Let's wait and see, APB will be a great test whether or not a FSP game with MMO elements is a viable genre. 

You can chose yourself whether you want to be a tough or fast fighter, nothing is ultimate, you always have to balance choices and live with them after.

1. Yes.

2. Just get it from their own homepage, it works well but takes about 10 hours to download. You get a free quad if you do, not very useful early on but you will love it later.

3. No queues, but some areas of the gameworld becomes rather laggy at US prime time due to the number of people there. Gameworld is over 1000 square km so once you get out of the start zone (which itself is larger than most modern MMOs) things are better.

4. No idea

5. Haven't seen any so far.

I would definitely say Spellborn, the world is just fascinating and it all starts with the whispering female voice at the game start that says something about how strange it is that the story of humankind was from after it should have ended.

Can't really give it the sense of wonder you get, combined with the realization that the world is a lot of broken rocks floating around in space, remains of a world that have exploded.

Yes spellborn is the only game in the past few years where you REALLY want to learn the story.

There is one danger in when you try to be different from WoW and that is if you try to be different for the sake of being different.

If a feature in WoW is a good idea in your game then use it, don't try to do something different just because you want to be different because the end result will almost always mean that your game becomes less fun and playable where it didn't have to be. I'm not saying that games should copy wow automatically, I'm saying Blizard put a lot of thought into how their game is played and they are pretty smart guys so there is no reason to reinvent the wheel unless you game needs a new design.

Once you do go for a different game design then you better make damn sure that your game is so fun and interesting to play and so content filled that people focus more on that than on how its played so you keep your players. 

For example Chronicles of Spellborn, it has an amazingly deep and interesting combat system, mobs that actually are intelligent and fight like players in PvP and a really weird and fascinating gameworld. But the game was so bug filled and the entire PvP reward and fight-for-something system were so lacking at release that people got annoyed with the game and then the differences from the "wow standard" became a detraction instead of an advantage for the game and it quickly died.

To the OP: Spot on, those are exactly the reasons why I'm beginning to love this game. You really feel you are there, its a place to be and its not just some level in some irrelevant game.

To Sparkfunk: Well shouldn't you be be happy that someone at last took some the good things about UO and developed on them?

 I didn't have any expectations when I bought this game but I must say I have been very pleased with it.

Yes it does have some kinks and problems but overall you really feel you are in a living gameworld that is HUGE where you don't have to quest but that being said there are like 5 - 8 times as many quests out there that you need to lvl up so generally you select one group of people to work for and then do those quests and don't bother with others.

Game simply is soo much larger and complete compared to most other released games these days that its amazing.

And I love that you actually have to use your brain to play the game and that you have the freedom to make stupid choices and then have to live with it. The game does not treat its customers like idiots that have to be spoon feed everything and I respect that.

Originally posted by Herodes 

Both populations are about 300 millions.

 

EU's population is over half a billion. But the part that use English as their main or second language is down to about 100-150 million. 

Originally posted by xanphia

Originally posted by afoaa

Have you tried Fallen Earth?

No classes, pure skill based system, gigantic open world, best crafting system made since Pre-NGE SWG, 6 sided faction pvp, taking and holding towns from other factions.

And everything takes time, lots of time. Took me 6 hours to make my first rifle....

 

This game keeps seeming better and better to me. Dec. can't be much longer :[

?? Its out now, why wait until december?

Have you tried Fallen Earth?

No classes, pure skill based system, gigantic open world, best crafting system made since Pre-NGE SWG, 6 sided faction pvp, taking and holding towns from other factions.

And everything takes time, lots of time. Took me 6 hours to make my first rifle....

There is no need to load it from steam, you can just download it from their own website. If you purchase it as a digital download from their own homepage then you also get a free quad. :)

To the OP, I think you should check out Fallen Earth. 6 sided faction PvP, no classes, skill based, sandbox, gigantic gameworld over 1000 square Km, one server for all players. NO elves, dorfs and wings, lots of Mad Max.

Just give it a little time, right now their server cluster cannot handle the load of players so there is some terrible server lag during prime time but they are working on it.

Originally posted by altairzq

How do you explain Aion?

IFit's confirmed to be more succesful than AoC and WAR. Mabye even more than both combined.

Even though people complain about the grind there then I think Aion will show why its a good idea. MMOs can thrive on people having a sense of achievement as well as action and fun.

The problem with WaR and partly also AoC was that you didn't really get connected to your characters because you progress too fast and run from one quest to the next without bothering to read the quest text and in the end you sit with an empty feeling.

CO suffers from this also, but even worse than AoC and WaR.

I think that exactly because Aion is grindy then it will keep an audience for longer than the instant gratification games, the instant gratification audience wont stay in the instant gratification games for long anyway.

I disagree, you don't see one direction of MMOs, the genre is splitting up into subgenres instead.

For example look at All Point Buleting, you are basically thrown into the game as max lvl from the start and only progress through your ability to build your reputation as a crime fighter or gangster which you do with PvP missions (game is not FFA first person shooter, its actually organzied into a progression system).

Then take Fallen Earth, a slow grindy sandbox game yet still full of quests if you want to do them (but you don't have to quest to progress) where it can take you 5-6 hours to make a rifle and ammo and many many days to create your first car.

Both are games with an audience, both are new games and none of the conform to the static formula of MMOs too many have fallen into lately and both are great ideas that cater to a different audience.

MMOs will stop being one genre, it will be many different things and in 5 years you probably can't even have a forum like this that will make any sense since there will be little universal MMO to talk about.

 There is several issues here, I think we should look at what an endgame should offer:

It should be entertaining, have purpose and meaning and contain some kind of slow progression.

Now the question is how do you create game content that fulfill all 3 things for as many kinds of players as possible? The problem is that many MMOs forget the "purpose and meaning" and therefore they fail in the solo'able endgame

For example if the entire purpose of the endgame is just to progress then a slow grinding solo endgame will not appeal because there is no purpose to the grinding itself and you are basically just wasting your valuable time not having fun.

On the other hand if the endgame contains a challenge of some kind that you can use your hard earned skills for then you _will_ see solo'ers grind slowly and patiently to be able to use their skills against those challenges.

So you have to ask yourself what is the purpose of having players improve over time at the endgame and answer that before you can even create a solo'able endgame.

DaoC is probably the MMO with the best endgame ever made. Everything you do PvE is done in order to become stronger in PvP and PvP is the whole purpose of the game. They also solved the casual/hardcore and solo/raider problem there by introducing several different ways to gain endgame abilties. You can grind solo dungeons, you can solo PvP, you can PvP raid in big warfare, you can do incredible big and tough PvE raids and they all end up giving you the same reward in the end but at wastly different speeds, generally the more you group the faster you progress but you are never without anything to do.

its a bit silly to say that one game style is in conflict with another, as long as you keep a sense of purpose in the game then you can have every single game style live side by side without getting in each others way and thereby you secure that your game appeals to more players.

Daoc just consolidated all their servers into one super cluster which is fulled with players in big battles, taking castles and territory from each other.

Sounds like its something like that you are looking for.

Of course those who still play it is the hardcore players so don't ever expect any easy PvP kills.

Originally posted by RealmLords

That's almost definitely server cpu.  My guess would be the zones are larger than what the server hardware can handle, usually i terms of PC and NPC counts.  Everything ticking (time slicing) ends up waiting and performance drops badly.

And you know its server lag because if you enter the Embry area outside prime time like early EU day then there is no lag in the area that were unplayable during US prime time.

Playing fallen earth, still have a sub for CO but waiting for more content before I play it again, and I keep my AoC atm because I belong to a really good guild there.

Originally posted by Terranah

I think game companies shoot themselves in the foot when they have ugly aesthetics.  There are some amazing computer artists out there and they can make really wonderful looking characters that are even not very system intensive.

Problem is that in this game they shouldn't look too pretty or perfect. After all you play a woman trying to survive on her own out in the wilderness. 

Just look at fallout, the base characters are not very pretty, and then there is a LOAD of mods to change body type (mostly done by asians) and the end result while being pretty really does detract from the style and sense of the game.

Don't see any messages about server hardware upgrades in that. The only opgrade mentioned anywhere is the upgrade to the forum server.

Lots of client updates but its really not that which is the problem, the problem is that their servers can only handle a limited number of players in a single area before they get overloaded and hang up.

I experienced the same kind of server lag as the OP describe while having 150+ fps so optimizing the client does nothing to help with the problems that make the game unplayable near Embry.