What are you playing now?

Second free weekend coming and price extended until the 22nd.

 

I found ME to be amazingly dull unfortunately. The game has no charm or personality or warmth whatsoever IMO, on any level (artwork, characters etc). I actually started to nodd off during the dialogue cutscenes, lol. Doh. Personally I think the dialogue system is silly, I came to the conclusion rather quickly that I'd rather just go watch a real movie that has decent cinematography, passable plot, characters, no pretense of interativity, is over in an hour and a half etc.


Been checking out Unreal Tournament 3 aswell. Enjoying it more than I did the first time, I think because it's runing about a bajillion times better than the demo. The only real difference in my machine is dual-core to quad-core so I don't know if it's meant to be majorly cpu heavy or they optimised the heck out of it. I have to say, for a game whose main feature over the previous games is graphics, it's one very ugly game in general though. And the single player campeign is as rediculously macho as I expected.

 

Not surprising given what a disaster the free weekend was. My version went directly from "this game is not available" (even though it was 100 percent loaded) to "game preloaded and ready for purchase" - no chance to actually play it as part of Steam. That's after the disaster that was getting Steam to install that meant making a new Windows user profile and copying my data around to stop it crashing on startup.

People who bought the game had it disappear from Steam, those who wanted to buy it couldn't add it to Steam because they already had the free version, those that were downloading it didn't finish before the end of the weekend. Whoever thought that putting out a free demo of the whole 8 gig game without preload at the same weekend of the release of 400 meg UT3 steam patch, 400 meg UT3 patch 2, 1 gig UT3 Titan Pack, and the 12 gigs of the new Total War games needs a good smacking.

The game itself is much better, though there are still a lot of design decisions I take issue with. There has definitely been a dumbing down, and while the game is more polished and complete with this major patch, you can still see where they decided to make things easier for new players or simpler for the consoles that has carried over to the PC version.

I think the problem with this is while they tried to make the game easier for everyone, what they've actually done is made is easier for the better players to dominate the average players. They've actually increased the gap between the casual gamer and the hardcore by making all the weapons equally average and somewhat spammy. Some of the great equalisers such as the shock rifle pushback/combo, or minigun lockdown have been toned right down. Even the sniper rifle has been slowed to make it useless for medium and close range, and using it at long range points a great big red marker to your position. A lot now comes down to closing fast and using rocket or flak spam as you bounce about - exactly what was wrong with the game before, but now much worse because a lot of other weapons work in pretty much the same way.

The titans were I presume an idea to help allow average players to rampage, but the better players will make all the kills, and then dominate with titans and juggernaughts. No team has a chance of getting back into a V/CTF game when there are half a dozen titans and juggernaughts raping your flag room and spawn points.

There just seems to be a lot less personality and soul in UT3 than compared to UT2K4. In trying to compromise, they've not pleased anyone. Even at the weekend's peak, there were only about 1200 players shown on Gamespy (now back to around 500), while UT2K4 was showing about 5000. Given that all players have to log into Gamespy for UT3, but not for UT2K4, it's likely the UT3 numbers are accurate, but the UT2K4 are underreported.

So I'm still ambivalent towards UT3. Whilst the new patch and pack is a big improvement, Epic have still not used all the lessons they've learned from the previous iterations of UT. Really basic stuff, like the server browser does not remember your filter settings between sessions, and is not available when joined to a server. You can't see the chat/score/mapvote windows at the same time after a match. Maps are designed to be simpler and with choke points (Torlan now only has one route through the middle - there is no fast flanking option at the expense of having to take more nodes). There is no first person view available in vehicles. Weapons have been nerfed together to make them less extreme and different, but averaging them out has made no single choice particularly any better than another. They've given you hoverboards for getting around large maps instead of wating for vehicles to respawn, but getting knocked off one is nine times out of ten a guarentee that you will die, as you have to go through a thrid person falling down/getting up animation that leaves you helpless while your attacker shoots you dead with a second volley. The vehicles still steer like they were designed for a gamepad, and the sad truth is that they probably were.

I moved from Unreal Multiplayer to UT, UT2K3, and UT2K4, and while each one was different to a greater or lesser degree, after a period of adjustment I felt that each one brought something to the table. There were general improvements, good ideas, things that added to the overall quality of the whole game. Epic worked at making each part better than the one before.

With UT3, I feel that Epic for the first time looked at making stuff easier, simpler, less good. Instead of looking at what was a good gaming experience full stop, they worried about what wouldn't work for the casual gamer, ignoring the fact that the casual doesn't play online, play for very long, or may abandon the game after a short time. By making thing easy, instead of the same graduated level of previous games where skill was rewarded, they've actually given the good players an overwhelming advantage over the casual gamers.

It's like seeing a modern remake of an old film, and realising that despite the glossy new technology and great effects, the new film has lost what made the original one special. Like a Hollywood remake, UT3 has been "reimagined" into a prettier, but ultimately more empty and shallow experience. This is I think it's main problem. It just doesn't engage like the older games do, it doesn't garner an emotional investment, it rewards button mashing just as much as skill, spamming just as much as aim, running straight at the target as much as tactical deviousness. They've made so many things about the game averaged out for ease of use and console conversion, that the whole experience becomes an average game that you can take or leave. UT3 is overall a lesser game today, where the previous ones (maybe additionally a better product for their times) really shone out.

 

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/03/ut3-steam-sale-extended-due-to-2000-play-increase.ars

It seems Steam has the numbers needed to move lots of subscriptions.

 

Yeah, that 2000 percent is a great headline, but when your average number of online players is 400-500 people, it's not so impressive, especially when the four year old UT2K version of the game regularly fields ten times that number.

It's all part of the hype machine. Keep telling people there are loads of sales and people online, and maybe people will buy the game (at a profit hurting £8.35) and make the headline true. Basically the game didn't sell well on the PC because of it's console focus, and so they are hoping to make money back by selling it very cheaply and with half the work done towards what it should have been on the PC.

That still doesn't fix the flaws endemic to the PC version that are really a fault in the approach taken to the design of game this time around. The game is what it is no matter how many players you get online.

 

The combat system was changed since pvp patch 1 and now the longest combos are 3 button ones.

The raids are fine now, but pvp in battle keeps and the border regions still require you to get graphics down to at least medium... The zone crashes have been fixed.

Many of the bugs have been fixed. If you ask me, crafting is still useless in this game. But it's a double edged sword with crafting and items in general. The game is not item centric and that is for me at least a good thing.

Perhaps it is an example of the extremes of gamers taste
But having tried many MMOs, I couldn't find any that didn't bore me to hell except from AoC. I like the fact that I don't need to spent my days and nights in front of my pc to enjoy this game and be good at it.
To be honest, I wouldn't recomend the game to someone that plays and likes Wow for example, it's tottaly different. But someone that likes action games and would like to see something that combines fast reflexes with an rpg, might be pleasantly surprised.

 

Wows popularity is becoming a selling point in and of itself... 12 million people can't be wrong, right?
Well Aoc is a diammond in the rough really. The way I see it though, chances are equall it will turn either turn to a real diamond or coal...

The sins are a very good class, but they are one of the hardest leveling classes in the game. If you roll one, prepare youself for a lot of frustration... The Conc on the other hand is the best class from the soldier side to pvp with. Just don't expect to tank in a raid with him

I cannot argue with that really Combat in Aoc is the main reason I'm still a subscriber from day one.
One of the things I didn't like about wow was the fact that it's trying to cater to everyones needs. That is of course the reason why it has so many players, but at some point it gets to me at least, kind of ridiculous...

If you don't expect to hear the dialogue from the NPCs beyond Tortage you won't be disapointed. 'Cause after you leave, they become mute

Mounted combat kind of sucks at the moment. You will always have the advantage on foot against an enemy on a mount... But you can always use your mount for a quick escape...

Hey, 12 million players can't be wrong now can they?
But as you said yourself, it's hard to live under the shaddow of Blizzards behemoth... A game with 2 expansions and countless patches that made it what it is today. People think that the successor to Wow will be larger and better from day one. I'm not sure that it can be done.

 

Much better, but still 2 buttons too many. Especially since the whole reason for the button combos for AoC no longer exist. Unless they found a way to implement the dynamic combo's that they promised? (And was the reason for multiple button presses) In other words, combo's were meant to be fully dynamic like an arcade fighter. You would for example start a combo off with say upper-right attack...and from there your directional attacks could be adjusted on the fly until you hit the final button of some combo and the attack would then execute.

As it is, the button presses are basically meaningless. As you start off by telling the game what combat skill you wish to execute and then you just mimic button presses and cannot dynamically change your attack.

So rather than direction, direction, direction, attack executed. Where each direction could be anything, leading to unpredictable attacks and changing combos on the fly to meet changing battle conditions.

Insead you have attack chosen -> simon says press these buttons. It's completely meaningless and unnecessary. The dynamic combo system they originally promised would have been exciting...

Thank goodness. As it was quite easy to exploit raid zone crashes in order to kill certain raid bosses multiple times an hour to get every possible drop for all classes in a day or two. Not to mention some game changing bugs (That one worm in the ice cave that didn't execute it's special attack) that made most of the raid bosses easier than some solo mobs.

That's basically it. Myself I prefer something with a difficult challenge and real consequences to dying (no MMORPG like that exists currently) like EQ for the first couple years, EQ2 for the first 1-2 months, and VG for the first 1-2 months. Unfortunately all of them went through a process of removing all difficulty from the game. And in VG's case, similar to AoC, its launch was completely tarnished by the excessive bugs in the game. And unfortunately, by the time the bugs were squashed, quite a bit of the difficulty/challenge of the game (unrelated to the bugs) was also nerfed. /sigh.

At this point, I've consigned myself to the fact that there will never again be a truly challenging MMORPG that punishes bad play and rewards taking large risks. Hell, I'll be surprised if any MMORPG comes out again that actually HAS any risks. Eve Online is the only current game that I can think of that has any sort of significant risk, and that's even made minor by the fact that it's so easy to make money in it to replace anything you lose.

Regards,
SB

 

The combos are there to make the game more chalenging, as you get lower damage with each combo step you fail to land on your enemy. As it is, the combat is very fast paced anyway, changing the combos in the middle of their execution might prove to be frustrating, although it might sound nice in theory.

Don't think that all bugs are squashed. There are plenty in there, nothing game breaking though.

Although I can understand the need for risk in a game, I think that people can get very easily frustrated when for example they get looted of all their gear upon death...
It's a very difficult thing to balance really. Wow has demonstrated how a game that puts everything on gear can be very successfull, but on the other hand, gear is mostly gainned by the hours you put in the game, not how good you are in it.
Gear based gameplay, kills off skill, while skill based gameplay cannot offer very powerfull gear, to the point that gear makes almost no difference in the game...
The only other thing that I could think of, that would bring risk in a game, is permanent death, but in this time and age, it's not acceptable

 

When saying risk, and I mean meaningful risk not the fluff you get in some games that's not even an annoyance (15 min lowered hp penalty in Warhammer Online for example that can be easily cured).

Something like EQ1 the first couple months where past level 20ish, you would suffer a 50% EXP penalty upon dying. And you can actually delevel. Added to that there was the prospect of Item decay (if you don't recovery your corpse) as well as people looting your body (in PvP). Likewise giving consent originally also allowed people to loot your body, thus making it imperative to have people you could trust. At later levels when death can become unavoidable (Raid bosses that Deathtouch) the penalty could be mitigated with receiving a res and getting most of your EXP back.

EQ2 had fairly high risks also at launch. Stacking death penalties that were fairly significant and were only removed when you recovered your "ghost/corpse." Of course, corpse recovery was made easier (unlike EQ1) by having your gear remain with you. Of course, gear could be damaged and at first was relatively expensive to repair. Also, you suffered an EXP penalty where half your earned EXP would go towards paying off the penalty and half towards progressing your char. All things that made death something you wanted to avoid even if you didn't fear it as much as EQ1.

VG had fairly high risks at launch. You originally suffered a fairly hefty exp "debt" on dying (during beta they had exp loss, but wussed out for launch) but couldn't delevel. You then didn't make any positive EXP progress until that debt was paid. Recovering your corpse would also recover much of the EXP loss. Items remained on corpse except those you voluntarily bound (but could then not resell or trade to other players). Saddlebags for your mount could hold extra gear for corpse recovery. Also like EQ1 but unlike EQ2 you could consent someone to recover your corpse for you.

Just some examples of somewhat meaningful penalties for careless or sloppy play. As well as introducing real risks for difficult challenges. As is all three of the above examples nerfed or removed entirely all those penalties.

Thus as in almost all MMORPGs now, death is more a convenient way to evac back to town/safe point than it is something to be feared. I routinely now jump to my death/suicide on mobs just to make travel easier. Likewise, there's no real sense of accomplishment or overcoming death defying odds for some coveted piece of gear or notoriety in defeating a nigh impossible encounter.

AoC is just another in a series of "how boring will this MMORPG be" type of MMO's that are all the rage now. At least to me.

The only two MMO's I still find interesting to play right now are for entirely different reasons.

Eve Online - I still have a fear of death here as losing a ship can still be a painful experience. And sloppy play could easily lead to a loss of a ship costing hundreds of millions of ISK. Still the fear isn't that great as it would still not require more than a week or so to replace a basic outfitted ship. Replacing a ship with all officer/faction gear would be much more painful however.

Warhammer Online - No fear of death, no risks worth talking about. In that sense it's the same as every single fantasy MMORPG on the market at the moment. However, what still makes this fun is the PvP (which I normally hate). As the PvP here feels VERY much like playing an online teambased FPS like the Battlefield series or Team Fortress for example. If you die, just get ressed or respawn (don't forget to heal after) and jump back in. It's all very fast paced with clearly defined objectives to accomplish. All of which has a very real impact on the overall war between the two realms.

So I don't view Warhammer Online as fun in the sense of an RPG (there's virtually no risk and death is again meaningless) but more in the sense of a FPS with RPG mechanics. Combat in PvP is far more fast paced/brutal and engaging than in another other MMO where PvP is a factor (including AoC, where the PvP just pales in comparison to WAR, IMO). Eve Online PvP is definitely more brutal and more painful, but it's not quite as fast paced.

Regards,
SB

 

Well, I ended up returning to WoW from AoC. WoW is a drug and we're all addicts. Whoever said Tortage was the best part of the game certainly wasn't lying. Tortage was the training wheels for a game that didn't follow suit in it's remainder. Under-population left little middleground between level 80's and me. No one who could be bothered to help. It was also unecessarily confusing at times, I didn't even know how to begin a trade. What I found most obnoxious was every zone was seperated by a loading time. There was no seamless transition between zones. I know it's not that big a deal, but it doesn't have that MMO feel. I already miss the graphics, though. WoW hasn't aged well, graphically. The combat, too. I decided to start on a server with a low population and will remain guildless, pvping most of the time. In time, I may return to AoC. I don't hate it, in fact I really enjoy it. But I constantly found myself comparing it to WoW, and when it didn't meet certain expectations, I grew annoyed. I was LOOKING for WoW in another game. WoW, being my first MMO, set the standard on how an MMO should be realized, and in time I'll probably become an elitist jackass who remains immoveable in his opinion. I hope it's not too late...

 

It's somewhat the same for me too.
Although I tried wow before aoc, it didn't excite me as much if not at all, and now I'm comparring everything with aoc, the first mmo that actually got me somewhat addicted

 

My first MMO was Everquest. I got into it. Got bored, lost interest. They released an expansion pack that really improved things (added instanced missions for the first time). I got into it again and started having fun. Then it got boring and I lost interest again.

Later I played City of Heroes. Really enjoyed how they put that game together, but it just had no end game. So I enjoyed it for quite a while, got in a fun guild and everything. But once I hit 50 there just wasn't much of anything to do, so I stopped playing.

After that, I got into Everquest II. I really got into that one hard, and even managed to be an officer in one of the two best guilds on the server (we claimed ours was best, of course, but I'm sure so did they...they tended to get more disputed kills, but we got nearly all of the server firsts, at least when I was with them). Well, I got really pissed off at one of the leaders of the guild, pissed off enough that I just didn't want to play anywhere near those players ever again. So I just stopped playing. And I experienced a bit of schadenfreude a little bit later as I noticed that my guild had disbanded within months of my departure. I'm sure my departure didn't have anything to do with it, but I am wondering what the cause was.

And somewhere along the line, I think when I was still playing EQ2, I got a little bit into World of Warcraft. It was fun and all. It had a better solo game than EQ2, but I wasn't enthusiastic about the end game. In the end, I just never got that far into it, and lost interest.

After all that, they released City of Villains, and so I got back into what was now City of Heroes/City of Villains. I really liked the villain game quite a lot: they made some huge improvements in the whole structure of the game. But it still had no end game, so I lost interest again. I think I did this once or twice more over the next couple of years.

Then, this past year, on a lark I decided to get back into City of Heroes again. This time, I stuck around: City of Heroes/Villains now has an end game! So far I'm really happy with it, and I am really wondering how this next game update is going to change things. Basically, it allows for player-created missions, which definitely should make things interesting for CoX. I'll probably be playing City of Heroes/Villains for a while yet.

 

CoH is one game I wanted to try way back when but never did as it didn't have an engame as was noted. Also didn't have much in the way of item collection which I admit I'm a rare item whore... Which is why I like raiding and was always in the top raiding guild of whatever game I was in.

I don't think I can even name all the MMO's I've tried. Starting from MUDDs in the late 80's early 90's. Well known trivia fact is that EQ1 was basically an advanced MUDD with a really advanced graphical interface.

Right now though, just sticking with Eve Online and Warhammer online. Although a friend and I are thinking of going back to Vanguard. It's the MMO I miss the most other than EQ1 before PoP came out. Although similar to EQ1 after PoP, most of the difficulty and challenge has been nerfed out of it... /sigh.

And it's saying something that I'm considering going back to VG considering it has no AA. And everyone by now should know how much I hate games with no AA and refuse to buy or play any game that doesn't have AA.

Regards,
SB

 

Which is one of the reasons why I've gotten back into it: they've fixed both issues, and also have a real economy now.

Now, it still doesn't have much in the way of raiding. Most of the high-end game consists of going on task forces, which are usually 8-player teams, and vary in length from anywhere between 30 minutes and four hours (or longer if the team sucks). There are basically two real raids: the Rikti mothership, and Hamidon. But there are lots of different task forces.

 

Is COH interesting from a pvp perspective? Is it ffa pvp? It's one of the few mmos I haven't tried... That and eve. I'd like to try eve but I'm not sure about the setting and combat mechanics... I'd love it to be an Xwing type mmo game, but I'm sure it's not like that at all...

The game I think is going to really make me an addict will be the new Star Wars mmo from bioware...
I know nothing of it, but I know Bio, and it's Star Wars. What can go wrong

 

I haven't really gotten into the PVP aspect. I understand there's one or two servers where most of the PVP goes on (you'd have to look it up, I don't know, sorry).

Basically there's two types of PVP. First, there's the arena, where you can join in pitched battles against other players, I think up to 8 total (though maybe 16), with a variety of game play types.

The main PVP, though, comes in the guise of a few contested zones. Each zone is a specific level (if you're below that level, you can't enter. If you're above, you're automatically set to the zone level, so everybody is on more-or-less equal footing). Each zone has a series of objectives that the various sides can complete, and they typically require multiple groups working in concert. I'm not clear on all of the mechanics or rewards, though. You'd have to read up on it. But all of these zones are heroes vs. villains (I believe, one may be FFA, but I'd have to check...), and from my very limited experience they involve groups of heroes going after groups of villains.

Yeah, I have really high hopes for that one. Their primary focus is going to be on story development, and they have different story lines for each class. I'm somewhat reserved in that it may not be pulled out very well, but we shall see.

 

I played CoH a lot, I think the PVP is great and certainly very unique. It suffers, or suffered (I haven't been back since about 2007) from lack of dev attention to PVP, though, and some combinations were just too powerful, especially in competitive PVP. There's a lot of FOTM, though the metagame was deep enough that you had exceptional players coming up with new builds. One downside is that though there are respecs, you can never switch primary/secondary powersets, so it's not uncommon for PVPers to build several different types of certain ATs (defenders, for instance). Also, the game is not balanced for 1v1. Some choices won't even be able to put a dent in others.

But the really cool part, is, once you learned the best options (essentially, jumping is the best travel pool, ranged > melee), is that PVP is -fast-. The most unique thing about City of Heroes are the travel powers, and they're fully available in PVP. It's very dynamic, and I certainly think it's worth checking out, but CoH is also a game you probably want to have friends in. Getting good equipment is extremely expensive.

Edit: fr PVP, the biggest server (in general) was Freedom, and the one with the best competitive play.

 

Actually, these days I probably get most of my money solo. Through the Oroboros flashback system, you can go back and complete basically any mission arc now, at any level (you get reduced in level for lower-level arcs). And with the merit rewards system, you also can get recipes from Oroboros flashback arcs in the same way you get them from task forces. Of course, the rewards are significantly higher per amount of time spent for task forces, but you also don't spend as much time waiting for the team to form and whatnot (and this is also for a scrapper...most other classes aren't nearly as good at solo play).

It's also nice that our server has a player-made public channel for the express purpose of making groups to complete task forces, missions, and all that stuff. Definitely makes starting up task forces easier, as well as getting groups together to take out giant monsters and whatnot.

 

Yeah, but unless things have changed dramatically, SOs cost around 1mil inf at level 22. And, again, maybe my numbers are old, but SOs at that level will better than IOs in effectiveness (not that I expect a level 22 to be able to afford a bunch of sets). I think now lowbies can have temporary travel powers? But it used to be that CoH was an incredibly slow-starting game (CoV was far better that way). DOs at 12 help, travel power at 14 CERTAINLY helps (especially with all the hazard zones), but things really take off at 22. Of course, as you level up it actually becomes easier to rebuy your enhancements (at least if you're not in an SG) and by 40 or so you have more money than you need (well, more money than you needed pre-issue 9. no idea how bad inflation's been, if it's been a problem at all.).