Originally posted by RodgerPW
I played this for a year, starting from release, and it is still my favorite MMO experiences

aye same here, the way the game mechanics worked it encouraged large scale coop, even among strangers, to accomplish things together that actaully significantly altered the world you lived in.  revolutionary.

i played Horizons in a medium sized active friendly RP-ish guild years ago when it first came out.  Along with DAoC it was my favorite game due to the Community. 

But one thing i started noticing is that there's waaaaay too much "emo" going on with a lot of mmog players. 

It's nice to be "nice" and compassionate and helpful and all, but if you're going to play mmogs you gotta be thick skinned and not let stuff bother you. 

Just as with a favorite film or novel or song, when it comes to the end (as all things must), reflect on the good times a bit, and then Move On.

For Horizons players i'd recommend checking out Age of Conan, it has (or will when it's released) a lot of the same feel to it as Horizons.  Plus it's run by a stable company, yet one that's not too large and impersonal.

There are potential gameplay  exploits   issues   "features" with the roaming guards that we are trying to work out.  

• PKing players of the same race, or one of  the aligned races means you will take an alignment hit
• there is no alignment hits for PKing races that is not aligned to your race
• you can PK same or aligned race without an alignment hit if your clan has declared war on that clan
• if your alignment has taken a significant hit,  npc guards will KOS (kill on sight) you in towns normally freindly to you 
• you can improve your alignment by killing mobs particularly evil to your race, or by killing enemy races
• the alignment system is to prevent repeated mindless ganking of noobs in beginner towns without consequence - which would massively limit its appeal to many players

y'know... that same list has been around since before UO, and no one has ever figured out how to make it actually WORK in-game.  Looks good in a list, but hard core PvP'rs don't play lists. 

The ShadowBane guys bragged that they had this ALLLL figured out, because they were all uber mastah killahs themselves who knew how to prevent exploits and griefing and balance everything out. 

Ya right.  Guess what.  SB devolved into a boring mindless gankfest just like every other game that's tried Unlimited PvP.

They failed, becasue they didn't understand the human nature of PvP players.

lol in-game he would be Sir Brian, Master of Cubicles, Sales Stooge Lvl 5 

RP and PvP?  eh i dunno, it represents 2 very different kinds of people, the story driven RolePlayer is rarely any good at PvP tactical team fighting, and the hardcore PvP'r rarely has any interest or patience for carebear RP. 

it's like expecting Mr. Rogers to also be Tony Jaa, and vice versa!

Originally posted by daarco

Seriously, who log in as a normal person?? Example: Brian 27, works in a office, selling time for ads in a radio station.

I've played almost every major mmog from UO thru EQ2 and WoW and i'm tired of the huge impersonal corporate mmogs.

What I'm looking for now is a small, immersive, intimate mmog with rich content that i can lose myself in... with a mature, active, dedicated, stable fanbase... run by a company that cares about the gameworld as much as they do about making money.

Yeah that's all i want. 

Honestly, even though i consider myself an extremely hardcore mmog'r, out of all the blockbuster titles coming out soon the only other one that seriously interests me is Age of Conan, becasuse it seems to have the same traits mentioned above.  I'm still reserving judgement on LotRO - on the one hand i luv LotR but i'm skeptical that Turbine can pull it off.

Oh i'll check out PotBS but the genre really doesn't appeal to me, and i do want to see what Richard Garriott did with Tabula Rasa but it seems to be 90% a fpsmmog. 

Everything else is just same old same old. 

Save us DF!  You're our only hope!

Originally posted by Seahorse

All well and good until the cluster goes down, mission lag etc.  At least with Ventrillo you can let them know you have CTD.

Given recent stability issues I fail to see how CCPs bandwidth problems will be solved by adding VOIP...

 

 

i didn't care for it either due to the initial "must group" thing (i guess they 've made most of the content more solo-friendly now) and the almost 100% instanced nature of it.

still...

players always cry "someone should make a mmog that's different!!!" so someone did and now players don't like that either so you can't win.  As long as a stable and profitable base of players find it fun who cares.

- fully integrated into the client

that's the nice part, a standardized integrated system, where everyone can audibly talk to everyone else in the world. 

 Hopefully ALL mmogs will adopt this as THE standard way to communicate ingame, eliminating the aggravating text system altogether.  For hearing impaired players or those who listen to music while playing, make the text system optional.

hm, how about this theory - the dominance of Fantasy is mostly a racial cultural worldview thing. 

Western mmog'ers (both players and developers) all share a common western european heritage that is filled with a mythos of elves and dwarves and magical mystical influences that goes back thousands of years, and originally springs from Greek and Roman views of how the natural and supernatural world operates.  Included in that is the notion of Monotheism and the 1000 year old democracy of Iceland.

What about Far Eastern cultures?  There's some common elements, with Dragons and Magic, but was there a rich Fantasy element to ancient Chinese civilization?  i don't know much about the subject, but the commonly shared "consciousness" seems to revolve around fictional stories based on an actual Dynastic History (like Romance of the 3 Kingdoms) rather than purely made up stuff like in the West.

And what of the Mid East, did they have a Fantasy element to their pre-Mohammad ancient culture? 

How about India?  Any pure made-up Fantasy?  Or did Indian culture evolve around fictional stories based on their (6000 year old?) Theological History of Hinduism and much later, Bhuddism?

no idea. 

Well i like the Road Warrior theme (or The Postman?), and i like that it's Skill based, and the character gx remind me of Anarchy Online; overall though the gameplay mechanics described in the review seem pretty generic for all mmogs today.  Hope they can somehow infuse the world with the same feel as the first 2 RW films - it wasn't just about  crazed characters running around doing random "stuff".  imo that's the flaw with all mmogs these days, player actions have no significance on the game world As A World.