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.

Does Perpetuum still have the same mechanics as the closed beta? Because if it does, it's got to be one of the most dry and boring games ever.

Collecting resources was an epic waste of time and moving your character around in combat felt more like an RTS than an RPG of any sort. In fact, much as I wanted this game to be pwnsauce, they ripped the entire goddamn GUI out of EVE Online. It felt like EVE in many respects... Save for the fact that it's magnitudes more boring. Even missions consisted of nothing more than a text terminal dump of the objective. About the only positive point I was able to find was that it was pretty in terms of graphics. Of course, all of that could have changed, but it was bad enough not to entice me into further downloads. Playing this game was literally like watching somebody exclaim, "EVE Online! But with Mechs!"  ..just infinitely more fail added to change things up.

Back to playing Iris Online.

This piece is kinda light on detail, the critical piece in being how they impliment it. Runes of Magic is the only MMO that I can recall (ignore the title to the left; I've washed my hands of that game for other reasons) that successfully addresses the issue of healer availibility though dual classing.

Since GW2 doesn't sound like its going that route, I'm guessing that either every class has a healing talent tree that you can spec and/or you can swap talent trees ala late Warcraft. The swappable build (assuming they do it somewhat traditionally) is almost nessisary to kill healer availibility issues... After all, the reason they're so rare is because of the sacrifices you make to actually be good at it. Leveling a priest in Warcraft was liking driving a nail through steel with your forehead only up until recently, and the game has been out how long now?

I don't know if I'm down with every class having priest abilities since you begin to kill of the pretige of the class itself. I understand why they're doing it, but now the ability is no longer unique... RoM can get away with it because you can also go double dps, dps/cc, etc and those classes won't have access to priest abilities. The presitge of a priest is somewhat maintained.

Depending on how GW2 executes, of course. It's like yelling, "I'm an Elementalist!" while everybody looks at you, rolling their eyes, saying, "Yeah so are we."  I guess if you're tryin to destroy any unique value healing has as a class, then that's the way to do it. Though I think they would have been better off giving it to a select few classes and implimenting swappable talent trees so the ability itself has at least some unique value.

My only other concern is stat allocation (something RoM doesn't address). Just because anybody can be a priest and something else, doesn't make your character effective at both; even once you change talents. Warrior <--> Priest = some messed up stat structure that would need to be addressed.

Like i said, article needs moar meat :)

Alright, pissing into the wind here, but seriously...

"Free to Play" is your web based email account. You maintain full usage of it while the providers make use of other revenue streams. Your email isn't delivered slower just because you didn't pay for the cash shop item to speed it up. Your ability to add attatchments doesn't vanish because your week rental expired... Your email is, by and large, fully functional whether you ever pay into the system or not.

What the current crop of trialware devlopers are insisting is free to play- including and especially LotR Online -simply isn't. It's free to log in. It's free to grind a few monsters. But serious advancement and competition? That's where your freedom stops. One look at LotR comparison chart confirms this all day long, and if you doubt that, look at DDO as an example of a ready made blueprint. Back in the day, this was called Shareware: You use a crippled version of a piece of software and pay to unlock it's full abilities.

Sound familiar?

Believe it or not, I don't have a problem with this, but dammit, call it for what it is. Whatever f2P was supposed to be, I'm pretty sure it wasn't a panzi scheme to lure gamers into a title under the false pretense that they wouldn't  pay- or even be expected to pay -anything into a cash shop of any kind to normalize their advancement to compete with paying customers.

And even if you were one of the ones that survived the cashless grind to the top, the game still wasn't built with you in mind. It was built in the expectation that somebody else would pay in, and the leveling curve, mobs, etc, are designed with that in mind. That alone is a shady business practice.

True free to play doesn't build a game around paying customers. It doesn't expect its gamers to pay into a cash shop. It doesn't try to lure them in with a promise of non-monetary gameplay while the host website pushes the top-up button on every page.

It's possible to make real, free to play gaming... Your email proves that. Just the suckering of people thinking they're going to get a free MMO experience while subtly weening them onto the teet of the cash shop is easier and much more profitable.

Originally posted by junzo316:  Since Turbine nor Codemasters ever release sub numbers, I have to call BS on the chart, sorry.  At best, this chart is a guesstimation.  Which means....made-up of inaccurate info.  It does have nice colors, though.  =)

Actually, I cross referenced the data from a number of sources and decided the MMOchart.com was the easiest to post. I also mentioned google because i knew there would be somebody- more than likely several somebodies -who would get defensive with the suggestion that their favorite MMO wasn't doing as well as they thought it should.

MMOcharts itself is regarded as being reasonably accurate. In fact, visit their website and see how they collect the data. It's not hard to do. Even if you don't go there, at least do some minute amount of legwork and come back with your own substantiations before accusing one of baseless inaccuracies; especially when you haven't bothered to produce your own. The  external source doesn't mean its bad data, and in the end, you get the same reply as Scot (below).

Originally posted by Scot

Ozzallous – on the basis of your subscription graph Lotro had ZERO subs by the first month of 2008. Sorry but we were playing then, I am on a overloaded sever now, the graph is pants. :D

Reading is hard, isn't it? To requote the second paragraph of the relevant post:

"Here is where somebody notes the chart only goes to mid 2008. I know. The google key words are "mmo statistics chart". Do your own research and learn something."

To clarify the mystery, this is why LotR went microtransactional--

Courtesy of MMOchart.com

Just so it's absolutely clear, I'm not making a judgement call on whether Rings is "good" or "bad", but I will note that it is tough to support an MMO whose peak was 200k after launch, and has been steadily declining since. You'll also note that DDO was suffering from the same condition prior to going trialware in 2009.

Here is where somebody notes the chart only goes to mid 2008. I know. The google key words are "mmo statistics chart". Do your own research and learn something.

Financially, it probably made sense to switch gears and operate under a microtransactional model where you could at least get more eyeballs on your game, even if your income tends to be less stable. "Something" is better than "Nothing" and nothing was exactly where both DDO and LotR were heading. I would have thrown both games under the microtransactional bus too with these numbers. Conversly, there's a reason why EVE Online hasn't gone trialware and the numbers bare that out.