1. An economy.

2. Severe curbing of vendors to help achieve #1.

3. Varying tradeskill stat combos to encourage specialization in order to achieve #1.

4. Take leads from EVE in regard to a contracts system and encouraging long distance "foot" trade, like caravans. In order to achieve #1.

EDIT:
 

I wonder if 4 is even possible, are all sectors level-specific? That would be a shame. Item 2 pretty much *must* be done eventually.

Originally posted by enzyme

then today while messing around the house/gaming I ended up watching Hardware (MARK 13) and The Last Man on Earth (the original B&W movie with Vincent Price,  based on the Matheson novel, that later was remade as The Omega Man with Charleton Heston, and then updated and remade as I am Legend with Will Smith).

I didn't know about The Last Man on Earth, I'm going to have to go find that one now. I haven't seen I am Legend largely because I regard the Matheson novella as a hallmark of 20th century literature. Does anything capture the persistent anxiety and alienation of Cold War society better than that book? I personally do not think so.

It seems like everything Will Smith is in is Disneyfied and from what I have heard I am Legend seems no different. To me, that would be an incomparable travesty. So I just ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist. Like 99% of Hollywood. So sad.
 

I think that is also why we are seeing more PA in pop consciousness. I know America, and I might guess the other Europeanized countries all have high degrees of alienation going on resulting at least some from the general anxiety of the whole "War on Terror" fiasco. Creeping security-state governance feeds it. And as "globalism" (aka global corporatocracy) moves from the birth stage of the 80s and 90s to now where it is really coming into its own, expect to see it get worse.

Legally challenging such foundational concepts as torture-prohibition and (in America) the government's responsibility to be held by international law (the Geneva Convention), combined with the advent of the age of De-Industrialization (known in a "gentler time" (lol) as the Information Age) has people in general society feeling rightly uneasy.

Whatever your viewpoints, tell me you are not feeling generally anxious in some way about the next 20-50 years. Even if you are optimistic, the fact remains you are being optimistic in response to your unease. We all feel it.

And this is why PA material is only going to get more popular as a meme over the next 10 years. Then it will either fade because good things start to happen and people's unease lessens. or things get worse and nobody wants to be reminded in such  a stark manner what their real life has become.

EDIT: Also just saw the bit about World War Z, I highly recommend that. I would feel comfortable saying it is the I Am Legend of our time. I would hope also that is accurate in portraying those of us living now as being more optimistic than the time of our parents (which I Am Legend predicted so very well).

I never played AC2, but I've been curious now for some time. I would definitely give it a try if it was re-released.

I have a pretty strong feeling, though, considering the baggage from killing the title and the length of (technological) time passed that this is never going to happen. But an AC3? I could see that happening.

If you think about it, bringing the AC2 engine up to date with the modern AC engine (I forget what they're calling it) would probably be a big enough task to warrant just creating a new title altogether. Of course I could be wrong, look at what Valve did when they updated their older games to Source. But Valve is an exceptional gamesmaker, so I won't bother to count on it.

LOTRO does have its problems, but for me it is the best of the themepark games out right now.

It has a generally more mature community than any other MMO I have been involved with, and in the world of MMORPGs this is a rare and precious commodity. At the beginning of WoW the community wasn't too bad, but that went downhill quick as all the Counter Strike trolls found their new calling life.

The funny thing, is that I have also experienced the "boredom" that others here have been talking about. I can really relate to that and to the comment about the "delayed" combat. I even stopped playing for a while in 2007 because mainly because of those reasons. (The final straw was seeing some dumbass running around Combe called "Iclubbabyseals" - community really makes or breaks games for me.)

But I came back and I am pleased I did. While there are still trolls and mental rejects running around, they are sadly everywhere in life (just look at the modern republican US political party - I'm sure the GOP of Lincoln have been turning over in their graves for several decades now). The great thing about LOTRO is that these people are a very weak minority. Again, community is almost everything to me in an MMO. And, if not LOTRO overall, at least Landroval has one of the best communities in any game out right now.

But the game is still mechanically a bit "boring." But I no longer find it that way, because I have adapted myself to the play style. The biggest adaptation was getting away from the style drummed into my brain by playing WoW for a few years and getting back to playing more of an RPG. In other words, getting out of the "RUSH RUSH to end game, collect phat lewts, rinse, repeat, RUSH RUSH RUSH). Adapting back from playing a RPG-themed RTS and back to a real RPG. I love that fact there is not a focus on "end game" in LOTRO and I actually worry that they will start focusing on it to cater to the lowest common denominator.

As to mechanics, though, more and more I am finding I am bored to death with the click and press 1,3,2,1,4 style of play that is endemic to 99% of the MMOs out there. But that is not LOTRO's problem, but rather an industry-wide problem I think. Out of all the point-and-click themepark MMO's out there, to me LOTRO has gotten it the most right.

Originally posted by Emeraq

I find that most of the time the problem is that the customer doesn't know how to read... Or just doesn't care to read, and assumes a lot... I could be wrong.

No, you aren't wrong. Not by a longshot. Even though most people can read, I believe the majority are *functionally* illiterate. The OP seems a case in point. But, boy can he use the swears!

Originally posted by levsix

I don't think this transition is going to bring them the profits they are fantasizing about. It is a niche game. But still, If it helps to keep the game alive and provides a positive experience for their player base, great.  I  liked DDO's combat system, the traps, and the puzzles. 

QFT

I personally am pleased with this announcement, as I do not currently subscribe but really would like to. I just don't have the time to play or the extra $15 laying around for a sub. From my personal angle, I see this playing out as me logging in every so often to the free game and playing then occasionally every random month or two actually laying out some cash for a sub.

Hearing about RMT item shops do make me nervous for the state of the game, but I'm willing to give Turbine the benefit of the doubt until we see how it actually turns out. DDO as it is now, compared to how it was at launch, is magnitudes better. I'm going to wish Turbine luck in bringing the game to a wider audience.

I don't really know *that* much about the VG saga, but I know enough to surmise that the fiasco was due to mismanagement and not meeting deadlines.

I find Vanguard - the game itself - utterly brilliant. If the 3D system wasn't so sucky and it was run by a business that wasn't equally sucky (SOE), it would be the ultimate current-day MMORPG, IMHO.

Most of us learn from our mistakes, hopefully if BM learned from the various mistakes made on VG I am extremely interested and excited to see what new game or concept may come next.

EDIT: I also found the "made on a mac" logo at the bottom of his page interesting. Probably put there by whoever he paid too much to design the page for him. Sigh, mac fanbois.

I have to echo what was said above about the warden - it is a really great class, but not at all noob friendly (unless you are a genre veteran, maybe).

I also can't state this strongly enough: if this is your first LOTRO character take the EXPLORER trade-skillset. Leveling your trades in LOTRO gets very expensive. If you want to fully experience that part of the game you may find yourself becoming disenchanted with it due to your being broke all the time. Being an Explorer, however, can actually help make you a bunch of money via trading your harvested and refined materials.

If you are brand-new to MMORPGs go with a hunter, champ or captain - or perhaps a rune keeper. If you are veteran of WoW, EQ or other games like that then just pick the class that sounds like you would like it. None of them are really *that* hard to play for someone who is familiar with the MMO concepts and general controls.

One thing to note about many of the hunter skills and some of the othe classes' skills is that they are induction based. I think that is the right word. Similar to mage skills in WoW - meaning you will need to stand in one spot for X seconds before the skill is fired. Some people (in the past myself included) have had a hard time adjusting to it.

In this game if you start a class and by level 10-20 you aren't really enjoying it, then drop it and start another. As I've said elsewhere here, LOTRO with the wrong class for you can be boring but with the right class for you it is extremely fun.

I recommend taking your time and rolling two more characters to start and playing them up to level 10-20. I say this because it feels like to me that LOTRO classes are truly dependent on your playstyle.

Me personally I played a champion for quite some time and have been pretty bored with it - it gave me a somewhat negative impression of the game though I've stuck with it. And guess what? A few months back I rolled a Lore Master and have never looked back - my LM has me coming back for more again and again. Where before I could fall asleep playing, now I have to force myself to quit or I won't get any sleep at all.

If you want to stick with one character I say play your first choice to about level 20 and if it doesn't catch you, try another class without looking back at the old one. Keep going until you find the perfect match, and you will have a blast in this game.

I don't even want to try and speculate how many players there are, but I can tell you from my own informal observations there are more people than last year. It seems like the there was a steady build-up to MoM , peaking sometime after its release and now tapering off. But that is just what I have seen on Landroval.

I level really slow so I spend most of my time in the lowbie areas and it seems like there is a fairly consistent supply of fresh blood, also. While there are numerous alts running around, it seems like the first-time player population has remained pretty healthy.

I'm running an AMD 6000 (dual 3.1ghz), 4gb DDR2 1066, with a nv 9800gtx and the game hitches and stutters on me quite a bit. I get pretty good fps, there is just a lot of stuttering - which seems to be dependent on population and/or time of day. Yesterday I logged into Seradon IoD and it was pretty bad, I logged back in last night at about 12:30am (US Pacific) and there was almost no stuttering.

It's nothing that huge but considering everything else it's enough to play into me deciding not to resub. I really love the ideas behind VG (especially crafting and diplomacy which I totally love) but between me not really having the time to play any MMO (let alone one a deep RPG like VG) and the crappy performance I probably won't resub.

If I had the extra money laying around I might resub just to support the project, but then we have the SOE factor - I am not keen at all on giving them my money - just because. I was surprised I even left the station launcher on my comp after abandoning it when I was faced with those wretched pink flying ewoks in SWG in February. Not only did I dislike those floating pink teddy bears, I found their very existence in the game offensive.

Vanguard is an excellent game, though. If SOE sold it to someone else and that someone else gave it the love it deserves I wouldn't even think twice about supporting it (even if I can't play as much as I'd like).

Originally posted by Elikal

I must say I came to MMOs from a Pen and Paper background, and I was instantly disappointed in how non-changing the world was. Everyone got the same "kill 20 rats" quests, and 90% of the quests was a copy-paste version of it. Insofar I tasted enough of this simple gameplay now. I think that past games caught the spirit of open world a bit better. The uncertainty added a sort of "reality" that maybe wasnt really there.

Let me make an example. In the old days of say, when Ultima V-VII was new, graphics where not photo realistic, but nice for me. Much of it was not in the game, but rather in my mind. Or with pearls like the first System Shock. I felt that game was WAY more spooky than say Bioshock. Photorealism kinda kills a bit of the fantasy. No shock is as great as the one in your head. And IMVPO the "gaps" in games like UO and EQ1 were similarly filled with the imagination of the players. There was also SO MUCH to discover, so much for such a long time. I recall well it took me YEARS to really discover the majority of the SWG content. That too had that language learning thing. I dont want to preach the return to SWG or EQ, but the way games are made today just IS a sort of simplification, also. Which add it all this.

I pretty much completely agree with you on this, except I have to say the first time I encountered the Saturnines in Bioshock - I kept hearing this voice talking around me ... I walked up to some workbench and there is this Blair Witch-looking goat mask on the table all spooky and stuff and then I turned around to leave and this freaky guy is standing right behind me!!

I literally almost p1ssed my pants on that one. I 've had similar moments like that in the old games, even the text-based games, but not quite like that. Bioshock is a good example of a game that didn't necessarily sacrifice quality story and gameplay for quality graphics.

In the old days, games were not more personal, or not much more. But we FELT like it, because they were vast, open and it took time to explore and know it all. So there always was this imagined secret lands or regions not yet seen in our minds. Today it is all mapped and charted and explained in Allakazam, and everyone uses the "optimal skill setting" as explained of website XYZ. It is no longer really the feeling to exploring strange new worlds, but to see familiar things over and over again. The novelty is gone for us, and the game scopes have also become more narrow IMO. Even tho the existing parts have been perfected, no doubt.

Personally I think the next MMO frontier is player-generated content. That is the only way to truly achieve this - allowing players to make their own instanced dungeons, lairs and whatnot. Think of a game like DDO where you get to run a different dungeon every night instead of running the same ones over and over.

Of course all of this is only going to last as long as the cheap energy keeps flowing and our monetary system stays afloat. Once the internet goes back to being a military and scientific communications tool instead of the commercial gang-bang it is today I have a feeling Pen and Paper will make a comeback in a big way ... and there is no Allakhazam or Wowhead for your own imagination.

EDIT: Also, I forgot to mention (remembered after looking at my sig) if anyone really wants all of the cool stuff that has been discussed follow the Lusternia link in my sig - bettery yet go there then follow the Vote link to the top site it's connected to and you will find thousands of MMORPGs that offer all of this and more. The thing is they are MUDs and and ZERO graphics. But if you crave the unknown and want to face penalties and extremely deep gameplay there are many, many that will give you that.

I went Hobbit just because I like the houses so much. I originally had an Elf house and it was great but I just couldn't resist the lure of the Shire!

I was curious about the Defender of Gwingris so I looked it up and thought I might as well post a link here for anyone else who is curious

quest:

http://lorebook.lotro.com/wiki/Quest:Remaining_Goods

sword:

http://lorebook.lotro.com/index.php/Weapon:Defender_of_Gwingris

Originally posted by trancejeremy

Originally posted by avalon1000

I did not enjoy this game at all.  Turned based is not my cup of tea.  I have played LOTRO for one year now and have to say I have yet to find a better game (although that might change with AION).  The game has decent graphics but not up to par with LOTRO.   For a free to play game (not really as there is a cash shop and cash shop games can end up costing way more than pay to play games on a month to month basis)  it's not bad.  I just cannot get into the turn base fighting system (guess it's because I am not Asian?).  The game is now deleted from my computer as I saw no point in keeping a game I did not enjoy. 

 

I don't understand what liking turn based has to do with being Asian. You know, early CRPGs in the West were all originally turn based. Wizardry, Ultima, Bard's Tale, Might & Magic.

It's just that as computers became more accessible to people, games got dumbed down in the West, and it was all real time clickfests or eventually FPSes (aka Whack a mole). But even then, it's not entirely dead.

Maybe he meant the JRPG style of combat which I think really hasn't penetrated into NA/EUR psyche excepting directly through Asian games like the Final Fantasy games. A notable exception would be the fantasy strategy game Disciples that uses combat very similar to FF (but since it's Russian does that make it Asian?).

But avalon should make sure to be more precise with language perhaps, as technically turn-based gaming has been present in all cultures since Chess, Go or Mankala - even Poker or Monopoly. It's just an easy way to structure gameplay.

Would one count the battle mechanics of games like Wizardry or Might and Magic 2 as being of the same style as Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy or Atlantica? The only thing they really have in common is that the fighting takes place on a separate screen. I would argue they are fundamentally different, to understand why I say this compare Wizardry to Might and Magic then compare Final Fantasy to Disciples. Each pair is very similar to its counterpart, but each pair is quite different from the other pair.

Of course whether you are comparing those games or the SSI Gold Box games or the Infinity Engine games (my favorite of all of them) it is all turn-based.

P.S. I am a LOTRO fan and have been at that game for quite a long time now. I think Atlantica is pretty good too, although I don't know if I will be sticking with it as I'm not sure if it is my cup of tea. But I can see how other people would like it.

I'm in the process of trying this game, it seems pretty interesting. But I can say the biggest barrier to entry for me at the moment is the crappy Final Fantasy art direction. [rant] Why must my dude look like a lady? I swear he even has breasts, and not decent fat man-boobs like I have, I'm talking petite teen girl breasts.

OK? My avatar is supposed to be a MAN, not a gender-bender. Men have hair on their nutsacks and their faces. They do not shave their legs and they do not wax poetic about the gallons of hair gel it would take to achieve the wussified haircuts there are to choose from.

I'm a man - I like to drink beer and watch naked women dance, I fart a lot, I am prone to randomly head-butting people and have a gloriously hairy muffin-top waistline that showcases my pimply butt crack.

Sigh ... this is why I don't play JRPGs. [/rant]

Other than that, I will slog through the torpid wasteland of moody teen metro-sexuals because I am very interested in the gameplay.

EDIT: OK So I just got down with playing for a few hours. The game is pretty enjoyable in terms of how it is structured. It is a little rough, but nothing that I've noticed would make me not want to play the game. The JRPG-esque battles are pretty addicting and I can appreciate the added strategy that must go into each one. Haven't touched on crafting yet. So far I like it. Even if I feel like a Disney version of Robert Smith from the Cure.

Originally posted by DarkPony

Originally posted by fortuente

Originally posted by DarkPony

Originally posted by Bruticus_XI

Sex sells, period.

 

Aye, and Legolasses as well. So forest elfs got two unique selling points right there.

And two fine selling points, indeed. Oh wait, you mean sex and Legolas sell. I thought you meant that forest elf's pointy nipples sell. They sure sold me, lol.

Isn't the great thing about gaming? It's like I'm a teenager who has never seen nipples again ... rather than an old man who will probably never get to see non-saggy nipples again. Sigh. Being old sucks. At least I have scantily-clad elves to look at.

 

*carefully pats Fortuente's back*

Bless us we are men, mate. Even when we get old we still have some appeal to women. George Clooney wasn't exactly young when he got voted 'man of the year'. And what about Hugh Heffner? Some females are very much attrected to seniority I suppose. Yeah, you could say; "and money!"  but there are plenty of rich younger men as well so that only rings true to a certain degree. Older women have it much harder in that regard.

I have experienced enough of life to know ... well, let's just say I am not too short on confidence where male-female interactions are concerned. Even now that I have gained 40 pounds and spend most of my time sitting in front of a computer I am just delusional enough about my attractiveness that I don't worry it  ...

However, I am currently all but married and we have a kid. So, elf boobies are all I have right now for variety, lol. Whatever you do - DO NOT GET MARRIED AND PROCREATE. Although, it is better than prison - just a bit. At least I can leave the house and while I may get butt-reamed occasionally, I don't get butt-raped.

It's funny, but I had the same basic experiences as everyone else in this thread. I couldn't stand DDO when it came out, but after a year-and-half or so I was blown away by how good it got.

Kudos to the OP for pointing out that pepole like us, also, may not have been ready for the game. I certainly matured and my viewpoints expanded within that time and I am sure that played no small part in my change of heart. But the hard work Turbine put into the game sealed the deal.

My only two complaints that remain are:

1. I don't like Eberron. Nothing can be done about that, but they have done a good enough job getting the classic D&D feel that it doesn't really bother me any more. They have done a reeeally good job at that, actually.

2. Subscription model. I wish there was a combined LOTRO-DDO sub (like SOE Station pass) because I just can't see myself subbing to more than one game at a time and I don't want to lose my LOTRO $10/mo rate - plus I want to support LOTRO also. If DDO was $10/mo or you could get both for $20-$25/mo I would be all over that and resubbed to DDO in a heartbeat. Micropayments, perhaps?

Something I would like to see in any game, but I think DDO would be particularly well-suited to: create your own dungeons/keeps. The ability to design your own instances, dungeon master style. I would pay the $15/mo on top of LOTRO or any other game sub for that feature without a doubt.

Originally posted by DarkPony

Originally posted by Bruticus_XI

Sex sells, period.

 

Aye, and Legolasses as well. So forest elfs got two unique selling points right there.

And two fine selling points, indeed. Oh wait, you mean sex and Legolas sell. I thought you meant that forest elf's pointy nipples sell. They sure sold me, lol.

Isn't the great thing about gaming? It's like I'm a teenager who has never seen nipples again ... rather than an old man who will probably never get to see non-saggy nipples again. Sigh. Being old sucks. At least I have scantily-clad elves to look at.

This thread makes me happy.

Why? I often make mistakes - big mistakes, small mistakes. We all do it, but I am an artisan of mistake-making. But I didn't sub to SWG after my recent trial. Mistake avoided. Way to go me!

Now about that metal fork I am about to stick into the toaster ...