Full loot is fine if the game isn't all about gear and is more about skills. Or by making everything craftable and not forcing people to raid shit for better equipment that they might lose. People's time is way more valuable to them than in-game money.

Even something as extreme as perma-death is viable, if the rest of the game mechanics support it.

The problem is that there are always contrarians, and in the past developers have experimented with stuff like this only to see that some unknown percentage of the population threatens to rage quit in public places. And publishers don't like that (nor do they understand why this is happening, how empty the threats are, and how insignificant the percentage of complainers really is compared to those who are happily making do, in-game).

The barriers to creating better games (i.e. more risk, more meaningful rewards) are compounded by the simple fact that the guys who print money off their MMO (Blizzard) have done so by following the safest paths possible. It's a copycat industry right now, and so this is the model we see explored by every major publisher.

Nevermind that EVE has proven thousands of times over that people dig meaningful risks for meaningful rewards.

At any rate, when it comes to SWTOR in particular, you can count on things being as miltoast as possible. This game costs too much money not to try to please everyone, all the time. And that means: no real risks, nothing "unfun" happening to your toon.

Every time a new game is announced, people immediately begin projecting whatever they want onto that game. This is a pattern I've seen repeated scores of times over the last ten years, it's really nothing new or interesting. This is why games have huge fall offs in subs after the first month -- delusional people pre-order, log in and realize that this is just more of the same crap they already hated, and unsub to go back to whatever title they've already got equity in.

No one wanted this game. No consumers were clamoring for yet another take on the 'classical MMORPG' model, and Rift will go bankrupt/F2P within three months. This is typical of small game companies; they do no research, they just make what they want to make. And fail when no one else shares their enthusiasm for their concept.

It will be a glorious day when a developer figures out that no one wants to play a ship who isn't already playing EVE.

Give us the ability to land on a planet and build an HQ and fight the natives, and rape the land and seas ... and then climb back in our ships and take off. Or, as a more realistic alternative, at least give us the ability to drop drones/clones/bots on a planet and play through their eyes.

If it ain't visceral, I'm no longer interested. EVE is a screensaver, and dogfights in space amount to flying in giant circles. Space is boring as a solo medium.

SWG remains the only game who has done much to get this mix right (as of the Jump to Lightspeed expansion). Too bad they turned around and ruined the game not long after.

Originally posted by Chubbyjesus

These are not true people, refreshing and bum rushing the site is only going to cause more problems.

 

Trolls WANT you to not buy your game, dont let them rile you up with bs.

I'm no troll, and I am a real person. You can check my post back log if you like.

Took me about 15 minutes and I never got a final confirmation page after confirming my order, but I've got an email saying "thanks, we took your dough" (not in so many words, of course). When I get home from work, I guess I'll find out if it worked or not, but from all accounts (no pun intended): Have Email, Will Travel.

Originally posted by Technohic

Originally posted by chope

i refreshed till it got to the next page where u enter the cvv.. it gave me a different error but i still got the email and was able to log in just now

 

Same here.

Wooohooo!

+2

Originally posted by Seranis

Originally posted by spire23

As to your original claim: I've been following DFO for nearly six or seven years now and I can't recall anything being stated officially regarding combat and the model put forth in Mount and Blade.

 

<@Teth> I will take your word on it, seeing as I really enjoyed Mount & Blade melee in TPV

<Claus|Dev> yea teth, M&B works very well
<Claus|Dev> we are very close to that

 

 

and

<TBC-Captain> so Claus...we have to ask...on a scale from 1 - 10, how close is DF combat to Mount and Blade...and frankly...are there mounts like in M&B? :)

<+Claus|Dev> m&b similarity is.. 7?
<+Claus|Dev> how do I answer that?
<+Claus|Dev> 7.23

from

http://darkfallinfo.com/index.php?page=Info&code=lxcjjn77ep&highlight=mount%20and%20blade

As it stands, it's great that manual aiming is in, but combat is alot more like wack-a-mole that wacks you back then M&B. 

Maybe someone should have asked 'how close is DF combat to Wack-a-mole?'

 

 

TBC-Captain ... too funny. That's my boy; I was the Lt of TBC for a long time. The Black Company has long awaited the release of Darkfall, to be sure.

But, still, those are pretty nebulous questions and the answers are vague, at best. What aspect of M&B combat were they talking about? The pixel-collision system? The moving your mouse to the right to strike on the right side of your opponent? The weapons being expendable and mundane? The combat happening from horseback, including archery?

I'm sure that there are similarities ... 7.23? I mean, he obviously was joking with his answer because the question itself (no offence, Capt), was pretty poorly constructed. "On a scale of 1-10, how similar is this hotdog to a muffin?" I mean, they're both food ... you eat them the same way, more or less ... how do you quantify or qualify an answer to that question using only the numbers 1 through 10?

Anyway, you've made your point all the same ... if they didn't want people to think that they had directional controls on a per-swing basis, I suppose Claus should have been more specific in his answers. Which only goes back to a sentiment I've maintained for years: the developers aren't supposed to be good at PR, they're supposed to be locked in a dungeon, coding. But this is a trend we will see more and more of as indie devs get their act together (in other words, it may get worse before it gets better): they know how to program, but they work on such shoestring budgets that they can't afford to staff the "soft" positions in a company, like a Publicist or a PR manager or a CR Manager, etc. So you get devs who know what they *want* to program speaking with an audience without an edit button or a handler.

This is one way in which Funcom and CCP have always impressed me. Gaute Gotinger (sp?) made some early mistakes with AO, but he learned from those errors and went on to become a very good game director, who could double effectively as a PR agent and spokesman for his titles.

 http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/Paragus1/022009/3314_Review-Darkfall-Beta

This is a pretty good review. Everyone should read this, instead of looking for reviews in a forum made up largely of people who do not know how to write, let alone how to write a objective analysis of software or an experience.

No offense intended to anyone in particular. I just mean to say that writing is something we can all do, mechanically, to a greater or lesser extent, but it's not something that most people do very well.

Originally posted by Eredaias

Originally posted by spire23

Originally posted by jimsmith08

Originally posted by leone2nd

Originally posted by maskedweasel

Not to mention the weight of the sword, the size of the sword, and what the sword is shaped like really can make a difference in melee.  I was to understand the combat on this game was supposed to rival Mount & Blade.... please go on the Mount & Blade forums and read how into realism the posters get there to get the developers to make improvements to enhance the reality of combat.

 

Mount&Blade is NOT an online game. Many people compare Mount&Blade combat with combat inMMOs when they shouldn't. Why doesn't anybody ask those devs in M&B forums if they could incorporate these moves in an M&B MMO and how easy that would be client server wise?

 

That seed was planted by the devs themselves unfortunately,and then paraded round by the fanbase.Thats why a lot of us were pretty shocked at how basic darkfalls combat is when we were told by the fans it was going to be complex and revolutionary.A combat system is not based around 2 attack animations with a broken block mechanic and no evasion buttons.

In a real sword fight,if we really must go into realism with this,people dont stand there swinging horizontally at each other.They use all kinds of different variations to break past each others guard-look at fencing for the most 'real' standpoint.

As for M&B,its actually going to be made online in the future,thats what the team are working on right now.

 

Mount and Blade is a husband and wife team in Turkey (I believe it's Turkey, I may be mistaken). Husband and wife. That's it. One dude doing all the coding, one bird doing all the writing and some art. I'm not sure where you heard that it was being made into an MMO, but there is no "team" working on anything. At best, that dude and his wife are getting hired on by a developer to work on some other title because they've got moxy and vision, just no means with which to achieve anything more than what you see in M&B currently.

 

And while we're on the topic of small developers: Adventurine, for the vast majority of the game's history (read: seven years), was, like, six dudes in some apartment in Greece, fellas. They built this thing slowly, restarting as often as time and outside technological progress outstripped their ability to code the game, both from an experience and skill perspective, and from a time and availability perspective. They had regular jobs, Darkfall was a labor of love. If you're not a developer it might be difficult to realize fully just how inefficient it is to code the way that they coded ... with long gaps between progress due to "real world" pressures like families, bills, etc ... and then to know, each time that you must take a hiatus to make some money or whatever, that when you come back, your code will be that much further away from the "industry standard."

 

As to your original claim: I've been following DFO for nearly six or seven years now and I can't recall anything being stated officially regarding combat and the model put forth in Mount and Blade. Since Mount and Blade didn't exist when the original DFO forums went up and the original manifestos were published, I don't really see how they could have referenced it ... what I *do* recall is a lot of wishful thinking on the forums. I also recall a very poorly moderated community that was constantly hypnotising itself into believing its own lies. Random "the devs said in some post that I can't find" threads would be taken as gospel for years until a dev finally decided to say "I don't know what you're talking about. That's now how [featureset] will work." All that they ever actually promised was a game that was all PVP, no PVE, no content, no NPCs, no safe-zones. A total sandbox. Anyone who has read the forums since they were first established will tell you that there is no way that the finished product was going to include intricate combat or amazing graphics -- not because the original vision for the game was super realistic, but because we all knew it was just a handful of dudes in Greece, trying their best to make something awesome. As the developers and artists behind DFO, Adventurine was right to aim high initially. That's how greatness happens, sometimes. But as a fan or consumer, one has to be grounded in reality when one chooses to emotionally invest themself into such an endeavor. You have to love the concept, not necessarily the first draft.

 

My original point (the one I meant to write when I hit "reply"  is this: we should all try to keep things in perspective. That either one of these teams managed to get anything to market at all is fucking incredible and a triumph for independent game developers everywhere. We should be encouraged by their achievements. Once indepdenent developers can get fresh and unedited ideas (read: ideas untouched by corporate methodologies) to the market, we as consumers are in a glorious place. We can have our pick of games, across a broad spectrum ... from polished to downright dirty, and find our own happy place therein. More importantly, the developers with lots of money are exposed to intellectual competition, which in-turn, drives their products to be that much better in the future. Sometimes. That's the best-case scenario anyway ... sometimes EA just gets hungry and eats up an indie just to stave off the selection/market pressures that much longer.

 

 

 

 Very good, well thought out write up. I agree with most of these things.

One thing I would like to clarify is that mount and blade is actually going to go multiplayer. It will not be massivley multiplayer or co-op campaign.
"[Armagan Yavuz] It will be similar to FPS multiplayer games. The network architecture will be based on the client-server model, and players will be able to run their own servers. We may also run some official servers, though we don’t have any solid plans for that yet."

More like they plop you down onto a battlefield with other players and you duke it out until you die. I'm still looking forward to this as I enjoy the Mount and Blade combat more than DFO beta's combat, but DFO has the advantage of being an MMO.

I hadn't read/heard that, but that's very cool. I, too, look forward to that sort of mechanic for M&B. It's a really terrific engine. There's a similar game built on the Steam engine ... the name is escaping me, but it's essentially Battlefiled Oblivion. The combat mechanics are nowhere near as detailed and specialized as M&B however.

And to whoever replied to my previous post with remarks about Tasos being a tool: I couldn't agree more. That man has done more harm to Aventurine's (thank you for correcting my spelling) cause than anyone short of the rather mercurial forum mods (Brannoc, I'm looking at you ... but I know you're not a bad dude at-heart, just a guy with an impossible job). His constant and transparent stream of bullshit and spin has sickened me for years -- most companies replace their public relations agent every so often because after a while, they run out of credibility as spin evaporates into dust again and again; leaving Tasos in the hot seat after he has repeatedly failed to exhibit any competency in damage control or community outreach is their biggest mistake to-date.

Originally posted by jimsmith08

Originally posted by leone2nd

Originally posted by maskedweasel

Not to mention the weight of the sword, the size of the sword, and what the sword is shaped like really can make a difference in melee.  I was to understand the combat on this game was supposed to rival Mount & Blade.... please go on the Mount & Blade forums and read how into realism the posters get there to get the developers to make improvements to enhance the reality of combat.

 

Mount&Blade is NOT an online game. Many people compare Mount&Blade combat with combat inMMOs when they shouldn't. Why doesn't anybody ask those devs in M&B forums if they could incorporate these moves in an M&B MMO and how easy that would be client server wise?

 

That seed was planted by the devs themselves unfortunately,and then paraded round by the fanbase.Thats why a lot of us were pretty shocked at how basic darkfalls combat is when we were told by the fans it was going to be complex and revolutionary.A combat system is not based around 2 attack animations with a broken block mechanic and no evasion buttons.

In a real sword fight,if we really must go into realism with this,people dont stand there swinging horizontally at each other.They use all kinds of different variations to break past each others guard-look at fencing for the most 'real' standpoint.

As for M&B,its actually going to be made online in the future,thats what the team are working on right now.

Mount and Blade is a husband and wife team in Turkey (I believe it's Turkey, I may be mistaken). Husband and wife. That's it. One dude doing all the coding, one bird doing all the writing and some art. I'm not sure where you heard that it was being made into an MMO, but there is no "team" working on anything. At best, that dude and his wife are getting hired on by a developer to work on some other title because they've got moxy and vision, just no means with which to achieve anything more than what you see in M&B currently.

And while we're on the topic of small developers: Adventurine, for the vast majority of the game's history (read: seven years), was, like, six dudes in some apartment in Greece, fellas. They built this thing slowly, restarting as often as time and outside technological progress outstripped their ability to code the game, both from an experience and skill perspective, and from a time and availability perspective. They had regular jobs, Darkfall was a labor of love. If you're not a developer it might be difficult to realize fully just how inefficient it is to code the way that they coded ... with long gaps between progress due to "real world" pressures like families, bills, etc ... and then to know, each time that you must take a hiatus to make some money or whatever, that when you come back, your code will be that much further away from the "industry standard."

As to your original claim: I've been following DFO for nearly six or seven years now and I can't recall anything being stated officially regarding combat and the model put forth in Mount and Blade. Since Mount and Blade didn't exist when the original DFO forums went up and the original manifestos were published, I don't really see how they could have referenced it ... what I *do* recall is a lot of wishful thinking on the forums. I also recall a very poorly moderated community that was constantly hypnotising itself into believing its own lies. Random "the devs said in some post that I can't find" threads would be taken as gospel for years until a dev finally decided to say "I don't know what you're talking about. That's now how [featureset] will work." All that they ever actually promised was a game that was all PVP, no PVE, no content, no NPCs, no safe-zones. A total sandbox. Anyone who has read the forums since they were first established will tell you that there is no way that the finished product was going to include intricate combat or amazing graphics -- not because the original vision for the game was super realistic, but because we all knew it was just a handful of dudes in Greece, trying their best to make something awesome. As the developers and artists behind DFO, Adventurine was right to aim high initially. That's how greatness happens, sometimes. But as a fan or consumer, one has to be grounded in reality when one chooses to emotionally invest themself into such an endeavor. You have to love the concept, not necessarily the first draft.

My original point (the one I meant to write when I hit "reply"  is this: we should all try to keep things in perspective. That either one of these teams managed to get anything to market at all is fucking incredible and a triumph for independent game developers everywhere. We should be encouraged by their achievements. Once indepdenent developers can get fresh and unedited ideas (read: ideas untouched by corporate methodologies) to the market, we as consumers are in a glorious place. We can have our pick of games, across a broad spectrum ... from polished to downright dirty, and find our own happy place therein. More importantly, the developers with lots of money are exposed to intellectual competition, which in-turn, drives their products to be that much better in the future. Sometimes. That's the best-case scenario anyway ... sometimes EA just gets hungry and eats up an indie just to stave off the selection/market pressures that much longer.

agreed.

Yar. Thanks, mate.

Anyone know? They should really post that info right along with the system specs since so many of us are in no way interested in playing a King's Quest-style game.

Originally posted by arobi

So I decided to give the trial a shot and I am happy to say I am really enjoying it. I dont know if I will have as much fun as I did pre-NGE/CU but I can honestly say that the game is very fun.

To all former players I say why not download the trial and give it a chance you never know you might like it.

If you look carefully, I'm fairly certain you'll find that this guy has an SOE employee badge hidden somewhere in his clothing.

Originally posted by Vincenz

 

Originally posted by spire23

More of a combat sim than an MMO, really.

 

While I'm not a fan of the game, I think that's selling it a bit short.  There's definitely more to the game than that.

I could have sworn that the original press release about the rebuild included something about ground-based avatars ... but now that I take a closer look, I can't find it.

What a bummer. Twitch will be a nice departure from EVE, but the glacial pace of MMO evolution is fucking killing me.

I get that NetDevil doesn't have the staff or the know-how to make a ground-based game be any good whatsoever, but would it kill one of these larger publishers to take a break from the IP game and create something holistic and meaty for the sci-fi genre?

Great idea on paper. Boring game.

This game is a lo-fi Eve, sans the charm and whimsy. More of a combat sim than an MMO, really.

These are very nice sentiments, but I get the impression that the readers of MMORPG are not the real audience here. He's writing to his own staff. I'd be willing to bet his promotion caused a lot more panic than he lets on to in the first paragraph.

Damage control, innit?

You paid them $30 for in-game money ... in beta?

You, sir, are a bona fide sucker.

Originally posted by Impyriel

Nice Axe, wonder if axe throw (among other ranged abilities) are ammo based.

 

Prepare for incoming criticisms about the game combat looking dull and character not having enough skills or something silly along those lines.

Abilities-based button mashing is for children and the infirm. Tsk.

Originally posted by dannis

Without reading all 15 pages of this thread, all I have to say is that if there will be no AoC Open Beta, then they better accept a shit-load of pending beta applications. People want to see if the game will run well on their system, if at all, and if they actually like the game and are willing to pay ~ $50 + $15/month for the game.

The game has been in beta for months. It's just not open to everyone ... only 100,000 or something like that. Like it or not, those 100k people are more than capable of giving them meaningful feedback about performance on various systems. They simply do not need to have an open beta to make whatever decisions they're going to make about accessibility.

And, AGAIN: no MMO eschews all free-trial periods. AFTER LAUNCH. WTF is it with people demanding a free ride before the game comes out?