I was able to sneak some time in.  I loved D2 - though I could only manage a few play throughs before I got bored :)

So far, I like it.  I do miss the erie atmosphere of D2 and D1.  I feel like they've made some great useability improvements over D2 (though online only is a huge step back).

I like the advancement system.  RPGs in general are moving away from the talent/skill tree system in favor of some form of "deck" building system.  We've seen so many takes on the talent tree, I think Blizzard had no choice but to try something different.  I also think making the game compatible with consoles is another reason for the system.

It definitely isn't as genre defining as D2 was - and Blizzard will get flack for that.  I think thats the inherent problem.... it feels like another D2 clone.

I found it strange indeed.  The game is just a bit 'different'.  The game ran fine for me.  I thought the game looked awesome.  The human city felt very much alive.  However, there were tons of players and it felt like a zerg fest in the gameplay areas, because of that, it was hard how to gauge how combat really "worked".  There were also a lot of notifications popping up here and there.  If anything, I would describe my initial experience as overwhelming.

However, when going through a part of my personal story... it was a nice break from the chaos :)  I would say combat is "different" but the more I played, the more I was getting accustomed to it.

Originally posted by Celusios

They pretty much have by this stated that case is a total joke. No company who truly felt it was in danger or truly had stolen assests would begin the process of taking people's money for a product to come out.

As far as I can tell, NCSoft is hating.

 

Umm... if a company stole assets to develop a product, wouldn't it be safe to assume they would be more than happy to take money for said product (even with the possibility of having to cancel said product due to a court order)?

Originally posted by SBFord

Originally posted by moosecatlol



The only thing that companions do that is innovative is take the work out of crafting, next up, companions that play the game for you.

Oh but they do :)

I have one companion that I swear will take out trash mobs much quicker than I can. 

But this type of crafting system was employed in Fallen Earth.  While you didn't have companions, your character was essentially a walking factory.  You could queue up items to craft while you were out questing, grinding, gathering, etc...  No need to stand around while you waited for items to finish.

I still log in and play (gasps).  I find the "sandboxy" feel to the game to be very refreshing.  The game is slowly but surely improving for the better.  The developers have been nothing but transparent and have aside for some short delays - have delivered on everything promised since its release.

Make no mistake - the game is still in flux and still very much a 'beta'.  The future is encouraging and 2.0 will make or break the game. 

Well...

If you are enjoying the game in its current state, why complain about paying a subscription?  If you aren't enjoying the game, simply don't sub and don't play.  Its really that simple.

While Bioware f-uped, why aren't players in general mad at the players who were gaming the system/exploit?  Its Bioware's fault for releasing 1.1 in the state it was in.  However, because of the nature of the problem, it was the players choice to take advantage of the exploit.  As a player, I'm frustrated that Bioware made a mistake, but I'm even more upset with being part of a community that like any 3 year old, will break out into a tantrum at any moment.

Bioware has a rough road ahead of itself.  Because its Bioware.  Because its Bioware that is now owned by EA.  Because its Bioware that is now owned by EA that is doing a Star Wars game, the community is going to be even more critical.  Simply put, if something similar happened in Trion's Rift, yesterday would have been a relatively quiet news day for MMOs. 

Originally posted by Vegetto

Would have loved to see the programmers faces when they were given this to work with.

No comments, it's not just an app, it's an entire game engine and no documentation on even how it fecking works? No comments on the code, that is unbelievable on a grand scale.

It's on par with being given a Chinese phrase book, but without the English language equivalents next to the phrases. A coder can get a good idea of what each line does (in the general scheme of things), but that's as far as it goes. The only way is testing it, or more precisely, breaking it, building it and testing it....

So now we know where the dev time went. And i would be shocked if that guy got sole sayso on this decision and if he didn't, what backgrounds do these idiots come from? Obviously not from a development capacity, as...i can't even put into words how stupid you would need to be to buy a half finished engine, undocumented with no code comments... Amazing.

Having experienced a similar situation - I imagine there was an extensive "transitionary" period.  You don't just buy tech like that and drop it in your engineers' laps.

For someone who has seen Hero Engine in action - it's extremely impressive - and I understand why Bioware went with it.

To be fair... SWG was always "level based".  I remember, after one of the revamps, the GUI finally started showing a "level" value for your character and one of the devs had said it was always there, just never shown.  I remember theorizing this because I remember noticing a mob's con level changing after I would purchase an additional rank in a profession tree.

While I do not play FE anymore, I did find it enjoyable.  Its as close to SWG as you can get currently.  However, depending on the type of player you are and depending on how forgiveable you are there wer a number of pitfalls....

• Clunky UI
• Unresponsive Controls
• Poor design decisions

Originally posted by Kyleran

New Frontiers came out and really added to the disatsisfaction, instead of players viewing it as an amazingly expansive new area to PVP in, it was largely viewed as unnecessarily spreading out the player base making it much more difficult to find a good quick fight, which is really all the player base ever wanted.

Right! I understood the need for a revamp of the frontiers... but its almost as if they said, "hmm.... Lets make one giant Battlegrounds zone and call it a day!"  Some really great areas got destroyed overnight.

Instead, what they needed to do was look at the most popular RvR points (like Emain) and replicate those strong points throughout each Realm's frontier.  They also needed to add some visual and structural variety to each Frontier.  Old Frontiers 'almost' had a nice balance between PvE content with the dangers of RvR.  So many great memories of a number of groups coming together to provide each other with recon and help thwart invading realm members - or the opposite, dispatching a number of groups to an enemy frontier and taking out scouting and pve groups one by one and then attempting a raid of their forts.

Mythic had their chance with WAR and didn't do so well (they were oh-so close, yet oh-so far) :(

DAoC's pve was always very lackluster.  Dungeons tended to be same-same throughout each realm with only the differentiation being the mobs that spawned and the items that dropped.  So, the grind tended to get boring.  Though, additions like Darkness Falls, Shrouded Isles and Dragons helped quite a  bit.  I was always surprised to find out that DAoC had quite the following amongst pvers.

The problem with DAoC was that Mythic neither understood their own game nor their player base.  Post-SI, things slowly spun out of control.  Outside of Darkness Falls, Realm Abilities, and the Battlegrounds, Mythic forgoed building upon RvR in favor of adding things like instanced pve dungeons, numerous Alternate Ability/Perk systems, more pve grinding, more pve raids, "eclectic" interpretations of lore, and interesting races/classes that usually never fit into the theme of each of the realms.

The two things that were DAoC's strength, Mythic repeatedly ignored: RvR and the lore and myths each Realm was based on.

Only thing keeping me in-game is my class quests and some of the more interesting planet-wide story arcs.  I am logging in because I want to find out what happens next - which is a good thing.

However, once the storylines run dry (if and when that happens, I dunno), I probably won't stick around much longer after that.  Its no different than with Rift.  The rift system was interesting enough to keep me coming back... but once the luster wore off and it became your 'standard' mmo, I left. 

Unfortunately - while providing entertaining diversions from the most enjoyable aspect ( the storyline), pvp/space/crafting aren't engaging enough to keep me subbed once I get bored with the quest lines.  I'm not one for playing for the sake of playing or faction/raid/quest grinding for the sake of improving a character.

Thankfully, I missed out on Balmorra.  When I left Dromund Kass, I was level 19.  My class quest was actually now two quests... Go to Balmorra and another to Nar Shaddaa.  When I opened the galactic map in my ship, I didn't think to look at Balmorra first given the quest that pointed to Nar Shaddaa was first on the list.

It wasn't until after completing some space missions that I realized that Balmorra was designed for levels 16-20 and Nar Shaddaa for 20-24.  By the time I set out for Balmorra, I was already level 24 and focused solely on completing my class quests despite the urge to partake in some side missions.

Once again, I'm given two paths to follow: Alderan and Tatooine... While I do like the ability to complete these branches in whichever order I choose, there is clearly a more "preferred" path as the level ranges are suited to specific ranges with no overlap. 

My current gripe is just that, there are clearly missions there for the sake of having missions (lots of them) and aren't in any way all that exciting.  The class quests are intriguing and so are the planet-wide arcs. 

Interesting...

I think to be successful(i.e. rolling in enough money to cover development, maintenance and growth of the game)  in the MMO industry going forward, you will need to think outside the box.  Whether that is with your revenue model, development process or gameplay designs -- something will need to change.

With its budget, SWTOR has no choice but to be grossly successful.  If it doesn't hook gamers, it'll be just another MMO to throw on the shelf next to WAR, AoC, Vanguard, Aion...  Some of these games had technical issues, some had design issues, and some were fairly polished with the exception of content that got old quick.  Gamers would have put Rift on the chopping block if it wasn't for Trion's ability to churn out content at an extremely quick pace.  SWTOR's failure (knock on wood) would be a huge blow to both MMO devs and gamers alike.

I was just reading an article about Minecraft and utilizing this development approach may be just what a smaller developer has to do to produce a winner.  While the devs of Minecraft didn't utilize a more contained release plan, they did release the game when it was in an alpha state.  Players got to jump in at a earlier than usual point (at a cheaper price) while being able to enjoy the game it was even so early in its development. 

To some degree, Square Enix has taken this approach with FF14.  When the realized they made a huge mistake, they quickly changed development plans and temporarily canceled subscriptions until the game was "back on track".

I could have sworn there was talk of a persistant FvFvF zone in the game in addition to your standard battleground challenges.  I hope we will see this.

Sounds promising.  Hopefully, Funcom will let this bake in the oven until its ready.  Funcom really can't deny the fact that launching AoC when it did really hindered the game's overall potential.

I'd rather see Bethesda find a way to do multiplayer in the spirit of Dark Souls.  Essentially, have players interact primarily indirectly and have it tie into the story's overall concept.  Things like having traces of my game or consequences of my actions leak into other players' games...  That'd be pretty sweet.  Or even a scenario where players get sucked into a void and are forced into a situation where they can either work together or against each other - the results having an impact on each game.

That or a separate multiplayer experiance (such as in ME3) where the single player campaign can be affected by your multiplayer games.  For example, leveling up soldiers that are imported into single player and will take part in an epic final battle or can be used as companions.

I am almost expecting a DDO-like experience with the exception of user-generated content thown into the mix.  That is what it sounds like their attempting to do.

I remember when the Bioware's NWN was in development, they talked about hosting their own persistent character "vault".  However, they scrapped that idea in favor of letting servers host their own character "vaults" or allowing players to bring in their own local characters.

I'll be back... I actually enjoyed the game a lot.  I didn't have an issue with the "lack of content".  I thought SOE actually had a solid game on their hands (with the exception of a few things).

I do hope SOE can maintain their development pace.  I'll stick around and may even use the cash shop.

I think Turbine really set the standard in terms of F2P offerings.  I really did enjoy DCU and hope it gets the attention it deserves now that its been converted.

Overall, I think gamers were a bit hard on the game (there were issues) but it was a solid game overall.