Seriously, I can't even post another blog entry for Old Republic anymore because I can only say "I told you so" so many damn times. It's not stellar graphically, it breaks absolutely zero new ground in gameplay, half the classes barely acknowledge their host lore and it only took a budget of 300 million to accomplish this feat. Oh, and you get the privilage of payng $15/mo for what f2p games are offering sans subscription these days.

Frankly, this game deserves to fail. Sorry Bioware.

Free to Play? Old Republic?  Excuse me while I choke on my laughter.

But seriously, this game cost what again? 300 million? It'll never see a return on investment if it does. Ever. That and the franchise is ultimately owned by a prima donna director with a ego rivaling Steve Jobs. Don't think its in the cards, frankly, but thanks for playing.

No matter what you pre-orer, you'll also get:

• 
  

  
  Hero’s Band

  
  

  Hero's Band Provides: +2 Power, +2 Precision, +2 Toughness, +2 Vitality, +2 Condition Damage, +2 Healing, and +2% Critical Damage

  
  

...Which you'll probably vendor in 10 levels or so :)

I'd be willing to bet the rationale behind the boost to 80 is that a majority of people playing for this long looking to get friends back already have toons at or near the level cap. In fact, I would say that the new SoR is functioning in much the same way the old one did: by giving the returnee a reason to keep playing with their high level friend instead of the high level friend rolling up a new toon from scratch just to play with their similiarly low level friend and content they've already been through half a dozen times.

If true, it aligns with the character xfer to the player's realm and the free upgrade to Cataclysm; effectively keeping both player and returnee together to redevolpe that insiduous habit forming relationship.

Frankly, story carries this game, nothing more, nothing less. Everything else is mediocre. I'd say more, but my blog was already a victim of the NDA hammer.

If you're already predisposed toward starwars, you'll give the medocre a pass because it does a reasonable job at representing your favorite fictional environment. If you're not all in for starwars, it's still a passably good game until something with a bit more mechanical substance comes around.

Story aside, if you're looking for a WoW alternative, prepared to be disapointed.

Three out of the five listed are F2P bedrock, frankly. It's almost worthless to point out crap like "pay to world chat" or even "buying your respecs". If you didn't expect these or other elements like them going in, you probably shouldn't be reviewing the game or genre to begin with. It's like calling out the game for "pay for XP pots".

Duh?

Information overload is a push and largely opinion based, but I will completely agree with Quest Auto-Nav. It's probably one of the worst things to hit MMOs in a while since it absolutely kills immersion in most cases. Nobody reads your quest text and they have no reason to explore. If you have lore to impart, it's wasted because your players are simply hunting for the highlighted auto pilot links.

Having said that, I hate to say Forsaken World needs it. Running back and forth across that damn capital for over 20 levels is complete and utter fail and after several dozen iterations, I don't care if the cake is a goddamn lie. SHOOT ME ALREADY.

Speaking of which, if you want to add to the fail five

• Forcing your players to run back and forth for over twenty levels in the same central quest hub for the sake of accomplishing nothing useful falls down completely.
• No talent points until twenty? WTF?
• Priests rely on two offensive abilities for over 20 levels. It's an ugly place to be.

Sure, whatever you say.

You can quote giant walls of text all day long, but that doesn't change the fact that it's just horrid for something they're actually exposing to the public, not just a limited test group. And hey, I love cartoony style graphics too and I even applaud them for stylizing their game, but that doesn't make up for the fact that that a game in this condition should have never been released to the public regardless of how you want to define 'open beta'

I mean you can quibble over the meaning of beta all day long, but that fact remains, and it's already costing them in terms of press as this thread clearly indicates.

That actually makes it sadder. Even worse because they implimented it so horrendously that it ceases to matter. That alone should be a huge red flag to avoid at all costs.

And this is open beta. The game is all but set in stone for release if past experience is any indication.

Originally posted by zigmund

The only reason Faxion is not getting the "player press" a game needs to get noticed is because it's nothing like Shadowbane, it's bug infested, graphics from the 1990's, horrible UI, lacks good game mechanics and has a host of other problems. So yes it's free, people try it for a few days and then uninstall it.Faxion needs 6 months to another year of development time.

I've got nothing but agreement on this one. Faxion is incredibly rough in any way that matters. So rough that there's no way it would ever survive as a retail product. The original Quake almost has a better graphics engine. Sound makes me cringe. After that, the gameplay isn't something you can't replicate on half a dozen better looking/feeling/playing MMOs found advertised on this very site.

Games like this just don't deserve your dollars until they show the effort.

Faxion hasn't.

I'll tell you what crippled pop values... First impressions.

Sever consolidation is a symptom of a bigger problem, frankly. Even if you take half the comments here at face value and consolidate them down to what? Two? Three servers? Sure you'll gain population density, but you're still bleeding out for overall subscribership.

It'll help you for your gameplay, agreed, but it's a bandaid solution for what is in reality a sucking chest wound.

As for it being more popular on the PS3, no surprise. The game screamed console from beta and it's big title in a small mmo console pond. Hate to say it, but this was all pretty well predicted from day zero, even with later improvement.

Smuggler = healing? Really?

That alone makes me want to cry.

A dissenting opinion.

Was not impressed. The main consensus within the in-game chat (when they weren't arguing about whether this was like warcraft or not) was "This is fun because I'm tired of warcraft." That's not exactly a glowing letter of recommendation. Likewise your zomg!soul systems are nothing more than glossed up talent trees. There are more of them and logically more combinations to be created... I hear that's in the next warcraft patch anyway.

That's sarcasm, btw.

It's a pretty game, but then that's just competent use of a newer graphics engine, even if there's nothing visionary about the world design or characters. Other games do far more than this one with a lot less. But it's still pretty.

The entire plot borrows (read: rapes) from the deathknight opening stage, save you're the scarlet crusade getting bent over while attempting to escape to northrend... Or travel back in time, your choice. I've heard people comment on how gosh, Rift is so serious. Really? Undead armies slaughtering a bigoted society down to the last man, woman and child isn't serious enough for you? Moving right along...

The rifts encounters themselves feel like a thinly veiled plot device designed to artifially "encourage" players to interact with one another so that the game can claim a social element and players can grab super l3wt. It's a paper thin excuse desperately reaching for deeper player interaction.

The rest is not remarkable enough to comment on.

Verdict: F2p inside a year.

Even button mashers have an audience. This game is clearly aimed at the console in terms of audience and complexity, with the PC market as an afterthought. As long as you can hang, you're golden since it does everything else right. Graphics, story, lore, audio... it's all bulletproof.

I'll warn you ahead of time, however... This game is barely an RPG and multiplayer instances are insanely bad in implimentation. You'll be punished for using a PC.

DCUO Combat Demystified:

• Street Fighter
• Ikari Warriors
• Streets of Rage
• Mortal Combat
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
• Golden Axe
• Ninja Gaiden
• King of Fighters
• Samurai Shodown
• Dark Stalkers
• etc etc etc

Alpha Counter:

Six Years Worth of Game Time Destroyed in EVE Pirate Raid.

Which is why I voted it for most innovative as well :)

Vindictus. But i gotta say, out of that entire list it's ironically that's Vindictus is the only game that's not an MMO. I'm sorry, but staged five manned instances does not make for "massive". It's a five man playstation game, no more, no less.

Originally posted by Vantras

I forget-does Runes of Magic have  question marks or exclamation points?

Both! Actually i stopped playing that game as soon as launch rolled around and it was still a buggy nuke fest. Old tag is old. very old. I'll ask them to correct it some day :)

Originally posted by Vantras
If you are looking for lots of jumping around, strafing, jumping, jousting, hopping, spinning, popping out of stealth to gank some "loser" this is not going to be the game for you.  If you are looking for that tiny bit of "giddy" you get when that ! or ? mark over the npc's head is no longer illuminated because you return his carrot-this isnt the game for you.  If you are the kind of guy that says "i reached level 25-where do i go next?"  this isnt the game for you.

'Loser?' 'Giddy?'  Did you just really lump ten million subscribers into the immature teenager demographic? Seriously? As for this game, only an apologist is going to ignore its critical deficiencies, and those really aren't that it rips gaming elements wholesale from EVE... It's that it does so and ends up failing badly at it.

For example, have you actually tried to mine anything yet? To do so, you'll first need to give up a weapons hardpoint on your mech. Second you'll need to equip the correct survey charges for the ore you'll be mining for. Bring thewrong charges and you won't find your ore. Third, you'll have to do a wide area search for your ore, which is denoted in a percentage formate, ie; you entire zone of scan contains 1% ore. Then you will have to hunt around for it using narrow scans to pinpoint the ore's exact location in order to mind it like some screwed up game of mining whack-a-mole. All of this prospecting is using up consumable charges, btw. Finally, if you haven't gotten attacked by now or killed by being underarmed, you can dig for crap via an obnoxiously long and drawn out- not to mention visually bland -mining process which can quite literally take five to ten minutes last  I played. Oh, and if you screwed up your loadout in any way, sorry, you can't re-equip in the field.

When I beta'd this game, the process was so complex and inanely time consuming that I literally sought out a player guide to help do it, because the game sure as hell didn't clue you in. For the love of God, I hope they changed that.

Likewise, there is very little skill involved in actually piloting your mech since most of your outcomes in battle will be decided before you ever step foot out of the garage. Once you're in open air, you navigate your mech on a two dimentional landscape that feels more like you're placing a unit in an RTS more than actually playing an MMORPG, with a ponderous pace to match. At least in EVE you could pilot your ship against an avasary in three dimentions through a beautiful space backdrop, not a landscape with the dimentions of plywood. Piloting actually takes skill. This game displays a complete lack of it.

The sky is pretty. And sure, there's terrain and some of it is even destructable. The enemy AI is actually great IMO, but all of this comes off as little more than gimmicks when pair against the bland gameplay that Perpetuum provides. It's not even mechwarrior fun, which itself suffers from the critical deficiency in that mass rules all. Perp doesn't even have character, and for that, I'm saddened.

So to answer your point directly: No, this game doesn't fail because it's EVE with mechs, even though that's certainly the basic premise behind the title. Nor is it because the people who disagree with you are looking for question marks and ganking losers. It's because Perpetuum harbors critical deficiencies that make what worked with EVE aggervate an already existing condition of fail for this title.

IMfreakinO and all that.