It's not a MMO per say but you can play through it with up to four people.  So it's basiaclly a MORPG.  It's not server based so it's not "massive".  But you can play it offline if you wish.

So I was browsing my local gamestop lastnight and I saw they had some copies of Borderlands (which is amazing since it appears to be sold out everywhere else).  So being optimistic I picked it up.  Oh, just to forewarn, this is a mini-review. 

So I poped it in my PS3 and decided to play a soldier class.  Soldier is basically those new to Borderlands would pick since they have a really fun class ability you unlock at lvl 5.  For starters the opening sequence is incredibly enjoyable and sets up the game nicely with the atmosphere and what you are looking for.  I mean come on, not to sound like a complete pig, but the goal of the game is to find a vault filled with alien weaponry, riches, and every desire imaginable.  Who doesn't want a treasure like that.

So I get started and get introduced by a robot which basically becomes your pal for a while as he sends you messages as you level up or access places informing you of new quests.  He teaches you the basics and you are immediately thrown into the fight, trying to save a settlement from bandits.  After you do this you unlock your first quest hub (my only one at the moment since I am currently lvl 11).  You get your first quests and it sends you out into the world. 

This is when you get introduced to better loot drops.  I don't know what it is but the Diablo fanatic in me really diggs the loot systems.  The game literally has millions of weapons to pick from.  Right now I have a third weapon slot unlocked and two out of my three weapons do extra damage against flesh and cause my targets to catch on fire doing dot damage.  There really isn't any armor per say but you can get shields.  Think Halo 1 with the shield.  It depletes as it gets damaged but recharges over time.  You can buy upgrade to your shield (for instance my current one does a flame nova when it depletes to 0).  You also get grenade upgrades the same way.  You buy grenades but their effects are dependant on what grenade upgrade you have (I have one that causes the grenade to toss out mini-grenades when it explodes, a-la cluster grenade).  Lot rarities vary on 5 colors.  You have white=common green=good blue=better purple=great and orange=awesome.  You start picking up greens blues and purples off the bat when you start doing the quests for Fyrestone (beginner town).

I really only have a couple gripes about the game.  For starters I had no clue why medkits were red or it said full when I walked over them after the creatures that dropped them died.  They ere never explained so I just picked one up to see and it fill my health up even though it gave the appearance that I couldn't use it (bug maybe?).  Another thing is it can be dry as you're just starting out in the world.  You get a kill quest to start off with but eventually you start getting into bigger and better things.

There are a lot of humorous points in the game.  From your little robot companion, to the strange machete-weilding masked midgets...all teh way to quests involving you to get kills by driving into your enemies in the game's vehicles.  I am thoroughly enjoying my romp through Borderlands as I continue playing my soldier.  And the best thing is that once you beat the game you can restart it with that character and you keep your gear and enemies scale to you like going to the next difficulty in Diablo.  Single player is fun but the real meat and potatoes is when you play this multiplayer, this game was built with multiplayer in mind from the ground up.  You can duel your buddies if you come across something awesome you both want.  Or if you just want to go out and show the world how bad-ass your guy guy is then hop in an arena and hand some noobs their bottoms.  I highly recommend this game to anyone who enjoys diablo and fps' and games like fallout.

If any of you really enjoy the game like I have and happen to be PS3 players you can find me at PSN:Ragnar83.

I just back into lotro.  For some reason it keeps bringing me back.  I think what they meant about attack responsivness I would have to say they may have improved on the time between hitting one of your hotkeys and your character actually doing the skill.  My highest level character is a 29 warden on brandywine and some of his gambit abilities heal him as well as doo damage but the problem lies in making sure I get those gambits off in time.  There have been times when I'm going against 3-4 mobs and I died because of the time between hitting the gambit key and him actually doing the gambit to get the bonuses.

Not sure about animations, yet.  I'm going to assume they aren't really improving on the animations all that much.  Not sure about the adventure pack either.  I just resubbed and did the 3 months for 29.99 and got Siege of Mirkwood for free.  Debating on the adventure pack though.  If you get the items on all your characters I think that would make it worth it.

Lol, I love it when the blizz kids don't get what they expect.  It's humorous.  No where did blizz say they promised to put a hero class in each expansion.  The wording was more along the lines of: their goal was to try to have a hero class in each expansion.  Being a developer you learn things when creating a game or expansion.  Nobody said that when Cataclysm was in brain-storming stage that they didn't have a hero class, maybe they did.  However, as the expansion went through the different idea boards and meetings perhaps it got cut because they were looking at the content of the expansion and couldn't fit a hero class in lore-wise so it got scrapped with other ideas they had to make for time and content.  The reason we got a DK hero class for lich king was because it fit lore-wise with Arthas.

Because if that was case then we would be getting epic quest chains to unlock a hero class like they claimed we would at blizzcon 2007.  But no we got "you have to have a character over 55" to unlock DK...hahaha what a joke.  And then when you played one it was a op class.  Heck 50-60 pvp bracket is still a waste of time for non-dk's.  Here's probably the big picture.  A new class takes a lot of work because you have to think about talents, skills, perks, etc.  And if they couldn't get a hero class to fit with the lore of the expansion then so be it, they cut it, really who cares?  We don't need a hero class every expansion.  They also said a long time ago they wanted to do an expansion per year...we get every two years now.

WoW isn't really Blizz's main concern in the mmo field at the moment.  In case you missed it, they said at Blizzcon 2009 (and some of us have known longer than that) that Blizzard is working on their next MMO of sci-fi origin (no, they said it won't be Starcraft).  So I'm pretty sue that the content for WoW won't be as groundbreaking as Burning Crusade or Lich King for future expansions.  A enw race here and there and possibly another class, but nothing to really win the hearts of veteran players who have since moved to other games.

I find it funny that people really compare games to WoW...seriously.  I would almost guarantee if you pitted original WoW against what players play today people would say the original sucks.  It's an unfair advantage to compare a brand new game fresh on the market or getting ready to come on the market with a game that's been out for 5 years and has been polished and fixed repeatedly.  On a personal level I think ToR will be better than WoW (heck I prefer lotro over WoW). 

Now you got a dangerous combination ahead for Blizz.  You have Bioware which is an international superstar when it comes to developing engrossing and fun games, I dare you to name one that hasn't gotten good reviews (and I'm talking big name reviewer not some dinky web blog created by a self-absorbed 50-yr old living in his mom's basement).  And then with Bioware you have Star Wars IP with anything that has Old Republic in the title and you have a game that is guaranteed to sell.

WoW is big an all but lets face it...I'm betting a good percentage of those accounts over in asia are gold farming accounts whose sole purpose is to farm gold, disrupt the economy on said servers, and just ruins the game for some people.  Numbers aren't always the end-all be-all for a game, WoW fanbois.  Try to look at what's under the numbers.  WoW has a huge gold farmer base, and many players who play multiple accounts (I'm on my third).  And then there's this gem http://www.geekologie.com/2008/10/guy_plays_36_world_of_warcraft.php.  We also have to take into consideration that the politics with advertising come into effect.  It may have said 11 million accounts but which ones are paid and which ones are trial?  Yes, Blizz is sneaky enough to include the free-trial accounts as well as the GM accounts.  Blizz are the masters of marketing, otherwise WoW would never have been this big.

I'm not bashing WoW, I just hate how whenever a new game is coming out; what's the first thing I see on this board...X Game will topple WoW, or WoW is OMGTEHPWNERZ on X Game.  No that wasn't aimed at the OP, he's siding with Star Wars :).  Like I said before, I'm pretty sure ToR will suck me away from WoW, lotro, and Aion (Yes I play 3) but I agree with a previous poster that I hope it never reaches that level of popularity.  Because there's a lot fo people who play WoW who honestly need to re-evaluate their online etiquette (seriously first Barrens chat now Trade chat).  Think of it in a druggy sort of way.  WoW is Crack, and ToR is marijuana...each will have it's addicts and paying customers and there will always be a discussion of which one gives you the best feelings when you use it.

Lol, doubt you'll find one F2P then...wait...wait...nope lost thought.  The only F2P that's any decent would probably be Dungeons and Dragons Online.  It was a previous P2P then went F2P.

Let's see...what I gathered overall from the thread was over 86% are still willing to play the game a month from now (including the guys who said they were willing to wait to sort the queues out).  The only people who said absolutely no is just under 14%.  Some how I don't see how 86% willing to play the game versus 14% not playing justifies making a thread saying that it's a crappy game.  I'm guessing the OP is a WoWhead, SWG geek, or just a troll trying to rile up some people.

I don't understand why these threads exist when they get debunked within minutes of posting usually.  We'll now that I'm done laughing at the trolls i'm going to go enjoy having three game subs.

Yes, leveling in Aion is a slow process (which is a good thing for some of us, makes it feel like we achieved something).  If you're extremely casual I'm guessing you're the kind of player who plays for about an hour a day...then the leveling will be slooooowwwwww.  Endgame-wise being that Aion is a Korean MMO and Asians tend to do PvP a lot in there games most of teh endgame, at the moment, is mostly PvP based though there are some end game dungeons.  There are changes coming though when it comes to implementing the dungeons to the game for the more PvE essentric player.

I think it's funny how people bash Aion and hate it because of the server queues and the grind (though I have yet to see a grind).  People say Aion will fail due to long server queue times.  What this tells NCSoft is that even after a week of being officially launched the game is doing very well because people have been willing to repeatedly wait in these queues to play this game.  People want to play because they think the game is good enough to wait in teh queue.  I've sat in several queues and not once sat there and had a nerd rage because of it.  I just minimize and watch videos or surf the web while i wait.  People flame the server queues because they hate waiting to play for a game that they think is good.  NCSoft is implementing new servers, slowly, but they are.  They want to make sure Aion will stay successful before spending a lot of money on costly servers.  They don't want a repeat of what happened with WAR.

Then you have the people who complain about the grind.  I don't notice a grind.  I always have a quest to do without doing the repeatable quests, I even have some quests while are 3-4 levels below me because I've been lvling doing all the campaigne quests and other quests as they come along.  This game only has a level cap of 50 and hitting that cap shouldn't be a fast process so I can see some people who are used to quickly getting to the top being bummed out because it takes them 6 hours or so to go from 19-20.

Aion is a beautiful game once you get past the server queues and think about the fact that the game takes longer to get to the top.  Graphically it's one of the most beautilful games out there.  It has an artistic flare to it that gives the game style over shear looks.  The color choices really bring the world out as well.  On the sound side of the house, the music gives it the Asian appeal with an epic feel to it.  Some of the tunes fit really well and others are strange yet fitting.  Aion is probably one of the smoothest games I have played.  What I think is funny is I have three subscriptions (WoW, Champions Online, Aion) and after just a  few hours of playing on the first day I keep finding myself waiting in queue to play rather than hop onto one of the other games.

I didn't make this post to say AION IS THE GREATEST...but more just point some of the underlying facts people tend to forget.  Server queues this long after launch means the game is really good in the eyes of the players.  Making reaching the level cap more of a challenge just means they don't want you to hit cap in a month so you can flame the boards about lack of content end-game because you have no patience.

Ok, fair enough.  Thank you NCSoft for listening to the cries of the players and doing something about the douche bags who afk shop.

Seriously, what are the people thinking when they post a puke-on little green item for that much.  Things like that tell me three things:

A)  Gold farmer.

B)  Greedy player too lazy to actually go work for the cash (who has that much on them at this point anyway).

C)  Just plain dumb for not knowing anything about economics and inflation.

But then you have to think about it...people probably paid that much for something in the Beta (again, really dumb since it's Beta) and those people deserved to get laughed at.  I have yet to find a single item in-game that I couldn't earn myself for whatever reason that I would willingly pay that much for.

1)  Yes, you can upgrade your existing account with the collector's edition items for an additional $10 through NCSoft.

2)  The music is definatly epic.  At the same time it has a different feel.  WoW, for instance, has music I would expect involving a game that centers around a small group of players romping through dungeons (which most of it is).  Whereas Aion's music has the more epic anime war feel to it.  It has an Asian flare to the music and I imagine seeing armies of cartoon warriors clashing. 

3)  Not sure on this one other than you can change it if you want.  I don't mess with view distance all that much.  My eyeballs are too busy oogling the pretty graphics around my character.

Well, you boys and girls have fun.  I'm going to go listen to my CE Aion soundtrack now :)

Originally posted by stayontarget

Originally posted by Shannia

 

Don't forget, anti griefing mechanics will be in place now.  So be careful.

 

Anti-griefing system does not apply to dueling.  But it is a form of griefing if you prevent someone to progress in the game and is reportable.  Get reported too many times for doing it  might get ya banned.

 

 

I'm all for this system...lets weed out the buttheads.

Lets see if I follow the logic here:  you camp an npc in the arena (which I managed to get to) that is required for a quest that gives you experience and helps you level up to teach people that they shouldn't rely on questing to lvl up but grind instead.  And by doing so it strengthens your faction by inhibiting them to gain the xp from the quest that will help them level up to actually be helpful to the faction.  Yeah I don't see your logic.  Personally I think it's you just trying to find a way to justify being a complete douchebag to the players who just want to turn in the quest and get the xp so they can continue on their merry way.  Quests are there for a reason...to give the player a goal to achieve, and by blocking them and saying you're doing it so they can't rely on questing is just proving to them that you are an ass.  You are essentially taking away the xp from them.  If you're so grind happy go play Holic or return to Lineage 2.

Personally the shrink in me thinks that the OP was repeatedly smashed in the face when he attempted to do the quest when he first started so the only way to heal his mental wounds is to do the same.  Poor form.

Honestly it depends on the type of comic you read.  Every super heroes has some sort of travel power which yes can be used in combat...even vehicles.  I agree witht eh earlier poster that if you could utilize travel capabilities on top of you power sets then you woul break the game.  I read comics but I read Spawn, The Darkness, Witchblade, Fathom, etc.  So I'm used to reading a darker, more mature oriented comic series and this is incredibly light and cheerful but I enjoy it. 

If you think it lacks depth and is shallow then what about the Nemesis system?  You create a nemesis at 25 who antagonizes you for the rest of the game.  That to me, feels epic because it feels like this villain which everyone can interact with is geared at going for you, just you.  For granted the missions could use some rewritting but they are still pretty decent lorewise. 

Champions Onlike is it's own IP based on teh PnP and because of that they should be considered a good comic because think about comic heroes and villains are made.  They are an idea in the mind of their creator.  So what their powersets don't match traditional power sets.  Honestly, if you are complaining that the game should follow what we read in comics today, then they fixed it; you would then complain that they are copying said comics.  It feels like the OP just wanted to find something to complain about so he thought, "gee I'll complain because CO doesn't feel like a comic to ME."  It feels like a comic to me, perhaps you should expand your comic base.

If you honestly don't like the game then don't play...I for one will play because I enjoyed the beta and enjoying the early release.

Greetings,

I am new to FF XI and currently have a trial toon on Ifrit.  One of the things I noticed when I started up FF XI was how un-userfriendly it was.  It took me a while to set up the windows and everything but now I feel like I am playing the game alone.  I lack teh knowledge of the chat commands so I don't know how to say stuff and get responses when I need help.  i am a huge final fantasy fan and want to try and enjoy this but so far I am having these issues.  Can someone help please?

-Raven

I am probably like many other people who are anxiously awaiting a beta key for CO.  I have been signed up forever and a day with Cryptic waiting for my key.  But it seems the closer it gets to date, the more magazines and websites have x amount of beta keys.  Really it kind of slaps those of us who have been trying to get into the beta through traditional means.  And it doesn't help when it seems like people probably have like 10 keys each because they just go and scour the sites for them and if they pick them up they either use them or sell them.  and don't say I haven't tried because I have.  I signed up for half the bloody sites to get a key just to get told "we have allocated all out beta keys" when I get done registering.  Or the twitter competitions mostly gets determined by who has the fastest internet connection with a refresh.  I wish Cryptic would send more keys out to people who have been registered for the beta through the CO website more often.

I saw a video interview with Bill and it stated that any cosmetic upgrades you can buy in the store can be earned in the game, as well as other little tidbits like extra character slots, name change, etc.  Said items will probably not be game breaking to give it an unfair advantage over someone who doesn't buy cryptic bucks.  That being said, not everybody can buy cryptic bucks due to one issue or another so all those items being in game will give those players a chance to acquire some neat looking stuff.  But like I said before, don't expect any items to be giving boosts over another player in PvP or make your superhero super powerful on a raid scale.  The devs know that is what can break a game.

WoW isn't a bad game.  I have many fond memories of playing but I do know many players are quitting.  Not enough to really be detrimental to the player population but the numbers are there to make teh devs notice and try things to keep people hooked.  Take teh next patch for instance.  I new dungeon, new raid, new rewards, mount lvl decrease, class changes, etc.  It seems to be the norm except I think they've been pushing this patch earlier and earlier because they want something to freshen the game, even after the beast patch of Ulduar.

A lot of the players who left WoW are old school WoW players who just need seomthing new.  The game kinda went downhill after BC and the formula for the game hasn't really changed to keep it fresh after almost 5 years.  At least tehy don't really over-inundate you guys with content like some games do where you can hit cap and maybe see 1/7 of the game.

WoW is not dying, it will never fall.  eventually they may go F2P after the next Blizzard mmo releases with some pay features but that would be simply to appease the hardcore WoW fan and not spend the resources on developing content for 2 mmo's.  The servers are just fine though I think they should probably do a merge sometime soon to boost populations on some servers.  Personally having that many servers is bad if you don't have teh numbers to supports them.  It gets expensive.

I think they'll get above 100k subs just because think of it as CoH2.  Same development company made it and just about every CoX player I talk to online (even myself) are moving over when CO releases.