Originally posted by nomss

Originally posted by EverSkelly

Horrible graphics..

Another game for children.

 

I love this graphic style more than photreal. And what's the deal with "game for children"?

 

Because it's not FOHTOHREEALEESTICK! And not drenched in blood and boobs, presumably. That's usually what people mean when they say something like this.

And Online MMO, huh? As opposed to the ubiquitous offline MMOGs we all know so well, I assume. :-P

Originally posted by johnmatthais

 In any case, the point is that original Fallout devs are in Interplay working on the MMO and they sold the IP when their finances went south, as we see commonly in the game development industry.

But, near as I can tell, they're not. Obsidian is working (apparently closely with Bethesda) on a non-MMO, while Interplay is tapping MAsthead, which is Bulgarian, for the MMO.

I have no idea what game you played, but it wasn't the Fallout 3 I played, that's for sure.

Incidentally, Interplay did not create Fallout, they merely published it. The creators were Black Isle, where most of the members went on to form Obsidian once BI closed. Obsidian, incidentally, is doing a new Fallout game that will be 'similar to' FO3, according to them. It's called Fallout: New Vegas. But yeah, Interplay has no right to Fallout in and of themselves. And they sold the IP when they closed their PC dev branch. So my heart bleeds for them and their incompetence.

 See, what I most love about the Fallout games is that while the world may be a depressing and dangerous place after the bombs fell, the player's actions have meaning, and if you play a good guy and even sometimes when not) the world is a better place when you're through with it. Some times it's improved for only some people, some times for everyone, sometimes some get screwed in the process, but overall the attitude is a positive one.

Fallout's world is a nuanced and complex place. I want any MMO to reflect that - not just grinding deathclaws for XP or their hands so I can make gloves to sell or something. And that, really is why I'm ambivalent about the MMO. And, well, it being in Interplay hands is not a boon, to my sight.

 Do my eyes deceive me? Is this one open to non-Americans too?

 Ah, Dark Sun halflings. Primitiva cannibals, yes. But primitive cannibals riding dinosaurs.

As for elves, I always was fond of the elves of the homegrown world of a friend of mine. A demon needed a warrior race as his servants, and brought them into the world. Their culture was much like the feudal Japanese one - warriors wielding swords of extreme sharpness and great bows of immense power with skills that were beyond the incredible, strict feudal structures and power struggles, and a lot of Zen going on. Of course, they didn 't want to serve the demon, rebelled, gave him a drubbing. Then the demon went and got a hold of that world's orcs instead, who were much more amenable to being ruled.

 Stereotypes don't come out of nowhere. I can already hear some of you sputter, but bear with me. Studies of very small children (i.e. without significant cultural imprinting) have borne out that boys tend toward toys with moving parts, wheel, and the like - toy cars, in short - while girls tend more toward anthropomorphic toys - dolls. This is a small propensity, mind you. But our ancestors will have noted this propensity, and it got codified into our societal expectations and cultural norms. So girls are now expected to like dolls, and boys are expected to like toy cars. A boy who plays with dolls is derided, and a girl playing with toy cars is seen as unfeminine. This is, of course, a problem.

Boys need the freedom to play with dolls and develop that side of themselves as much as girls need the freedom to play with toy cars. It's actually a feminist thought - why is a boy derided for playing with 'traditionally' feminine toys? Are they bad, somehow? To have equality of the sexes, the roles of the genders need to be considered equal, and they're not. Yet.

Originally posted by MMO_Doubter

Originally posted by wizyy

I think this person is abusive and deserves a warning or a temporary ban. Moderator?

 

This is the forum equivalent of running home to mommy. Pathetic.

And this, then, is the forum equivalent of not knowing why forums have moderators. Abusive behaviour is not something to cultivate, anywhere.

Although, I prefer to simply use the 'report' link, and not post about it unless I myself am directly involved. It's, well, cleaner.

 I played the crap out of Fallout and Fallout 2. Gods, but did I ever. Found the crashed UFO (velvet Elvis picture and all), got the car. They were excellent games, and Black Isle was an excellent studio. Interplay was not an excellent publisher, but oh well. I didn't care so much back then. So then Bethesda bought the Fallout license. I worried. Would they be able to do a 'real' Fallout game? I decided to wait to buy it. Finally I did get it. I was not disappointed. FO3 is IMNVHO entirely as good as the first ones. Is it the same game? No, but then time has kinda run away from the isometric turn based RPG a bit. It has its flaws - what game doesn't? But I can live with those. Moving the action to D.C. was a stroke of genius. The story itself feels eminently Fallout-esque, and the game system, while changed, fits very well.

I honestly do not get what people are complaining about here!

 To the reasonable observer it must. But that seems like standard procedure these days. Europe is only just now getting the Playstation 3's movie service, for example. Games are commonly released between a few months and a year later here - if at all. And MMOGs often divide their communities into EU/rest-of-world seeming to specifically firewall us dirty Euros away from all the others - and then of course neglect the European community, even when they lavish events and special stuff on the other one.

Bitter? Me? Noooo. What gave you that idea?

Sending packages back and forth between the US and Europe is, these days, trivially easy. I can't vouch for Asia, Africa or South America, but Europe, at least, is easy, and not hugely expensive - at least it hasn't been the innumerable times I've sent packages to the US, or my mother-in-law has sent packages to my wife here in Sweden. So 'shipping constraints' sounds a bit thin, to me.

---

Originally posted by ghstwolf

300 people (12% of a <2000 person pool)

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To some people, everything should be free, I guess. Never mind that that $15/mo pays for regular, pretty cool upgrades of the game, which introduce new, long-sought-after features. And mind you, you don't pay a penny for those updates themselves, like you do with other games *cough*WoW*cough*. The extras, well, they're for people who want all the goodies there are to get, and who think that putting some cash into a company that's proven its track record with making a cool game and then supporting and evolving it through five+ years is a good idea. So people like me.

I'll be getting GR, just like I'll likely also get Champions Online.

Originally posted by Nahnar

I agree with you.... in some part... but lets think on other players too to have fun, example: PVP mystery game.... evry1 could have fun, evry1 happy.

How would that work? I am having some trouble reconciling the ideas of (ultimately non-violent) mystery solving with (rather violent) PVP. Give us your thoughts on the matter, I'm curious. :-)

Originally posted by Yamota

Also, most games, cater to the young male audience (young being anywhere from 15-35) and that audience likes, fictional, violence so a non-violent MMO would not cater to the majority of the audience. Possibly would it appeal to the female audience but isnt there already such an MMO, Sim something? Where you just live and do nothing special. Sounds pretty boring to me. *shrug*

RTFA. The Sims Online died horribly in flames.

Also, please don't paint people with that brush of yours - it's a mite wide. 15-35 males may play MMOGs with violence, but then, so does a large proportion of females. This is well documented in various studies. And similarly, I for one (at 31) would definitely play a mystery MMO - likely together with my wife, who also loves the adventure/mystery genre. It just remains to be seen if it can be done right.

Some of the ideas that have come up in this thread sound promising (NYPD Online, as told above being the prime example IMO), and generating content can be done, if you know your coding and your software design, and have a few bright ideas. A Clue/Cluedo style setup, where the elements of the mystery are generated on the fly by the game from a number of prefab pieces would work quite well. Clue has IIRC 6 murder weapons, six suspects, and eight or nine murder locations, and it's a rasre thing that the same mystery comes up. Now, instead, have 20-30 different possible weapons, 30 motivations, 50 suspects, and a bunch of pieces of evidence to add into the mix, and a murder mystery can be generated that has a 1-in-20-million chance of ever being seen again. Then add other types of crimes or mysteries to solve. Suddenly, guides are much less useful, and player mystery solving skills become paramount. Cooperatively, you could work as a team on it, some players interrogating suspects and interviewing witnesses, some  finding clues at the scene of the crime, some doing lab work, etc. Solving the crime means having the evidence to present a criminal case, or similar, for which the whole team would then get credit.

No violence involved. But lots of thinking and putting pieces together.

Originally posted by hogscraper

 [NYPD Online]

 

I would play the shit out of this game. People would start wondering where I was and stuff.

Being fat is not funny.

Being fat and dressing up as a Spartan from 300 is funny!

There's lots of costumes an overweight man with a little self-awareness could pull off. A Spartan is not one of them, and just like a (hairy, skeevy-looking) man dressing up as Faye from Cowboy Bebop is funny, so is this. It's not the fat - it's the complete incongruity of character to player.

Originally posted by Zorvan

I'm a certifiable butthole in real life.

Glad you said that, and not me, buddy. ;-D

But you have a point. It goes both ways. Some people, offered anonymity, become, as Gabe of Penny Arcade puts it, 'utter f***wads' [bowdlerized to protect the guilty]. Others go the opposite way. It makes for an interesting look at society - how much of people's good behavior is enforced solely by the threat of being shunned by their peers? And how many of us hide good hearts under hard exteriors for whatever reason?

Originally posted by japo

Reward players for discovering "X" number of places with cool looking stuff.

Give special gear for completing 100, 500, 1000, etc quests.

Give eye candy stuff for "x" number of hours in game.  This rewards people who play a bunch but RP or do other things besides getting toomax level.

Give rewards to crafters that create a ton of stuff.  Sure they get cash from selling stuff, but give them cool robes or cloaks....stuff like that.

Yes. This is sensible thinking. CoH did some in  this direction with its badges (that could be used as name 'epithets' of sorts) for all sorts of things, from defeating certain enemies or missions, to exploration, to crafting, to trading on the marketplace or spending a certain amount of time in a zone, but bigger, better, more of this!