Originally posted by Teala

Age of Wulin, not only does it look good, but the game is a sandpark...a mix of themepark game play with sandpark attributes with skill based progression.

Watch this trailer...I am telling you it looks wickedly fun.  clicky  >>>>   Age of Wulin Trailer

Wow that looks effin tasty

Back during beta my end criticism of the game was why the heck should we pay a sub for this?  My entire criticism of the game was that it did not offer enough to warrant a subscription model.  Price of the box?  Absolutely, the developers made a solid multiplayer game, just not a solid mmo.

Ultima Online. 

The Ultima series deserves an up to date go over while maintaining certain elements of its core.

  The thing that I always liked about Ultima, being one of the seminal rpg series, is that it always held that middle ground between strategy and action.  Was easier to get into than your diablos but had more depth than anything BioWare, Looking Glass, Black Isle, Interplay etc could come up with.  The largest problem with Ultima was, sad to say, Garriott and I think that now would be a great time for it.

What went wrong for sandbox games?  Its a sandbox.

See, if you are old enough to remember sandboxes, there isn't a whole lot to do with em except get fleas lol.  Now, if you bring a bucket and there is a nearby water fountain and maybe a little shovel, then you can start building castles.  But you have to have those tools.  You can pretend you are in a quarry or working on some big project, but without the Tonka Trucks and stuff you have nothing but a pile of sand.

If someone wants to create a sandbox they, imo, need to actually build a world.  NPC's with their own personalities and motivations, quests that are generated by npcs depending on needs and wants.  Yes today I log in and the Barkeep has a task for me to go and help bring new glasses or something.  Typical fed ex quest.  But why?  Because the tavern owner needs to restock occasionally, but he doesn't always need all the same things.  Sometimes there is a special party and there is a run on Gin so tomorrow he has to restock.  But he doesn't need to restock it every darn day so I go and do the quest but Jimmy can't, unless I fail.  However, Jimmy could do something for the smith on the other block.

If you want a good sandbox it needs to be a living breathing world, something like what I think SWG wanted to be but they forgot to make sure all the toys were working and that the paint on the tonka trucks was set so kids wouldn't get tetnus :P

Originally posted by Icewhite

I don't see it as much different from the borderline libelous flash movies that appear in every campaign.

Depends, this one is touting the fact that you can go into this game and perform acts of murder against virtual representations of actual people (Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin etc).  If there were a game for shooting Obama, Pelosi and the like how quick would the condemnations come?  And if someone will tolerate virtual violence against people that they do not agree with, then they must tolerate virtual violence against people with whom they do agree with.  Tell me, would it be acceptable if those targets were your mom or your dad?  Not sure about Rush but pretty sure that Beck has a couple kids and everyone knows about the Palin kids lol.

If you equivocate because of ideology then perhaps the ideology you equivocate for is not as sound as one might believe?  A sound ideology doesnt need to rely on the failures of another for its own successes, if that makes sense.

Personally, I believe that freedom of speech protects this, just as it does other vile and disgusting things.  My issue comes when one wants to condemn one thing while defending the same.

Secondly, it has nothing to do with libel.  Nothing whatsoever.  Libel involves misrepresenting another in a damaging way.  My coming out and saying that person A is a heroin addict and pedophile, publishing it and having it cause damage to that person's character etc.  This does have to do with the advocating of violence against real people and using that as a selling point. 

Originally posted by fansede

Honestly I don't think it is wise for a gaming company to get involved in politics. Imagine if a game hd you shooting the President.? Al Sharpton?  A head shot to John Stewart and Rachel Maddow? Would you expect nothing to happen?

It brings bad attention to the gaming industry and is asking for regulatory slaps on the whole industry. You may get some media attention now, but congressional hearings - already leary of gaming companies for "corrupting the youth", now has more fodder.

http://www.newsmax.com/InsideCover/video-game-kills-palin/2011/09/07/id/410140?s=al&promo_code=CFF3-1

 

Tea Party Zombies Must Die

Looking forward to see if there is the same amount of outrage as there was about the idiotic Slavery the Video game etc.  I know that there are wack job groups out there that make whtie power games and the like and they are routinely bashed and held up as pariahs.  Wondering how blatant the hypocrisy will be concerning this one :)

Three ways in which wow ruined mmos.

1) Opened the doors to the lowest common denominator which has in turn fractured and hurt far more communities than it has helped.

2) Brought about the sense of entitlement bs into our games, thanks to number 1.  The one place where you actually had to earn your way these mouth breathers turned into a welfare state where you are given crap just because you log in.

3) Because of the huge population, again thanks to number 1, in World of Warcrap it forced other developers to throw away ideas that would have actually progressed the genre in favor of churning subpar clone after clone. 

its not an mmo.  Might as well start putting up all the zynga shit too while you're at it.

Originally posted by MMOExposed

I noticed the mmo community for some reason cheered Anet on, when they announced no Raid Dungeons in Guild Wars 2. Well I want to ask. Why is Raiding so unpopular now days to the MMORPG community?

Isnt Raiding, a Massively Multiplayer element of PvE combat?

Would you rather future MMO to be balanced for 1v1 PvE rather than 1v20+?

I want to know why the community doesnt like Raiding any more.

Note:
Wasnt calling out Guild Wars 2, that was simply an example.

Wouldn't want to speak for the community as a whole, but for myself raids are little more than a developer's cop out.  As the so called endgame you would think that it would be something a litte more epic than spending a couple days a week doing the same instance over and over again all for the chance of getting a piece of virtual loot.  Then, you get to spend at least half your offraid nights WORKING towards raid night.  Not playing a game, but gathering resources for hours to craft things to try and give you an edge, not to mention having to grind for cash to pay for repairs if you have a bunch of drunkards and stoners in your guild lol.

Originally posted by Kalfer

Tom Bramwell: I feel sorry for @TheRednerGroup today. We are blacklisted by @2KGames and it seems to be standard practice.( http://twitter.com/#!/tombramwell/status/81302961376071680 )

 

 

Story: It's because of their Duke Nukem Forever review. Like most other of Eurogamers reviews it's more well written than most other internet gaming journalistic reviews: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-06-12-duke-nukem-forever-review

 

Historically(from my perspective) Eurogamer has gotten hate from angry bitter fanboys who did not favor their particular game. In many ways I think we are once again reminded of how stupid gaming journalism is. How silly and unproductive it is. More than the reviewers and publishers who "cheat" I think it's the end-readers who are the most dumb. To even have the slightest stock in someone elses opinion regardless of how legit they are, is failure at highest level.

 

 

Reviews are not to be agreed with. Finding  a review with the same opinion as yours is not the ideal situation. A person will never find another person who they agree with 100%. That's not the point. That's not what it's about. A reviewer who has the oppesite ideas and tastes as one self might make a much more attractive source of information.

 

The review is supposed to be a tool. The thing that makes it different from a normal article is the cherry - The editors own opinion sprinkled in over. But many reviewers(including MMORPG.com reviewers) get this mistaken by thinking that they need to babble on about their favorite ice cream and what they think is cool and what is not.

A good review is a source of information to give the reader some facts about a game. The reviewers own opinion should not be the factor(AT ALL) about the readers own desire to play or not to play a game. The facts presented in the written format, should give the reader their own images in their heads about the appeal/lack of appesl about the title.

 

That is not what is happening today. Today we have scores. The tool for the dumb. The score is an excuse for people not to read the review, but just look at the score and thus have concluded in a single number about the games worth.

 

A score can never be a substitute for a review. It rarely ads to it. A score can only make it swing to a certain side. There is always a "but" and always a "if. Everyone is different, have different perspectives, preferences, experiences and are on different stages in their live.  A score can never be a common ground for everyone. And if it had to just have an as wide an appeal as possible, every game should get 6-7 to cather to everyone, to be some idiotic "objective" opinion that ends up servering no one with it's "neutral stance".

 

 

Remove the score, remove the self absorbed ego, and make reviews fun to read again. If all reviews were fun/entertaining to read/watch, people wouldn't need scores.

And if people had any confidence in their own opinions they would not need scores to tell them what is fun and what is not. metacritic, gamerankings, ign, gamespot... These things don't matter. They shouldn't. It's incredible weak character to feed of these things, yet we see many people who do it. Who become upset when something they like, is not echoed throughout the so called "professional gamers".

 

A term which I laugh at. You can't be a professional reviewer or gamer. Not anymore professional than any fratboy playing Call of Duty teenager or the middle aged mom playing Sims. This is just entertainment. But the idiots on all side of the fence is turning this into serious business, as I am a proof of now as well, since I made this thread.

Actually, people can be professional reviewers. 

There are several problems, however:  First amd foremost is the audience, sorry but most people under the age of 30 have the critical thinking ability of a slug.  Understand, there is a difference between a blogger who is nothing more than an extension of various publisher's marketing departments and reviewers.  Firing Squad, Eurogamer, PCGamer (to a lesser degree tho they seem to be trying to correct their path), and a couple of others actually test the games, make sure that they meet the metrics that the developer and publisher have set and report back with something more than opinion.  See, there is a difference between opinion and objective facts.  I understand that the media flooded world we live in today stresses opinion far more than fact, but again, that is because of the people's inability to actually think.  I am pretty sure that the degree of sag in pants has a direct corelation to deficincies in IQ, see that is opinion :P

You say make the reviews fun to read again?  Well, that is the problem.  See, opinion is far more entertaining for the unintelligent than that which is measurable.  Opinion is constantly argued, and with absolutely zero results.  That is why religion and politics are things best left undiscussed in pubs lol.  Verifiable facts, on the otherhand, cannot be argued or refuted without actual evidence, but that does nothing for the fanbots.  Which of course means that there is no reason to discuss which means that people won't sit on the moronic website for hours possibly looking at an advertisement.  Which is all the bloggers have to generate revenue from.  Advertisments from publishers.  Is it just a coincidence that when a new game from a big publisher comes out every shit blog out there gives over every advertisment spot, plus a popup or two, to that game/publisher?  And is it any coincidence that the review always pops up right in the middle of the advertisment contract?  I don't think so, but it is just my opinion based on what I have seen for the past several years.

In order to be a professional reviewer one must be able to separate fact from opinion.  Most of these sites do not have contributors that are trained to know the difference.  Hey, its not all their fault, most professional journalists from the Times to your local rag are incapable of dilineating between the two.  Plus, you have to have people that are actually moral individuals.  People who understand that they hold power over someone's purchasing of a product.  When reviews cater to the publisher they are purposefully lying and defrauding the audience, you.  And ANY publisher who gets their panties into a bunch over a negative review should immediately be blacklisted by every gamer.  If you support immoral people they have no reason to change.

Props to Eurogamer and every other site that would not bow to a publisher.  Too bad those are becoming less and less popular.

From the articles I have read Sony as a whole is some 3.1bn in the hole this year with some 137 mil being attributed to the hack....

Sony was nearly 3bn in the hole before anonymous and geohot stuff.  Sony hasn't been "making it" for some time now so, I think the better question is how long will the fanbots let Sony sit there wallowing in its own excrement before finally allowing it the dignity of a graceful death? :)

I thought that I had read that whwat you describe as being in hnh was what they were going for over here?  Could be mistaken but it was from some interview or something right around the initial launch of the game.  Along with that this is 100% permadeath, your toon dies, its dead.

It will be an intriguing game, as long as you have no qualms about psuedo and fake history heh.

Women cannot, at this time, own property (unless their husband dies and he had no brother, and they had no sons).  Slavery/indentured servitude is how a great number of the "colonists" were able to even afford the transport across the Atlantic, so will that be in? :)  Not to mention that all farming skills from the "homeland" pretty much are absolutely useless in the New World until after local flora and fauna species have been replaced.  Not to mention the whole myth of religious freedom lol, do we get to burn people at the stake and put them into the stocks for no other reason than that their land buts up against mine and I want to expand? :)

Can we abandon the settlement to join the natives?  *Historical fact*:  Most colonies had laws on the books prohibiting people from running and going native.  Especially with Irish and Scottish settlers, coming from tribal cultures themselves, found the native way of life far more appealing and more natural than the oppressive filth that made up the colonial town life.

The primary thing is this for me:

You preview just about every single game, you interview developers, publishers, marketers, sound engineers, etc etc etc.  Take all of that information they gave you.  Then take all the information from the back of the box.  List it all.  Install the game and begin playing.  Did they bull**** you or were they honest?  Is everything that they, through you, said would be there, there and fully functional?  Is the combat as revolutionary as they claimed?  Are the graphics really as awe inspring as the screenshots you have been pushing like crack in actual play, or do you have to have a 50 grand super computer to run it?  Are the different systems everything that they portrayed them to be?

If the answer is unequivocally yes then tell us.  But, when it isn't you have to tell us.  You also cannot possibly expect us to accept some nonsense like, well while this feature hasn't made it in, I talked to so and so developer and they assured me that it would be sometime in the next few weeks but wouldn't tell me exactly when.  Look at it like you are a teacher.  Little devvie has a project due on Tuesday.  He hands in his project but tells you that he was not able to do the whole thing and asks for an extension.  Well, in a school where acheivement and education is important little devvie gets an F and devvie's mommy and daddy get to come down and talk to the teacher and the principal.  If a developer promises the sun, the moon, and all the stars but only delivers on the sun they should be held accountable.

Keep all the personal opinions seperate from the important stuff, because opinions are just that.  Opinions.  Some more educated than others, but it doesn't matter.  There are some 7 billion people on the planet and every last one of us is a wholly unique individual and every last one of us have our own opinions lol.  In the response to me Stradden uses the term analyst.  Analysis and opinion are separate.  Analysis uses measurable criteria.  Opinion does not an analyst make.

[mod edit- non constructive]

I would stage reviews in 3 stages.  First is launch.  Is everything that the developer promised there and fully functional?  If not it is your responsibility to call them on it and not equivocate and forgive because maybe tomorrow, maybe 6 months from now it will be true.

You should also have at least 2 people, preferably 3 or 4, to do each review.  Again, need to counter the fact that too many of you are way too cozy with publishers and have had your opinions bought with tchochkies and fluff.  Seriously, is a freaking remade lunchpail with a vidiot game toon worth your integrity? Wait, don't answer that :( lol.

Then those same people should come back and review it again at the 3 month mark, then at the year mark.  Each time holding the developer accountable for what they said they would do and what they actually did.  On more than one occasion have read a review here where your "writers" give positive marks for future promises.  Hey I can promise you that in 6 weeks there will be no more hunger, poverty or war.  Doesn't mean that it will happen lol.

the transferring of bonuses from weapon to weapon sounds kind of nifty, will have to see it in action before I could make any sort of assessment though.  Can see many ways that this would be nothing but a bullet point of negligible gameplay implications though.

Originally posted by bezado

For those who are not a mmorpg <INSERT IP HERE>, do you guys get sick of the fans overly excited expectations for the theme?

I am a fan of <INSERT IP HERE> but never was for the online game, and now the new one coming out. I seen them growing up the movies, then in my teens and the last ones, kinda over the whole star wars thing. I just don't see the exciting factor there like you guys with light sabers and Jedi powers. Maybe I am more impressed by the movies. So what is the whole nerd excitement still over after all these years ever since SONY basically screwed your first one up. Are light sabers really that interesting over maybe Indiana Jones or Ghostbusters, now those would make cool mmorpg's.

Expecting some hate but nothing I said was hateful, just a question on thoughts if anyone else sees it like me that the whole Star Wars thing is over played even though it had one major title previously for a mmorpg.

Fixed it for ya with the orangish yellow text.

As to Indiana Jones and Ghostbusters?  Seriously?  ROFLMAO!  Maybe for yet another facebook game or some nonsense but seriously, an Indy mmo?  Would not be possible while maintaining the IP.

What the community thinks is the last thing anyone cares about.  Some publisher or marketing hack/psuedo blogger will come up with bullsh** terms to make him or herself sound like they are intelligent. 

Instead of worrying about what label you want to put on the pile of sh** realize that you are quibbling over sh**.  Nothing of importance or significance, just moronic happy dancing around in a flood of excrement.

Maybe people should, for once in this "modern" era of craptasticity, hold the developers accountable for the crap they shovel out the door?

Otherwise lets get to honest labels, massively multiplayer hamster wheel of impotence sounds about as accurate a label for every mmo released in the last 7 years as any other label you can pull out of your backside :)

I only recently bought in and all that fun stuff.  So far been worth the first month, might be worth the second.  Then again the sky isn't falling because there is a queue, I figured there would be when I created all my toons on a high pop server.

Originally posted by Deivos

Originally posted by waynejr2

Originally posted by fivoroth

What do you expect them to do? There is nothing they can do to set things right and make people forget that their personal and billing information might have been stolen -_-

You want marks as a compensation? I am at a loss for words -_-

Good thing I have never given them any of my info and I chose Xbox over Playstation...

 I would like them to pay for a credit report once a month for life.  You have to monitor them to make sure people aren't trying to get a credit on your good name.  That would be a start.  Second, they have to offer to compsate with money for people to hire lawyers to deal with any such issues.  Finally, how about $1,000,000,000.00 US Court fine.

Well, they are all ready doing free credit reports to US residents according to their page about this.

No.  SOE is not providing you with a free credit report.  The United States Congress passed a law several years ago dictating that US citizens are entitled to one report from each of the 3 reporting agencies free of charge.  If, for whatever reason, you already had gotten a credit report for the year you are sh!t out of luck unless you want to pay.  Sony has done nothing for anyone but give your information away because of their ineptness and incompetence.  Best part is, if you weren't actively subscribed your information still got hacked and Sony ain't giving you sh!t.