MMORPGs

In Chronicle 1 you won't drop what you're wearing, which is also the version that Lineage 2 will launch with. I don't mind that you lose XP on death and can delevel heh. The worst thing that can happen to a mmorpg, imo of course, is that it's too easy to level and get good equipment so that you're maxed within a month. Obviously alot of players call that 'grind' and 'tedium', but I guess I just don't agree. I don't see anything wrong at all with that a person who plays 8 hours a day has a better char than someone who plays 8 hours per week.

Anyways, here are the (huge) patch notes for Prelude (open beta) and Chronicle 1 (retail):


http://www.lineagecenter.com/forums/showthread.php?t=398

http://www.lineagecenter.com/forums/showthread.php?t=341

And just a FIY, I'm not breaking any NDAs by posting those since the NDA for the Korean, Taiwanese and Japanese betas have been lifted some time ago.

This is some of the stuff you can expect in the open beta (from a newsletter):


"The Open Beta phase for Lineage II begins on March 28th, 2004! Characters from the Open Beta will not be deleted after its completion! You get two months of actual play time for free! One month during Open Beta, plus one free month subscription when you purchase the Lineage II game.

The Lineage II Open Beta test will introduce Prelude, the latest version of Lineage II in North America!

New Lineage2.com coming!
Check back later this week for an all new look Lineage2.com and
further details of everything that's happening during Open Beta!

NCsoft will be hosting an array of events during the Open Beta period. Invite your friends to play and compete to win!

Top Clans of the Land!
At the end of Open Beta, the top 10 clans (based on clan level plus total clan member levels) will be entered into a clan drawing. First prize is a $200 gift certificate for every clan member, second prize is a $100 gift certificate for every clan member, and third prize is a $50 gift certificate for every clan member!

Movin'on Up Drawing!
Any player who successfully achieves the first career transfer at level 20 will be entered into a drawing to win a gaming system, an LCD monitor or a video card!

World's Strongest Man Competition!
Become the ultimate warrior! First player to achieve level 40 wins a gaming system from Alienware!

Are You a Virtual Photographer?
Submit your screenshots to Lineage2.com and each week a winner will be chosen to receive a digital camera!

Lineage II Directors!
Bi-weekly prize for the best 30 second game trailer!"


Edit:

I realise that this sounds kinda lame heh, but the game doesn't begin untill after 20-25ish when you've done your first class change. It took me a week on my first char to reach level 20, and it got alot more fun for me after that since you actually started to gain by grouping instead of going solo.

 

Well... none of the MMORPG currently available have particularly interesting combat.

EQ sucks as a melee toon. Battles take a long time and as a melee toon you usally hit auto attack and watch yourself fight. You get kick and taunt which you can use in some situations but that's nothing to write home about. It becomes a bit better in the higher levels with additional skills and AAs and such but the system is pretty simplicistic.

EQ's saving grace is group tactics though. People better know what they are doing. A crappy tank who can't hold aggro will get his group killed, same for a crappy healer. Then there is crowd control etc... that's what makes EQ combat a bit more interesting than in most other MMORPGs.

Anarchy Online is kinda like EQ and SWG in that regard... auto attack and some some skills and special attacks you can use. A bit better than EQ but group tactics aren't really needed in either game so EQ still wins. I didn't play AO in a long time though so things might have improved.

DAoC... the least of the evils. You have combat styles, some situational, some positionals and there are chains etc. DAoC has a weapon resistance system, i.e. some mobs take less damage from piercing weapons, some more from slash weapons etc. It's probably the best melee system in a MMORPG so far. Group tactics work the same as in EQ on paper but people only do PBAOE groups nowadays but you can still find a "traditonal" group in Albion sometimes.

Lineage 2... well, it's OMGWTF horrible. Makes me wanna drown little kitties and shove handicapped children into passing traffic. It's EQ all over again sans the involving group tactics but with faster paced combat. Reminds me of AC2's combat system which is also horrible. You can't even do much in terms of special abilities and such... there are some skills like Power Strike or whatever it's called which makes you hit really hard and maybe two or three more but nothing which would make combat tactical by any stretch of imagination. L2's combat honestly bores me to tears. I'd rate it among the worst of all combat system.

Almost forgot. Horizons... well, I wasted all my superlatives for crappiness on L2's combat but Horizons is even worse. It's too easy, it's auto-attack and that's it. Yes, Horizons is probably the worst.


The plain and simple truth is that there is no MMORPG with truly good combat. DAoC and EQ come out on top for different reasons. DAoC has the best melee system, EQ the best group combat (but a horrible melee system). Neither game is good when it comes to combat but they are somewhat better than the rest.

Making combat less repetitive and more involving is something I hope the upcoming MMORPGs will do.

WoW seems to try to make things more interesting by giving characters broad range of interesting combat skills and spells. We'll have to wait and see how it works out but I guess it will be a lot better than what we have now.

EQ2... well, isn't much information on EQ2's battle system out there. It will probably feature EQ's group tactics in some way, though supposedly different. Dunno, we'll see about that. What I find most promising so far are allusions that classes will have abilities they can use in combat which will work in combination with other class skills, e.g. a Warrior could be able do things which make a rogue more effective. Also, there has been talk about opening moves for Scout classes which will affect mobs or group mates in one way or another. They also hinted that some buff spells won't be long lasting anymore but will be very short in duration and thus become more of a tactical choice by casters to make during combat.

I expect that both, WoW and EQ2 will be a lot better than current MMORPGs but it's too early to tell whether they will really succeed.

 

Well things are getting a bit better .

THey decided to finally close osi (origins systems inc ) and move everyone to la but not many devs moved. So once all the devs that would post on the forums including the main dev said good bye and we didn't get news for a week we were all pissed off .

But then they closed enb and the dev team from there is taking over. Enb was a great game plagued with the closing of westwood while the game was still live and massive buget cuts and no push in the media by ea .

There are a ton of amazing systems in the game and it really works wel lfor the casual and hardcore gamer .

I'm still upset because the game was basicly finished. IT was going to go into beta with all systems fully working. But it went from april release to sept release .

 

Two things . Uxo has tactical combat . You can read up on it here http://www.uxo.ea.com/feature_combat.html


Second whoever said that the grind is needed is wrong .

If you set up a game that was easy to lvl but at every lvl there is a ton of unique content and quests and when you hit the end game there are tons of content for you to play there is no reason why the game will become boring .

I played earth and beyond for a year and a half. I was lvl 150(maxed) on 3 chars by the third month .

But there was allways things to do as a maxed out guy that kept a ton of people in the game .

There are some people who can play 10 hours a week and some that can play 10 hours a day.

It shouldn't mean that the poor guy who can only play 10 a week should take 4 years to see the end content of the game and the guy that plays 10 hours a week see the end content in 4 months .

Also killing bats or giant spiders every day for hours on end to get a lvl isn't fun and will make a ton of people shy away from lineage 2 . The main thing that will keep people there is the pvp of which i am no fan .

 

If it was so easy to create content, then we wouldn't have to play all the mmorpgs of today that are severly lacking in the content department. Sure, it would be nice if all games could launch with the same amount that EQ has today, but that's not happening anytime soon. And since the content is lacking, you can either make it really easy to level and you'll blaze through the content in a month, or you can make it slow so that the content will last longer. I prefer the later one.

I think what you refer to as a ton of people differs from what EA thinks is a ton of people, since they're shutting the game down.

And as I said, I don't agree. Although 4 years is a bit much, imo heh. In AC it took 1.5-2 years for the first person to reach the max level (126), which I think is fine. But the thing with AC though was that the power of a level 126 char wasn't necessarily alot more than a char who was 70.

Instead of fast leveling and alot of content, I want slow leveling and alot of content, which sadly no games really deliver today, because content is not created in an instant.

I agree, and the killing of bats and spiders for hours is no different from other mmorpgs heh. The only thing which draws me to Lineage 2 is the PvP, which will be unmatched. If not for PvP I would've given up on mmorpgs a long time ago.

 

Perhaps instead of spending all the time finding ways to make players take years to lvl they could add in content .

Content to me is not fighting the same monsters over and over again so that i can reach the fun parts of the game .

Content to me is not killing monsters that i had to kill over and over again 5 lvls ago so i can farm money to pay for equipment that i need and spend days doing that just for an item .

80-120k depending on the month you look at . Which is what alot of the games are surving on .

I've already told you exactly why enb is closing . CLosing westwood while the game was live , buget cuts done to the game which caused bad lag and delays on content .

Doesn't stop it from being one of the better mmorpgs on the market .

See now that is stupid . A char almost twice as high in lvl isn't alot more powerfull than the other char.

What is the ponit of continuing the lvling ?

Why do you want slow lvling ? Is it because you need to have an edge against more casual gamers ?

There is no point in needed to spend weeks or months at a certian lvl .

And here you go . You answered why you want such slow lvling .

For the pvp .

You know that if you can invest the most amount of time killing bats you can get the edge in pvp .

To me though pvp is just an excuse to have less content in the game .

The feel hey lets just have them kill each other for fun. Oh oh i know lets let them loose lvls to when they get ganked. That means they will spend alot more time playing the game which means we make more money .


Ultima online learned its lesson from this . Thats why they made fel and tram. One with no pvp and one with pvp .

It also seems that osi / ea learned its lesson with pvp and that is why uxo only has dueling and gvg which both sides need to agree on .

THat is a game which will truely have epic pvp . Just look at the combat system .

 

In RPG terms having say 50% more health/damage/whatever is of course considered not much more powerfull, the expectation of RPGs is that to a lvl100 character a lvl150 one is a god. The problem with that kind of leveling is that it becomes impossible to have players be part of the same game in a meaningfull way as soon as they differ more than a couple of levels.

As I understand you Earth and Beyond chose to solve that problem by capping ... instead of capping I think it makes more sense to have the power to level curve go from a steep one to a shallow linear one though (ie. apparently basically what AC did).

 

But all games cap .

There was no pvp in enb . There was also enough content that a lvl 100 person wouldn't care what a 150 was doing because they could hunt in diffrent spots all over the universe and see new things often .

If someone is twice your lvl he should be more powerfull. You should be able to notice the diffrence.

I'm a lvl 25 mage in lineage 2 and last night I got my but kicked by a lvl 30. It was no contest. There is no way i should be able to stand against a lvl 50 . As it should be .

The only reason to slow down lvling is for pvp . That is all .

 

Spoken like one who has never tried to create content on this scale.

80 - 120k? The latest numbers I had heard was down in the 20k area. Where are you getting your numbers from?

I can see both sides of the argument, how in DAOC, RVR became the high level content. Likewise I can see your point as well.

Well they also had to deal with the really screwed up balance. It was FAR FAR easier to get ahead by going the Dreadlord route.

Epic? Sounds dreadfully boring.

 

That's what I thought. Pretty much standard combat but with click-per-swing. I hate that. Carpal Tunnel Sydrome ahoy!

And GvG when both sides have to consent pretty much means no GvG going on unless there is a compelling reason to engage into PvP.

 

THe latest numbers I have are from x mass , and that was 80k .

As for the combat its not standard clicking like lineage 2 or eq 2 , how fast you click depends on how fast you attack , pausing between attacks means stronger attacks but slower . You have a momentum system built in and a combo system built in with multi spells cast at certian times add effects to your char and negative effects to the creature your fighting .

Those forseen by the devs and those unexpected an exmaple given was during dev testing they had a 4 man pvp match and 3 of them decided to gang up on the main dev. The main dev casted summon dameon (sp?) which by it self wasn't strong enough to kill the 3 but the smoke and effect of it coming to life gave the main dev enough time to escape .

Private zone gvg is perfect . There will be a ton of guilds using it. There are two diffrent modes along with a ranking system to be used.

They haven't set a cap but they have tested it with 40 vs 40 and it works fine with no slow downs . These are held on a private instanced map on which means there wont be random gvg breaking out in populated zones which already have bad slow down (any big town in lineage 2 with 20 private stores up slows you down to a crawl .)



But hey everyone wants something diffrent for an mmorpg. For some of you thats killing bats so you can become uber and kill newbies. For others its dynamic questing and complex combat systems .

 

Yes, the good old click-to-swing. The longer you hold the button, the harder you hit. How innovative! Games had that 10 years ago. They now call that "Momentum System"? What a pretentious word for something so trivial.

Honestly, who wants to click every time you want to swing your sword? It's like Morrowind und combat sucked in Morrowind

Read: it will be utterly pointless except for bragging rights.

If click-to-swing is what UXO devs call "complex" then I don't even wanna see the rest of the game.

 

Click and swing is much better than click once and wait .


In other games what else is there besides bragging rights ? Getting loot ? Thats about it . I can get loot from monsters

 

"Click and wait" sucks bit time but if I had to swing that freaking sword hundreds if not thousands times a day by clicking the damn mouse button I would go nuts.

"Click-Swing" is just as boring but you can't even take a piss while fighting.

The upcoming MMORPG will make combat more involving, there's no need for horrible Morrowind-style combat.

It's called character advancement. You get better equipment and higher levels and you can advance to new areas and explore new content. People like that.

Ganking some idiot and his group just for shits and giggles in a carebear consented duel doesn't do shit. There were arenas in EQ where people could PvP. Guess what, no one ever went there.

 

Perhaps they didn't go there because there was other better content .


ALso in a game like lineage 2 you don't get xp for killing other people. You might get loot but thats it .

 

Yep. I'm withholding final judgement mind you since so little is actually known about it but if they haven't managed to deal with player motivation to PVP, then it's pretty much stillborn and they shouldn't have bothered.

Again, where (not when) are you getting your numbers from? I think our Marketing dept. would highly disagree with you because even the Sims Online is running with ~100k. Anyhow those #s are enough to keep a MMO product running pretty 'ok'.

Look at it this way. 12 bucks a month, half of which is eaten up by bandwidth and CS. $6 x 100,000 = 600k per month in profit. Over a course of a year that's 7.2 million (again in profit - well, discounting the cost to run the team and any other marketing you might do). That alone is pretty damn close to paying for another 3yr MMO cycle (in just one year!). Therefore your math does not make sense if EnB was as healthy as you think. The latest numbers I remember (I could be mistaken - wasn't paying attention) have EnB at 20k subscribers. That is much more in line with "why" they are shutting it down. EA isn't dumb, they've done the charting and have seen the population curve ahead for a year (or more). It's trending downward and nothing can stop it.

 

they were posted on stratics at one point i believe in january and it showed a negative trend over the last year with numbers continuing to slide.

The numbers have been pretty acurate before. Most of the companys stay tight lipped about numbers unless they are quickly going up (swg)

I know ea isn't dumb. The problem may be found in the fact that they kept offering people free months to stay .

As I said since x mass the numbers may have well droped to 20k . But the last numbers I have seen said 80k .


I def agree that the trend was downward .

I played the game for a very long time. Ea did nothing but try to kill the game .

No lag , decent plot adn then ea gets westwood and there is suddenly lag , no content for a few months. Then the lag stays but they finaly give us content . Then they made a rash of new uber weapons from drops that can easily be farmed by large guilds and many left the games very quickly .

 

Haha, I said in the part above that, which you also responded to and said was dumb, that I thought it was fine in AC that you didn't have that 'edge' but that there still was alot of leveling. But that's for a different reason than in Lineage 2 though. As a level 75 mage in AC I killed plenty of level 100s (untill everyone started speccing magic defense though hehe). The point is, for me, when the advancement is over, the game is over. And being a higher level in Lineage 2 doesn't give you an 'edge', because the one on one PvP will be miniscure. It will be quantity before quality. A group of level 30is are not guaranteed to win over a larger group of level 20is.

Because I don't want the game to be over after a month. Why do you want fast leveling? So you can sit around the campfire and sing songs when you've maxed your char?

No, all games don't cap. AC let you earn experience after you've reached the maximum level, which means character advancment is pretty much infinite. Lineage 2 lets you gain an infinite amount of skill points, and if Lineage 1 is anything to go after, they won't let anyone reach the maximum level and will just raise it if anyone reaches it.

Oh and I call bullshit on your EnB number. You don't close a game with 100k subscribers.

That I fully agree with.

 

Just a little FYI. SWG ain't going up. It plateaued quickly after launch. Then again my data is a few months old but the trend was there.