Allies Matrix - I like how Dark Eldars distrust one another. :)

The thought of Eldar merchants and quarter in a IG or SM city is just ... *shivers*
Same as Necrons, Chaos and Tyranids happily scurrying about in Dark Eldar citadel.

/Y

Playstyle wise it's a quite normal mmo, from the looks of it. One semi unique idea is the skill wheel and the skill limitations.

If you've played Guild Wars it'll be very familiar. As you adventure you'll gain skills, skills get placed in the quick bar and used per normal. You can (probably out of combat or in calm hubs) change skills in the quick bar, but you can only equip 7 active abilities and 7 passives at once.

So even if you gain all 510(?) skills you wont be any better than the one that only has 14 skills, if you've equipped the same.

It's also a nice tradeoff, do you want some self healing abilities to go with the assault rifle, or some evade buff? Then you cant equip that extra bleeding penetrating round.

The ideas are very nice, i do hope they also manage to make it fun.

/Y

Originally posted by Convarion 

And this guy wont be playing the game long because the lore will be the only thing good about this game. I forsee the gameplay being very much like every other MMO when they had a chance to make something new and revelutionary.

Before you start bashing what im saying Virgil Games has already come out saying because of the low overhead cost of this game that even with 100,000 subscribers they will still be able to create content patches and support the game.

Way to aim low guy.... Lets make a game where if we have the lowest subscriber base we still make money.

My faith in GW continues to fade.

100k is actually a sound number to look for. This info is rather old, but there's not many mmo's that keeps 200k+ for a long time. http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart2.html 

WoW certainly wasn't aiming for 1m+ since it was unheard of prior to that, and WH40k is in many ways a niche.

What scares me more is Only 2 factions. That's to a large degree what killed WH in the first place for me. In 40k, everyone fights everyone some of the time, and someone all of the time. That even includes interfactional war, as Marine chapter against chapter and so on. That needs to be captured in the game. 

Sure, alliances and such between orks and chaos. You should be able to cooperate between factions. Just like you should be able to break alliances.

/Y

So, having played the original HG:L i want to try this one. However it doesn't seem to accept any of my mail adresses. Anyone know anything about this?

/Y

I really loved the first 20 levels with all the spoken dialog and such, but once you leave Tortage it's silent. Would be nice if they had some dummy-words, like simlish. Still it's an impressive and beautiful game, so good luck to you.

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Originally posted by battleaxe

The system is what it is, and it kind of sucks.
It lets you run the same heroics over and over until you die of boredom.  Unfortunately, this brings out the griefer population trying to spice things up.  I've seen ppl kicked from the group because they did too little damage, ppl kicked because they criticized the tank, ppl kicked just to keep them from getting the last boss done, and so on.  I haven't found the need to use the kick button myself, so maybe it should just be removed unless someone is more than 50 yards away from the group, afk or disconnected.
If you are a dps class, you will wait 15-30 minutes in queue each time.  Tanks and healers have no wait.
 

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I've seen people kicked for many and various reasons, but one of the upsides of the new system is that the leader cant just kick people, but it's a vote. Depending on group that can make a world of difference.

Having characters of all 3 roles there's a damn difference between the queue times. Which mostly proves that tanks and healers are in rather short supply. One small difference and upside of the old Anarchy Online is 6-man groups, usually meaning 4 dps/group, instead of 3 like in wow, making it easier for dps.

/Y

Thus is oral and anal sex unnatural and wrong? It's not used for propagation.

Thus is masturbation wrong, it's not used for propagation.

Thus is marriage wrong, it's a hinder to propagation.

The fact that several species has homosexual experiences isn't of interest i take it? 

/Y

Originally posted by Scyris

Honestly it doesn't look all that diffrent to me personally, they need to totally redo character models and such with high poly models for players and npc's and monsters, before worry about the ground you walk on IMO.

This is pictures from the new engine, not remodeled/retextured items. What did you expect, models would automatically get 4 times more vertices and changed animations?

/Y
 

Originally posted by Nasir64

3 x 8 hour shifts at 30k (being nice) players. that is 90k players all around. Now give or take 20k for ones offline that are used for manufacturing, that is 110k at BEST. And a good majority of them are alt accounts. Subtract the trials at say 20k to be nice. and you still have 90k subs.
 

Dont mistake subscriptions with concurrent user. Any MMO has about 25% active account at any time. That's the reason why you have about 16k account on a WoW server and 4k user limit (which then turns into a login queue).

As such, looking at your 90k number it'd give 360k accounts ...

/Y

I really hope they get it together. As an old AO'er myself there simply isn't any other sci-fi mmo that's really competing as of yet (7 years down the line). Quite strange, considering how many fantasy games there is competing for the same audience.

Sure the Ogre shots looked great, but it's the correct decision to use 1 engine in 3 games (AO, AoC, TSW) to only have 1 set of bugs and updates needing to be done. :)

What these screenis show is that they've basically caught  up with the old ogre work, meaning they've redone the previous 2,5 years of work in 6 months. That bouds (sp?) well for the future.

/Y

Originally posted by CactusmanX

I don't like item decay.  It may solve the issue of items overcrowding and provide more reason to buy items but I don't think it does it in a very fun way.

From a buyers perspective, items breaking is just annoying and the faster they break the less I care about what items I have and just slap something on with decent stats.

As a crafter I am just pumping out items I couldn't care less about to get money and level.

I would like to see other ways of getting items out of the game other than making them break.

Like in Champions, you can research to level your crafting skill, which destroys the item in the process and also keeps people from making tons of crap onbody wants just to level up their skill.

And/or something like NPC merchants and collectors that you can trade items to for money or reputation or something, removing the items from the game.  Or maybe you have to make things for NPC troops, removing the items from the game too.

I would rather see something like that rather than just my items break and someone has to make me new ones. 

A very good example of the mindset and system of non breaking system. People dont like to pay taxes either, but most do. :)
 

From a player perspective your "slapping on" is actually a good thing, as it lessens the problem with elitism and "you must have the best gear to be pro", it's hard and expensive to keep equipment in that shape. Therefore it's ok to "just" use good gear.

The Champions example is a clever way of removing items without flooding the market, i like that one.

Selling stuff to merchants is the opposite of what i'm getting at, it adds cash to the economy, while repairing only drains it. Draining cash from the economy of a game is important to lower inflation. Yes, economic theory is quite appropriate to games also, since it is a economic market with lots of persons.

The point is that decay removes items "from the top", while handing in to npc's removes them "from the bottom". I mean, who'll ever downgrade their active weapon of choice for some npc faction? Decay and losing items on death (which is harsher and more extreme) forces you to get the same gear again (status quo) instead of only upgrading (inflation).

Ofcourse, depending on the rate of decay or lost items the acquisition time must be changed also, raiding for 3 months for 1 weapon sucks in that setting, unless there's a almost as good alot easier availible.

It's actually wrong to compare Bind on pickup to Decay. One limits the reusability for alts and limits the trading market and is a way of removing money/value from the economy, while the other feeds the need to reacquire the same item and constantly feeds the economy. 

In Anarchy Online, e.g. very few items are bound and thus the same item looted 4 years ago still is traded and the money just moves between accounts.

In EVE Online, lots of items break and you spend alot of time getting the same gear back.

If the items stay, people leave an instance or similar once they have the loot they can get and never look back. What if you lost that Rifle/Axe?

Not losing items means that the main way to get players to play new material is to improve the drop, causing mudflation and scaling issues.

One way to combine them and avoid the mudflation will not fare well with the players, i assume, it'd be to nerf old gear to have new one be as good as the previous best ...

/Y

Originally posted by mbblade

Games today are getting less and less choice in the classes. Before you had like 10-15 choices, now you get a couple and be satisfied with it or don't play. They only give you the basics too, i mean warrior, healer, nuker and ranger are all that you can pick now. Whats up with generalizing why can't we have a vast array of choices like we used to do, i think companies are getting REALLLLLLLY lazy. People have asked for PVP and i think thats all there putting into games now, the heck with an array of choices lets just put a few and let them PVP. Well i say the HELL with PVP, make the game like they used to be, i don't care about customizing body features cuz you NEVER EVER see them anyway. More classes, some PVP a good lore and PVE content is all that is needed

Daikatana had 30 different weapons. Lots of choices. It must be a good game, then.

Starcraft has like, 5 troops/army, it must be a lousy game then ...

/Y

Originally posted by bloodyleach
Soooo.... apparently if your game is aimed at the younger set, your graphics and interface can suck. Makes no sense kids should get just as good a game as nerds... how else do you expect to convert the little lambs.

I dont know if you're referring to my post, but i stated it needs a big push in the texturing department to look modern and up to date, however good graphics doesn't make a good game, we've seen all too many examples of that. What i mainly said was that it can be a quite good and fun game even with a kid-rating, as in no blood and such.

Ofc. it should be a good interface, else it's a cumbersome game and will simply annoy people. Many console based games suffer from that.

It wasn't very long ago since a friend was totally imbursed in the updated Pirates!, which isn't very impressive graphically, but still one of the strongest stars in the history of games. :)

/Y

Originally posted by martinj63

What folks are failing to comprehend here is that in a couple years  most games rated T and below will be Sans the Global chat and Plus the naming database.  People truly have no clue how close WoW came to Speedchat and Name selector just like Toontown.  Developers are being slammed and I mean slammed by Senators and parenting group because little Timmay keeps hearing the F word on Barrens chat by folks named donkeyhumper, now that the mainstream media has "Discovered" MMO's you can bet your ass developers will start sanitizing them in any way possible to save public face. 

And that's what's scary. The general trend is to blame the game and developers for problems in the society, ofcourse it's seeing the F-word in a text chat and seeing semi-nude fantasy characters that creates killers. It has nothing to do with easy access to guns, drugs, exclusion from society and such. It's the games ... :p

A bit off topic, but i had to get it out.

As to the game, currently it looks bad, it need a big touch on the texturing department, but i do think it can be quite fun, and it's a niche that's not very exploited, thus very good from a competition standpoint. If i remember correctly it's basically Sea Dogs with new names and some undeads (and the graphics currently look the same also), and it was a fairly fun game. "Family friendly" can be quite fun, i dont think many complain about the lack of blood in WoW, it's not what makes or breaks a game. It's no blood in BF2 either, and it's a darn fun game. :)

If pulled off right it can be a quite successful game, there's 14 on the dousen of fantasy games, the only "ride, trade and fight"-game is EvE and not all like sci-fi (not to mention the harsch pvp-idea of eve). Pirates of the burning sea is an obivious contender, but will probably not exist in a free version.

This will not be a wow-killer, but it'll get a large enough community, i'd say SWG-size (genereally: among the biggest pre-wow)

/Y

I liked the editorial, but i feel it's unfair on a couple of points.

WoW has some grinding, but levelling is fast and easy. Faction is a bad grind BUT it's volontary. The only faction you really _need_ is some timbermaw to ride/shop and AD/CC ofcourse. Now, doing strat 10 times cant really be considered grinding, we know those that has been there 100+ times, and those 10 times will give enough faction.

What i'm getting at is that you dont _have_ to be revered with every faction. There are only a select few where you need a decent faction to progress, and that faction will be had through normal play.

This is where i feel WoW is different from e.g. AO, the grind in AO is the levelling. You cant escape levelling. Thus you must grind. You also have a faction grind which affects xp gained. WoW has no level grind. See the difference?

Apart from that i think the WoW game is a good implementation of the franchise and although i would sometimes like to see more of the rts in it, i cant find a way how it would be done. AV is the closest you get where you can play a peon by collecting boxes in the mines.

I think the expansions release will be smooth. I dont think Blizzard would allow themselves anything else. There will be balance problems, as balance on the beta server with 50 players isn't the same as on the larger scale full servers. Performance wise it's just another continent with new maps and the same graphics engine. It'll be smooth.

Someone said pvp'ing dont require skill. To be a good pvp'er requires skill, but getting pvp-ranks mostly requires grinding. As i'm a bad grinder i'll never get much of a rank even if i never make a fool of myself in the BG's. I do hope the new system will put some more fun, meaning and incentive to pvp, it's a overlooked part of the game.

/Y