... by any anti-redeye camera that does a pre-flash. However, it is quite successful if considered solely as a promotional tool for this particular beer company.
Please add some form of adaptive (or configurable) quality to your streaming service. I currently find it unusable (and therefore not worth paying for) due to occasional audio gaps. I would FAR prefer lower quality without interruptions to a high quality stream that cuts out once or twice per song.
Just adding my love for the Tunnels of Doom. Released in 1982, it can best be described as an upgraded version of Rogue. Random dungeon generation, first-person hallways, non-combat interaction such as fountains and vaults with secret passcodes, random magical items, listening for monsters at doors, this game had nascent versions of alot of the features that people now appreciate in rogelikes such as Nethack, but with graphical sprites and color which, in 1982, made this game freaking awesome.
I did my thesis in exactly this area. My research assumed that task complexity had something to do with enjoyment, but I was wrong. Experimental evidence showed that people had more when the difficulty of the task made the outcome uncertain relative to their skill level. This jives with researcher Kevin Burns theories of enjoyment being derived from unexpected good news (the unexpected occurrence of positive information gain) - i.e. the punchline of a joke or winning against the perceived odds.
I'm frequently amazed the games industry doesn't just stand up one day and go "Y'know, we talked it out between us, and we've had enough. We're going to all get jobs with fewer hours and better pay in something dull like spreadsheet programming.
Actually, many do. There is a huge attrition rate in the industry; however there are always more than enough inexperienced programmers wanting to give it a try. Of course, why fight to keep senior people around when programmers are easily replaceable cogs from the point of view of management? This explains the quality engineering that goes into many of today's games.
"The mainframe survived its near-death experience and continues to thrive because customers didn't care about the underlying technology,"
That is the answer right there. Not every user is irrationally neophilic. If a technology is the best choice either in function or in cost with respect to the needs of some user, then it will continue to be used.
from http://web.archive.org/web/20021202071205/www.worl dofwarcraft.com/wow/faq/ : How will World of Warcraft differ from other MMORPGs? World of Warcraft will differ from other MMORPGs in many ways. One of our main goals is to ensure that players can enjoy World of Warcraft without having to invest huge amounts of playtime. Players will be able to complete quests and experience the world at their own pace-whether it be a few hours here and there, or week-long adventuring marathons. Additionally, our quest system will provide an enormous variety of captivating quests with story elements, dynamic events, and flexible reward systems. World of Warcraft will also feature a faster style of play, with less downtime and an emphasis on combat and tactics against multiple opponents. We also plan to incorporate several unique features, which we'll disclose throughout the course of development.
Once a character reaches 60, the only playstyles are to raid or grind. At 60 you can play at your own pace, so long as that pace matches that of at least 20 other people. Story elements and dynamic events are cool, but at 60 there are fewer and fewer quests that take longer to complete and are accessible to fewer people. Fighting a huge raid boss doesn't involve much tactics against multiple opponents. And to boot, the raid itemization progression (aka mudflation) has totally thrown off PvP balance between those who raid and those who do not.
A bunch of guys with no industry experience got together to make a modern MMO faster, cheaper, and better than anyone else. They hired their friends who also had no industry experience to manage and lead the development. The guys mismanaged the project and the lack of experience amongst the team caused development to miss goals. They ran out of money. The End. I am not surprised that I never heard of this company nor this project.
What really bugs me is this obsession that MMO designers have with creating content that can only be appropriately experienced by legions of obsessed players.
I absolutely agree - putting so much effort into pleasing such a small portion of the customerbase is silly.
This makes particularly little sense for me in the case of World of Warcraft where there's a rather abrupt transition from being able to make decent advancement with very casual play, to a game where in order to continue perceptible advancement you have to become rather hardcore, just to enjoy a relatively small amount of game content that allows you to continue to progress.
I absolutely disagree - there is plenty of non-raid content at the top level that is accessible to people who only have two hours or so to play at a time (similar duration to watching a movie). Two hours is plenty of time to form a group of 5 friends and tackle one wing of a high level dungeon. I myself spent over a month doing quests in Black Rock Depths bit by bit - the jail one night, the bar anouther night, take down a lava spewing giant another night, loot an ancient relic another night. I had a blast doing it at a casual pace. The only people I hear complaining about content at level 60 are: A) hardcore players who have already gotten 500+ hours of entertainment out of the game, B) power-casual players who blow by all the content at full sprint, and C) epeen-envy players who think "content" is having the best item in the game and then getting something batter.
There are at least five 50+ 5-man dungeons that come to mind that could provide a 5-man group months of activity: Dire Maul, Blackrock Depths, Lower Black Rock Spire, Stratholm and Scholomance. With all the various quests to do and wongs to do them in, each one of these dungeons could easily provide 20 or more hours of cooperative (but not raiding) gameplay. IMO WoW has so much high level content available, the first expansion will be out well before the vast majority of players exaust it (and if you are telling me the majority of 3.5 million people are lifestyle-MMOers, I'd like to have some of what you're smoking).
Re:, Wars, Survival, Wealth - Anything But The Gri
on
The Ultimate MMORPG
·
· Score: 1
I think you are looking for something like Shadowbane, but I don't think you really want what you think you are looking for.
What you describe is a system where you personally have the ability the change the face of the world, but the implication of this is that all players have the ability to change the world - including people with way more time on their hands than you, and people with far more miscievous intent than you. I imagine such a game would devlove into a wasteland ruled over by roving gangs, where the majority of fun-minded plpayers are driven off by constant harassment. Perhaps players could eventually organize and establish warring city-states, but this type of activity is probably not what the vast majority of fun-minded casual players are interested in.
But like the mistake Douglas Hofstadter makes in Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, there is nothing that "forces itself upon us."
Eh? I thought that was the whole point of the absurd "horse,apple,happy" semantics was that meaning was a more "meta" thing that we as humans applied to a syntax if the semantics made intuitive sense to us.
Maybe too much schooling has made me a stodgy young academic, but didn't LISP provide us with extensibility and everything else XML cuold possible offer, in a much cleaner and more elegant syntax?
Speaking of which, does eBay assisst in shutting down illegal sales? It seems like Blizzard would need their cooperation in shutting down the trading of currency. Otherwise Blizzard would have to track the currency dealers themselves - namely characters that have a tendency to in-game-email gold to many other players, or characters that tend to buy trash at the auction-house for strangely large sums of money.
That fallacy is very rare amoung MMOG critics, because few people are stupid enough to misinterpret straightforward statements that way, while still retaining enough intellect for minimal literacy.
Well, I certainly hop you back up that insult with some substance.
No. Just like Jack said, avatars are disposable if you don't lose anything by disposing of them. Your suggestion that time would be lost is completely contradicted by his hypothesis that nothing would be lost.
A player expends a certain amount of his time for a certain level of development to his avatar. To dispose of the avatar is to lose the value the player placed on that avatar is lost, and thus the value the player placed on the development of that avatar, and thus the value that the player placed on the time that he previously spent. Just because you have already paid for a thing does not mean that it loses all of its value.
Now to reiterate my original point, a "death penalty" does not add value to an avatar, it just dilutes the value of the character with respect to time cost. As another person responded to my post, at some point the penalty for dying makes the "avatar value" gained per unit time so small that people will actually reroll and start a new avatar in order to gain a more favorable amount of "avatar value" for their time spent.
So my original point still stands, if people already value their avatars, then there is no need for a "death penalty" to somehow make them value them more.
Jack: If players lose nothing by being defeated then naturally the players won't see death as an issue. Players will begin to look at their characters like those in FPS games such as Counterstrike or Battlefield 1942. In other words, the player's avatar is perceived as disposable.
This fallacy is very popular amongst MMOG devs. Avatars are disposable only if the player considers the cumulative time that they have put into developing their character as worthless. I believe that most people value their time, and therefore value their developed avatars with or without some penalty for dying that equates to hours of game time.
... you could always spend a lifetime multi-classing, but don't go complaining to the DM when you discover that divided XP means you make only half the progress in each of your classes. Who cares how many hit-dice you have if HR is only looking at your class-skills!
I wonder if this is a reaction to the success that the Warhammer 40K game, Dawn of War, is seeing. If so, I still think a Warhammer Fantasy Battle RTS would be more appropriate than a MMOG.
ASIDE: As much as I love Blizzard's Warcraft and Starcraft, I've always felt that they are highly derivative of the WH tabletop games. The addition of hero character to WC3 only increases this similarity. Although we should all thank Blizzard for beating Games Workshop to the punch in delivering a video game in the spirit of fantasy and sci-fi warfare, and hammering out and perfecting modes of RTS interaction, I hope that the youngin's out there appreciate the origins of the genre. Warhammer* computer games are no johnny-come-latelies - they are the games that should have come out before *craft, but for the lack of vision on the part of GW to expand out of their book & miniatures driven buisness model. Praise to the old Blizzard for having the vision to take the spirit of Warhammer and project it though Westwood's Dune 2.
I absolutely agree. "Star Wars" was not a success because people liked Lucas, Lucas was a success because people liked "Star Wars". Audiences responded to the actual movie that was released, not to the ideas that George had in his head. Assuming that audiences liking a movie is the ultimate measure of how good a movie is, who is George to say that his new version is "better" than the one that people actually loved. All he is doing is asserting that "better" means that HE thinks its better - which IMO is a bit self-centered and not at all a good measure to go by.
IMO this is also where the Wachowski Bros. went wrong: they assumed that it was the creative vision behind their movie that people loved, and not the movie itself. So by that assumption, producing two movies that adhere to their creative whims will result in movies that people love - which is evidently false.
I tend to find watching sports that I know nothing about to be very boring. For instance, watching an NFL game before I played football was just like watching a meaningless pile-on of huge men - but after learning both the rules and the nuances of strategy involved it became much more interesting to watch.
I think good commentating would play a large part in keeping a televised gaming event interesting. Someone to describe to the home viewing audience what is happening on screen ("we can see here in the replay that Daigo has individually parried every hit of his opponent's super-combo, in order to do this, he had to respond to each individual hit with split-second timing!"), what the strategic implications of certain moves are ("well Chuck, it seems like the terrorist team is piling the bodies of their fallen teammates on the bomb - this is a new strategy in this version of the..."), and what the heck all the l33t sp34k trash-talk means ("but Chuck, when the red captain calls the other team 'ub3r' he is actually *insulting* them by sarchastically using an *out-of-style* superlative to imply that their time has passed...")
I agree. It is actually painful to see FFT so high on the list with no Shining Force at all. Sure FFT has prettier graphics and greater mechanical compliexity, but I found it lacking with respect to the original SF in two very important regards:
First, the characters in FFT have no character. The class system makes everyone's abilities so fluid that the characters are merely putty to be molded into the perfect fighting machines. I prefer the Shining Force system of being given a selection of soldiers, each with their unique blend of abilities, strengths and weaknesses, and finding a combination of these unique talents that works for your strategy.
Second, group formation and positioning is far less meaningful in FFT. With a group size of only five, you can't make much in the way of formations. With SF's twelve characters per group, you have a much wider diversity of tactical formations - even multi-group tactics, such as sending a small force behind the enemy front line to take out their healers, are possible. Also, because of the range and spread of spells in FFT, you cannot effectively create a formation that has any integrity against melee attacks without being absurdly vulnerable to magical attacks. In SF, making a formation that is slightly looser or tighter (for instance, shoulder-to-shoulder vs. "checkerboard") can subtly change how well your formation does against melee or magic based attacks.
Certainly FFT has something going for it in the more complicated use of terrain, the complex plot, the complex game mechanics, and the beautiful spell graphics. However I always felt like it didn't quite have enough tactical substance as it could have. Over the years I have revisited Shining Force far more often than FFT - mostly because of the memorable characters and the interesting shapes of the battles that unfold.
Agreed. I still like Shining Force better than *Tactics. One of the big reasons is that the characters are well differentiated, even within the same character class. I think this helps define their personalities (consider how different each of the centaurs plays - i.e. this one makes a good tank, but can't aim a lance ot save his life; that one is a great lancer, but is vulnerable to magic due to low HP, etc.).
I didn't like SF2 as much - I can't see how people prefer SF2's graphics, and somehow it felt less like an epic adventure. I don't know too much about where they took the series after SF2, but from the screenshots it looks like they've turned it into a gernicized fantasy-anime RPG, but I really hope they are keeping in touch with the original SF's roots. Its been a few years since I've gone back and played them, maybe its about time to revisit Max and the gang...
I realize that many here a loathe to give a nod to a Microsoft published product that only runs on DirectX, but Dungeon Siege by Gas Powered Games is remarkable for its constant streaming of a huge 3D RPG environment from starting the game with a hoe to the final boss showdown with no loading screens. They used some tricks as described in this whitepaper to achieve the effect. Although they had to linearize the content to a large degree, the idea of traversing a tree structure of content, constantly streaming in upcoming nodes is one that more developers could adhere to in creating continuous worlds.
Slashdot Mirror
... please be moderated right off the site?
... by any anti-redeye camera that does a pre-flash. However, it is quite successful if considered solely as a promotional tool for this particular beer company.
Please add some form of adaptive (or configurable) quality to your streaming service. I currently find it unusable (and therefore not worth paying for) due to occasional audio gaps. I would FAR prefer lower quality without interruptions to a high quality stream that cuts out once or twice per song.
Just adding my love for the Tunnels of Doom. Released in 1982, it can best be described as an upgraded version of Rogue. Random dungeon generation, first-person hallways, non-combat interaction such as fountains and vaults with secret passcodes, random magical items, listening for monsters at doors, this game had nascent versions of alot of the features that people now appreciate in rogelikes such as Nethack, but with graphical sprites and color which, in 1982, made this game freaking awesome.
I did my thesis in exactly this area. My research assumed that task complexity had something to do with enjoyment, but I was wrong. Experimental evidence showed that people had more when the difficulty of the task made the outcome uncertain relative to their skill level. This jives with researcher Kevin Burns theories of enjoyment being derived from unexpected good news (the unexpected occurrence of positive information gain) - i.e. the punchline of a joke or winning against the perceived odds.
I'm frequently amazed the games industry doesn't just stand up one day and go "Y'know, we talked it out between us, and we've had enough. We're going to all get jobs with fewer hours and better pay in something dull like spreadsheet programming.
Actually, many do. There is a huge attrition rate in the industry; however there are always more than enough inexperienced programmers wanting to give it a try. Of course, why fight to keep senior people around when programmers are easily replaceable cogs from the point of view of management? This explains the quality engineering that goes into many of today's games.
"The mainframe survived its near-death experience and continues to thrive because customers didn't care about the underlying technology,"
That is the answer right there. Not every user is irrationally neophilic. If a technology is the best choice either in function or in cost with respect to the needs of some user, then it will continue to be used.
mod this up, please. "casual physics" makes no sense.
from http://web.archive.org/web/20021202071205/www.worl dofwarcraft.com/wow/faq/ :
How will World of Warcraft differ from other MMORPGs?
World of Warcraft will differ from other MMORPGs in many ways. One of our main goals is to ensure that players can enjoy World of Warcraft without having to invest huge amounts of playtime. Players will be able to complete quests and experience the world at their own pace-whether it be a few hours here and there, or week-long adventuring marathons. Additionally, our quest system will provide an enormous variety of captivating quests with story elements, dynamic events, and flexible reward systems. World of Warcraft will also feature a faster style of play, with less downtime and an emphasis on combat and tactics against multiple opponents. We also plan to incorporate several unique features, which we'll disclose throughout the course of development.
Once a character reaches 60, the only playstyles are to raid or grind. At 60 you can play at your own pace, so long as that pace matches that of at least 20 other people. Story elements and dynamic events are cool, but at 60 there are fewer and fewer quests that take longer to complete and are accessible to fewer people. Fighting a huge raid boss doesn't involve much tactics against multiple opponents. And to boot, the raid itemization progression (aka mudflation) has totally thrown off PvP balance between those who raid and those who do not.
A bunch of guys with no industry experience got together to make a modern MMO faster, cheaper, and better than anyone else. They hired their friends who also had no industry experience to manage and lead the development. The guys mismanaged the project and the lack of experience amongst the team caused development to miss goals. They ran out of money. The End. I am not surprised that I never heard of this company nor this project.
What really bugs me is this obsession that MMO designers have with creating content that can only be appropriately experienced by legions of obsessed players.
I absolutely agree - putting so much effort into pleasing such a small portion of the customerbase is silly.
This makes particularly little sense for me in the case of World of Warcraft where there's a rather abrupt transition from being able to make decent advancement with very casual play, to a game where in order to continue perceptible advancement you have to become rather hardcore, just to enjoy a relatively small amount of game content that allows you to continue to progress.
I absolutely disagree - there is plenty of non-raid content at the top level that is accessible to people who only have two hours or so to play at a time (similar duration to watching a movie). Two hours is plenty of time to form a group of 5 friends and tackle one wing of a high level dungeon. I myself spent over a month doing quests in Black Rock Depths bit by bit - the jail one night, the bar anouther night, take down a lava spewing giant another night, loot an ancient relic another night. I had a blast doing it at a casual pace. The only people I hear complaining about content at level 60 are: A) hardcore players who have already gotten 500+ hours of entertainment out of the game, B) power-casual players who blow by all the content at full sprint, and C) epeen-envy players who think "content" is having the best item in the game and then getting something batter.
There are at least five 50+ 5-man dungeons that come to mind that could provide a 5-man group months of activity: Dire Maul, Blackrock Depths, Lower Black Rock Spire, Stratholm and Scholomance. With all the various quests to do and wongs to do them in, each one of these dungeons could easily provide 20 or more hours of cooperative (but not raiding) gameplay. IMO WoW has so much high level content available, the first expansion will be out well before the vast majority of players exaust it (and if you are telling me the majority of 3.5 million people are lifestyle-MMOers, I'd like to have some of what you're smoking).
I think you are looking for something like Shadowbane, but I don't think you really want what you think you are looking for.
What you describe is a system where you personally have the ability the change the face of the world, but the implication of this is that all players have the ability to change the world - including people with way more time on their hands than you, and people with far more miscievous intent than you. I imagine such a game would devlove into a wasteland ruled over by roving gangs, where the majority of fun-minded plpayers are driven off by constant harassment. Perhaps players could eventually organize and establish warring city-states, but this type of activity is probably not what the vast majority of fun-minded casual players are interested in.
But like the mistake Douglas Hofstadter makes in Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, there is nothing that "forces itself upon us."
Eh? I thought that was the whole point of the absurd "horse,apple,happy" semantics was that meaning was a more "meta" thing that we as humans applied to a syntax if the semantics made intuitive sense to us.
it never ceases to amaze me how many people yearn for the grinding days of yore...
Maybe too much schooling has made me a stodgy young academic, but didn't LISP provide us with extensibility and everything else XML cuold possible offer, in a much cleaner and more elegant syntax?
Speaking of which, does eBay assisst in shutting down illegal sales? It seems like Blizzard would need their cooperation in shutting down the trading of currency. Otherwise Blizzard would have to track the currency dealers themselves - namely characters that have a tendency to in-game-email gold to many other players, or characters that tend to buy trash at the auction-house for strangely large sums of money.
That fallacy is very rare amoung MMOG critics, because few people are stupid enough to misinterpret straightforward statements that way, while still retaining enough intellect for minimal literacy.
Well, I certainly hop you back up that insult with some substance.
No. Just like Jack said, avatars are disposable if you don't lose anything by disposing of them. Your suggestion that time would be lost is completely contradicted by his hypothesis that nothing would be lost.
A player expends a certain amount of his time for a certain level of development to his avatar. To dispose of the avatar is to lose the value the player placed on that avatar is lost, and thus the value the player placed on the development of that avatar, and thus the value that the player placed on the time that he previously spent. Just because you have already paid for a thing does not mean that it loses all of its value.
Now to reiterate my original point, a "death penalty" does not add value to an avatar, it just dilutes the value of the character with respect to time cost. As another person responded to my post, at some point the penalty for dying makes the "avatar value" gained per unit time so small that people will actually reroll and start a new avatar in order to gain a more favorable amount of "avatar value" for their time spent.
So my original point still stands, if people already value their avatars, then there is no need for a "death penalty" to somehow make them value them more.
Jack:
If players lose nothing by being defeated then naturally the players won't see death as an issue. Players will begin to look at their characters like those in FPS games such as Counterstrike or Battlefield 1942. In other words, the player's avatar is perceived as disposable.
This fallacy is very popular amongst MMOG devs. Avatars are disposable only if the player considers the cumulative time that they have put into developing their character as worthless. I believe that most people value their time, and therefore value their developed avatars with or without some penalty for dying that equates to hours of game time.
... you could always spend a lifetime multi-classing, but don't go complaining to the DM when you discover that divided XP means you make only half the progress in each of your classes. Who cares how many hit-dice you have if HR is only looking at your class-skills!
I wonder if this is a reaction to the success that the Warhammer 40K game, Dawn of War, is seeing. If so, I still think a Warhammer Fantasy Battle RTS would be more appropriate than a MMOG.
ASIDE: As much as I love Blizzard's Warcraft and Starcraft, I've always felt that they are highly derivative of the WH tabletop games. The addition of hero character to WC3 only increases this similarity. Although we should all thank Blizzard for beating Games Workshop to the punch in delivering a video game in the spirit of fantasy and sci-fi warfare, and hammering out and perfecting modes of RTS interaction, I hope that the youngin's out there appreciate the origins of the genre. Warhammer* computer games are no johnny-come-latelies - they are the games that should have come out before *craft, but for the lack of vision on the part of GW to expand out of their book & miniatures driven buisness model. Praise to the old Blizzard for having the vision to take the spirit of Warhammer and project it though Westwood's Dune 2.
I absolutely agree. "Star Wars" was not a success because people liked Lucas, Lucas was a success because people liked "Star Wars". Audiences responded to the actual movie that was released, not to the ideas that George had in his head. Assuming that audiences liking a movie is the ultimate measure of how good a movie is, who is George to say that his new version is "better" than the one that people actually loved. All he is doing is asserting that "better" means that HE thinks its better - which IMO is a bit self-centered and not at all a good measure to go by.
IMO this is also where the Wachowski Bros. went wrong: they assumed that it was the creative vision behind their movie that people loved, and not the movie itself. So by that assumption, producing two movies that adhere to their creative whims will result in movies that people love - which is evidently false.
I tend to find watching sports that I know nothing about to be very boring. For instance, watching an NFL game before I played football was just like watching a meaningless pile-on of huge men - but after learning both the rules and the nuances of strategy involved it became much more interesting to watch.
..."), and what the heck all the l33t sp34k trash-talk means ("but Chuck, when the red captain calls the other team 'ub3r' he is actually *insulting* them by sarchastically using an *out-of-style* superlative to imply that their time has passed...")
I think good commentating would play a large part in keeping a televised gaming event interesting. Someone to describe to the home viewing audience what is happening on screen ("we can see here in the replay that Daigo has individually parried every hit of his opponent's super-combo, in order to do this, he had to respond to each individual hit with split-second timing!"), what the strategic implications of certain moves are ("well Chuck, it seems like the terrorist team is piling the bodies of their fallen teammates on the bomb - this is a new strategy in this version of the
I agree. It is actually painful to see FFT so high on the list with no Shining Force at all. Sure FFT has prettier graphics and greater mechanical compliexity, but I found it lacking with respect to the original SF in two very important regards:
First, the characters in FFT have no character. The class system makes everyone's abilities so fluid that the characters are merely putty to be molded into the perfect fighting machines. I prefer the Shining Force system of being given a selection of soldiers, each with their unique blend of abilities, strengths and weaknesses, and finding a combination of these unique talents that works for your strategy.
Second, group formation and positioning is far less meaningful in FFT. With a group size of only five, you can't make much in the way of formations. With SF's twelve characters per group, you have a much wider diversity of tactical formations - even multi-group tactics, such as sending a small force behind the enemy front line to take out their healers, are possible. Also, because of the range and spread of spells in FFT, you cannot effectively create a formation that has any integrity against melee attacks without being absurdly vulnerable to magical attacks. In SF, making a formation that is slightly looser or tighter (for instance, shoulder-to-shoulder vs. "checkerboard") can subtly change how well your formation does against melee or magic based attacks.
Certainly FFT has something going for it in the more complicated use of terrain, the complex plot, the complex game mechanics, and the beautiful spell graphics. However I always felt like it didn't quite have enough tactical substance as it could have. Over the years I have revisited Shining Force far more often than FFT - mostly because of the memorable characters and the interesting shapes of the battles that unfold.
Agreed. I still like Shining Force better than *Tactics. One of the big reasons is that the characters are well differentiated, even within the same character class. I think this helps define their personalities (consider how different each of the centaurs plays - i.e. this one makes a good tank, but can't aim a lance ot save his life; that one is a great lancer, but is vulnerable to magic due to low HP, etc.).
I didn't like SF2 as much - I can't see how people prefer SF2's graphics, and somehow it felt less like an epic adventure. I don't know too much about where they took the series after SF2, but from the screenshots it looks like they've turned it into a gernicized fantasy-anime RPG, but I really hope they are keeping in touch with the original SF's roots. Its been a few years since I've gone back and played them, maybe its about time to revisit Max and the gang...
I realize that many here a loathe to give a nod to a Microsoft published product that only runs on DirectX, but Dungeon Siege by Gas Powered Games is remarkable for its constant streaming of a huge 3D RPG environment from starting the game with a hoe to the final boss showdown with no loading screens. They used some tricks as described in this whitepaper to achieve the effect. Although they had to linearize the content to a large degree, the idea of traversing a tree structure of content, constantly streaming in upcoming nodes is one that more developers could adhere to in creating continuous worlds.