Go play Planescape:Torment and then get back to me. That is the kind of deep storyline that I am talking about. I was merely suggesting a way that Blizzard could make a game within a game. The fact that such a game within a game would likely cost more than their entire WoW budget to date may put them off though. In addition to the fact that they could just make an entirely new game instead...
Please reread my post. Those dungeons do not have interesting or significant storylines. WoW is not a story-driven game. Period. It's about killing monsters or performing tasks which are mainly about killing monsters. It can't be all things to all people. I figured my awareness of the term "instances" would tip you off that I know about them.
Yup. The servers have been slashdotted, somehow. This press release story/advertisement probably just reminded lots of/.ers to log in at the same time flooding the already fragile servers.
There's a bit of grinding (since you have to level to do the quests or go to new areas) but it's nowhere near as bad as any other RPG I've played.
I take it that you haven't played many then? This game is all about grinding. You can do "quests" if you want but it's just more grinding in the context of doing a job for someone. I have a real job. What do I need a virtual one for?
The game has nice artwork. Great art design. Other than that I don't see anything particularly special about it. If you liked Diablo II then you will love this, but if you hated Diablo II you won't find this (Diablo III) all that different.
Many good games don't have much replay value, and yet people still buy them without feeling ripped off.
I bought a copy of WoW. I am currently playing it, but I have absolutely no intention of continuing past the first 30 days which are included in the game cost.
If I enjoyed the game more, I would certainly be willing to pay the $15/month. Unfortunately it is just Diablo III with much better graphics. That is the game style. Kill monsters, rinse, repeat, ad nauseum. While fun at first it gets old pretty fast, at least for me.
The "quests" or tasks or jobs or whatever you want to call them working as a fedex delivery man, hitman, or the like is no replacement for an exciting plot. There is no plot. Just lots of running around killing monsters (many of whom are very similar to one another).
The goal if there is one is just to level up and keep killing tougher and tougher monsters who look much the same as the easier ones except for the names above their heads.
I don't think it would be impossible for Blizzard to add some kind of huge dungeon (or "instance") that would be like another self-contained story driven game in its own right, but I don't think that's going to happen. Sandbox play that relies on players keeping themselves busy killing each other is far more profitable.
but I suppose on my next round of maintenance I had better lock down IE as much as I can.
Actually you can lock it down completely by turning off javascript ("active scripting") and activeX and a few other switches like I-frame etc. It should be at least as secure as Firefox if you do that.
Sorry but not all IE users are affected by this. Only the clueless ones who run IE with Javascript and/or ActiveX enabled. There's no excuse for that, and I have no sympathy for such people. If you run IE you just have to run with ActiveX and Javascript disabled. End of story. Nothing to see here...
Actually it didn't work for me either and I'm running IE6 SP1. Perhaps they shouldn't code it in javascript. I am concerned about this vulnerability but I can't test for it because those idiots decided to use javascript for the test. Grrr.
Any encoder with a modicum of talent will divert more of the available bitrate to high-action scenes.
In this case that doesn't matter all that much. Go convert a 128 kbps MP3 to WAV and then recompress it to a 64 kbps AAC file. Then let me know how it sounds. Recompressing a file that has already been losslessly compressed will not get you very far no matter how good you think the replacement format is.
I know that there are some people who cannot tell the difference between a 700 MB xvid file and the 9 GB DVD version, but I am not one of these people. I have watched MANY xvid movies and it is never as sharp and there are tons of artifacts.
I clearly have no idea what I'm talking about.
Well I wouldn't go that far, but you may want to get your eyes checked.
The problem is that most game developers spend so much time on the graphics (artwork, engine, character models etc) that the actual game design is often an afterthought. I agree that this may be a necessary step in our evolution, but it is frustrating to have to live through it and watch all the beautiful graphics that could have been used to lead the player through a wondrous story-driven world.
Although I played and enjoyed computer games in the 70s and 80s, I don't think they really reached any level of maturity until the early to mid 90s.
I loved Castle Wolfenstein, Archon, and Crush, Crumble, and Chomp, but I was just a kid. At the time, better games just didn't exist. Now, I would find such games incredibly boring and unplayable (although the grenades and stick-ups/ammo stealing in Castle Wolfenstein would still be fun).
Once you see better graphics it's awfully difficult to go back.
Have you considered that emotional attachment may be somewhat inversely proportional to age? Also those games were part of a whole era. When I was 10 back in 1980 I had a casio calculator watch that had a version of Space Invaders (with numbers) on it. I have fond memories of that but I would never call it a great game. When you're young all kinds of things have strong emotional associations.
My favorite games are all from the 90s: Ultima Underworld I and II, Elder Scrolls: Arena and Daggerfall, Might and Magic VI,VII,VIII, Planescape: Torment, Fallout I,II, Baldurs Gate I,II, Icewind Dale I, (all CRPGs because that's what I like the most).
Nothing from the 70s or 80s makes my list. Those games were well designed for what they were but they were still just simple games and most of us playing them were just kids. In those days most adults didn't seem to play computer games. At least I didn't know of any who did.
Kids have it so much better today. Although they can (and should) still play those old classics to get a proper sense of computer game history, I wish I could have played games like we have had for the past decade or so when I was a kid. It must be great to grow up with that. Perhaps 500 years from now we will have ST:TNG holodecks and life will never be the same again. Until then computer games are as close as we can get to an interactive (unlike books/films) virtual world.
I don't see why I had to wait until I was in my 20s to play a game like Ultima Underworld or even Wolfenstein 3D. What a waste.
Keep in mind those games may only have been fun because you were like 8 years old or something. Try playing them now. It wasn't the square pixels. It was that we were so young and experiencing the very first video games on this planet. It was exciting, but so are lots of things at that age.
I think the point is that game design per se hasn't really improved much in the past quarter century of computer game history. Graphics have though. But graphics just aren't enough.
Well not all of us. I played it until the cows came home. Those damn dam controls drove me nuts. But I found it frustrating in the same way that I have always found "adventure" games frustrating. What's so great about solving puzzles? Still the dialogue was first rate. And I loved the grue stuff.
I found the first graphical adventures like Wizard and the Princess and (the much better) Cranston Manor to be even more frustrating, but still.
OTOH, I had a lot of fun playing Super Star Trek on a DEC PDP-11. And I loved the later games for the Atari 400/800, Apple, TRS-80 etc. Games like Crush Crumble and Chomp, Archon, Castle Wolfenstein...
Just don't forget how everything seems new and exciting when you are very young. Everything is a novelty. It doesn't take much to entertain a little kid.
Remember, these are not the same type of kids we were. These guys have had computers, gamesystems, and the like ALL THEIR LIFE. They might know a bit more about it. They are the entertainment generation.
Actually the same could be said for anyone mid-30s or under. I was playing computer games by the time I was 7. That was in the 70s. The only difference is the quality of the graphics. At first all the games were text-based and then came pong (or breakout). But they were still games.
I don't have much experience with young kids, but the ones I meet seem pretty "stupid". Some of them are smart of course, but I haven't run into them. They are probably all home in front of their computers or reading arcane texts. So we don't see them as much.
Highly intelligent people tend to start gaining their thinking abilities at the same time as everyone else: at about 7 years of age. But until they have more time to build up a knowledge base they just don't know very much, even if they think they do.
Pretty impressive that you could play such games at 3. I can't even get my 6 year old nephew even close to being able to play Zork. He seems to need graphics, and he doesn't understand most of the words.
My first game was Star Trek or Super Star Trek played on my friend's DEC PDP-11. His father worked for DEC. So he had one of those. This was a bit before anyone really had the Atari 2600s, probably around 1977. We also played Adventure on that PDP-11. Great fun. I would have been about 7.
You have definitely never been to Cuba. I have. Don't believe the hype. Your argument would have been more convincing if you had used China as an example.
At the moment AMD is kicking Intel's arse in the performance sector. The pentium M (Banias) is the only remaining tech that Intel really has. Lots of chickens have come home to roost now that Intel's super-ultra-mega clockspeed boosted chip has reached the end of the line.
For the sake of a continuing healthy, competive market even the most die hard AMD fans had better hope that Intel gets back on track and allows some engineers to actually make some product decisions for a change. The Banias core seems to be their only hope.
I have found all of these recent benchmarks to be rather amazing. It's tough for anything to beat an overclocked Pentium M in games even with the huge disadvantages of an aging platform without all the latest goodies. Intel should be embarrassed. Deeply. Their Pentium 4 is a disgrace.
It is clear that for anyone who cares at all about power consumption, heat, or noise, nothing can touch a Pentium M, not even a Cool n' Quiet enabled 90nm Winchester Athlon64. If Aopen releases a desktop motherboard with the upcoming alviso (PCI-E, DDR2 etc) chipset, things could get very interesting indeed.
and will actually beat a Pentium 4 clock for clock in some applications.
Actually make that all applications. At least clock for clock. It also tends to beat the Athlon64 clock for clock but that's a much closer race. The P4 is such a marketing-driven dog of a processor. Thank god I will never have to own one.
But really silly is your asumption those people would go back home, why should they?
Well maybe because they don't want their children to go through an "edcation system on a low and cheap profile". If you believe these stereotypes then they probably do too. They come to our country that is inferior in every possible way to every other country, make a quick buck from our doomed economy, and get the hell out as quickly as possible. After all the US is the root of everything that is wrong in the world is it not?
Personally, I despise IE's "zones"; they're too hard to manage, and only necessary because the browser is so insecure.
That is an article of faith. Actually it's javascript that is insecure. I don't want unknown web sites running any scripts on my computer.
With all active scripting disabled I would bet that IE6 is actually more secure than firefox with javascript enabled. That is my bet and that is the only reason I use IE. I don't trust Javascript and you do. I guess that is the difference.
Ask yourself if there has ever been a javascript exploit that has also worked on Firefox or Mozilla. I can answer that for you:). Those Javascript exploits obviously won't work on IE with javascript disabled. So which is more "secure"?
You are willing to put all of your trust in the Firefox devs as being perfect 100% of the time by always anticipating possible exploits before they happen. I am not. With javascript and activeX turned off I am still not quite as invulnerable as a Lynx user, but it's as close as I can get.
Please don't confuse us with the facts. Don't mention the third world slash and burn forestry practices destroying large tracts of the (CO2 breathing) forests. Don't mention that most of the warming occured between before 1940. Don't mention that the actual ppm increase in CO2 since 1850 (280ppm to 350ppm) is the same as historically observed changes throughout history (varying between 170ppm and 280ppm). Don't mention that "global warming" mainly occurs in large cities and that global averages change wildly based on whether or not you include measurements taken from large cities. Don't mention the inaccuracy of thermometer technology or the difficulty of manufacturing and maintaining an atmospheric thermometer with an accuracy of less than +/- 1 degree F or whether the countries most responsible (not the US btw) for the warming trend could afford, maintain, and properly use such technology for decades. And definitely don't mention the massive changes that would be required all over the world, far more than most pro-greenhousers would accept, (making Kyoto look like the joke that it was) in order to reduce our C02 emissions significantly. Definitely don't mention holding 3rd world slash and burn countries accountable.
I am also running IE6 SP1. I clicked on the link but nothing happens because my browser doesn't understand javascript commands. That evil "javascript:start()" is useless against any browser with javascript disabled.
Javascript is the work of the devil. IT IS TURNED OFF in my browser. Obviously ActiveX is even worse and it is turned off as well. Now that is what I call secure browsing. Much better than the security through obscurity that a javascript enabled Firefox browser gives you.
Of course you can turn off javascript in Firefox too, but I bet not many of you leave it that way. In IE I can leave it off because I just enable it for a select few "trusted" sites (mostly e-commerce sites like Newegg or Amazon that I have purchased from before).
In God's name WHEN is Firefox going to implement javascript whitelisting or security zones as a standard feature? Whitelisting is available for cookies, so why not for javascript as well?
The real alternative is to Just Say No to Javascript and ActiveX (or any other intrusive client side scripting language). Turn them OFF and leave them that way. They are nothing but trouble.
I'm thinking hard here, and the only things I am coming up with are OS shell integration and activeX
Javascript whitelisting and/or security zones. I cannot always remember to turn off javascript after I have enabled it for a particular site, so this is a very important feature to me. Until Firefox adds it I'll stick with IE thank you very much.
How many of these exploits work with active scripting and activeX turned off? Not many.
Slashdot Mirror
So does this mean I can legally put one of those GPS trackers on my ex-gilfriend's car now?
Go play Planescape:Torment and then get back to me. That is the kind of deep storyline that I am talking about. I was merely suggesting a way that Blizzard could make a game within a game. The fact that such a game within a game would likely cost more than their entire WoW budget to date may put them off though. In addition to the fact that they could just make an entirely new game instead...
Please reread my post. Those dungeons do not have interesting or significant storylines. WoW is not a story-driven game. Period. It's about killing monsters or performing tasks which are mainly about killing monsters. It can't be all things to all people. I figured my awareness of the term "instances" would tip you off that I know about them.
Yup. The servers have been slashdotted, somehow. This press release story/advertisement probably just reminded lots of /.ers to log in at the same time flooding the already fragile servers.
There's a bit of grinding (since you have to level to do the quests or go to new areas) but it's nowhere near as bad as any other RPG I've played.
I take it that you haven't played many then? This game is all about grinding. You can do "quests" if you want but it's just more grinding in the context of doing a job for someone. I have a real job. What do I need a virtual one for?
The game has nice artwork. Great art design. Other than that I don't see anything particularly special about it. If you liked Diablo II then you will love this, but if you hated Diablo II you won't find this (Diablo III) all that different.
Many good games don't have much replay value, and yet people still buy them without feeling ripped off.
I bought a copy of WoW. I am currently playing it, but I have absolutely no intention of continuing past the first 30 days which are included in the game cost.
If I enjoyed the game more, I would certainly be willing to pay the $15/month. Unfortunately it is just Diablo III with much better graphics. That is the game style. Kill monsters, rinse, repeat, ad nauseum. While fun at first it gets old pretty fast, at least for me.
The "quests" or tasks or jobs or whatever you want to call them working as a fedex delivery man, hitman, or the like is no replacement for an exciting plot. There is no plot. Just lots of running around killing monsters (many of whom are very similar to one another).
The goal if there is one is just to level up and keep killing tougher and tougher monsters who look much the same as the easier ones except for the names above their heads.
I don't think it would be impossible for Blizzard to add some kind of huge dungeon (or "instance") that would be like another self-contained story driven game in its own right, but I don't think that's going to happen. Sandbox play that relies on players keeping themselves busy killing each other is far more profitable.
but I suppose on my next round of maintenance I had better lock down IE as much as I can.
Actually you can lock it down completely by turning off javascript ("active scripting") and activeX and a few other switches like I-frame etc. It should be at least as secure as Firefox if you do that.
Sorry but not all IE users are affected by this. Only the clueless ones who run IE with Javascript and/or ActiveX enabled. There's no excuse for that, and I have no sympathy for such people. If you run IE you just have to run with ActiveX and Javascript disabled. End of story. Nothing to see here...
Actually it didn't work for me either and I'm running IE6 SP1. Perhaps they shouldn't code it in javascript. I am concerned about this vulnerability but I can't test for it because those idiots decided to use javascript for the test. Grrr.
Any encoder with a modicum of talent will divert more of the available bitrate to high-action scenes.
In this case that doesn't matter all that much. Go convert a 128 kbps MP3 to WAV and then recompress it to a 64 kbps AAC file. Then let me know how it sounds. Recompressing a file that has already been losslessly compressed will not get you very far no matter how good you think the replacement format is.
I know that there are some people who cannot tell the difference between a 700 MB xvid file and the 9 GB DVD version, but I am not one of these people. I have watched MANY xvid movies and it is never as sharp and there are tons of artifacts.
I clearly have no idea what I'm talking about.
Well I wouldn't go that far, but you may want to get your eyes checked.
Well that's WAY more of a social life than I have. Why is face time so important anyway? Meatspace is boring.
The problem is that most game developers spend so much time on the graphics (artwork, engine, character models etc) that the actual game design is often an afterthought. I agree that this may be a necessary step in our evolution, but it is frustrating to have to live through it and watch all the beautiful graphics that could have been used to lead the player through a wondrous story-driven world.
Although I played and enjoyed computer games in the 70s and 80s, I don't think they really reached any level of maturity until the early to mid 90s.
I loved Castle Wolfenstein, Archon, and Crush, Crumble, and Chomp, but I was just a kid. At the time, better games just didn't exist. Now, I would find such games incredibly boring and unplayable (although the grenades and stick-ups/ammo stealing in Castle Wolfenstein would still be fun).
Once you see better graphics it's awfully difficult to go back.
Have you considered that emotional attachment may be somewhat inversely proportional to age? Also those games were part of a whole era. When I was 10 back in 1980 I had a casio calculator watch that had a version of Space Invaders (with numbers) on it. I have fond memories of that but I would never call it a great game. When you're young all kinds of things have strong emotional associations.
My favorite games are all from the 90s: Ultima Underworld I and II, Elder Scrolls: Arena and Daggerfall, Might and Magic VI,VII,VIII, Planescape: Torment, Fallout I,II, Baldurs Gate I,II, Icewind Dale I, (all CRPGs because that's what I like the most).
Nothing from the 70s or 80s makes my list. Those games were well designed for what they were but they were still just simple games and most of us playing them were just kids. In those days most adults didn't seem to play computer games. At least I didn't know of any who did.
Kids have it so much better today. Although they can (and should) still play those old classics to get a proper sense of computer game history, I wish I could have played games like we have had for the past decade or so when I was a kid. It must be great to grow up with that. Perhaps 500 years from now we will have ST:TNG holodecks and life will never be the same again. Until then computer games are as close as we can get to an interactive (unlike books/films) virtual world.
I don't see why I had to wait until I was in my 20s to play a game like Ultima Underworld or even Wolfenstein 3D. What a waste.
Keep in mind those games may only have been fun because you were like 8 years old or something. Try playing them now. It wasn't the square pixels. It was that we were so young and experiencing the very first video games on this planet. It was exciting, but so are lots of things at that age.
I think the point is that game design per se hasn't really improved much in the past quarter century of computer game history. Graphics have though. But graphics just aren't enough.
Well not all of us. I played it until the cows came home. Those damn dam controls drove me nuts. But I found it frustrating in the same way that I have always found "adventure" games frustrating. What's so great about solving puzzles? Still the dialogue was first rate. And I loved the grue stuff.
I found the first graphical adventures like Wizard and the Princess and (the much better) Cranston Manor to be even more frustrating, but still.
OTOH, I had a lot of fun playing Super Star Trek on a DEC PDP-11. And I loved the later games for the Atari 400/800, Apple, TRS-80 etc. Games like Crush Crumble and Chomp, Archon, Castle Wolfenstein...
Just don't forget how everything seems new and exciting when you are very young. Everything is a novelty. It doesn't take much to entertain a little kid.
Remember, these are not the same type of kids we were. These guys have had computers, gamesystems, and the like ALL THEIR LIFE. They might know a bit more about it. They are the entertainment generation.
Actually the same could be said for anyone mid-30s or under. I was playing computer games by the time I was 7. That was in the 70s. The only difference is the quality of the graphics. At first all the games were text-based and then came pong (or breakout). But they were still games.
I don't have much experience with young kids, but the ones I meet seem pretty "stupid". Some of them are smart of course, but I haven't run into them. They are probably all home in front of their computers or reading arcane texts. So we don't see them as much.
Highly intelligent people tend to start gaining their thinking abilities at the same time as everyone else: at about 7 years of age. But until they have more time to build up a knowledge base they just don't know very much, even if they think they do.
Pretty impressive that you could play such games at 3. I can't even get my 6 year old nephew even close to being able to play Zork. He seems to need graphics, and he doesn't understand most of the words.
My first game was Star Trek or Super Star Trek played on my friend's DEC PDP-11. His father worked for DEC. So he had one of those. This was a bit before anyone really had the Atari 2600s, probably around 1977. We also played Adventure on that PDP-11. Great fun. I would have been about 7.
You have definitely never been to Cuba. I have. Don't believe the hype. Your argument would have been more convincing if you had used China as an example.
A couple of more links
here and here.
At the moment AMD is kicking Intel's arse in the performance sector. The pentium M (Banias) is the only remaining tech that Intel really has. Lots of chickens have come home to roost now that Intel's super-ultra-mega clockspeed boosted chip has reached the end of the line.
For the sake of a continuing healthy, competive market even the most die hard AMD fans had better hope that Intel gets back on track and allows some engineers to actually make some product decisions for a change. The Banias core seems to be their only hope.
I have found all of these recent benchmarks to be rather amazing. It's tough for anything to beat an overclocked Pentium M in games even with the huge disadvantages of an aging platform without all the latest goodies. Intel should be embarrassed. Deeply. Their Pentium 4 is a disgrace.
It is clear that for anyone who cares at all about power consumption, heat, or noise, nothing can touch a Pentium M, not even a Cool n' Quiet enabled 90nm Winchester Athlon64. If Aopen releases a desktop motherboard with the upcoming alviso (PCI-E, DDR2 etc) chipset, things could get very interesting indeed.
and will actually beat a Pentium 4 clock for clock in some applications.
Actually make that all applications. At least clock for clock. It also tends to beat the Athlon64 clock for clock but that's a much closer race. The P4 is such a marketing-driven dog of a processor. Thank god I will never have to own one.
But really silly is your asumption those people would go back home, why should they?
Well maybe because they don't want their children to go through an "edcation system on a low and cheap profile". If you believe these stereotypes then they probably do too. They come to our country that is inferior in every possible way to every other country, make a quick buck from our doomed economy, and get the hell out as quickly as possible. After all the US is the root of everything that is wrong in the world is it not?
Personally, I despise IE's "zones"; they're too hard to manage, and only necessary because the browser is so insecure.
:). Those Javascript exploits obviously won't work on IE with javascript disabled. So which is more "secure"?
That is an article of faith. Actually it's javascript that is insecure. I don't want unknown web sites running any scripts on my computer.
With all active scripting disabled I would bet that IE6 is actually more secure than firefox with javascript enabled. That is my bet and that is the only reason I use IE. I don't trust Javascript and you do. I guess that is the difference.
Ask yourself if there has ever been a javascript exploit that has also worked on Firefox or Mozilla. I can answer that for you
You are willing to put all of your trust in the Firefox devs as being perfect 100% of the time by always anticipating possible exploits before they happen. I am not. With javascript and activeX turned off I am still not quite as invulnerable as a Lynx user, but it's as close as I can get.
Please don't confuse us with the facts. Don't mention the third world slash and burn forestry practices destroying large tracts of the (CO2 breathing) forests. Don't mention that most of the warming occured between before 1940. Don't mention that the actual ppm increase in CO2 since 1850 (280ppm to 350ppm) is the same as historically observed changes throughout history (varying between 170ppm and 280ppm). Don't mention that "global warming" mainly occurs in large cities and that global averages change wildly based on whether or not you include measurements taken from large cities. Don't mention the inaccuracy of thermometer technology or the difficulty of manufacturing and maintaining an atmospheric thermometer with an accuracy of less than +/- 1 degree F or whether the countries most responsible (not the US btw) for the warming trend could afford, maintain, and properly use such technology for decades. And definitely don't mention the massive changes that would be required all over the world, far more than most pro-greenhousers would accept, (making Kyoto look like the joke that it was) in order to reduce our C02 emissions significantly. Definitely don't mention holding 3rd world slash and burn countries accountable.
I am also running IE6 SP1. I clicked on the link but nothing happens because my browser doesn't understand javascript commands. That evil "javascript:start()" is useless against any browser with javascript disabled.
Javascript is the work of the devil. IT IS TURNED OFF in my browser. Obviously ActiveX is even worse and it is turned off as well. Now that is what I call secure browsing. Much better than the security through obscurity that a javascript enabled Firefox browser gives you.
Of course you can turn off javascript in Firefox too, but I bet not many of you leave it that way. In IE I can leave it off because I just enable it for a select few "trusted" sites (mostly e-commerce sites like Newegg or Amazon that I have purchased from before).
In God's name WHEN is Firefox going to implement javascript whitelisting or security zones as a standard feature? Whitelisting is available for cookies, so why not for javascript as well?
The real alternative is to Just Say No to Javascript and ActiveX (or any other intrusive client side scripting language). Turn them OFF and leave them that way. They are nothing but trouble.
I'm thinking hard here, and the only things I am coming up with are OS shell integration and activeX
Javascript whitelisting and/or security zones. I cannot always remember to turn off javascript after I have enabled it for a particular site, so this is a very important feature to me. Until Firefox adds it I'll stick with IE thank you very much.
How many of these exploits work with active scripting and activeX turned off? Not many.