All Posts by lkavadas

A PvE story based and completely linear quest grind with a mediocre combat system does not a great MMO make.

And that's exactly what you can expect from Bioware.  This MMO will not be a sandbox.  This MMO will have little to no serious focus on PvP.  This game will not feature skills, or a unified game world (i.e. no shards or instances), and it will not advance the genre at all.

All Bioware has ever been able to competently do is a tell an engaging story.  Wonderful strength for a single player RPG, terrible curse for an MMO.

MMO developers stand to learn a lot from Deus Ex.  It should be a primer for anyone bothering to enter the MMORPG business.  Deus Ex was the most immersive game I've ever played.  I even played it two or three months ago and was still completely floored and amazed by the sandbox freedom of it.

An eight year old FPS is the next true evolutionary step that MMORPGs need to take.

Originally posted by tvalentine

Originally posted by bluealien1

Doesn't EVE have full/partial loot? That game seems to be doing just fine with it... Besides, looting makes it that much more exciting.

 

the difference is that Eve has safe zones, and Earthrise doesnt.

A bit disingenuous.  While there is no mechanic in the game which technically prevents a player from opening fire on another at any time there are strong, and harsh, NPC countermeasures in place in certain locations (like Sal Vitas, the capital of the city-state Continoma). 

So if you want to kill some newb get ready to have an NPC storm on top of your head.  Plus you lose all of your gear if killed whether it was insured or not.  And the massive repercussions with reputation., et cetera.

Yeah, awesome.  I know when I unsubbed in April I was like, "Screw fun and engaging high level content, I want to look pretties in my armor."

And tool tips?  Someone's really getting excited over tool tips?  Really?  Tool tips?

Originally posted by Jpizzle

Gaius,

I don't think there's anything the devs could do to make you happy.

Are you always this pretentious?  By all means, go ahead and tell me how and what I think.  You know best.

All they have to do is three things to make this game not blow ass:

1. Endgame.  I don't even give a shit what they add at this point.

2. Decent PvP.

3. A crafting system.

Clearly my lofty standards are so complex and unachievable that TR has absolutely no hope.  What's sad is that the three items in my list are completely basic things that should have been in the game at launch.

Originally posted by Jpizzle 

I'm wondering if you've seen/played this game other then reading about it on websites.

Since Tom took over, things are more focused, devs are more involved, and the game overall is thriving. It's no where near where it should be, but the frank and openness of the Devs has convinced me to stick around. Today's Friday Feedback had some pretty nic additions.

• new weapons
• duel color armor paints
• 'real' number descriptions

It's not the end-all-be-all of MMOs, but the Devs have stepped up and showed a lot of gusto lately.

 

Yeah, B.S. dude.  Tom has done literally nothing in his short tenure.  The game is more focused?  No, it isn't.  The first producer letter from Potter was just a regurgitation of Long's producer letter Feedback Friday deal from mid April.

The devs are honest?  Yeah, I'll give'em credit.  They totally are.  They totally prove day in and day out how detatched from the game they are.  Did you see their priority list?  New User Experience is their #1 priority?  WTF?  And a LFG tool?  Really?

And that list sucks.  How long do you think it took them to take a shotgun, whip up a model and texture, and then just alter some DB variables to make them different?  Wow, it only took them eight months to add a single new weapon!  Pat on the back right there.

And the dual color armor thing has been asked for since f(*&*(%ing closed beta.  Again, eight months and they have a completely minor cosmetic change implemented.  Yeah, they're on fire.

Let's see what TR lacks:

1. Any. Endgame. Content. Anything.  Just one thing.  Just one.  Eight months and counting = nothing yet.

2. PAUs?  Vapor.

3. COCPs? I guess they're "supposedly" getting close but they were supposed to be released in D10 and are they being released in D10?  Nope.  Oops.

4.  Command Opportunities? Nope, still cancelled.

5. PvP Map? Ha, for test server only.  Great decision there.  Great.

Destination Game's management of Tabula Rasa is simply the most atrocious I have ever seen in any MMO to date.  They could not prove themselves to be any more incompetent.  The fact that we're eight months after launch and a max level player still doesn't have one single thing to do makes that remarkably evident.

All the TR dev team is talk and push it crappy minor changes that fail to retain players.  I'd be amazed if they even had 40k subs at this point.  And that's being generous....

Has any major MMO died?  Umm, schyeah.  Hello, "Motor City Online" ring any bells?

j/k although I did totally love that game.  There was something magic from 2000-2003 with MMOs so many great ones came out... only to be shut down or butchered

It looks okay.  I'm liking Earthrise a lot more though.  No classes at all, no professions, no levels, just pure skills.  Completely open PvP.  No instancing whatsoever.  They're aiming for a single game world, and if that's not possible servers that are geographical (all North American subscribers in a single North American game world).

Plus ER's combat is sounding very similar to Tabula Rasa's and while TR was an atrocious game the one thing it didn't excellently was it's combat.

Hey genius, read about the game.  There's like this thing called "insurance."  You can like "buy" it with "money."  It like, "gives" you your gear back.

Way to fail.

Beer is for women.  Man up and drink tequila or quit embarassing yourself.

It's just a matter of entertainment equipment unification.  Right now my PC functions as my home stereo, my DVD player, my cable box, my TiVo, and everything else that a PC does.  The only reason I even a bought crummy as Xbox 360 was because of my Guitar Hero after bar party lust.  Seriously, if GH didn't exist I would never have bought an Xbox.

I think right now the only thing lacking with PCs is peripherals in games which is pretty difficult for developers to tackle since there is no standard anything.  No standard joystick, no standard controller, there's not even any real standards between keyboards and mice.

Peripherals aside, this unification of mediums will eventually make consoles go extinct.  And admriker4 is correct, PCs simply advance much too quickly in this age for consoles to remain competitive for long.  It also doesn't help that a modern console costs about half as much as a decent gaming rig.

Y'all would be pretty surprised to see what a grand will get you on New Egg.  The whole $6,000.00 Falcon NW/Alienware days are dead.  PCs be cheap now.

I think Guild Wars has the worst PvP I've ever seen.  The combat mechanics and balance are very nice but the organizational apparatus is quite poor IMO.  I mean, this is technically an MMO and my PvP is on a smaller scale then even the smallest of Counter Strike servers.

That ain't right.

I do like the game though.

Besides preCU SWG, EVE, and PlanetSide, I think every MMO I've ever played is pretty damn terrible.  I think MMO's last three years worth of releases have been about the worst in gaming history for any genre.

Originally posted by BoudahXL

And on the other side you have this vet devoted to a game that was almost as important to him than real life career.

Yeah, I played like twenty hours a week give or take in the winter and that dwindled down to 5-10 once it started to warm up outside (I live in Minnesota, downtown Minneapolis to be exact, but our winters are cold).

The point is that I didn't sit there playing TR for forty hours a week.  As far as guild leaders go I was pretty casual.  But there came a point where I absolutely dreaded logging into TR for my weekly unit muster which was all of five or ten minutes.

And then I quit.  I'm glad I did.  Eight months after launch and Destination Games still has absolutely no repeatable content in the game and has no idea what the hell they're going to do one week from now let alone a coherent development plan.

Are you really asking what is the usefulness of PvP...?

Just so you're aware, no game AI to date has met or surpassed that of playing against another human.  Until AI makes that leap PvE will always be pretty lame in comparison.

Plus it's simply not as exciting fighting something which is nothing but 1s and 0s.

Originally posted by SioBabble

Junk dealers were in the game from launch onwards.

Yeah, but they didn't buy junk loot off players until well into the CU.  Back in the day their only purpose was selling those kits which you collected the parts for and once you had all of the parts they turned into an object (rugs, gong, et cetera).

Best PvP?  There's really only one answer for that: PlanetSide.  Server pops aren't that great these days but ya can't have it all...

I'm not going to tell you to the quit game.  You've already committed yourself by plopping down fifty bones for it.  I'm just flat out telling you that there isn't anything in this game to look forward to and that the developers' priorities are atrocious.  Pretty much the worst I've seen in every MMO I've played and if you take a look over yonder (to the left of this text) at all of those acronyms under my avatar you'll see the list is pretty extensive.

You'll honestly enjoy this game for a few weeks.  After a month or two... maybe, most people don't last that long.  Will you be playing this game a year from now?  Absolutely not.

I will sing it one praise though.  I honestly enjoyed the combat.  A lot.  It just wasn't enough to carry the entire game by itself.

Other two questions?  About "giving up on my squad and your review?"

No and no.  The 47th has since moved on to kill time in Guild Wars until Earthrise releases.  In fact, quitting TR actually helped the 47th along quite a bit as I got the forum updated, installed a really dynamic module system with full vBulletin integration, and basically learned how to program all of it.  The relaunch of our website was fantastic.  I still can't even believe I did it all by myself considering I didn't know anything but the basic mechanics of HTML going into it.

Not sure what you meant by "gave up on your review," though.  I read the entire thing.  I'm just here to temper your excitement about Tabula Rasa.

My only "real advice" for you is to make sure your subcription's "auto-renew" feature is turned off.  Make your decision month to month.

Originally posted by Bunktown207

Gave up on what?

Tabula Rasa...

Listen OP, I'm the guild leader of Cassiopeia's formerly largest and most active guild, the 47th AFS Expeditonary Force (now the 47th Continoman Expeditionary Force in anticipation of Earthrise).  I actively planned public server events as fast as Critters, the Community/PR/Event person, would allow me which was once per month.

I began TR at closed beta, played at launch, and made it all of the way until the end of April.  I sat there each week at our unit musters trying to brainstorm something, anything, to do for my members.  I sat there as a level 50 for four and half months, and I took my sweet time getting to 50 mind you, farming one specific mob in one specific spot, on one specific map waiting for some content, any content to be released.

In that time what did the devs deliver?  Two instances, neither of which can be repeated.  Military Surplus.  Some hybrids which are nothing but a cosmetic variation on humans.

I sat there in November of last year reading an interview that was all about Personal Armored Units, small mecha that were to be introduced into the game, only to find out in a Producer interview from mid-April that coding hadn't even begun on PAUs.  That the pet system ala Guild Wars' "Heroes" was completely canned, that months and months of profession development were focused solely on sniper and spy while the rest of the professions suffered from out right neglect.

I sat there through an absurdly high player attrition rate.  Most of my members didn't even make it to level 30 which isn't even half of the grind.

Months and months and still TR has absolutely no real content.  Nothing compelling.

You'll be done with this game very quickly and you'll regret not having that $28.00 in your wallet the next time you hit a bar or head to Taco Bell.  I can't believe I spent $140.00 on this game after all is said and done.

I really, really tried to make TR work but in the end the dev priorities were so ass backwards that after six months of a live game they still didn't have a single piece of repeatable content for level 50s.  What's truly sad is that on their recent list of their top eleven priorities post 50 content came in at #10, second to the last above only promotional support.  And this is after eight months...

Finally I gave up.  So will you.