.) they slowly get implemented into the games. I believe some of the games coming out will have more things like active blocking and such(click yer button at the right time to block)

These things change slowly, and many come out in games that flop, only to be used in other games with more refinement and more success. Changes are slow, due to corporate fear of change, but they DO happen.

D.

Personally, I love my fantasy genre, but I know people are getting plain sick of it. I thought a post apocolypse type MMO could be cool. Maybe techno-magic or something weird.

Could have basically a sandbox type thing goin on. Perhaps some quests to open certain high end skills and/or crafting options. Maybe mutated creature mounts of some sort, mechanical vehicles too perhaps.

Have it open pvp, similar to shadowbane, let people build cities, factories, have cities war with each other. Could add in some aerial combat things too maybe?

Dunno, sounds like something a bit different. Every post-apocolyptic game I've really seen seems to be an fps type thing.

could be cool though, have mage type races, techno-races....mages fireball vs. a techno/robotic missle launcher, dual weilding sword warrior vs mortal combat Kano lookin guy with metal fists heh. Mad max meets LOTR, lol. Sound interesting to anyone?

D.

Sadly, the trend I've noticed over the years...the big companies, i.e. sony and..well...sony pretty much make the same game over and over with new graphics, riding the horse til its dead.

smaller independent gaming companies come out with fascinating ideas for a game, but they don't have the money to back it, so they bring in a big name company to help them, then said company takes over the games, kills all the new ideas, and makes a new clone of their other games, which in the end becomes a craptastic game instead of something potentially great...i.e. Horizons.

The last big name company I've seen put out a decent game was Blizzard...

Vanguard had potential honestly..until the got SOE to "publish". We all saw what happened then...the game blew hard and sony bought it, just like every other game out there that sucks.

Honestly, VG isn't a bad game..there's just not much about it different than wow or eq2. Slight differences only. It may as well have been an expansion for eq2, would have saved a lot of money. I think halfway through development the VG guys already knew they were gonna sell out to sony completely. They went for the quick buck, I have no respect for them anymore, they owed their fans more than that. It's sad really.

Unless someone who has a zillion dollars collecting dust gets a bug up his arse and decides to develop a game for the hell of it..you won't see anything deviating radically from what is already out there...companies just can't take the risk of losing millions of dollars on a gamble.

D.

I started off online games as a hardcore roleplayer, playing text muds like gemstone 3. Honestly they were probably the most fun I ever had outside of pen and paper d&d. Once I moved to DAOC and on to other games, I realized that I would never have the same roleplay as I did in the text muds. Too many shiny graphics, and too big of a non roleplaying player base. In games like GS3(now GS4) the few people who weren't roleplayers were pretty much like extras in a movie. They provided moving background, but no real interference.

It became a lot harder to get into roleplay on the graphical games though. Although its fun to run around talking like a dwarf, etc. and so on, it just lost its appeal. I blame it on chat boxes.

Anyway....now I prefer to have fun leveling my characters up pvp'ing. Pve is fun, as long as there's a pvp element to go with it. What can I say...graphics spoiled me.

D.

I forsee 1 guy talking like an orc..and everyone else in vent...though it would be kinda fun to run around talking like an orc for a little while.

d.

Honestly, the endgame in the popular configuration of MMO's is not going to change anytime soon. Its still going to be..hurry up, level to 50, 60, 70 whatever the level cap is..run these raids over and over to get cool gear so you can...well..do nothing, but you'll look cool! wait..everyone looks the same now....crap. But wait! There's more! When you are finished doing pointless raids for no reason what so ever other than to get the same exact cool gear that everyone else has...we'll put out an expansion to make everything you have obsolete!! Then you can grind for another 6 months to get the new cool gear! When you finally get all that for no reason what so ever other than there is nothing else to do...we will release another expac! Yay!

Thanks, but no thanks. End games need to have some actual purpose. It doesn't have to even be overly complicated. Just make a reason to get all that L337 gear. The only reason I can honestly think of off the top of my head is pvp. I'm sure there is some non-pvp solution out there, but I just can't think of a reason to play games long term without any pvp.

I love leveling characters, it is a lot of fun to watch them develop, but by the time you cap their level, you might as well quit and go find another game if there is no pvp..otherwise, whats the point of even leveling characters? I think end game raiding is the stupidest thing ever invented when that is all there is to the end game. Raiding should be a means to an end..not THE end.

Why should you even care if your character is high level? The answer...so you can compete with all the other toons out there and not get the floor mopped with your pixels. If you can't answer the reason to complete all these raids and hours upon hours of grinding, you are just wasting your development time and should go back to the drawing board.

There's a reason why there are only a couple major MMO's out there that really succeed well with this formula...because it sucks, and after one or two games dominate that exact mold..there's no reason to make any more of them, at least not for a few years.

Games like WoW are a good primer for new people..but thats about it. WoW did about as good a job with that formula as can be done in my opinion, which is why it does so well...but damn if it isn't boring once you get to the "endgame"

D.

I'm not saying that anything is definitely gonna beat WoW down anytime soon...but don't underestimate WAR. If mythic sticks with the professional dedication that they had with DAOC, WAR is gonna be one hell of a game.

Out of all the MMO's I've played, DAOC was one of my favorites. It's the only one that held me for several years. The best any of the others ever did was hold me for 6 months at most. In fact, the only thing that killed DAOC for me was when everyone got tired of it after several years and left for WoW and EQ2 etc. and so on. When I had no guild left to play with, and didn't feel like getting to know a new guild, thats when I got bored.

I'm curious to see what WAR does.

D.

My entrance to online gaming was a MUD called Gemstone3. It was awesome, and probably still would be if I had the time to devote to it. I left Gemstone at the urging of several friends from my work to go play Dark age of Camelot. I realized after a few months that roleplaying online would never be the same as the old text based game. There's just too many pretty things to look at, too much armor to get to look cool, too many people to frag so you can be ub3r l337. I sometimes miss my roleplaying days...but I enjoy the pvp much more now.

In my honest opinion...if you want role play go play a MUD...or check out Hero's Journey if it ever comes out. Hero's journey is made by Simutronics, who made Gemstone3. If any game coming out has a hope of roleplay, it is that one. If they stick to their tried and true formula they will have active gm's(who play npc's and gods, etc and so on).

I think that would be your best bet for roleplay anytime in the near future.

D.

I played both games for a bit, though I did not play for months and months. As far as game play, they are both basically the same. I think I liked the actual game play of Vanguard a bit better. As far as crafting, both have a pretty in depth system, waaaay more difficult than WoW crafting. I guess as far as crafting goes it depends on how much you like to work at it. For both games, if I remember correctly, you really have to pay attention to it. I personally didn't care for either system that much, but I know several people who enjoy crafting that liked both games.

I think Vanguard crafting is a bit more interesting of the two though. I would call it a toss up between either one. If you really want to do it..get a station pass and try both out. In the end it will probably come down to which one you find a solid guild in first.

D.

.[/quote]

I still think the most important reason is being missed. WoW dragged in millions of previously non-MMORPG players, hell given the tech specs it might have even dragged in some non-PC games players, coming along to join a group of friends talking about it at school. THIS is where WoW's success lay, it could never have managed those player numbers otherwise, if it had there wouldn't be any other MMORPGs left, they would all be empty. They came because they are b.net players, and they will never leave WoW because they crave Warcraft.[/b][/quote]

Agreed. They had a powerful liscense to draw on also. Honestly, my biggest dissapointment for WoW was the awesome set up they had for a PVP centered game..and they didn't use it. WoW pvp was a poorly thought out after thought IMO, but the game still had some fun factors to it. It was fun exploring and stuff for the first few months.

D.

Personally, I'd hold judgement until the game actually launches to decide if its worthless or not. At this point and time, I do not even plan on playing this game, but every game has potential until they prove otherwise.

BTW...what you mean by guild zoning in Shadowbane??? If cities belong to your nation, or your guild you can port there, or if someone opens their tree for some reason..but they are not separate zones. Do you even play shadowbane?

I played wow for the majority of beta and a good 6 months or so after release. While WoW got boring for me after awhile, there was nothing wrong with it. While there is nothing extremely fabulous about WoW, the reason it is so successful is not necesarily because it was innovative..because it wasn't, or that it was super exciting, because it wasn't.

What makes WoW so successful are the things they did right. They released....gasp...a finished product!!! Hell, WoW ran better in beta than the majority of the MMO's I've played ran 3 months after release. Honestly..thats really it. They made a simple mmo that was easy to play, made decent(not great) graphics, and FIXED THE BUGS IN BETA. If wow had released with all the same content it had at release, but was as buggy as most MMO's are that come out...it would have flopped just as hard as every other game that has been coming out.

Vanguard honestly isn't much different from WoW, with the exception of the dev team releasing an unfinished product. The differences between WoW and Vanguard are mostly cosmetic. At the core they are very similar, but WoW ran better at release.

To the poster that flamed people talking smack about games...honestly, many of us probably have years more experience at MMO's than you do. Not trying to offend anyone, but its the truth. I played Vanguard at release, I played wow in beta and for a few months after release, I've played AC, AC2, EQ2, DAOC, SB, beta tested most of them, including lineage 2. I am not bashing any game in particular, just discussing the facts.

D.

Agreed. The cg movies are cool to look at, but utterly useless otherwise since they don't depict anything close to what you will see in game. Its almost false advertising. However...they should take these game engines and make cg movies with them. I remember watching the EQ2 trailer and wishing that R.A. Salvatore would make a CG movie of his Drizzt novels using the engine. Now THAT would be something to get excited about, heh.

D.

MMO'S are this generations dungeons and dragons. Just like there were a few extreme cases where disturbed individuals skewered someone with a sword because they got too into their characters..D&D was labeled as satanic and evil by people who didn't understand it.

Well, this generation has people dying in internet cafe's in Korea because they played an mmo for like a week straight with no food or water until they died. MMO's are evil and satanic, or simply a waste of time because of this.

People will denounce and belittle anything that is not in their sphere of understanding. The stereotypical males at your workplace, for instance, will look down at you for playing an MMO for 20hrs a week, or reading up on your game while at work, etc...but while you're doing that..they are watching guys in skin tight uniforms running around playing games and getting paid millions for it...which they will watch for 20 hrs a week...and they spend their free time at work looking up the stats for last nights game, or memorizing how many home runs the new flavor of the month has in his career, how many during rainy games, how many in each stadium, how many homeruns hit while fans were eating a hotdog with their left hand while holding a light beer in their right...

In reality, they are not really any different, just hobbies that people get obsessed with, but if its not THEIR hobby, its weird and wrong and socially unacceptable.

Not much you can do about it, people are closed minded in general, and will tend to stay that way. Not everyone is like that, but the vast majority are.

D

Vanguard actually ran great for me, I hardly had any issues with it, and those I did have were minor. My issue was that it bored the hell out of my after about a month. At first I figured I was just really jaded from the amount of experience I have had with MMO's...and maybe I am. The game just didn't seem to offer anything. There was no actual REASON to run around and grind levels out.

They should market this game in Korea IMHO..it seems more of the Lineage grind til you die...literally type of game. Very reminiscant of the asian mmo's I've seen, with better graphics.

Hell, I said screw it and went back to Shadowbane until the next big thing comes out that I'll play just because its new. I'm digging shadowbane..even though the graphics suck, there's still glitches...at least there seems to be an actual reason to play it.

Just my 2 cents.

All I got to say is this...

http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/comic.php?d=20040326

Wow...I thought E3 didn't exist anymore...didn't they stop it after last years show?

ROFL, LMAO.

Are you serious? Do people really need voice chat to beat some dumb ass pve raid? I can see why you need it for pvp..but pve? What kind of loser gamers are being bred today that need to hear someone tell them what to do every 5 seconds...if you get to the stage of being in a raid and can't follow a couple simple instructions pre raid...you should quit.

Anyway, to answer some of your questions...not everyone feels like talking..some of us have kids, etc. and we can't be listening to voice chat on headphones cause we got to hear whats goin on around us. (i.e. kids, etc.) Having it blaring on speaker while your family is trying to watch tv or something isn't always feasible either if you don't have an office to put your pc in. And hell, sometimes you just don't want to listen to the retarded stuff people say in vent.

I have vent, I use vent. Mostly for pvp. I would never, ever, ever, ever NEED to use vent for pve. The only time I'd be in vent for pve is if I WANTED to have a conversation with whoever I was playing with.

Hell, half the time if I'm in vent during pve I'm not even talking to the people I'm playing with anyway.

My 2 cents from an experienced gamer, take it or leave it, and think outside the tiny little box that you have put yourself in, wanting everyone else to conform to what you think is cool.

p.s. Like, half the people I see playing these days are playing from work anyway...kinda hard to be in vent most of the time when you're at work, heh.

D

Honestly, people will come back when an xpac releases..for about 6 months if there isn't another good game out to play. But the simple truth is..once people leave the first time..they are on their way out. The game got old, stale, boring, been there done that.

No matter how many cool expansions you add, eventually nobody will care anymore. There will be a core base of players that will stay for years...those who are easily satisfied, or those who finally see their chance to rise because the big dawgs have moved on.

What eventually kills a game, is when enough people become disenchanted and leave that the general player base visibly sees it....no players in the nooby areas, no friends left to group with. Some people will adapt, recruit new guildies, join a different guild, etc. But many more will simply take a break and wait for the next game their guild and their friends jump in to.

Also what happens is that the "oldschool" guys have their clicks, new people are shut out, so there's no one for them to group with, no fun to be had, so they'll move on after their 14 day free trial, not even having seen the vast majority of the games content. They'll say the game blows and they don't see why anyone ever played it, because they only see the first 20 levels of it before they get tired of playing by themselves. At that point they will go play the newest game out, because they know there will be people in the noob areas to group with, and/or kill.

Thats pretty much how it goes for any game. WoW isn't going anywhere soon, but its starting its slow fall into yesteryear.

Honestly..I never really had any technical issues with vanguard..it just didn't have anything special. If you put it in an EQ2 box I might not even notice that it wasn't eq2.

I figured it would suck as soon as I heard sony was involved, but I gave it a shot anyway, cause I wasn't playing anything else at the time.

I don't care how many graphics upgrades, sound fixes, bug fixes you do...I just don't see what the point is.

I'm not a hard core pvp guy, but damn...if there's no pvp, or just a stupid pvp server where you can kill everyone..whats the friggin point. You're grinding pve mobs so you can get the next cool gear and say you're a higher lvl...so that you can do it again. On the lame arse pvp server..its the same exact thing, except you'll get ganked while you are doing it.

Dunno..if there's no meaningful pvp in a game, and since roleplay doesn't exist in graphical games to any real extent...the game is a waste of shelf space.

Games like DAOC and Shadowbane were hella fun, hell, even WoW was fun for awhile, with horde vs. alliance..but there just doesn't seem to be any point to vanguard what so ever, other than sigil making a game to dump on sony so they could make a quick buck.