So many games and so little time. So many games and not enough cash to play them all.

I have never limited myself to one genre or platform so that raises the amount of games to thousands I want to play but will never get the chance. If only I could create clones where I experience everything they do, then I may be able to get to them all.

I plan on doing w/e I'm in a mood for day to day, hour to hour. Some moments all I want is pvp, other moments I'm more concerned with exploration and lore discovery.

I really like creating certain looks ingame so I'll be gear hunting aswell. In many games that I have played I always seem to search out making my warriors look like Samurai and there always seems to be a combination of armor and equipment to help me do so.

In other games I may have rushed to cap to maintain a level playing field with the griefers and gankers to atleast give me a fighting chance when questing for lore. On some level I didn't like doing it but it was more about survival than anything.

With the downscaling, I don't foresee any reason to rush through anything though. I plan on playing one of each class and atleast one of each race. Leveling to cap may happen faster for one or the other but I don't think I will do it on purpose, just gonna play to be playing. I think this is A-net's intention with how Tyria was crafted this time around. GW1 was pretty much the same thing, fast to a low cap and much of the world was the same level so level cap wasn't a huge issue.

I think it will hold my main attention now that I'm not currently subbed to any MMO. Still plugging away at titles and what not in the original Guild Wars, put it down for awhile and got back into it.

As far as MMO's go, will probably spend some time in Planetside when it drops. Other than that, SC2/ LOL/ and a multitude of upcoming console games coming up will see my time.

So many games, so little time...wish I had clones.

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Originally posted by Naevius
I consider my characters to be my minions, not my avatars, so I tend to set gender by whim.

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I am pretty much like this.

I also tend to lose myself in the game world, where it doesn't really matter what gender I am because I don't even notice.

I also like to make my characters look bad ass so certain armors will look better on one gender over the other.

I also never assume characters in game are being played by one gender or another. I treat everyone pretty much as genderless person.

With that said, yup...probably will be making male and females.

Nope.

I purchased this game because I am indeed a fan of A-net thus far and the first Guild Wars. I appreciate what A-net is trying to accomplish with making a full fledged MMO, (Guild Wars to me wasn't an MMO, but a lobby game geared towards pvp).

I consider myself someone who likes video games so I will play almost anything on any platform whether it be for PC, past consoles or the current Xbox and Playstation consoles. With that said, I have wasted money on a plethora of video games that just didn't do it for me in the long run. Maybe it will happen here, maybe it won't, but from the little time I spent in the beta events it didn't seem like a waste of my cash. For me though as I can only speak for myself.

I can say that the hype for this game seems to be a little different as it's not coming from some aggressive high energy PR machine, but from the people who are playing and testing it. In recent memory SWTOR comes to mind as an example, the testers it seemed to me,(speaking from my observations which indeed could be wrong)overall had nothing but bad things to say about it when the star wars and or Bioware fanbois, and the media had nothing but love for most aspects of it. I mean even Morgan on X-play was praising this thing. Granted, deep down I wanted a great Star Wars universe to play in, it just didn't do it for me.

Not sure I would say that I knew it would fail, wait, Has it failed?

I knew something wasn't right when artistic style was first released. That this game would be a crap shoot. I enjoyed Biowares previous titles so why not give this one a shot. As a single player game it's not bad, not great either. As an MMO it's pretty terrible.

The game was decent multiplayer wise up until I left Dromund Kaas. I hardly saw anyone on other planets. Fleet was always packed but damn, worlds were bare.

1-50 story/leveling was alright,infact that's probably one of the better leveling experiences I've had in the MMo verse. Once capped though is when the problems start to shine. It's not so much that there wasn't much to the so called end game, it's that the little it did have was too easy to breeze through.

The other problems:

1. Poor performance, shoddy engine.

2. Bland skill animations for the most part. Very few skills stood out to me. Leap/knockbacks/force pull/lightning and death from above are skills that had decent animations, but like I said ,very few.

3. Armor sets were craptastic looking, social armor that made little sense to put on if you were anything other than a light armor caster. This armor also had the nerve to be moddable.
The entire time I was playing I had hoped to atleast find a black robe hooded or not so that I could look like how I feel sith should look. Jedi looked closer to what most would say they look like. This would atleast have helped immerse me a tiny bit more.

Attention to detail is not a word phrase I would use in this game.

4. Faction balance. From the ground up the choices you made on your way to cap should have determined whether you join the republic or empire and then be able to redeem or betray your chosen faction.

5. Exploration ended so early. Painted backgrounds really killed it for me. Cliff barriers, Cave faces that when looked through were a gateway to nothingness.

6. Too many skills that had absolutely no practical purpose.

Things that didn't bother me, but apparently bothered others:

Lfg tools...could care less about.

PvP was fine until the level cap grind, although...huttball 9mil times can wear on you.

UI customization...could care less if I have it.

Can't say that I exactly wasted a few dollars playing this as I did get some enjoyment out of it. Hell, lunch coffee and cigarettes for a week cost me what I payed to play it for a few months.

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Originally posted by aesperus

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Originally posted by helthros

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Originally posted by Bladestrom Repeating the same bossss for months on end can be ok, but wouldn't it be better to have lot of other content to do at the same time?

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You don't think they could release all the bosses at the same time? They'll chew through the bosses in weeks or days even, then what? It's unrealistic to think that programmers can crank out enough content to satisfy the insatiable thirst gamers have for PvE content without some sort of limitations.

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I don't normally say this, but this is probably not the game for you, and you should probably not play it. This is a very difficult thing to explain, and no matter how many people manage to do so, people still don't seem to understand. So, I'll try one more time.

GW2 is not about a treadmill, or a grind, period. Can you play it that way? Absolutely; but the game is not designed around it. And that is a key difference. Most MMOs are.

Think about this for a minute. You can, essentially, grind or power through any form of content. However people generally don't do this for all forms of media. You could speed through most MMOs, without feeling like you've missed much, true. But could you say the same about speeding through a game like zelda, or uncharted, or mass effect? You could speed through reading a book. However you are probably going to skim over a lot of details that may be important. The reason being that these other games and media generally have multiple layers of content and detail on which to experience.

Can you play this game like every other MMO that you're supposedly sick of, and grind boss after boss? Yes, yes you can. However the assumption here is that you have to, and you don't. There is way more to this game than boss farming. If you choose to ignore all that, then fine, but it's not the game's doing.

So what is 'endgame' for this game? I know most people think of this as a 'buzz word', but it really is 'the game'. Once you hit max lvl (80), the entire game is opened up to you. You are free to experience every part of the game, regardless of lvl. You also are rewarded for all content, in a manner that scales up to your current lvl.

- If you only care about getting the coolest looking armor and gear. Yes, you will be running dungeons. This doesn't give you any advantage, but it will make your character stand out from other characters. Especially if you start mix & matching pieces of armor from different sets.

- If you want to explore, there is quite a massive world in which to do this in. You can uncover hidden treasures, puzzles, map completions, dynamic events, etc.

- If you want to craft, you can search for the rarer materials, and experiment with them to see what new recipes you can unlock

- If you want to play mini-games, theres tons of these scattered around the world

- If you want to PvP, you have sPvP and WvW to partake in

- You have meta events to experience / trigger. Large open world bosses.

- If you like lore. There are a lot of hidden lore pieces all around the world. People to talk to, places to discover, etc.

Point being is you have a lot of options. Far more than most MMOs. If you choose to ignore all the options to focus on just 1, then again, that's not really the game's fault. That's how you personally are choosing to view it.

People will burn through the content of this game, I have no doubt about that. People always do. However it's going to take a lot longer with this one than with other games. It took people about a month to burn through TOR, and about a week to burn through TSW. This game has more content than both combined. Not to mention, a lot of the content in this game changes quite a bit. You're first experience with an event can be dramatically different from the 2nd time you experience it, depending on a list of different factors. And on top of this, Anet will be cycling out events and swapping in new ones throughout the game's lifespan.

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Holy Crap!!! Well said.

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Originally posted by ragz45
 
Now take a game like TSW which has no LFG tool.  If you want a group you advertise in the LFG chat, or put one together yourself.  After playing in TSW durring beta and release, it's one of the few games I've playing in a long time where people are actively chatty all through out the dungeon.  I view this as a direct result of the fact that the game has no LFG tool, and people are forced to socialize to get groups.

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I dunno if I can accept that because a game doesn't have a LFG feature, players are more likely to be chatty within a dungeon. I know that for me(as I can only speak for myself and not assume what others are thinking), that my in dungeon party chat may not get any input from me if I'm not in a mood to type. Vent or Rumble would get me talking, but typing may take some extra work on my part. Sometimes the effort just won't be there.

Spamming the LFG chat or general chat: to me isn't really being social.

I think attention spans these days are very short. Take Swtor for instance, which didn't really have a LFG tool, the fleet immediatly became the hub for getting anything done. Sitting at the fleet spamming for an hour isn't fun so I would pass on doing a dungeon if I didn't get party members within 10-15 mins and head on to do something else solo or play another character.

Regular chat will have participants regardless of LFG tools imo.

Not a huge fan of automated LFG tools that toss you into a random group.

Not a huge fan of spamming or looking at spamm concerning finding a group.

Personally, I think something simple that's sorta a message board with a list of dungeons. If you are lf a g for that dungeon you post on that list and each person contacts each other. Then have a section for quest, DE's or just a free section for miscellaneous/exploration.

The message board could be game wide as it may give you a purpose to guest another server.

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Originally posted by QuicklyScott

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Originally posted by iceman00 None. How about developers be original and do their own thing instead of trying to remake something from decades ago?  Its my same problem with Hollywood and how intellectually broke it is.  Their biggest movie of the summer is a remake of a 10 year old franchise.......

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This.

 

The lack of imagination floating about is worrisome.  We need more George R R Martins.

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Hundreds of thousands of writers crafting worlds everyday. Just gotta search for them.
Pretty sure it was someone who approached Mr. Martin about turning his vision into a show and not the other way around.

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Originally posted by iceman00
None.

How about developers be original and do their own thing instead of trying to remake something from decades ago?  Its my same problem with Hollywood and how intellectually broke it is.  Their biggest movie of the summer is a remake of a 10 year old franchise.......

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I see things abit differently I guess. There are tons of new IP's that hit the market everyday. They may not have huge dollars behind them but they pop up all the time. Sure, many of the successful ones get sequels and what not, but hey, that's the price of success. People want more. I know I was a fan of Ninja Gaiden when it returned.

Hmm, Hollywood is no different. There are thousands of movies coming out every quarter. Sure large studios put cash behind a few remakes and sequels to bring in the dollars, it keeps them in business. I also see the reasoning behind telling the same stories over and over again, it's what humans do. How many times have I read or seen a movie, based on greek/roman mythology or king arthur or robin hood? Too many to count. How many versions of Shakespears works find there way into theatre and film. It's what we do.

I'm gonna go with:

Bad Dudes

Shinobi

River City Ransom

FF7

Diablo 2

Strider

Chrono trigger

any of the koei dynasty warriors/samurai warrior games with better graphics,mechanics +blood and guts with decapatations.

Redo star wars: battlefront 2. Edit: would also like to see an updated version of Bushido Blade 2.

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Originally posted by kitsunegirl
I bought a preorder for AoC, but got turned off by various stuff, funcoms handling, the aggressive and abusive community, the bad reviews, the fanboi reviews, the crappy open beta client - tied in to the first item listed. If I do buy the game, I doubt Ill play it til a month or two after the game is launched. Perfect launches are rare, and the way Funcom has been running their ship, Im not expecting one.
Currently, Im considering playing EQ2 again... I hate SOE alot, but the game is relatively fun, it has a lot more content than Warcrack, graphics are less pretty, but more realistic. And I did love playing my fae, as much as I like my Draenei... Its just SOE... and Smedley. >.> Ive cancelled Warcrack and Lotro waiting for both expansions.
Oh, and honestly, AoC is meh to me, the game Im dying to play is Aion. I know its an NCSoft game, styled like Lineage II, but Ive had my eye on it since around 06...

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I'm actually in the same boat. The only game holding majority of my desire to play is Aion. In the meantime I will probably give AoC and War a shot. Currently playing EQ2 and WoW off and on with a dab of Guildwars for my pvp fix. Everything I've seen from Aion is A+ and have been watching it for about a year and a half. Great concept imo.

No, look for something else...lol. You my friend are an unadaptable sludge.
OmG, why does my mage keep changing how I play him? Grow up. You aren't making the games. The way games are progressing or leveling out obviously says that the things you want in a game just aren't going to be done.

By the way, In WoW there really hasn't been many changes in play style. A mage is still just a mage.

I'm responding to this because I am so sick of folks like you who think more time in a game grants you the high rise penthouse over the peons on the street. We all pay the same price to play these games. We should all have access to the lore for one, which the culmination usually happens in endgame content. But because I like being solo I should never know the story? Dude fuck off!!!!

Troll over and out.

Grats, LF to GW2 also. Keep up the good work. Nice game.

You want something that hints at being an MMO till War comes out? I second the motion on Guild Wars. It's a free sub. Can't go wrong there. Pvp ain't bad either the way it's done. Team based pvp in the form of gvg or Guild vs Guild. It's an easy pickup. You go through the pve and you'll be rdy to start the pvp or do them both at the same time.

Sure, to start off you'll be behind the power curve in the amount of skills you will own, but you unlock them for your account so any pvp character you create will have them. It's an easy game to finish (by finish I mean every chapter has the storyline that resembles being played like it were a single player game which is why many consider not a real MMO)and get caught up with a lot of choice on how your character is built skill wise. But being able to be good at those choices is where the hard part comes in. Some have it, some don't.

I personally am a fan of this game because of the way classes don't counter each other, particular skills do. Ie; A monk places an enchantment on an assasin to give hit points back to the assasin eveytime it's hit. A necro, or mesmer could have brought a hex that shatters enchantments. Cool downs are basically nil which makes for a strategic fast paced fight. No cool down is really more than 60sec.

Interupts, enchantments, hexes, conditions, rituals are all very clear cut. By that I mean find your target and be able to see exactly what that person uses when they use it. Makes for finding out how to break an opposing character down or opposing team for that matter.

A monk may be the greatest at healing, but with the hybrid play...an elementalist or ritualist may be some hidden healers on an opposing squad.

I don't really play anymore though as I am now back to WoW getting geared up. I can forewarn you though, if your a fan of movements such as swimming and jumping, and hell...flying, you won't be able to do that stuff in Guild wars. After awhile tho, you'll get past that playing with what they give you.

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Originally posted by gestalt11
If you do this everyone complains about balance.

The two major names coming out are PvP titles so its not that surprising they went for classes.

However I will say I think they are kind of copping out. Although Guild Wars probably is a game that you do not believe fits your archetype. It actually does do so even though there are classes. GW has over 1000 abilites each with their own stats and you can cusomize your abilites with each one via your attributes, which are essentially analogous to skill points. Each class has on average over 100 abilities and everyone can have 2 classes so you can have somewhere between 200-300 abilities to choose from. There are no restrictions in class combinations.
GW lets you build a character in a very similar way to the systems you describe. Whether people like the progression model is irrelevant for this disucssion. The point is that you do not need a UO skill style game to accomplish roughly the same thing. Afterall putting points into skill just gives you abilities anyway.

The reason i mention this is because of the balance thing. GW is a very well balanced PvP game. This is because they came up with a meta-system then created all their abilities to make the real system. They have interrupts and enchantments and enchantment removal and hexes and each type is designed to perform a certain way.
When GW creates a class the only balance concern they need to worry about is whether the abilities do what is intended for that class and that certain undesirable phenomenon like tank-mages are either not possible or have a weakness (like relying on enchantments).


So in other words you won't see this type of system start to pop up again until games start balancing the way Guild Wars, via a comprehensive ability design using a meta system, does instead of the way WoW does, via class and role.
This won't happen anytime soon. Most designers do not have the ability for elegance that Anet or CCP do. Its much easier for them to cobble things together into classes and call it done.

Its the same reason many programmers use iterative Loops instead of recursion even though sometimes the recursion is a far more elegant solution. Its just easier to think about and grab a hold of with your mind. The funny thing is they convince themselves this makes class based balanced easier to do, because its a simple model. But actually its a model with many unseen holes and is thus much harder to balance than Guild War's style balancing.
The class balance model requires a complete reanalysis of everything everytime any change is made. The Guild Wars system does not. That is one of the reasons it is superior for an MMORPG. However this fact is not generally fully understood or taken into consideration and usually the apparent simplness of of the class based model wins people over. Its a sort of misidentification of the KISS principle. They are keeping the wrong part simple.

They think by keeping the classes simple balance will be simple, but then they just keeping running into the problems of cascading changes and strange interactions because they did not actually design systematically.

So you are screwed until this becomes obvious to the slacker monkey part of their brains. I don't say that pejoratively, laziness is important for designers. It is your motivation for doing things right. But at the same time it can be very simplistic and its not until you get hit of the head enough with the problems of the two approaches that you sort of begrudingly say "OK lets try it this way, because that other way was too much of a night mare."

Right now the skilled based people are the victim of completely awful balance, well really complete lack of balance, that existed in games like UO. The designers saw this knew it was bad, heard the complaints and knew it hurt their bottom line. They then looked at how to control those system better and just saw a complete mess and ran as fast as they could to what appears to be the easy solution: classes.

They are now in the process of realizing class balance, while offering some improvments over no balance at all, is in fact a big hairball of wires that you have to untangle every frigging time. So while you can set up decent balance maintaining it is a gigantic pain. And you will need to do some maintainence because there is no way you do it perfect the first time and things change anyway.

The next step will be getting past the idea that class are a necessary evil and there is no other solution. Over the next few you will see that mantra repeated over and over. It already is. Then a few attentive designers will realize the whole thing is already solved in GW and that emulating them will actually give them and the players more freedom and make balance easier to maintain.

So you are screwed for I dunno like 5 years or until Guild Wars 2 comes out. Or you can play Eve. Or maybe that World of Darkness MMO CCP is supposedly making. Otherwise you are screwed for a while because it will take them a while to move to a more comprehensive and elegant balance system and that is what drives all this. Well also the robot like reliance on class roles messes with their thinking too. But in the end they actually need to do the original design with no classes and put classes on top if they want roles, other wise they go back to their hairball.

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oh ok, I missed this post...yeah, i agree

I still think Guild Wars trumps with their idea of how to run a class based system. A pick ur poison, build a deck magic the gathering style with a dump into an attribute pool to make the deck stronger. Couple that with over a thousand skills and bam, a very nice system.

It's class based but built around hybrid play.

New builds, very viable builds are found everyday. Granted they said that in GW2 that the scope would be toned down (which I personally think is a mistake..but hey, it's not my game), but for now that system was/is done well imo. Too bad I wanted a non instanced world and a tad better community or I would still play it religiously.

Devs choose the route of class based systems for imo one very simple/practical reason, it's easier to balance.

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Originally posted by Vincenz

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A lot of people would quit, yes. But they'd also gain other players, and according to player forums, opinions etc. The community and graphics are the biggest problems with WoW ;)

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I'm pretty sure that Blizzard, in fact, achieved a billion dollars in annual sales by basing their entire business model off of player forums...

Let me say this again...slowly...

WoW has no biggest problem...they have 10 million subscribers...they may not have your 15 bucks a month, but that's hardly a problem or a reason to change a single thing.

get it yet?

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Yeah, I get it and second it. Man it's great to be practical. Too many (forum outspoken) elitist, art house characters in the MMO community as a whole who are over thinking the "player plays a game process".

For me it's either play what they give you or don't. As far as complaints go...well, everyone is entitled to have an opinion, problem is that if it's not brought about in a positive manner then no one gives a shit. Certainly not I. If it goes beyond constructive criticism, You are just wasting your breath.

I have been thinking this for a long time, with the over abundance of these sort of threads. If you don't like what a game company is offering you beyond the small changes that could be made...DON"T PLAY IT<~~>GO AND MAKE YOUR OWN GAME. Think you could do better, Don't talk about it...Be about it.

Jeez, people need to throttle back and enjoy what has been given to you and stop taking the work behind any of the projects for granted which is exactly (from what I see), 95% of the threads are on this site or any site like it.

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Originally posted by saluk
It is just very expensive, and the players have rejected so many games in the past, AND you have to actually compete with WoW, which has become the MMO monopoly. Think of Microsoft and the OS market. There are many little operating systems, but none can even come close to the marketshare of Windows, no matter how bad MS tries to screw it up.

MMO is a totally different market than anything else. Some things that make MMO's hard, and different from other games:
* Coding is harder
- network code is really difficult, and the entire game including all game logic etc has to be based on that netcode. In my personal experience, the programming of an mmo is roughly 5x as hard as programming a single player game, and maybe 2x or 3x harder than programming a typical arena based multiplayer game.
* Function of the game is different
- Most games are purchased by players. If people like the game, they will tell their friends, and their friends will buy it. Then you make a sequel, and all of those people will buy your game again, even if it's practically the same. MMo's are not games. MMo's are a service. Like any service industry, growth and sustainability are key. You have to have a good reputation with players, and keep that reputation. During development, you have to plan for the life of your game, 1, 2, 5, 10 years ahead of when you release it. Also, you have to think about how you will keep players coming back to your game without getting bored. Traditional games do not have this problem. There is an "end". An mmo, if it were good enough, should never end. And not only do you have to keep the game fun, you have to convince players to continually pay you money for access to it.
* Failure is not an option
- Another thing that makes mmos more difficult, is that part of the VALUE of any mmo is the community. As a developer, you have some control over the community, but in the end it's up to them to be accepting of new players or be more elite. An elite community is going to have a hard time sustaining the game with new players. Also, if a game comes out at launch and doesn't do well, it has no chance of picking up steam later, or being a gem people find in the bargain bin. Word of mouth will kill the game, no one will be in, and any new players will see the empty fields and not stay for long. You have to get a reasonable amount of dedicated players at launch to have any sort of chance.

To me, MMO's are most similar to clubs. So imagine you have a city, with a giant club that everyone goes to. For 5 years, people have tried opening other clubs nearby. For the first few weeks people check out the new clubs, but then go back to the main show. The music at these other clubs is maybe the same, maybe better. But who wants to go to a club with 3 people in it? Sure, you'll get a few places here or there that offer something really different from the main club, but the people who go there are weird looking. They all wear funny hats, which scares you off. Maybe the funny hats are a good thing, but you are afraid of them just the same.

MMo's have lost so much money. I think if you add up, in general, money made and money lost by mmo's; they are collectively very far in the red - except WoW might tip the scale.

With games that are designed to last a "lifetime", how can any new game succeed?

I think publishers though have the wrong idea. Rather than trying to make a new club that looks like the popular one, which won't do much to ciphon patrons away, they should look instead at the alternative clubs and see if they can't find ways to bring out more alternative people. Maybe bring in people who don't go to clubs any more, because they are tired of the way things are. Oh, also tell the patrons to stop wearing funny hats. At least when new people are around :)

Do what Nintendo did. Whether you like them or not, they managed to come out in the latest round doing extremely well. Instead of being very far behind in the console race, they are very close to everyone else. Did they do this by out sonying sony, or out msofting msoft? No, they did it by being a better Nintendo.

These companies need to stop trying to be a better WoW, and start thinking about being a better alternative.

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Ur "Club" and "Nintendo" analogies are spot on.