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MMORPGs Matrix and Star Wars
Jedi2099 writes "Warner Bros., Monolith Productions and EON Entertainment are combining forces to
create a new massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) based on The
Matrix using Monolith's new LithTech Discovery System. "
Personally I'm much more interested in the fact that the
Star Wars Galaxy Beta
that has started taking beta apps.
Somehow I have a feeling that a lot of them will crash and burn due to an insufficent market.
... damn. Too late. :( Guess I'll have to wait until December to play now. You people are EVIL! :)
I loved it, but can you imagine automatically going into it every time someone on a massively multiplayer service turned it on? ;-)
Every great movie gets a game. 95% of those games are GIANT FLOPS.
I'll try it once the reviews come out.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
For 12.99/mo you will know the matrix.
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howbout RealLife? You go outside and interact with other people. Great graphics, although it is rather difficult to advance in levels. Oh, and no starting over.
Wasn't the matrix a MMORPG in the movie? The AI developed a system in which the humans would lead ordinary lives simulated inside a computer. So couldn't one skip the $50 and just go lead a normal life and get the same effect?
Besides the next generation of the current crop of MMORPG's like Asheron's Call 2 and EverQuest 2, Cyan has finally announced their intentions of doing a MMORPG with the MYST universe.
'He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.' - Douglas Adams
.. new sign-ups get to play as "batteries"..
I always wonder if these licensed games tend to hurt the worlds they're designed to cover. I enjoyed the matrix and idea of Neo as "the one" because of the limitless freedom and ability he'd found by simply freeing himself of doubt.
Then again you have to wonder if in the movie what we didn't see was the user's HUD or in-game chat: "Trinity, I'm down to 12% health, find me a med-pak!", or better yet: "he's using a wall hack!"
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Great, another game to get hung up on. Time has an article on the addiction angle of all these MMORPGs.
..... it does a great job of imitating the move from the game
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Weird.
Your reality is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever. - Baron Munchausen
Call me fickle, but this MMORPG is just tooo similar to the first Matrix in the movie.
Next, you'll be telling me that Skynet has automated all our stealth bombers, and they have had perfect flight records...
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
Now I can finally follow Trinity around staring at her ass without getting the crap kicked out of me by her bodyguards every couple of days. Or play an agent and tap the hell out of the woman in red, since, you know, it wouldn't be weird having sex with a program or anything, since I'd be playing as a computer program myself. Of course I'd be a human playing a program having sex with a progr... god, I need to get laid.
"What are you playing there?"
A virtual computer-generated world with thousands of other people. All your enemies are programs created by the simulation.
"What's the game about?"
A virtual computer-generated world with thousands of other people. All your enemies are programs created by the simulation.
"..."
I can just picture the chat now...
from the can-i-play-as-trinity? dept.
;)
I think the better question would be: Can I play *with* Trinity?
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
getting excited about a sci fi role playing game. Maybe just because I am into computers all the futuristic hacking games etc seemed very silly. I am an avid fantasy rpg'r so I am sure it is my limitation. I'd just rather fight wizards and elves and dragons than aliens and robots.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Oni's gameplay was remarkably similar to "The Matrix", although its visuals obviously were not. They could save themselves a lot of time by just licensing the game engine, keep the buildings, changing all the characters, and making it massively multiplayer.
(Yeah, I know Oni's fighting engine was rather simplified compared to, say, Street Fighter II, but when you're trying to go for widespread appeal, that's actually a Good Thing. Plus, Oni allowed you to pick up new moves as you advanced in levels, a feature which lends itself nicely to an MMORPG.)
- You can't win. There are no real goals.
- You can't pause. My GF hated when I used to play DAoC and she'd come into the den to say hi and I would tell her to wait until I could log out.
- They require an obscene amount of time investment.
Yup, that's why I keep my addiction to games I can win in a month or so and pause.Small scale multiplayer RPGs are fun, but MMORPGS just seem to eat time. Even when I played a lot of Quake 2, I could drop out any time and not feel guilty about letting my character lvl fall behind my friends' levels.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
And use Zork as a template for an online game.
Maybe someone should patent it? I'm sure the USPO would grant one.
Look at all the features to sell it:
Low startup cost (if you have users, they have the equipment)
Great bandwidth for graphics and info
Realistic interactions with NPCs
Many professions to follow
Realistic Physics Model
Low Lag
On the other hand, advancement is sometimes difficult, your account can suddenly run out without warning, PKing is turned on, and you can't restart if your character sucks.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
What's so fun about online matrices?
ubergeek1: "Ooh boy, I wanna be 1,3!!"
uberggek2: "Oh yeah, well I'm 5,5"
>
>miscellaneous fighting noises...
>
ubergeek1: "Ha! I got normalized on yo' ass! Whatchya gonna do now, that I thrashed your second row??"
ubergeek2: "Little did you know that I have the cloak of Cholesky! Prepare to die!"
The poster was being funny, but the idea is interesting. Distribute some of your processing load to unused cycles on user's systems. Not all MMORPGs require all the horsepower a system can provide. It might be a neat feat and it would mean that in some cases, adding users might be a significantly lower drain. This might help with a few of the problems of scalability for MMORPGs. Imagine that you could also earn account hours or credits in game for leaving your PC hooked up when you aren't there if you have a good BW connection so the server can offload some processing onto your machine. Probably a lot of issues involved, but it might offer some interesting lines of investigation.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
Great, all we need is another online game to suck the life from my friends (who by the way, already spend 15 hours a day playing Everquest). Somebody unplug me, I am tired of living in this matrix (I mean world)!
The "Matrix Universe" is the real universe. So I'm guessing they'll render the entire world in a 3D model. And maybe at the start of the game, it'll ask you were you live in real life, and then it'll place your character in whatever your hometown is, standing right in front of the virtual version of your house. Then you'll wander inside and head towards the room where your computer is, and there you'll see yourself sitting on front of a computer, and if you get real close to it, you'll see that on the computer monitor is a 3D model of the room you're in, with you looking over your own shoulder at a monitor, on which there's a 3D model of the room you're in, with you looking over.....
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
You must have been in my Engineering Algebra course... ;)
We all know the correct response to the cloak of Cholesky is the sword of Eigen following by the spell of n-spacial translation.
In n-space, no one can hear you fail the course...
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
I just had a perverse thought: What if this is how the Matrix starts? I mean, what better way to train a responsive and comprehensive environmental control system to become intelligent than to insert the activity of thousands of sentient entities into that environment? The words "self-fulfilling prophecy" come to mind.
Well, the words "improbable," "obtuse," and "gotta get out more" come to mind as well, but it's a curious thought.
-Jon
I think not...(*poof*)
..the realism!
if you crack the game, they send agents after you!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Personally I'm much more interested in the fact that the Star Wars Galaxy Beta that has started taking beta apps.
Taco is eagerly awaiting his chance to play his long-imagined gungan character j4r-j4r during the beta.
> TPM was widely disappointing while the matrix was that year's big surprise...
... just like ours. Talk about photorealism !!!
I wonder if that's why it made SO MUCH money than the Matrix, specially after so many bad reviews and "bad word of mouth".
And oh yeah, it had much better special effects, imagine, a virtual world that looks
- sigs are for wimps.
I would much rather play Morpheus than Neo. It would be quite something to unplug people and tell them this is not a joke and watch them throw up!
The point is Descartes' "evil genius", and the file got the point quite well.
Well.. personally I have played my share of EQ in my day. In case you haven't it's pretty clearly a ripoff of D&D straight across (which is all Tolken anyway.. but eh.. ). So maybe all the races have been seen before, maybe no new concepts. But it IS a new world.. it is their world (you're in our world now is their slogan).. this allows them to write history, future, plot lines..
It allows you to be the main character in your own little world.. silly perhaps.. but
If you put it all in a preexisting storyline, with a preexisting world with already established heros, already planned and acted major events...well what the hell is the point anymore?
Why bother with a Matrix mmorpg? Afterall you aren't the one... the one will fix everything... you are just a spudly.. you don't matter. No matter what you do, live or die, quest or destory evil bad guys... you have no effect.
At least with EQ (which is quite a ripoff at times) they could make their own races... if they ripped off a race they could give it a new history.. they could make their own evil badguys.. name their own dragons.
Can they REALLY do that in SWG and Matrix? The world is already defined.. races and classes already exist, already have a history.
In other words.. EQ while being a ripoff allowed room for creativity, for discovery. SWG and Matrix are just yet another marketing device.. 'ooh ooh lets make a cool racing game.. then put it on Tatooine and call it SW Epi1 Pod Racer!!'
It is one thing being yet another adventurer in a world with no pre defined heros or plotlines... but why pay the money just to play a cameo in a movie?
'..that kernel panicked like a nun in a crack house!'
of the fact that there have been like 8000 MMORPG announcements along with the xbox service and all the mmorpg games it is supposedly going to offer
i just have one question, where do the think all the people who are supposed to subscribe are going to come from
i'm going to asssume that most people, if they play at all, are certainly not going to pay subscriptions for 3 or 4 different MMORPGS at the same time, did this market just balloon into a 60 billion dollar a year industry when i wasn't looking? last time i checked the 2 biggest markets for these kind of games seem to be highly saturated (lets' face it, the main audience for MMORPGs is us, adn we are/have be en facing a huge recession, who the fuck wants to pay another $10 a month per game for 4 or 5 games on top of their car/apartment etc w/o a job
the other market is the teenager/young adult gaming market, which is thoroughly saturated with tech gadetry and games from all sides
it doesn't seem like all the MMORPGS can survive so why do they keep announcing new ones
All you have to do is buy this copy of Dianetics...
Is hacking the game to give yourself super-powers (able to jump tall buildings in a single bound, bullet resistance) considered brilliant? or illegal?
Coding Blog
> More theaters means more money. Forcing theaters to play the movie for more time means more money. Lucas is the Bill Gates of movies when it comes to dealing with theaters.
You must be talking about the Spider-Man movie, which plays in more theaters, and which Sony paid more money to hold those screens for the Memorial Holiday. But then again, it's cool to bash Lucas, and not Sony when convienient.
- sigs are for wimps.
I never said I didn't like it.
But Oscar for best special effects over TPM ? Yeah, right !
- sigs are for wimps.
Maybe this would be where the Xbox pricing scheme would come in handy? Ten bucks a month for all the online games you can eat, regardless of whether they're shooters, RTSes, MMORPGs, or whatever.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
There's an inherent problem with MM online games. What do you do when too many people congregate in one place? How do you even know if they are all in the same place when there's thousands of people online at the same time? How do you determine this efficiently? The solution to this is difficult but was discovered by me and some others in the mid 90s. This solution was ignored by every game company we tried to get to adopt it (our pricing was pretty reasonable, but game developers have an ego thing about anything they didn't invent themselves) INCLUDING Monolith productions. Eventually the company was sold to Sony, which means that only SONY has the ability to publish a MMORPG that doewsnt' suffer from the horrible performance problems that Ultima Online, Everquest, et al suffer from.
(To my knolwedge no other solution has been discovered, and ours was patented.)
So, what al ot of people do is make it so that there can never be too many people in one place by spreading them over lots of servers, or putting in game limits. In othere words, what you end up with is a 32 player game-- not a MM game!
So, given what I know about this situation (including the multiplayer architects at monolith) this game is going to suck ass.
Which is too bad, because its a great concept and MMORPGs could be a huge gaming genre... but egos, bad marketing notions and a hollywood style of production ("just rip off last years hit and it should work" attitude) have given us a dark ages for video games.
We had the solution before Ultima Online was close to release-- we deomod tens of thousands of players in the same area with NPC objects moving around independantly-- it was pretty amazing, like some of the more massive battle scenes from Return of the Jedi and epidsode 1.
But the gaming industry wasn't willing to use a technology they didn't invent, and so one of them got a monopoly on it. This is not about patents being bad-- this was a worthy breathrough that was made. This is about bad choices leading to bad games.
So, if your MMORPG experience sucks, blame the game developers. Their arrogance killed the solution, and they continue to develop poor solutions thinking you'll buy, as one gaming industry exec said "Shit in a box, if we market it right".
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23