True there are cooldowns on the skills, but the rotation of the tiers still applies to how much extra time you might have to wait to use the skill again.  If you only put a skill on one tier, even if the cooldown is very short, you will have to wait for the rotation to come back around to that tier again.  But if you have those skills on more tiers they are going to come up more often.  Just like in Magic card game.  The more cards of the same type you put in your deck, the more often that card will come up in battle.  You have alot of control over the frequency of a skills availablity.  If its a long cooldown, then sure you wouldnt prolly put it on many tiers, but many cooldowns are probably rather quick.  Like a quick Healing skill.  You may want to keep on every tier so that you can always use it when you need to rathan than waiting for the rotation to bring that tier up again.

Also there are many skills that can be chained together.  So you use one skill on tier one, you can put a chain skill on tier two and Im not sure how many can be chained this way.  

The combination of using the cooldowns with the frequencey of the skills on the tiers give alot of strategic layers.  And then there are still abilities with no Cooldown at all, just slight wait for the skillbar to roll over to the next tier which seemed pretty fast in the videos.  But you cant just clickity click like mad to make more swings than someone else just cause you click faster.  Characters do have Speed attributes too to consider.  Speed of movement, and speed of using skills.  That probably determines how fast the skillbars rotate to some degree.

Originally posted by Indeed

There is one thing all of you US gamers should keep in mind because it's a good guess that it's on the mind of every European developer too: The European market forgives minor bugs with the release but in the US you need a polished product from the start, like WoW or LotRO, not like Vanguard.

The reason should be clear, in the US you are accustomed to first class software of your fellow countrymen, in Europe you might get enough applause for originality alone. It's a general point of view, sometimes European developers have the best software, like SAP in their field, but in the gaming business if you fetch programmers out of 19 countries, which is what happened, to make a state of the art product you can't take risks with the American market. You are always thinking in the back of your mind about coming to the US only with the second release build. It wasn't that important 5 years ago where everybody was nearly happy about being able to log in on the first week of an mmo.

Perhaps it's really all only publisher related but I have a feeling that you don't get a final release date before the open beta. Which definitely won't start this month. After all, even WoW didn't manage the christmas release (or did it in the US?) and postponing releases is part of the mmo business like a player avatar. Nevertheless good luck.

Actually he is Exactly right.  Ive been seeing this trend for the last decade.  Ive always been telling people here in the US that they are a much  more spoiled lot in terms of accepting innovations over polish.  Ive checked out TONS of games from everywhere in the world.  Look at games like Gothic which has always been more innovative and interesting to me than the Elder Scrolls games, but because they are buggier games &  use european voice talent.  They get slammed in every review.  Even though personally I have never had that many bugs, I suppose because I know how to use my computer well.  More recently this happened with Two Worlds.  Totally fantastic sandbox open world RPG with more innovative ideas than you can think of, and again its lack of gloss and it gets slammed in America.  Europe takes alot more risks with their games, STALKER is another great one.  It got decent reviews, finally.  But its rare.  Often they get slammed just for having bad voice acting, even though the English language is not the native language of the game developers.  American's are extremely fickle and more apathetic in general.  This adds up to very minor things causeing hatred of games that should be given more slack and patience because of their new ideas in gameplay.  In many ways we in America keep developers on a "play it safe" mentality or the KISS concept (Keep It Simple Stupid) to please the most mass market here.  Its why our MMOs keep getting churned out like clones of one another with very little new ideas.

  I totally agree with you, Indeed.  Its good to see someone else say it.

And you can bet Spellborn wont even be out in Europe until March of 08 at the earliest.  They will push it back to keep polishing up the game until just before their competition gets near their release dates.  Competition like Age of Conan and Warhammer Online primarily.  I think they will get it out before them though.  And MMOs are one thing even in America, you'll mostly see get released with lots of bugs.  Its just a matter of how many or how bad they are.  Its expected now in MMO market.  Just not as long as it isnt as bad as Vanguard.  So ya I dont think that aspect would hold back Spellborn from simultaneous release, it really will be a matter of publishers. The European games often have a big prolem with finding good publishers in the U.S.  But Spellborn is so fantastic and I think will shock the scene so much that it will be able to pick and choose any publisher it wants I think.

 Did anyone catch that Spellborn ingame chat is built within IRC so you can login to your guild or public channels from work or wherever you might be able to access IRC to chat in the game.  And email in the game will be accessable outside the game through the Spellborn webpage.  Really cool stuff.  I wonder though how easy it will be for IRC hackers to take over channels and cause all sorts of Havok. 

Actually its much more complex and interesting than cooldowns.  The way you build your skilldeck will have bearing on how long you wait to use a skill repeatedly.  Like there are 6 tiers that the skill bar rotates on.  If you put the same skill on all 6 of the tiers that rotate, (Each tier can hold about 5/6 skills) Then your cooldown will be hardly nothing because you dont have to wait for the rotation to come back around to that one skill again.  Or you could put it on alternating tiers meaning you can use it twice as often.  The way you setup the Skilldeck makes all the difference in how long the cooldowns are. 

Watch some of the Dev Video Interviews and you see tons of great footage towards the end on how combat performs.  Its fantastic!

Also it has a very complex and interesting way of using character attributes, that I've never seen anything remotely like.  You'd have to read about that on the webpage.  And about bodyslots too.  Pretty wild stuff.  I cant wait to try it all out.  Spellborn is just overflowing with new ideas.

  Why do you people even compare Hellgate to an MMO?  Even Guildwars was more of an MMO that Hellgate london is.   Hellgate is a multiplayer Hack & Slash rpg.  Multiplayer.. not Massively Multiplayer.  Even the nifty 3D lobby rooms will only hold about 100 players at a time, and you'll never play an area with more than 8 people at a time.  Well eventually they might build up to 16 or 32 allowed in an area.  Like any other FPS game is capable of.  But still NOT an MMO.  But they are pulling alot of the same bad habits of MMOs, like releaseing a game with half of its content missing, and promising it will come out in patches. 

Spellborn is the only really unique MMO on the horizon though.  Much moreso than AoC, I believe.. Spellborns concepts, design, gameworld, combat mechanics (Real Time), and PVP just stomps all the others even in development, into the dirt.  Especially those Fans of Asheron's Call will finally have a game to look forward to with glee I think. 

  Well I know people say that its so players dont feel they are memorizing the same level, but they are memorizing the generic pieces of those generate randomly generated chunks.  They memorize how the chunks are going to be organized and exactly how it will play out.  Thus the whole "random" feature is just a false bit of hype to make something sound better than it actually is.

Nethack had the whole random thing down perfect.  And no other game has done it that well since, including Diablo.  Randomly generated levels is a Limitation, not a feature.  IMO.

Oh and I sent you a PM, Dante.

 Agreed, most everything Ive seen with Hellgate London so far reeks of laziness and lack of inspiration.  It almost feels like something SOE would be behind.

If it had some kind of overall focus like say, XCOM had with more and more knowledge to be gained about the Demon Invasion, how they work, what their weaknesses are, etc.  as you progressed through the game. That would have been extremely compelling to play through.  But instead they are devoting every effort into finding ways to market the game and pull more money out  of gamers pockets, especially by locking out core features of most all other multiplayer games and saying they are Hardcore features requiring a subscription. 

Imagine if this game successfully fools a large number of newbie gamers to pay a subscription fee thinking they are getting more for their money this way, then maybe EA, will make all of its future games like say Battlefield for instance,  to require subscription fees to get special weapon unlocks, special maps, or other things that come as standard parts of the $50 package today.  Maybe they will even make them all with 3D Game Server Lobby's so players can talk  to other players, so they'll naievly believe they are in a MMO.

They might continue this marketing trend in giving people Less, but making them think they are actually getting more.  Because the newer consumers easily forget the past..

I believe that Flagship is going to sell  Hellgate unfinished and say they are adding more content constantly online, then flagship can fall back on saying that there's more content if you subscribe, which there might well be.  But you've already shelled out $50 and now your stuck with either a unfinished bland game you wasted money on, or paying $10 a month continually to not only experience new things, but also to keep the added characters you make and speacial gear you might find.  I believe its a trap to incrementally lure people in.  But time will tell, maybe it will be an honestly great game.  But the signs of schemeing are very prevalent around this title especially.

Why do many people think that Randomly generated levels (at least how all developers make them) are a good thing?

The supposed random levels in many games are really just recycling of the same textures in boxy rooms in slightly different order.  They dont effect how you play through the level one bit.

Rather than make a level randomly get built, why not design the level with the best detail you can that actually fits into a story, and then that level could come up randomly maybe when you enter portals.  

What truly should make the level replayable over and over is the variables that occur between different monsters that might be on the levels and how they end up interacting with the players randomly.  You can run through the same level many many times and constantly have unique things happening if the creatures have decent AI and actually ROAM the levels like a player does.  Even let some monsters be smart enough to use loot they randomly find even on other dead monsters against the players.  Imagine a monsters running over to a weapon dropped, picking it up, and using it!  Or other items this way.  This creates infinite varieties of situations each time you play through the levels.  Maybe some creatures on a level may be against other creatures, and when they randomly stumble accross each other could end up in their own fights.  These kinds of dynamic situations allow for replaying levels and getting new experiences each time.  Having a radom level generator is the Laziest method of all for creating replay value.  A well designed Level with thinking monsters running through are 100x more interesting to experience again and again than the same crap over and over in "randomly" built levels that look ultimatly the same anyway and have no gameplay value because they are simplified for the purpose of being randomly generated.  You see you give up much much more gameplay by having a random level generator built in, than you gain.  

I wish there would be sites that would setup interviews with developers more as a discussion and engage them more about these kinds of concepts rather than just asking them the same tired questions with no followups. 

  Some of ya here mighta heard about Spellborn, but I was totally suprised to find out about it just today here on MMORPG.COM and normally I got my eye out for anything like this.  If you haven't seen this yet, then check out the Video Interview with the devs who run through the game in great detail and show off things that Asheron's Call fans have all been seeing only in our dreams before.  The designers themselves were big AC fans who played on  DT PVP server.  They've done what I was beginning to think empossible with current Netcode on MMOs.  They go so far beyond what Age of Conan has only barely been able to break away from.

Anyway check it out. I'm pretty psyched now about it..