I figured all videogame voice talent would be normal Joes and Janes that work for the companies, but I guess it stands to reason that they would use real actors in the a-list titles. But after RTFA I think I've suddenly started to like Cortana a lot more...
I think one of the big issues with WoW (and other MMO's) that can suck people in to it is the team aspect. If you don't show up for a raid you feel like you are letting those other 39 people down. That they NEED you to help them advance.
If you are playing First Person Shooter X and your significant other comes to you and asks you to help them open a jar of pickles, change the bedding, go out for a beer, or play naked twister, you can save and quit or pause the game and come back to it later. With MMO's there is no pause or quit. So you have the social pressure on you of these 39 people depending on you NOT going afk and you end up putting the real world one or two people aside.
I think Blizzard may have realized the timesink issue with the expansion because of their change to smaller 5-10 avatar raid encounters with saveable "wing" dungeon instances. But the fact of the matter is if you are in the middle of a fight and something happens in the outside world that requires your attention, you'll still have a tendency to prioritize the gameworld first. Thats the danger of the MMO. The social pressure of not wanting to let other people down that are depending on you.
I can see it now. The film will only have sprocket holes every 20th frame or so. It will freeze up as it jumps on the sprockets of the projectors then rapidly spool back to the takeup reel. All the spells and attacks that were frozen onscreen will be cast in 1/24th of a second. Blizzard will blame it on the serice provider and say their film is "Working as intended, no fault found."
Then the 13 year old next to you ninja loots your popcorn.
Sorry for the long winded post, but I'm having a slow day at work.
I played (I still have an active account and character "HellBat", but haven't logged it for over a month.) Planetside for one of the top outfits (Hostile Takeover) on the Markov server and the reasons all of the top players have left the game are related to the constant nerfing and dumbing down the game has received since they added the core combat expansion.
The first thing they did to cause a mass player exodus was to nerf the surge implant. The surge implant would basically double the players movement rate while using stamina at an increased rate. This allowed players who enjoy fast paced (doomish footspeeds) fps fragging action to really get in the kind of gameplay they like.
They still have the surge implant, but your weapon auto-holsters when you activate it and has a cool off time in which you are essentially helpless/weaponless for somewhere around 2.5 seconds after you deactivate it. The reason for the nerf was twofold. First all the inexperienced FPS players who came over from the MMORPG world would get worked by uber FPS'ers with ungodly aim, resource (stamina, medkit, medtool, repair tool) management, and situation management skills. (ie Dreamer) These players would then hjop onto the message boards and complain loudly that the people killing them had an unfair advantage. Second and most importantly of all, due to the games horrific prediction netcode, players who move at high speed in a vertical direction would warp around on other players screens. Since the hit detection is client side in Planetside it leads to the obvious exploit of people intentionally warping up/down stairways, maintaining their ability to hit/aim, while making it very difficult for people to hit them. Obviously something needed to be done about it, but basically instead of repairing the netcode (obviously a very difficult proposition) SOE took the nerf bat out and essentially killed the implants usefulness as a combat implement and turned it into a way to just cover territory. This caused all the people who enjoyed the speed fps games to lose their enjoyment of the game and therefore cancel their subscriptions.
The second thing and what seems like the final nail in Planetside's coffin is the addition of BFR's into the game. BFR stands for BattleFrame Robotics aka Mechs. They took a game mechanic that was about infantry capturing and holding bases and introduced an uber weapon into it that made infantry useless in the field. In the past in Planetside infantry caught in the field against a vehicle was likely to get pasted if the pilot of said vehicle had half a clue, but a good squad working together could hold off a few vehicles for a while. They introduce the BFR and suddenly the field is filled with these gigantic uber weapons that were essentially invincible against infantry and most vehicles. The community cried out and SOE took the nerf bat out about 4 times in the first month trying to balance the BFR but the mindset was already in place. Giant robots standing around in enemy base courtyards waiting for any infantry stupid enough to come outside to pad their killcounts. Nobody will get out of their BFR's to cap a base (the objective of the game) because there is a lengthy timer (45 minutes I believe) to get another one and basically while you're in one it's free kill mode. I hear that in the time I've been gone that they planned on further nerfing them to make the one man variants less powerful but basically SOE crapped the bed so hard in adding them that the global population on their markov server in primetime dropped to probably 20% or less of the pre-bfr days.
Also, performance is a problem with this game. When on a continent with small scale battles of 30-60 players performance is generally good with framerates never really dropping below 75 for me. (AthlonXP 3200, Nforce2, 1G ram, GF6800GT, 1024x768 res, cable modem) Anytime the battles would ramp up to 100-200 players the framerates would drop down to the 20-30 ra
Slashdot Mirror
I figured all videogame voice talent would be normal Joes and Janes that work for the companies, but I guess it stands to reason that they would use real actors in the a-list titles. But after RTFA I think I've suddenly started to like Cortana a lot more...
v oice_over_jen_taylor_06.jpg
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/dayart/20061023/450
I think one of the big issues with WoW (and other MMO's) that can suck people in to it is the team aspect. If you don't show up for a raid you feel like you are letting those other 39 people down. That they NEED you to help them advance.
If you are playing First Person Shooter X and your significant other comes to you and asks you to help them open a jar of pickles, change the bedding, go out for a beer, or play naked twister, you can save and quit or pause the game and come back to it later. With MMO's there is no pause or quit. So you have the social pressure on you of these 39 people depending on you NOT going afk and you end up putting the real world one or two people aside.
I think Blizzard may have realized the timesink issue with the expansion because of their change to smaller 5-10 avatar raid encounters with saveable "wing" dungeon instances. But the fact of the matter is if you are in the middle of a fight and something happens in the outside world that requires your attention, you'll still have a tendency to prioritize the gameworld first. Thats the danger of the MMO. The social pressure of not wanting to let other people down that are depending on you.
I can see it now. The film will only have sprocket holes every 20th frame or so. It will freeze up as it jumps on the sprockets of the projectors then rapidly spool back to the takeup reel. All the spells and attacks that were frozen onscreen will be cast in 1/24th of a second. Blizzard will blame it on the serice provider and say their film is "Working as intended, no fault found."
Then the 13 year old next to you ninja loots your popcorn.
Sorry for the long winded post, but I'm having a slow day at work.
I played (I still have an active account and character "HellBat", but haven't logged it for over a month.) Planetside for one of the top outfits (Hostile Takeover) on the Markov server and the reasons all of the top players have left the game are related to the constant nerfing and dumbing down the game has received since they added the core combat expansion.
The first thing they did to cause a mass player exodus was to nerf the surge implant. The surge implant would basically double the players movement rate while using stamina at an increased rate. This allowed players who enjoy fast paced (doomish footspeeds) fps fragging action to really get in the kind of gameplay they like.
They still have the surge implant, but your weapon auto-holsters when you activate it and has a cool off time in which you are essentially helpless/weaponless for somewhere around 2.5 seconds after you deactivate it. The reason for the nerf was twofold.
First all the inexperienced FPS players who came over from the MMORPG world would get worked by uber FPS'ers with ungodly aim, resource (stamina, medkit, medtool, repair tool) management, and situation management skills. (ie Dreamer) These players would then hjop onto the message boards and complain loudly that the people killing them had an unfair advantage.
Second and most importantly of all, due to the games horrific prediction netcode, players who move at high speed in a vertical direction would warp around on other players screens. Since the hit detection is client side in Planetside it leads to the obvious exploit of people intentionally warping up/down stairways, maintaining their ability to hit/aim, while making it very difficult for people to hit them. Obviously something needed to be done about it, but basically instead of repairing the netcode (obviously a very difficult proposition) SOE took the nerf bat out and essentially killed the implants usefulness as a combat implement and turned it into a way to just cover territory. This caused all the people who enjoyed the speed fps games to lose their enjoyment of the game and therefore cancel their subscriptions.
The second thing and what seems like the final nail in Planetside's coffin is the addition of BFR's into the game. BFR stands for BattleFrame Robotics aka Mechs. They took a game mechanic that was about infantry capturing and holding bases and introduced an uber weapon into it that made infantry useless in the field. In the past in Planetside infantry caught in the field against a vehicle was likely to get pasted if the pilot of said vehicle had half a clue, but a good squad working together could hold off a few vehicles for a while. They introduce the BFR and suddenly the field is filled with these gigantic uber weapons that were essentially invincible against infantry and most vehicles. The community cried out and SOE took the nerf bat out about 4 times in the first month trying to balance the BFR but the mindset was already in place. Giant robots standing around in enemy base courtyards waiting for any infantry stupid enough to come outside to pad their killcounts. Nobody will get out of their BFR's to cap a base (the objective of the game) because there is a lengthy timer (45 minutes I believe) to get another one and basically while you're in one it's free kill mode. I hear that in the time I've been gone that they planned on further nerfing them to make the one man variants less powerful but basically SOE crapped the bed so hard in adding them that the global population on their markov server in primetime dropped to probably 20% or less of the pre-bfr days.
Also, performance is a problem with this game. When on a continent with small scale battles of 30-60 players performance is generally good with framerates never really dropping below 75 for me. (AthlonXP 3200, Nforce2, 1G ram, GF6800GT, 1024x768 res, cable modem) Anytime the battles would ramp up to 100-200 players the framerates would drop down to the 20-30 ra