| 256 posts found | |
|---|---|
|
Real non-WoW Fanboi's (or gurl's) First Evening in Hyboria
General Discussion « Age of Conan 5/18/08 6:19:48 AM
Originally posted by WiccanCircle
So "next-generation MMOG" to you is just better graphics? please...
my first thoughts on this game are exactly the opposite: - where is the innovation? the combat system is only marginally different than WOW-style button mashing and isn't really 'real-time' at all. - where are the new game mechanics? - all the linear, instanced outdoor areas and continual zone loading are seriously annoying. damnit i don't want a linear game... - why is the NPC so stupid? NPCs stand around in static spawns waiting to die in all these MMOGs. How is it possible in this day and age that MMOG NPC AI is still this bad???
The only MMOG i know of that it really pushing the boundaries of MMOGs and will be coming out soon is Darkfall.
AoC is pretty, I will say that, but a next step in MMOGs it is not.
It's WOW with better graphics.
Disappointing :(
|
|
Originally posted by Catizone it's obvious they don't want a lot of publicity... their website is almost always out of date; they've just started updating it with recent screenshots & info in the past few months.
the biweekly developer journals are targeted at the community, not the general public.
it's pretty obvious they'e not hunting for cheap publicity; it's surprising you think they are.
i will be surprised if they don't release by the end of 2008, all the signs are pointing to a game in the final stages of polishing. |
|
did it ever occur to you that maybe they don't *want* too much publicity about their game while it was still in hardcore development mode?
makes a lot more sense to only ramp up the info when they know for sure they are ready to release.
it's their money, their prerogative, they're not being dictated to by some faceless money-hungry publisher only interested in their income stream.
look at the coverage of AoC & WH over at betaleaks.com, they've been slammed in numerous reviews and have heavily revised their release schedules because of it.
are they really so different than DF? DF has been in devel for a long time sure, but then it has a pretty ambitious feature list. seems OK to me.
|
|
|
I prefer they didn't have a big name publisher -- means they won't be compelled to 'sell out'. |
|
Originally posted by Catizonefair enough but why would you think they care if you think it's bullshit?
i think most people have become so used to being spoonfed bullsh1t by game companies/tv advertisements/politicians that they get upset when a company just shuts the f**** up and gets on with developing a great game. |
|
Originally posted by Draccan personally i find it funny that you think the developers have anything at all to gain by falsely claiming to be developing a highly non-commerical hardcore-PVP MMOG. .. but then you should never underestimate the power of stupidity... just look at religions.
|
|
Originally posted by Catizoneagain - why should they if they don't have to?
whatever happened to developing the best possible game first and then letting players discover how great it is?
personally i don't need a bunch of bullsh1t marketing videos to make me want to play a game. |
|
Originally posted by Catizonei think you are thinking of the 'big software company' way of doing things, where they jump to beta early because of publisher/license/financial back imperatives.
DF is made by a small company, using money they raised independently. they can choose to release/test however they like.
|
|
|
Age of Conan Developer taking cheap shots on Darkfall
General Discussion « Darkfall 4/04/08 4:59:19 AM
Originally posted by Realm-Reaper the game is already real, just check out the videos, the hundreds of screenshots and dozens of developer journals. why is having a bunch of pimply teenagers playing 20mins of starter quests any better evidence than the stuff that's already out there?
i think perhaps you poorly understand the fact that DF is being developed by a fairly small private company, not a big game publisher. big game publishers throw money at marketing to hype a game to achieve big sales, often at the expense of the quality of the game.
the other big thing is that it's smart not to hype an unfinished game too early; it's better to ramp up the PR campaign as you approach beta, not before. DF was ramping up to beta in 2006, but then decided not to, because as they said, they had the money to do so. they're a small team, of course they are going to take longer to write a game with a lot of new/innovative game mechanics. nothing they have claimed is technically that difficult; it's more the case that contemporary MMOs have just been made deliberately narrow in scope and with tightly controlled consensual PVP.
as a professional software developer myself, i can understand their dilemma, and i think they are doing more or less the right thing. the "critics", as you call them, generally have a pretty poor understanding of the software development process, and don't really have any evidence to back up their claims. the simple facts are that the company is clearly well-funded, and very determined in their focus. they know what kind of game they are trying to make and haven't wavered from that vision.
well-funded + driven == a good environment for developing good software. it's am ambitious project for sure, but not unrealistically ambitious.
hope that clears some things up a little.
|
|
|
Age of Conan Developer taking cheap shots on Darkfall
General Discussion « Darkfall 4/03/08 12:50:01 PM
in terms of paid man-hours seems like AoC and DF have had very similar amount of development. DF team is small, of course it's going to take a long time so arguments about length of development time are kinda stupid.
personally, i just want a great PVP-oriented MMO to play, because everything that's currently available is sh1t. DF is the closest thing to my ideal MMO so of course i want to see it released, and as a professional prgrammer of 10+ years experience i don't see any technical reason why they should be able to deliver a great PVP sandbox game. AoC i thought might be a contender, but given all the bad writeups on betaleaks.com as well as personal comms with a friend who is in the beta makes me think otherwise.
you guys need to realise that the WOW-style of game probably requires a lot more resources than a DF-style (sandbox) game, for the simple fact that WOW has so much scripted PVE content. in a PVP sandbox game, you're more providing the world and the game mechanics, the players are providing most of the content.
|
|
Why wait for who knows how long, when you can go play AoC of WAR. Actually, you can't yet play either of those games. And guess what else - I know more than 1 person in each of the betas of *both* those games and all I'm hearing for both is a lot of disappointment. Aion *might* be a good game, but it's not yet at English beta stage and being an Asian MMO, might turn out to be a massive PVE grindfest.
Darkfall is easily the most promising upcoming MMOG on paper, the sheer depth & breadth of the game and the size of the development team always meant that it would take a long time to develop. However it's clear that a) the project is well-funded; b) they are making steady progress (see regular developer game & graphics updates); and c) the developers have no intention of releasing the game before it's "done", which is a sure sign of a highly promising game.
Reading between the lines of all the info we're receiving from the DF devs I predict that there will be a beta before the middle of the year. |
|
Originally posted by ghoul31 the game is a sandbox - you're free to farm the hell out of dungeons/mobs/whatever, just as you're free to attack whoever wherever and whenever you like. it's up to you to do as you wish. |
|
|
it's in development, same as AOC and WAR... any reasonably complex game these days takes years to develop. darkfall has a bunch of revolutionary new features for an MMOG, of course it's going to take time. |
|
|
the developers have explicitly stated that the graphics and art have been designed & optimised for large scale battles, so i highly doubt it will require super high end graphics cards.
as for general art direction, they have obviously gone for a generally dark and violent look to the game; a world torn apart by war between racial factions. i find it a pretty realistic look myself.
if you're comparing to WOW (world of (no) warcraft), well, WOW obviously decided to go for the multicolour cartoon look, but WOW has plenty of ugly too - eg: silithus, desolace, un'goro, westfall, etc etc. just depends on the zone. |
|
|
People widely accused Team Fortress 2 of vapourware because of the number of years it was in development, but now it's out and it's majorly awesome. Point being that good things take time. WOW was in development for 4 years, and those guys had a much much larger development team.
Honestly though i don't see the point of the OP. The game is clearly in development -- there are updates, screenshots and videos released on a regular basis and the development team is clearly not going hungry so they obviously have the resources to make the game exactly as they want it.
Which is exactly how they should be doing it. No point releasing tons of marketing/hype info until they are on the verge of release. |
|
|
i'd suggest also looking at Darkfall - it's a major departure from the WOW-clone mainstream. it's slanted more towards PVP than PVE i suppose, but there will still be a large amount of PVE content in there as well. it's expected to beta or release this year.
most recent vid: http://files.darkfallonline.com/darkfallvideo.zip A quick overview vid: http://youtube.com/watch?v=_bYYT6Wg3Gg Some gameplay: http://files.darkfallonline.com/darkfall_battle.zip official website: http://www.darkfallonline.com/ summary of features forum post: http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=43318
Some notable highlights: - kill anything, anywhere. friendly fire is always on, and you can attack, kill, and fully loot anything. you can be as evil or as good as you like. - no 'levels' or 'classes' - you learn, capture, or quest for skills, and those skills 'level' the more you use them - can build whole cities, ships, villages, towers, forts to control land, sea, and/or resource nodes - almost everything in the game can be player-crafted - can fight on horseback, or from ship-to-ship, and use siege weapons - PVE mobs have decent AI, and depending on their Int, will fight you in different ways. 'Epic' mobs are truly epic, and borderline unkillable. PVE mobs build their own towns and strongholds, they can attack your towns, and you can wipe out theirs. - the game is designed from the ground up to feature massive battles, 100+ vs 100+, has almost no zone loading screens, and the game world is expected to scale to 10000 concurrent players (their game servers are clustered out the ass and servers dynamically redistribute load across the cluster). |
|
There is an easy way to get the DEVs at Funcom to shut up...make REAL progress.