No I've never played a Blizzard game before. I didn't give up on the game, I just played the trial. I found it very bland, maybe I picked the wrong race/class, but I thought orcs would be more interesting.
I'd play again but am having technical problems, by the time I get them fixed I'll probably have run out of time for the trial.
I've got nothing against the game, I wanted to enjoy it, I wanted to see what everyone else saw in it, I just couldn't get into it.
I've played demos of WoW, EQ2 and Eve, other than that I've only played MUDs, which are pretty much the same without graphics.
I spent a couple of hours or so getting to level 6, that should be enough to judge a game. Although I admit I am having a lot of problems with Vista. I thought that after all these years they'd have made their OS better, rather than worse.
If WoW is the best of the lot, then I think I'll stick to sports and action games.
I'm not buying that '12 page' argument. I'm a tenth of the way into the original level cap. Which is equivalent to 100 pages into a normal 1000 page book. If you're not enjoying yourself that far into a book then there's something wrong.
Maybe if I level up I can run faster or ride a mount and explore the whole world, but I'm on a limited trial so limited to the early game, this means I only get to see the first part of the game that doesn't impress at all.
I've talked to other players, they don't respond. In fact no-one talks at all. They hang around, then run off. Maybe they're all talking by microphone, but this isn't a very social game. In the real world, if you greet someone, you expect them to respond. In WoW, it's acceptable for them to completely ignore you. Maybe MMO players are just ignorant.
Although I had a suspicion that my initial post would draw out a lot of enraged fanboys, I suppose I have to reap what I sew.
The start of a game is how it's judged. If the beginning of the game is shit, then it doesn't matter how good the rest is, because no-one will play it. If the combat system is so great, why didn't they show it off in the early levels when people will form their impressions of the game?
EVE is a game that plays itself. You click to go to an asteroid, your ship makes its own way there. You click on an asteroid, and the ship does its own mining. I'm not sure there's actually a game there.
That's assuming that every form of entertainment provides the same level of excitement per hour. An hour watching a great classic film, or seeing your favourite band in a once in a lifetime experience, or watching a sports game that will be remembered in years to come, may be worth more money per hour than filling time in a game killing cockroaches.
I don't think I'll have time, I'm using Vista which fucks up in a completely different way every single day, so I probably won't get to play again until my trial runs out.
The part of Everquest 2 I played was this very nice looking forest with a beautiful sea next to it. Unfortunately the game was pretty poor. After fighting level 1 worms, I move onto wolves that kick my arse, giant spiders, and mushrooms that shoot me dead instantly.
Maybe I made a mistake picking an orc, but all areas of the game should be nice. I know people are saying don't judge a book by its cover, but I'm playing a 14 day trial, I'm not going to be going on level 70 raids. I would have thought they'd make the newbie parts fun and interesting, rather than a desert.
No, it was an orc. So how does the game get more interesting? Is there anything more than grinding on mobs/quests until you get to the top level? I can't explore too far as then everything kills me.
OK, I downloaded the trial of World of Warcraft a few days ago to see what all the fuss is about. The game seems to work as thus:
1. You see a mob walking around. 2. You right click on it, you fire a few arrows at it, it runs towards you, you automatically fight it. 3. It dies, you get some xp. 4. Do it a few more times and level. 5. Goto 1.
I got up to level 6, and that seems to be all the game really has. You get more powerful with each level, and better equipment, and can fight more dangerous things, but the game's still exactly the same. Instead of clicking on a level 1 boar, you click on a level 6 scorpion or something. Does it actually get more fun when you get to the really high levels? The combat system is awful, worse than Golden Axe which is like twenty years old. All this modern technology and it's like playing an old text-based MUD: "you hit the boar for 10 points of damage, the boar hits you for 5 points of damage etc."
It's very slow walking around, and there isn't much of interest to look at. There are a couple of small villages, some dirt tracks, and not much else.
Quests seem to be either: 1. Kill ten things, bring its drops back. 2. Carry something from one place to another.
Apparently this is the greatest ever MMO, ten million players, bigger than Jesus etc. and I was completely underwhelmed. The graphics are pretty uninspiring, the world is a bland orange with no real features or vegetation: you sort of expect roadrunner to go past at any moment. NPCs just stand around doing nothing other than giving you quests, other players don't even talk to you, it's like playing a single player game.
I tried Everquest 2, which is pretty much exactly the same game but with better graphics and a worse interface. Are all MMOs like this? If so I really don't see why they carry so much interest.
Well, no one is holding a gun to your head to make you patronize a place that allows smoking, nor are they forcing anyone to work there.
And no-one forces anyone to work in a place full of toxic fumes, with bare electric cables sticking out of walls, and asbestos everywhere. Maybe we shouldn't have workplace safety rules then?
The bollocks in the parent post is why Ron Paul's campaign crashed and burned, and why his supporters are all lunatics. Left to its own devices with no regulation, the free market just fucks everything up. Of course the free markteteers don't care as long as they're making a shit load of money.
It SHOULD be a choice for adults to make...much like wearing a helmet on a motorcycle...if you're over 18 and can afford the insurance...you should be able to act like an idiot if you want to.
Helmet laws aren't there for your interest. They're there for the interest of the people who have to scrape your brains of the highway. The ambulance staff who have to carry your broken body to the hospital, when they could be helping someone else. The doctors and surgeons who have to fix you, when they could be fixing someone else. The other motorists whose journeys are blocked by a big pool of blood across the road. But as a libertarian, you don't care about anyone other than yourself, so feel free to ignore this paragraph.
Safety laws will exist as long as people think they're invincible, and don't give a shit about the people who have to clear up after them.
Cows and sheep eat grass, pigs eat pretty much anything. I'm not sure what chickens eat, maybe some sort of seed. I don't know who feeds corn to cows, how would they pick up the cob-holders?
Maybe it's just deja-vu, but I could swear you posted this exact same post in another article months back.
Plus the french don't eat tons of fatty food, they eat hardly anything at all. Maybe a slice of toast for breakfast, salad for lunch and a small meal for tea.
I'd be happy if they came out with an MMO which didn't have gameplay based on 20 year old MUDs. Seriously, this is the 20th century, and the best MMO around, World of Warcraft, with its ten million subscribers, can't manage anything better than 'you hit the goblin for 10 points of damage, the goblin hits you for 8 points of damage', and 'fetch me fifty bulls earlobes in order to complete the quest'?
Let's have an MMO which has some actual game to it, rather than just being a giant chatroom with a combat system that makes Golden Axe look advanced.
Westerners born in the last 20 or so years have a very limited palette and no adventure when it comes to food.
Then how do you explain the prevalence of all those curry and kebab houses, selling all sorts of strange foreign foods with ingredients of dubious origin?
Cars themselves are luxury items, of course, and you're perfectly capable of living in a city and using public transit like most of the world.
That assumes of course that you work in a city. And you work hours served by public transport. For a lot of people, me included, living in a city served by public transport would massively increase my commute time and oil consumption, as I would then have to drive right back out again.
As for most people in the world living in cities, I think it's something like a 50/50 split. And then it depends on what you define as 'city'.
$8 a gallon is pretty much the going rate in the UK at the moment. Of course most of that is tax, taken by our thieving government that refuses to improve public transport. Or in fact any public services whatsoever.
What I was saying is that the PC architecture is still so far ahead of console that next-gen games will only play on PC. (And by Next-Gen, I mean games designed for the technology designed over the past two years).
So what you mean is that games designed for the latest expensive PC graphics cards will only play on the latest expensive PC graphics cards? The problem is, most people have no interest in those cards, as well as all the other costs with gaming (more RAM, better processors, Windows Vista). Most people don't upgrade their PC every two years, it's more like every five, by which time there'll be a new generation of consoles anyway.
The PC is already and likely permanently dominant in the area of MMORPGs and FPS games.
I'll give you MMO, but ever since Halo, the FPS has been as big on consoles as PCs, if not bigger. PC gamers don't even have machines capable of running the latest FPses like Crysis, whilst Call of Duty 4 is selling millions on consoles.
You can build a PC that outperforms a X360 now for well under $400 - even in Australia!
Where exactly? Windows Vista alone would take up a huge chunk of that budget, never mind the case, motherboard, processor, RAM, cooling system, hard disk, DVD drive, controllers, wireless, PSU, keyboard, mouse, and all the cables and adapters needed to hook your graphics card up to the TV.
All it takes is a few killer games that run on PC only that the consoles simply can't be made to run, then the new gen of game players is going to start wanting PCs, diluting the X360 *and* PS3 marketplace...
If a game comes out with such high requirements that it couldn't run on the PS3, that in all likelihood it won't run on most PCs either, so what's the point?
The fact that yourself, as well as all your kids all have high-end gaming PCs suggests you're far richer than most gamers, and your opinions are probably completely out of touch with reality.
Of course, that's assuming that every gamer instantly upgrades to the latest graphics cards every year in order to get all the latest buzzwords.
I'd guess that most PC gamers play on a several year old machine barely capable of playing World of Warcraft and the Sims, which is all they're really interested in. Other gamers have consoles for things like fifa, COD, GTA etc.
The high-end PC market is pretty small, and most people would rather play Assassin's Creed on their new 50" HDTV than Crysis on a PC, no matter how many pixels/voxels/shaders the latest overpriced, overheated video card can generate on its tiny monitor.
Because even though people will now have the option of booting into an instant on linux desktop - 99% will wait 10 minutes to get into vista just to check their email and play on the internet anyway.
What other option do they have, considering that the Linux installation more than likely won't have modem drivers or firmware, rendering e-mail checking and internet playing impossible?
Great, now all Linux has to do is come up with a way of installing nvidia drivers or modem firmware without having to go to the command line and type cryptic commands.
Odd how an old shitty Mandriva CD of mine came with modem drivers, whilst the latest Ubuntu didn't, meaning it was effectively a doorstop, as the only way to get the drivers was online, through my non-working modem. Maybe Linux is going backwards.
Slashdot Mirror
No I've never played a Blizzard game before. I didn't give up on the game, I just played the trial. I found it very bland, maybe I picked the wrong race/class, but I thought orcs would be more interesting.
I'd play again but am having technical problems, by the time I get them fixed I'll probably have run out of time for the trial.
I've got nothing against the game, I wanted to enjoy it, I wanted to see what everyone else saw in it, I just couldn't get into it.
I've played demos of WoW, EQ2 and Eve, other than that I've only played MUDs, which are pretty much the same without graphics.
I spent a couple of hours or so getting to level 6, that should be enough to judge a game. Although I admit I am having a lot of problems with Vista. I thought that after all these years they'd have made their OS better, rather than worse.
If WoW is the best of the lot, then I think I'll stick to sports and action games.
I'm not buying that '12 page' argument. I'm a tenth of the way into the original level cap. Which is equivalent to 100 pages into a normal 1000 page book. If you're not enjoying yourself that far into a book then there's something wrong.
Maybe if I level up I can run faster or ride a mount and explore the whole world, but I'm on a limited trial so limited to the early game, this means I only get to see the first part of the game that doesn't impress at all.
I've talked to other players, they don't respond. In fact no-one talks at all. They hang around, then run off. Maybe they're all talking by microphone, but this isn't a very social game. In the real world, if you greet someone, you expect them to respond. In WoW, it's acceptable for them to completely ignore you. Maybe MMO players are just ignorant.
Although I had a suspicion that my initial post would draw out a lot of enraged fanboys, I suppose I have to reap what I sew.
Hair? You don't know you're born. In my day, we were just protein stands in the primordial soup. And we liked it.
The start of a game is how it's judged. If the beginning of the game is shit, then it doesn't matter how good the rest is, because no-one will play it. If the combat system is so great, why didn't they show it off in the early levels when people will form their impressions of the game?
EVE is a game that plays itself. You click to go to an asteroid, your ship makes its own way there. You click on an asteroid, and the ship does its own mining. I'm not sure there's actually a game there.
That's assuming that every form of entertainment provides the same level of excitement per hour. An hour watching a great classic film, or seeing your favourite band in a once in a lifetime experience, or watching a sports game that will be remembered in years to come, may be worth more money per hour than filling time in a game killing cockroaches.
But is there really time to do all that in a ten day trial, most of which is taken up by Vista not working?
If I were making a game, I'd make it fun from the outset. I learnt mining and got a pick, but couldn't find an actual mine.
I don't think I'll have time, I'm using Vista which fucks up in a completely different way every single day, so I probably won't get to play again until my trial runs out.
The part of Everquest 2 I played was this very nice looking forest with a beautiful sea next to it. Unfortunately the game was pretty poor. After fighting level 1 worms, I move onto wolves that kick my arse, giant spiders, and mushrooms that shoot me dead instantly.
Maybe I made a mistake picking an orc, but all areas of the game should be nice. I know people are saying don't judge a book by its cover, but I'm playing a 14 day trial, I'm not going to be going on level 70 raids. I would have thought they'd make the newbie parts fun and interesting, rather than a desert.
No, it was an orc. So how does the game get more interesting? Is there anything more than grinding on mobs/quests until you get to the top level? I can't explore too far as then everything kills me.
Where are the interesting non-orange places?
OK, I downloaded the trial of World of Warcraft a few days ago to see what all the fuss is about. The game seems to work as thus:
1. You see a mob walking around.
2. You right click on it, you fire a few arrows at it, it runs towards you, you automatically fight it.
3. It dies, you get some xp.
4. Do it a few more times and level.
5. Goto 1.
I got up to level 6, and that seems to be all the game really has. You get more powerful with each level, and better equipment, and can fight more dangerous things, but the game's still exactly the same. Instead of clicking on a level 1 boar, you click on a level 6 scorpion or something. Does it actually get more fun when you get to the really high levels? The combat system is awful, worse than Golden Axe which is like twenty years old. All this modern technology and it's like playing an old text-based MUD: "you hit the boar for 10 points of damage, the boar hits you for 5 points of damage etc."
It's very slow walking around, and there isn't much of interest to look at. There are a couple of small villages, some dirt tracks, and not much else.
Quests seem to be either:
1. Kill ten things, bring its drops back.
2. Carry something from one place to another.
Apparently this is the greatest ever MMO, ten million players, bigger than Jesus etc. and I was completely underwhelmed. The graphics are pretty uninspiring, the world is a bland orange with no real features or vegetation: you sort of expect roadrunner to go past at any moment. NPCs just stand around doing nothing other than giving you quests, other players don't even talk to you, it's like playing a single player game.
I tried Everquest 2, which is pretty much exactly the same game but with better graphics and a worse interface. Are all MMOs like this? If so I really don't see why they carry so much interest.
The bollocks in the parent post is why Ron Paul's campaign crashed and burned, and why his supporters are all lunatics. Left to its own devices with no regulation, the free market just fucks everything up. Of course the free markteteers don't care as long as they're making a shit load of money.Helmet laws aren't there for your interest. They're there for the interest of the people who have to scrape your brains of the highway. The ambulance staff who have to carry your broken body to the hospital, when they could be helping someone else. The doctors and surgeons who have to fix you, when they could be fixing someone else. The other motorists whose journeys are blocked by a big pool of blood across the road. But as a libertarian, you don't care about anyone other than yourself, so feel free to ignore this paragraph.
Safety laws will exist as long as people think they're invincible, and don't give a shit about the people who have to clear up after them.
Cows and sheep eat grass, pigs eat pretty much anything. I'm not sure what chickens eat, maybe some sort of seed. I don't know who feeds corn to cows, how would they pick up the cob-holders?
Maybe it's just deja-vu, but I could swear you posted this exact same post in another article months back.
Plus the french don't eat tons of fatty food, they eat hardly anything at all. Maybe a slice of toast for breakfast, salad for lunch and a small meal for tea.
I'd be happy if they came out with an MMO which didn't have gameplay based on 20 year old MUDs. Seriously, this is the 20th century, and the best MMO around, World of Warcraft, with its ten million subscribers, can't manage anything better than 'you hit the goblin for 10 points of damage, the goblin hits you for 8 points of damage', and 'fetch me fifty bulls earlobes in order to complete the quest'?
Let's have an MMO which has some actual game to it, rather than just being a giant chatroom with a combat system that makes Golden Axe look advanced.
Does that 27.5mpg include taking off, landing, taxiing and driving to and from the airport? My car gets 35 and is relatively inefficient.
As for most people in the world living in cities, I think it's something like a 50/50 split. And then it depends on what you define as 'city'.
$8 a gallon is pretty much the going rate in the UK at the moment. Of course most of that is tax, taken by our thieving government that refuses to improve public transport. Or in fact any public services whatsoever.
The fact that yourself, as well as all your kids all have high-end gaming PCs suggests you're far richer than most gamers, and your opinions are probably completely out of touch with reality.
Of course, that's assuming that every gamer instantly upgrades to the latest graphics cards every year in order to get all the latest buzzwords.
I'd guess that most PC gamers play on a several year old machine barely capable of playing World of Warcraft and the Sims, which is all they're really interested in. Other gamers have consoles for things like fifa, COD, GTA etc.
The high-end PC market is pretty small, and most people would rather play Assassin's Creed on their new 50" HDTV than Crysis on a PC, no matter how many pixels/voxels/shaders the latest overpriced, overheated video card can generate on its tiny monitor.
Great, now all Linux has to do is come up with a way of installing nvidia drivers or modem firmware without having to go to the command line and type cryptic commands.
Odd how an old shitty Mandriva CD of mine came with modem drivers, whilst the latest Ubuntu didn't, meaning it was effectively a doorstop, as the only way to get the drivers was online, through my non-working modem. Maybe Linux is going backwards.