Remember EverQuest? How there were great parts and parts that made you want to scream?
Brad McQuaid was the design force behind the parts that made you want to scream, and argued for years for their retention post-release when other people maintaining the game wanted to remove them.
Guess which WoW class the author plays? A technical article outlining some of the design reasons class imbalance occurs and some of the solutions would have been interesting. This is just some GamePro schmo taking advantage of having a short article to write to whine about paladins.
Any article that talks about character balance in MMOs without talking at least about broken-by-generalization and broken-by-specilization is kinda not even a little interesting to anybody who's understanding of the issue exceeds 'OMG meh cl4ss haz bene nurf3d!!!11!!!'.
Anyway, FF isn't a series, like LOTR or Star Wars, it's a brand, like Dreamworks or Pixar. As long as there are new story lines, there is room for new FF games.
Quoted for truth.
Re:McQuaid Part of the Problem, Not Part of the Cu
on
The MMOGs of Tomorrow
·
· Score: 1
I never said that there weren't people for whom McQuaid's style of game design worked. There clearly are, as evidenced by the multiple people on this thread who are quite clear that exactly the elements of EQ that I and many others despise (or despised, for onces that have since been changed in EQ) are what you're looking for in Vanguard.
However, I am not 'wrong'. You won't find a lot of gamers more hardcore than I am, and I'll tell you right now that my idea of what constitutes a 'challenge' involves more than harsh death penalties (that really just reinforce players taking the safest and least risky play options rather than exploring), boring run times through empty game areas, and group-dependance not just for optimal play, but any play at all. Those aren't 'challenges' to me, they're just obstacles to me playing the game at all. Any time a trained chimp could overcome the obstacles merely by not caring that their time was being wasted, you need to think about what kind of 'challenge' it is that you're relishing.
I know there are people that really, truly want what Vanguard will be. Not everybody that distrusts McQuaid's idea of 'challenge' is a casual gamer.
Secondarily, the statement 'the crowd originally drawn into EQ and played for years and years eventually left from boredom and lack of challenge' causes me endless amusement. You played for years and years and then got bored and left? You're not looking for a challenge, you're looking for a purer Skinner box reinforcement mechanism.
How do you kill an idea? How do you kill a name? There's no connection between (most) Final Fantasy games and what came before them, plot or mechanics wise, so how can newer ones be dragged down by older ones? The developers of any new Final Fantasy games are totally free to rock or suck on their own terms.
The fact that the comment thread is all about past Final Fantasies rather than future ones says a lot about how discussion worthy the original news post was. 'Death of Final Fantasy Predicted, Internet to Follow Shortly' *rolls eyes*
McQuaid Part of the Problem, Not Part of the Cure
on
The MMOGs of Tomorrow
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There were aspects of EQ's original design that, however nifty they seemed in theory, just didn't work out in practice (melees not binding themselves, for example). McQuaid was the major block to those aspects of the game being fixed and stood in the way of important gameplay improvements for years, until he left (or was forced to leave) Verant. Given the total failure on his part to acknowledge the failures and limitations of EQ's original design and his vocal committment to making Vanguard in the same spirit, I can only imagine the degree to which Vanguard will blow screaming past the border of user-unfriendly and make a beeline for user-malevolent.
I wonder if they're doing Warhammer Fantasy or 40k. The heroic fantasy subgenre of MMORPG seems pretty swamped right now, both in terms of volume as well as having WoW sucking all the oxygen out of the room right now. War40k, though, if they could make it work as an MMORPG somehow, would face less stiff competition....
I actually found Rebellion to be rather entertaining for a few hours. The space fleet battle sequences were really kinda nifty. Fight attrition was AWFUL, though, discouraging use of TIEs and foo-Wing fighters in favor of anti-fighter corvettes and captial ships, which didn't seem very Star Warsy to me.
The only really competative question to be addressed by the article was... not addressed by the article. Which is to say, they failed to answer the burning question, 'Which was worse, Force Commander or Rebellion?'
Damn. If you ran 30 Hamidon raids you practically deserve to kick my ass in the arena.
If he runs hours and hours and hours of (debatably, but certainly to many people) tedious Hamidon raids, he deserves to kick ass in a totally unrelated game context? I can't get behind that game decision. PvP should be as much about the relative skill of the players in constructing and using their characters, not about who spends more of their free time stomping on Mitos.
I'm curious to know what features you feel WoW is missing, especially the 'popular D&D' elements. That's not me being snide (snide, on/.? Naaaah), I'm seriously not sure what you're missing. WoW seems pretty complete to me.
WoW graphics are a case study why 'graphics != technology' is so very very true. WoW's graphics engine is actually pretty technically simple. No bump-mapping, limited shader use, etc, etc. From a technical standpoint, EQ2 is way ahead of WoW. Except... Blizzard, they cheated. They hired these people called 'artists' that have a 'sense of aesthetics'. Sony hired modelers with a background in Maya or Max or something. A winner is Blizzard.
IMHO, CO was the worst thing they ever did to NS. There are fewer NS servers than there used to be, with some of the old ones moving to the very different CO gametype. And then you get the people coming into NS from CO asking how to upgrade their guns and whining to the comm (even more than they used to) for HMGs and shotties, and not knowing what an RT is, etc, etc.
Implementing a half-assed FPS on top of NS is just hurting what NS legitimately does well.
Sensory first needs to be pretty amazing to make up for the lack of Defensive upgrades. Fades and onoses really, really benefit from Carapace/Regen, and forgoing DCs in favor of making your skulks better is a major sacrifise. I'm not convinced yet that it's worth it, even with the really good new cloaking/SoF-SC/free upgrades for skulks. Non-Defensive upgrades fades and onos are much more limited than ones that have access to Carapace or Regen, and fades and onos are a heck of a lot more important than skulks in most games. Upgrading your skulks at the cost of your fades and onos may still be a bad move.
The introduction of artillery in the first MWDA expansion broke the game so very, very badly. They've revised the rules for artillery one or two times in a minor way and recently released a major, near-total game and rules overhaul, all basically because artillery, as implemented, was simply overwhelmingly powerful and reduced the game to POGWarrior (in reference to the chits laid on the playing field to represent incoming artillery fire). The game wasn't perfect in the original release, but WizKids has been borking it pretty hard with each new release.
If you just get rid of artillery, I suppose it's a pretty good fun game, but if you and your friends are at all competative, the game breaks badly.
+1 insightful. How is it that not a single Japanese developed RPG managed to get into the top 10 of Best Console RPG?
Of course, looking at the list of game reviews elsewhere on the site... the site clearly is almost myopically concerned with RPG releases from US developers. If you don't have reviews of Final Fantasy X or XI, Xenosaga, Shin Megami Tensai: Nocturne, etc, etc, up, then the awards list just reflects the site's previous... orientation. But that also means it's not a very complete reflection of what actually happened in RPGs in 2004.
Anybody that says that WoW's server availability and stability are worse than EQ's or AO's never actually played early EQ or AO.
And, re: nerfs, please. Cry more. I know that most players would rather devs allow their games to accumulate broken game mechanics that they can leverage until they get bored, but devs have never been that dumb.
I used to play StarCraft ladder and was quite highly ranked for a while, and my opinion all along was that people that played on Fastest were crack monkeys that didn't know how to play with good units like defilers or sci vessels and so played on fastest to minimize the effect of high-micro-required units. This certainly doesn't change my opinion. Fastest is great if all you know how to do is send waves of marines or hydra surging across the map....
It really does depend on how you look at it. Yeah, there have been some pretty high-profile failures in gaming. And this is new news... how? No, really. ET for the Atari 2600, anyone? You can throw as many stones as you like at GTA3:SA, Doom 3, Half-Life 2, Halo 2, etc, but they are not failures. And if what you're looking for is seriously novel gameplay and content rather than evolutionary works, Katamari Damaci is only the most high profile of odd new games on the market.
Sure, if all you're looking at is the 15 gazillion platform clones or whatever, things don't look good. But that's a pretty limited perspective. Judging the US movie industry by what Jerry Bruckheimer has given us recently isn't a very useful perspective, either.
Hardly. Sony swore up and down for years upon years that Everquest 2 was not supposed to be a replacement for Everquest 1. They swore they'd continue to support EQ1 after they released EQ2. And for years these bizzare 'Sony will force us all to play EQ2 rumors!!!11!!!' rumors continued.
Why, in Shiva's name, would Sony want to kill EQ1? To throttle their golden goose only to hope that EQ2 could catch the same lightning in a bigger, better, bump-mapped bottle? No, they did the smart thing all along; EQ2 wasn't supposed to kill EQ1, it was supposed to kill WoW.
That said, it didn't kill WoW, but that was the idea, I'd imagine. And with EQ2 notably failing to set the world on fire (even without comparisons to WoW, EQ2 is not doing that great, and compared to WoW, EQ2 barely exists), I'd think that Sony plans to quite honestly do its best to keep EQ1 doing well for as long as possible.
Of course, the last expansion they did for EQ1 that was honestly good stuff was LDoN (and that from a ex-hardcore raider (PoTime flagged and not quite Uqua-complete before I quit)). This sounds like they're getting away from the stupid-ass GoD / OoW alien invasion content they got into for some unknown reason, but I'm skeptical that they still have the touch at this point.
You're kidding, right? Those of us on the 21st century side of the digital distribution divide have been screaming at media companies for over half a decade now that they need to use the amazing (nigh unto frightening) power of internet distribution rather than fear and suppress it. Some of them get it, most still don't. Forest works for the ones that get it.
Slashdot Mirror
Rated +1 for True
Remember EverQuest? How there were great parts and parts that made you want to scream?
Brad McQuaid was the design force behind the parts that made you want to scream, and argued for years for their retention post-release when other people maintaining the game wanted to remove them.
Guess which WoW class the author plays? A technical article outlining some of the design reasons class imbalance occurs and some of the solutions would have been interesting. This is just some GamePro schmo taking advantage of having a short article to write to whine about paladins.
Any article that talks about character balance in MMOs without talking at least about broken-by-generalization and broken-by-specilization is kinda not even a little interesting to anybody who's understanding of the issue exceeds 'OMG meh cl4ss haz bene nurf3d!!!11!!!'.
System Shock 2 4tw.
Anyway, FF isn't a series, like LOTR or Star Wars, it's a brand, like Dreamworks or Pixar. As long as there are new story lines, there is room for new FF games.
Quoted for truth.
I never said that there weren't people for whom McQuaid's style of game design worked. There clearly are, as evidenced by the multiple people on this thread who are quite clear that exactly the elements of EQ that I and many others despise (or despised, for onces that have since been changed in EQ) are what you're looking for in Vanguard.
However, I am not 'wrong'. You won't find a lot of gamers more hardcore than I am, and I'll tell you right now that my idea of what constitutes a 'challenge' involves more than harsh death penalties (that really just reinforce players taking the safest and least risky play options rather than exploring), boring run times through empty game areas, and group-dependance not just for optimal play, but any play at all. Those aren't 'challenges' to me, they're just obstacles to me playing the game at all. Any time a trained chimp could overcome the obstacles merely by not caring that their time was being wasted, you need to think about what kind of 'challenge' it is that you're relishing.
I know there are people that really, truly want what Vanguard will be. Not everybody that distrusts McQuaid's idea of 'challenge' is a casual gamer.
Secondarily, the statement 'the crowd originally drawn into EQ and played for years and years eventually left from boredom and lack of challenge' causes me endless amusement. You played for years and years and then got bored and left? You're not looking for a challenge, you're looking for a purer Skinner box reinforcement mechanism.
How do you kill an idea? How do you kill a name? There's no connection between (most) Final Fantasy games and what came before them, plot or mechanics wise, so how can newer ones be dragged down by older ones? The developers of any new Final Fantasy games are totally free to rock or suck on their own terms.
The fact that the comment thread is all about past Final Fantasies rather than future ones says a lot about how discussion worthy the original news post was. 'Death of Final Fantasy Predicted, Internet to Follow Shortly' *rolls eyes*
There were aspects of EQ's original design that, however nifty they seemed in theory, just didn't work out in practice (melees not binding themselves, for example). McQuaid was the major block to those aspects of the game being fixed and stood in the way of important gameplay improvements for years, until he left (or was forced to leave) Verant. Given the total failure on his part to acknowledge the failures and limitations of EQ's original design and his vocal committment to making Vanguard in the same spirit, I can only imagine the degree to which Vanguard will blow screaming past the border of user-unfriendly and make a beeline for user-malevolent.
I wonder if they're doing Warhammer Fantasy or 40k. The heroic fantasy subgenre of MMORPG seems pretty swamped right now, both in terms of volume as well as having WoW sucking all the oxygen out of the room right now. War40k, though, if they could make it work as an MMORPG somehow, would face less stiff competition....
I actually found Rebellion to be rather entertaining for a few hours. The space fleet battle sequences were really kinda nifty. Fight attrition was AWFUL, though, discouraging use of TIEs and foo-Wing fighters in favor of anti-fighter corvettes and captial ships, which didn't seem very Star Warsy to me.
The only really competative question to be addressed by the article was... not addressed by the article. Which is to say, they failed to answer the burning question, 'Which was worse, Force Commander or Rebellion?'
Damn. If you ran 30 Hamidon raids you practically deserve to kick my ass in the arena.
If he runs hours and hours and hours of (debatably, but certainly to many people) tedious Hamidon raids, he deserves to kick ass in a totally unrelated game context? I can't get behind that game decision. PvP should be as much about the relative skill of the players in constructing and using their characters, not about who spends more of their free time stomping on Mitos.
I'm curious to know what features you feel WoW is missing, especially the 'popular D&D' elements. That's not me being snide (snide, on /.? Naaaah), I'm seriously not sure what you're missing. WoW seems pretty complete to me.
WoW graphics are a case study why 'graphics != technology' is so very very true. WoW's graphics engine is actually pretty technically simple. No bump-mapping, limited shader use, etc, etc. From a technical standpoint, EQ2 is way ahead of WoW. Except... Blizzard, they cheated. They hired these people called 'artists' that have a 'sense of aesthetics'. Sony hired modelers with a background in Maya or Max or something. A winner is Blizzard.
This is news?
'what stops a carrier from denying broadband service to an end-user who has cut the cord and uses only a wireless phone?'
Nothing, that's the point.
'What prevents a carrier from refusing to provide DSL service to a savvy consumer who wants stand-alone broadband only for VoIP?'
Nothing, that's the point.
I swear, it's like you people have never even heard of monopolistic pricing and captive regulatory agencies.
IMHO, CO was the worst thing they ever did to NS. There are fewer NS servers than there used to be, with some of the old ones moving to the very different CO gametype. And then you get the people coming into NS from CO asking how to upgrade their guns and whining to the comm (even more than they used to) for HMGs and shotties, and not knowing what an RT is, etc, etc.
Implementing a half-assed FPS on top of NS is just hurting what NS legitimately does well.
Sensory first needs to be pretty amazing to make up for the lack of Defensive upgrades. Fades and onoses really, really benefit from Carapace/Regen, and forgoing DCs in favor of making your skulks better is a major sacrifise. I'm not convinced yet that it's worth it, even with the really good new cloaking/SoF-SC/free upgrades for skulks. Non-Defensive upgrades fades and onos are much more limited than ones that have access to Carapace or Regen, and fades and onos are a heck of a lot more important than skulks in most games. Upgrading your skulks at the cost of your fades and onos may still be a bad move.
The introduction of artillery in the first MWDA expansion broke the game so very, very badly. They've revised the rules for artillery one or two times in a minor way and recently released a major, near-total game and rules overhaul, all basically because artillery, as implemented, was simply overwhelmingly powerful and reduced the game to POGWarrior (in reference to the chits laid on the playing field to represent incoming artillery fire). The game wasn't perfect in the original release, but WizKids has been borking it pretty hard with each new release.
If you just get rid of artillery, I suppose it's a pretty good fun game, but if you and your friends are at all competative, the game breaks badly.
It is very pretty and very nicely kinesthetic.
+1 insightful. How is it that not a single Japanese developed RPG managed to get into the top 10 of Best Console RPG?
Of course, looking at the list of game reviews elsewhere on the site... the site clearly is almost myopically concerned with RPG releases from US developers. If you don't have reviews of Final Fantasy X or XI, Xenosaga, Shin Megami Tensai: Nocturne, etc, etc, up, then the awards list just reflects the site's previous... orientation. But that also means it's not a very complete reflection of what actually happened in RPGs in 2004.
Anybody that says that WoW's server availability and stability are worse than EQ's or AO's never actually played early EQ or AO.
And, re: nerfs, please. Cry more. I know that most players would rather devs allow their games to accumulate broken game mechanics that they can leverage until they get bored, but devs have never been that dumb.
I used to play StarCraft ladder and was quite highly ranked for a while, and my opinion all along was that people that played on Fastest were crack monkeys that didn't know how to play with good units like defilers or sci vessels and so played on fastest to minimize the effect of high-micro-required units. This certainly doesn't change my opinion. Fastest is great if all you know how to do is send waves of marines or hydra surging across the map....
It really does depend on how you look at it. Yeah, there have been some pretty high-profile failures in gaming. And this is new news... how? No, really. ET for the Atari 2600, anyone? You can throw as many stones as you like at GTA3:SA, Doom 3, Half-Life 2, Halo 2, etc, but they are not failures. And if what you're looking for is seriously novel gameplay and content rather than evolutionary works, Katamari Damaci is only the most high profile of odd new games on the market.
Sure, if all you're looking at is the 15 gazillion platform clones or whatever, things don't look good. But that's a pretty limited perspective. Judging the US movie industry by what Jerry Bruckheimer has given us recently isn't a very useful perspective, either.
Hardly. Sony swore up and down for years upon years that Everquest 2 was not supposed to be a replacement for Everquest 1. They swore they'd continue to support EQ1 after they released EQ2. And for years these bizzare 'Sony will force us all to play EQ2 rumors!!!11!!!' rumors continued.
Why, in Shiva's name, would Sony want to kill EQ1? To throttle their golden goose only to hope that EQ2 could catch the same lightning in a bigger, better, bump-mapped bottle? No, they did the smart thing all along; EQ2 wasn't supposed to kill EQ1, it was supposed to kill WoW.
That said, it didn't kill WoW, but that was the idea, I'd imagine. And with EQ2 notably failing to set the world on fire (even without comparisons to WoW, EQ2 is not doing that great, and compared to WoW, EQ2 barely exists), I'd think that Sony plans to quite honestly do its best to keep EQ1 doing well for as long as possible.
Of course, the last expansion they did for EQ1 that was honestly good stuff was LDoN (and that from a ex-hardcore raider (PoTime flagged and not quite Uqua-complete before I quit)). This sounds like they're getting away from the stupid-ass GoD / OoW alien invasion content they got into for some unknown reason, but I'm skeptical that they still have the touch at this point.
Hot on the heels of the overwhelming success of the I-Opener, I see.
+1 Damn Skippy to everybody that says that if you have a old fogy in your life that really wants to try out that Internet thing, get them a Mac.
You're kidding, right? Those of us on the 21st century side of the digital distribution divide have been screaming at media companies for over half a decade now that they need to use the amazing (nigh unto frightening) power of internet distribution rather than fear and suppress it. Some of them get it, most still don't. Forest works for the ones that get it.
Oh, you did not just diss Star Wars. It's on now, you little punks.