I have all my game magazines from the early 90s, and the writing is amateur and full of typos. I suppose I would consider EGM the highest quality of the group, but that's not saying a lot.
Frankly, after 1996, I wondered why anyone was still reading magazines. Not that the gaming press has improved to any great degree since then. It's selfish, immature, and angry. I like how it reacted to Nintendo's E3 presentation, claiming they weren't "catering to hardcores" by releasing new installments of their core franchises. I guess having a new Mario, Zelda, and Metroid game in the last 12 months wasn't enough (as if Mario and Zelda were ever "hardcore" anyway).
I don't think we do, quite honestly, judging by the multiple scandals that have gone seemingly unpunished during the Bush administration.
That's no different from the multiple scandals that plagued the Clinton administration, the difference between that the media actively covered it up back then.
Hell, the only reason we know about Monica Lewinsky is that Matt Drudge broke the story after Newsweek was going to quietly shelve it. And look how Obama's campaign got away with breaking its campaign financing promise and thus was able to accept record-breaking amounts of donations with no government oversight, often using untraceable prepaid cards. It's business as usual in Washington.
Your fallacy is that you're thinking solely in terms of technical specs. Those are just numbers. They don't determine whether a product is superior.
The NES was technically inferior when it was released in the mid-1980s. It ran on a cheap, old processor from the previous decade. It was still the best console because of its influential controllers, programming simplicity, and quality of software.
Fallout 3 has a lot of the same problems Oblivion did. Also, the writing and voice acting can sometimes be quite bad, and the plot sort of rushes and falls apart embarrassingly once you reach your father.
It's also breakable. I killed Burke before he could kill the sheriff Simms. When Burke died, Simms promptly disappeared in front of me, and all NPC scripts still acted like he had died. That's when I knew I was playing a typical Bethesda game.
Hitler was constantly trying to goad countries into war before his own imagined death, rushing Germany's military buildup forward without financial regard. It's really impossible to declare that the Internet could have "stopped Hitler" because his was the kind of personality that dictated such grand world plans. He had a future planned for the German people extending beyond his life.
The way he took control of his party and eventually his country might even have been empowered by the Internet. I suspect Hitler would have exploited such a communication medium. I think the Internet strengthens cults of personality as much as it exposes criticisms of them. To act like we're in such a great, enlightened time is silly. In my opinion, the Internet has made people even more gullible in many ways.
I count instances as grinding because they are the primary way of progressing your character once you've hit max level. When the quests are all done, it's how you spend your time in WoW from that point forward. Even the PvP is compartmentalized into little instanced dungeons for gear in the form of the Arena.
A lot of your complaints boil down to 'I have no friends in the game to work with or help me out'. I got into Dalaran about an hour into playing LK, completely for free, mostly because I'm part of a very large Guild that is in turn part of a larger alliance of about a half dozen other guilds all of whom have membership numbers in the hundreds.
Your response to not having access to Dalaran was "know a mage." I responded that the majority of mages charge high prices to get to Dalaran, especially on my server which is one of the highest population Horde servers in the U.S. (Mal'Ganis). It doesn't really help your point that you had to rely on your large guild to get you to Dalaran. What about normal people?
Leveling to 80 will easily gain you over 3k gold even if you never do a daily, so you won't be broke. As for rep, seriously, what the hell? You complain about dailies and you complain about dungeons. Apparently you want to hit exalted with factions without doing anything at all. I take it back. You don't need to play Oblivion. You need to play Progress Quest or find a pretty screensaver.
As for leveling to 80 netting me 3,000 gold, I play a resto shaman. This means I leveled mostly through instances. I do not have 3,000 from that journey to 80, I'm afraid. I also find it amusing that you defend the mindless grinds of WoW, as if they're somehow different from Progress Quest.:)
That's not affecting the world. It's just progressing through phased static content, another form of AoC's instancing.
When I think of affecting the world, I think of something dynamic and non-scripted, such as the battle over Wintergrasp which could go either way based on the players.
Over the last year, I've played Warhammer: Age of Reckoning and Age of Conan.
I really feel sorry for both of them.
The bar's a bit higher now. The sheer variety of quest types now in WoW is just ludicrous. They put in a medevac quest.
I feel the opposite. I feel bad for WoW, because once you've hit max level in WotLK, there's nothing else to do but grind. They tried to rip off many Warhammer features, but they still can't touch public quests and RvR.
Look how many people are disappointed in how easy the expansion was. Check out the official forums where people have cleared all the content.
A lot of them get addicted to the social aspect. It's the MySpace of MMOs. The playerbase itself, in-game especially, is incredibly stupid and immature. Expect tired 4chan references and Chuck Norris jokes.
The game itself is completely mindless and nearly devoid of any real game design. You run up to yellow exclamation marks that tell you to run a short distance, kill 10 of something, and come back to get the next exclamation point.
I remember starting the game last year and being amazed that this was the #1 online game that I had been hearing so much hype over. I played the Warcraft RTS games, and I started an orc warrior expecting to do cool things for the Horde in their fight against the Alliance. Instead I was killing boars. Then killing scorpions. Then killing imps. Then killing centaurs. Then killing pig-men. And it never ended until I unsubscribed. It sure never felt like Warcraft to me.
I think there's a gambling addiction aspect to it as well. People run dungeons hoping for a chance of some special piece of gear to drop. Did I mention that, by the way? When you're done grinding all the yellow exclamation points, the rest of your time in the game is about mindlessly grinding for pieces of virtual gear. That's it. You don't do anything else, because there's nothing else to do. You just play to get gear in order to make it easier to get more gear.
You grinded when you leveled to 80, for starters. You have to grind dungeons for gear, which you even admit at the end of your post (weirdly, you don't refer to it as grinding). You'll also be grinding when 3.1 comes out and the real endgame content is released.
Also, here is not that big of a variety in quests. People reference a few memorable ones while ignoring the tons upon tons of "Kill X of Y" quests. The worst of WotLK is the large number of "Run to this location and then come back so I can tell you what to do there" quests. The quest giver refers to it as scouting the location. I refer to it as stupid game design.
Missing recipes, missing crafted sets for certain specs, bad itemization on existing sets (holy paladin set has strength and little intellect)...and so on.
Missing profession recipes, crafted PvP sets for certain specs while ignoring others, weird itemization (holy paladin set has little intellect and has strength on it)...it's a mess.
I would consider missing recipes that are required for an achievement that they put into the game to be quite glaring.
You may mock his desire for the achievement, but once you've hit 80 and discovered there's nothing else to do but sit in battleground queues or grind dungeons, you might start looking at filling out your achievements just to kill the boredom. So it sucks that Blizzard just totally forgot their own recipes.
Are you sure you played WoTLK? There is some fantastic storytelling questlines in this expansion, on par with and better than such things as getting keyed for Onyxia back in the day, and certainly much more of it than there was in the original game and TBC.
Too bad it's buried under the avalanche of "We're a helpless tribe of tuskarr/taunka, collect feathers/horns/kill elementals/scout this location and return to me."
This is totally opposite from my experience with the expansion. It feels exactly like 10 more levels of the same game that Burning Crusade was.
Your character doesn't affect the world at all. I really don't get what you're referring to about having a "notable impact on the world." About the best you can do is take Wintergrasp for a cheesy Northrend buff that lets you collect "Stone Keeper Shards" from bosses in dungeons. That's it.
People are hitting level 80 and finding out that there's nothing to do but exactly what they did before--stand around battlemasters in a queue or mindlessly grind a dungeon over and over. Furthermore, the content is ridiculously easy. The dungeons are the blandest and shortest Blizzard has ever put out, and the quests are barely challenging.
If you are sick and tired of "Kill X of Y and return to me" being considered great RPG design, you'll be disappointed in WotLK because it's the same boring thing of the last four years. Classes have been made more redundant so that there's no specific reason to use a particular raid layout. Nice intentions, but as a result, the game feels really bland and generic. There's not even a gold grind at the end for some new mount ability to work toward--just pay 1000 gold at level 77, and you can fly again. Easy. And boring.
I don't see anything sociopathic about Steve Jobs. He's just deadset in his opinions enough to overrule any sort of committees or focus groups that might play a bigger part in the design of his competitors' products. This gives Apple a narrow but clear focus.
You're being ridiculously semantic just to feel intellectually superior. Of course there's such a thing as "MIDI music." It refers to the music that is in MIDI format.
A CD doesn't make noise by itself either, but I doubt you're going to argue that it isn't what would be referred to a "CD of music." Well, maybe you will just to have something to argue about.
Slashdot Mirror
Neeeeerrrrrrdd rrrraaaaagggggeeeee!
Sony's check is in the mail.
I have all my game magazines from the early 90s, and the writing is amateur and full of typos. I suppose I would consider EGM the highest quality of the group, but that's not saying a lot.
Frankly, after 1996, I wondered why anyone was still reading magazines. Not that the gaming press has improved to any great degree since then. It's selfish, immature, and angry. I like how it reacted to Nintendo's E3 presentation, claiming they weren't "catering to hardcores" by releasing new installments of their core franchises. I guess having a new Mario, Zelda, and Metroid game in the last 12 months wasn't enough (as if Mario and Zelda were ever "hardcore" anyway).
You're avoiding high-quality stuff because of some vocal individuals. That's silly.
That's no different from the multiple scandals that plagued the Clinton administration, the difference between that the media actively covered it up back then.
Hell, the only reason we know about Monica Lewinsky is that Matt Drudge broke the story after Newsweek was going to quietly shelve it. And look how Obama's campaign got away with breaking its campaign financing promise and thus was able to accept record-breaking amounts of donations with no government oversight, often using untraceable prepaid cards. It's business as usual in Washington.
Nobody outside of Slashdot cares about Ogg.
Your fallacy is that you're thinking solely in terms of technical specs. Those are just numbers. They don't determine whether a product is superior.
The NES was technically inferior when it was released in the mid-1980s. It ran on a cheap, old processor from the previous decade. It was still the best console because of its influential controllers, programming simplicity, and quality of software.
Fallout 3 has a lot of the same problems Oblivion did. Also, the writing and voice acting can sometimes be quite bad, and the plot sort of rushes and falls apart embarrassingly once you reach your father.
It's also breakable. I killed Burke before he could kill the sheriff Simms. When Burke died, Simms promptly disappeared in front of me, and all NPC scripts still acted like he had died. That's when I knew I was playing a typical Bethesda game.
Yes, the last time we had one party controlling the entire government went so well for us!
I hate to break it to you, but the U.N. hasn't done much better, my friend.
As a matter of fact, they literally rape people in the countries they help--look it up.
Hitler was constantly trying to goad countries into war before his own imagined death, rushing Germany's military buildup forward without financial regard. It's really impossible to declare that the Internet could have "stopped Hitler" because his was the kind of personality that dictated such grand world plans. He had a future planned for the German people extending beyond his life.
The way he took control of his party and eventually his country might even have been empowered by the Internet. I suspect Hitler would have exploited such a communication medium. I think the Internet strengthens cults of personality as much as it exposes criticisms of them. To act like we're in such a great, enlightened time is silly. In my opinion, the Internet has made people even more gullible in many ways.
I count instances as grinding because they are the primary way of progressing your character once you've hit max level. When the quests are all done, it's how you spend your time in WoW from that point forward. Even the PvP is compartmentalized into little instanced dungeons for gear in the form of the Arena.
Your response to not having access to Dalaran was "know a mage." I responded that the majority of mages charge high prices to get to Dalaran, especially on my server which is one of the highest population Horde servers in the U.S. (Mal'Ganis). It doesn't really help your point that you had to rely on your large guild to get you to Dalaran. What about normal people?
As for leveling to 80 netting me 3,000 gold, I play a resto shaman. This means I leveled mostly through instances. I do not have 3,000 from that journey to 80, I'm afraid. I also find it amusing that you defend the mindless grinds of WoW, as if they're somehow different from Progress Quest. :)
That's not affecting the world. It's just progressing through phased static content, another form of AoC's instancing.
When I think of affecting the world, I think of something dynamic and non-scripted, such as the battle over Wintergrasp which could go either way based on the players.
I feel the opposite. I feel bad for WoW, because once you've hit max level in WotLK, there's nothing else to do but grind. They tried to rip off many Warhammer features, but they still can't touch public quests and RvR.
Look how many people are disappointed in how easy the expansion was. Check out the official forums where people have cleared all the content.
A lot of them get addicted to the social aspect. It's the MySpace of MMOs. The playerbase itself, in-game especially, is incredibly stupid and immature. Expect tired 4chan references and Chuck Norris jokes.
The game itself is completely mindless and nearly devoid of any real game design. You run up to yellow exclamation marks that tell you to run a short distance, kill 10 of something, and come back to get the next exclamation point.
I remember starting the game last year and being amazed that this was the #1 online game that I had been hearing so much hype over. I played the Warcraft RTS games, and I started an orc warrior expecting to do cool things for the Horde in their fight against the Alliance. Instead I was killing boars. Then killing scorpions. Then killing imps. Then killing centaurs. Then killing pig-men. And it never ended until I unsubscribed. It sure never felt like Warcraft to me.
I think there's a gambling addiction aspect to it as well. People run dungeons hoping for a chance of some special piece of gear to drop. Did I mention that, by the way? When you're done grinding all the yellow exclamation points, the rest of your time in the game is about mindlessly grinding for pieces of virtual gear. That's it. You don't do anything else, because there's nothing else to do. You just play to get gear in order to make it easier to get more gear.
You grinded when you leveled to 80, for starters. You have to grind dungeons for gear, which you even admit at the end of your post (weirdly, you don't refer to it as grinding). You'll also be grinding when 3.1 comes out and the real endgame content is released.
Also, here is not that big of a variety in quests. People reference a few memorable ones while ignoring the tons upon tons of "Kill X of Y" quests. The worst of WotLK is the large number of "Run to this location and then come back so I can tell you what to do there" quests. The quest giver refers to it as scouting the location. I refer to it as stupid game design.
I play games to get away from the grind of life.
Missing recipes, missing crafted sets for certain specs, bad itemization on existing sets (holy paladin set has strength and little intellect)...and so on.
Missing profession recipes, crafted PvP sets for certain specs while ignoring others, weird itemization (holy paladin set has little intellect and has strength on it)...it's a mess.
I would consider missing recipes that are required for an achievement that they put into the game to be quite glaring.
You may mock his desire for the achievement, but once you've hit 80 and discovered there's nothing else to do but sit in battleground queues or grind dungeons, you might start looking at filling out your achievements just to kill the boredom. So it sucks that Blizzard just totally forgot their own recipes.
Too bad it's buried under the avalanche of "We're a helpless tribe of tuskarr/taunka, collect feathers/horns/kill elementals/scout this location and return to me."
Ignoring the fact, of course, that mages have been charging 20-50 gold per port.
You'll be broke and will have to mindlessly grind dungeons for rep instead. You left that part out, I see.
It's a disappointing expansion.
This is totally opposite from my experience with the expansion. It feels exactly like 10 more levels of the same game that Burning Crusade was.
Your character doesn't affect the world at all. I really don't get what you're referring to about having a "notable impact on the world." About the best you can do is take Wintergrasp for a cheesy Northrend buff that lets you collect "Stone Keeper Shards" from bosses in dungeons. That's it.
People are hitting level 80 and finding out that there's nothing to do but exactly what they did before--stand around battlemasters in a queue or mindlessly grind a dungeon over and over. Furthermore, the content is ridiculously easy. The dungeons are the blandest and shortest Blizzard has ever put out, and the quests are barely challenging.
If you are sick and tired of "Kill X of Y and return to me" being considered great RPG design, you'll be disappointed in WotLK because it's the same boring thing of the last four years. Classes have been made more redundant so that there's no specific reason to use a particular raid layout. Nice intentions, but as a result, the game feels really bland and generic. There's not even a gold grind at the end for some new mount ability to work toward--just pay 1000 gold at level 77, and you can fly again. Easy. And boring.
I don't see anything sociopathic about Steve Jobs. He's just deadset in his opinions enough to overrule any sort of committees or focus groups that might play a bigger part in the design of his competitors' products. This gives Apple a narrow but clear focus.
You're being ridiculously semantic just to feel intellectually superior. Of course there's such a thing as "MIDI music." It refers to the music that is in MIDI format.
A CD doesn't make noise by itself either, but I doubt you're going to argue that it isn't what would be referred to a "CD of music." Well, maybe you will just to have something to argue about.