Do you know who is REALLY to blame for all those illegal downloads that help fund terrorism?
The movie industry. Without any regard to their fellow man and society they keep on producing movie after movie drawing their poor victims into a downwards spiral of constantly try to download the latest of their poison.
Why, I say that if we ban the movie industry (and really, only a communist could be against that) then the act of pirating movie will be wiped of the face of the earth and our youngsters will be saved from this destructive path the pinko's and homosexuals from hollywood have set them on.
Save a child, kill a hollywood producer.
I dare you to find a single flaw in my resoning. No movies, no piracy.
But you forget, you pay for the OS so get the real support from a real company that cares about its customers and not a collection of hairy hippies who tell you to RTFM when you try to install Linux on a crappy old dell with a busted harddrive.
Amazing, really, tomorrow there will be a story about linux and someone will post a story that paying MS means you got proffesional support. Denial, it must be a wonderful place to live.
Read it carefully, remembering things that were said in previous paragraphs and it quickly becomes clear that the reviewer WANTS to be positive. A deadly sin, a reviewer should always be neutral.
Easily fixable bugs are okay? If they are easy to fix, then why haven't they been fixed?
He has to grind between content and as you say, there is a reasonable amount of content? Didn't the reviewer say at the beginning that this ain't the dark ages anymore, MMO's have been around for a long time and dev's should know better now.
CO is Yet Another MMO that doesn't innovate as much as try to chase the twitch/PvP crowd, or worse the console crowd. Others have complained about how simple the game is to play, almost as if designed for a gamepad. No kidding, the game is going to the 360.
As I like MMO's a lot I have spend a lot of time thinking about MMO's and frankly, I think the drive for both twitch and PvP are hopelessly flawed for an MMORPG.
Why? The proof is in other games.
There are TWO games we play often and more importantly for LONG times, long past their graphical lifetime.
The first are the multiplayer FPS. I have long since grown past it, but you didn't play Quake for the pretty graphics, you played it for the instant hard action. But these games all have one thing in common. You are equal. Think about it, everything about multiplayer FPS games, tries to balance the players to extreme, often by simply making them exactly the same, or by playing both sides of the battle in turns.
Why is the RTS Starcraft so loved? Because the sides are superbly balanced.
But this goes against the heart of a (western) RPG, to build your own character, different from others. In a game like Neverwinter Nights, you get to choose from several classes and it is very clear that not all are equal in combat. Dungeon and Dragons Online even warns for this. Some classes are harder to play then others. How do you balance completly different classes with totally different roles? You can't.
This is like starting a game of counterstrike, and one side is given pistols and the other machine guns. Ouch! But an MMO never forces you to switch side and the session never ends. In multiplayer FPS/RTS any advantage you do take, ends at the end of the session.
There are however other games we play for long times, but these games tend to be more about strategy, development. Slow process where we carefully plan our actions. Wether that is an empire building game or the sims or a strategy or a (civilian) flightsimulator, in these games we have a set of skills/capabilities and the game is to learn them and how to use them best. Wether that is sorting our what sims need to do what to get all the stuff done and still advance, or plot the course of an aircraft, or direct a battle doesn't matter. These games are NOT about twitch, they are about tactics, stategy and thinking.
WoW and EQ and all similar games are like this. You have a character, you learn its skills and then you use these skills. It ain't about twisting and turning but using the right skills at the right time. Twitch is NOT what is needed here, it only distracts.
The proof is in Champions Online "block" skills. As another poster has explained, it has nothing to do with blocking, let alone predicting when an enemy has to be blocked. A meter is displayed, when it is full you should have pressed a button or you take a massive amount of damage. Bugs (mentioned in the review) or design mean your actual skills are interrupted while this is going on. Gone all your plans, all your tactics. And it goes on constantly. The combat quickly ends up as nothing more then pressing your cheap attack, power attack when you got power and BLOCK whenever the light comes on.
But isn't that fine for dozens if not hundreds of console action games? Yes, but those games ain't player for hundred of hours. Action games come and go very quickly.
MMO's shouldn't. They are very expensive to develop so a publisher needs the kind of a
Who is the scammer here? The person that tried to hide negative feedback by creating a new account, or e-bay? Seriously dude, hire a lawyet. They need the money and the laughs.
Yes your honor, I raped this girl and then she kicked me, she should go to jail!
eBay is not a forum like slashdot (and if there ever was an example of bad code,/. is it) but an auction site. This means that for one thing, it has to rely on being up-to-date and handling requests in order. If you don't see my post for half an hour, who cares. If you don't see my bid until after the auction ended, well you might be pretty pissed off because I was going to bid way higher then the current offer.
As a webdeveloper myself, it is often pretty hard to imagine just how different an application needs to be, to suit a different need. There is a definite tendency for people to think "oh it is the web, I can do html, I do a web application". Nope. Even if you got experience with one type of webapp, don't presume you know how to another. Especially on a gigantic scale.
You start to run into all sorts of problems once you have to scale up, especially when you got to the point scaling don't work no more and you got to split things up.
Even simple things, like cross-domain scripting start to get in the way.
Lets give the ebay developers at least a little bit of credit, they might not do things perfectly but the site has run succesfully for years. So maybe, just maybe, they know what they are talking about when they say caching don't work for them.
The story mentions an AK-47. Everyone here knows what an AK-47 looks like, that gun looks nothing like it and that becomes the whole focus of the story.
The 911 call went probably something like this "Help, I see someone walking with a big gun. What kind I dunno one of those big things like an AK-47."
What next? An elephant breaks loose and the story focusses on how the caller said it was an african when it was actually an indian elephant?
If there is a god, each and everyone of the idiots that went "haha, that ain't an AK-47 will be attacked by alligator, call the police for help, then have the police show up and walk away again because the thing using them for a chew toy is a crocodile.
This story has the idiocracy tag, I know who the real idiots are here.
And really, carrying a semi-realistic looking replica weapon in public. What are you thinking.
The poster seems to claim that Star Wars The Old Republic is going hardcore, but that just seems to be a wish from a lot of WoW players, there is little indication this will be true.
For those who are lost, hardcore has become term in the MMO market to describe those players who like World of Warcrafts end-game raiding system. In this system there are a series of dungeons populated by though bosses you fight with a group that drop 1 piece of armour each time. You need said armour piece to stand a chance in the next dungeon. Since only one piece drops for a group, you either got to be very lucky or repeat the dungeon multiple times. Say it is a 24 man raid, then you need to do the raid 24 times for everyone to get it. To support this, complex point systems have been created (Suicide kings and others) to arrange who can win what and when.
Some would call this a grind, doing the same thing over and over for a piece of gear that will just enable you to do the same again in another dungeon. Other call this hard. The idea is that hard and a lot of work are the same thing. Hardcore for some means "though challenge" for others it is closer to "spending lots and lots of effort". Gear in WoW is "special" because it would have either cost you a lot of time or you been very lucky on the rolls. Sadly, for some, this is translated into skill.
The debate on hardcore vs "easymode" then becomes that certain gamers who are willing to spend a lot of time into a game get upset if EVERYONE gets that special item just by completing a quest. It is not the thougness of the quest that is the issue but that in quest mode EVERYONE gets the reward, not just one person. There for in quest mode if a special item is rewarded, you only need to do it once.
Some people (like me) claim that the people who can sink a lot of time into a game are kids with little else happening in their lifes. They get upset when normal people with jobs and responsibilties can get as far in the game as them. If everyone can achieve the same, then they are no longer special.
For an MMO developer it is a though choice. There are a LOT of kiddies out there (and please note, being a kiddie has NOTHING to do with your real age) but there are also a lot of carebears out there. Ideally, you want both to pay for your game but that is unlikely to happen. So, you got to make a choice and it doesn't matter what choice you make, the other side will claim that you are failing because of that choice. Yes, some people claim WoW has failed because it only attracts the "kiddies". I wish I had a failure like that.
Almost every new MMO forums will be overrun by basically two groups. On the one hand the people who think the sandbox MMO's like Ultima Online and (especially in this case) SWG should make a comeback and on the other hand the WoW kiddies who think WoW is so great every game should be a carbon copy.
Bioware has "competed" against Blizzard before. Baldur's gate vs Diablo. Yeah really, both are RPG's so obviously they compete against each other. Read some players posts on the subject. Plenty a diablo player slams the heavy talking in Bioware games and many a Bioware player calls Diablo gameplay an endless boring hack&slash. In reality, the games are of course completly different and will generally appeal to different people. Only the true gamer, the totally cool and fantastic (like me) will play both games and enjoy them for what they are and not for what they are not. Yes, I am that good, worship me.
But when Kotor came out, many a diablo player posted that it should have less talking and more slashing.
And the exact same thing is happening right now with SWTOR.
Bioware has not been extremely clear on exactly what the gameplay is going to be like in SWTOR. But what they have told so far is that there is going to be a LOT of story and the you make choices similar to the ones we have come to expect from Biowares single player RPG's. Raiding often forms the endgame in an MMORPG (well, it does in WoW and WoW is
Have you actually bothered to read the other story about the cannon build by a dad?
Notice anything? As big as it is, there is no way you can fit a laywer in there to fire them. Not unless you chop them into little bit firsts and that would get the gun powder wet and unable to fire.
No sir, firing lawyers is NOT the solution. Try again, or build a bigger cannon.
Just look at the slashdot page. Read the article about the Indian satalite? Note how the BBC does NOT report that the satalite did what it was supposed to do and was nearly a year in operation. No, instead they make a snarky comment about India spending an insignificantly small amount of their GDP on a space program that keeps its scientists busy and not leaving for greener pastures in the west.
Could the British BBC possibly be a little bit biased against their former colony having a space program while they do not? Nah. British reporting is not biased against Israel because those pesky jews kicked their butts post WW2 and upset all the carefully aranged middle east politics that had kept britain in control by having the natives fight each other.
Everyone has a bias, it is created by how they were raised, what version of history they read in their history books. Britain has a markedly different version then the rest of the world.
To give you the most basic example of just how engrained bias can be, take this. Palestine, is this the original name of the area now known as Israel? Answer, no. It was RENAMED after the second jewish uprising from "Provincia Judaea". History records (not biblical) show this name change. Of course the "original" name was already the name giving by ROME, an occupier. Yet a LOT of the argument about the current conflict from the BBC point of view tries to make it appear that Israel is the newcomer. It is, from a certain point of view.
For an even clearer example. What is the name of the continent to the west of the BBC studio? America? Really? So it had no name before europeans discovered it? When americans complain about immigrants, the story change significantly if it became "Immigrants, complaining about immigrants".
There are three free news papers in Holland. "De spits", "De Metro", "De Pers". It is intresting to read the news in all three of them. The first two are mostly in the business of reprinting press releases while the third on occasion does its own reporting (well, at least translates someones elses reporting). What is intresting to note then is what is included, what is excluded and on what page.
The recent war in gaza is an obvious example. Amnesty released a report blaming both sides for attrocities. You might argue with the report, BUT if you are reporting on said report, then the facts are that both sides get blaimed. That is not what all media reported however. A few said focusses only on the blame on Israel, a few mentioned in a single line that Hamas was also mentioned and a few mentioned the full story. ALL reported the facts, but by choosing what facts they reported, they showed bias.
Often bias is needed to keep an article readable, if you mention every option, every opinion then you would need a forklift to carry a newspaper. You can't go over the entire history of religion and the world everytime you mention the middle east (despite the fact that this entire history of religion and the world make the situtation what it is).
If you want to watch the BBC's reporting and see if it is unbiased you should attempt to look at it from the position of someone with whose opinions you do not agree.
The truth, the whole of the truth and nothing but the truth. It is the SECOND bit that is the kicker. I am the sexiest man. This is the truth. The whole of the truth is that " I am the sexiest man, in my house, right now".
If you think the BBC is unbiased, then you need to become more skeptical.
As others have pointed out, but it is worth repeating. Dell DOES sell Windows PC's WITHOUT office. So all they have to do, is use that existing and presumably tested image that they have used for years.
Dell is blowing smoke here. It is basically saying: "Dear Judge, we sell coffee with sugar, taking the sugar out would be insanely hard. Please don't tell us to sell coffee with the sugar taken out."
The only issue here is Dell's bottom line. The profit margins on software are insane. Sure, it costs a fortune to produce, but the cost of selling it is nearly zero for these PC's. Just an option checked, different image used and foila. Money in the bank.
Dell has been very helpful in creating a monopoly for office and now it is once again lying on MS behalf.
There ARE images, that DELL is using RIGHT now, that do NOT include office. That is ALL they need to do. Oh but the issue is with Word, not with office? So? That is MS problem. Nobody is going to buy office without word, for that matter you can't.
Dell can just stop selling office and let MS take the damage for trying to come with a way to still sell office without word. Not their problem.
Sufficient as far as I know means something like good enough. Not compleet. My income is sufficient to live on does not mean I am rich or I am without money worries. A diet that is suffcient to survive on would hardly be called optimal.
So just how free should society be? Completly free?
One of the problems in the world is that we wants simple things, left/right, while politics tend to be very complex. Take Cuba, you had a system before Castro that had the majority of the public living in oppression, and after Castro, the exact same thing. Of course, the people who had it good before are complaing that now it is so much worse. Well duh!
That is what is fuels a lot of the violence in Iraq. You had a minority who controlled the country who suddenly had to give it all up and be ruled by the people they previously controlled. That sets bad blood. So the freedom of one means the restraint of another.
South American countries can be divided into two groups, those that are friendly to the US and can kill as many people as they want, with US backing and those that are not friendly to the US and get slammed for building hospitals.
Chavez is doing EXACTLY the same thing as the US has been trying to and a lot of european countries as well. So why does Chavez get so much more flak?
Why the mentioning of weapon purchases? The US spends far more on killing tech and its senators are trying for the same laws. Where is the link? Oh, there isn't one.
Chavez is running a country where the rich used to have their way completly. Now things changed and guess what, the rich don't like it and the US don't like it that a source of oil is no longer run by people who like them. It makes any reporting by any US citizen on Chavez in my opinion extremely suspect and this article is just a confimation of my susipicions.
Yes this law is stupid, but the reporting on it is so biased that its simpler message is lost in the propoganda.
The US has the largest number of people incarcerated. Period. Yes, MORE people are in jail in the US then in China or India. Countries with populations over a billion. (4-5 times the population).
Granted, China's figures might not be accurate, but India is a democracy. Not a perfect one and India has many wrongs but still, the figures say a lot about the US of A.
Then again, in far more liberal countries, the crime figures are really not all that different.
Personal use has been legal in holland for some time, and we still got crime and crime-ridden area's.
One thing I learned about the US that is hard to grasp for someone from say Holland is that there are areas in the US where you just can't buy produce. No vegetables.
Sure, you can DRIVE to another area, but that costs money.
Now I can't say exactly how true this is, but the simple fact is that even in "poor" areas in holland you can easily WALK (in less then 5 minutes) to a supermarket. Often one of a regular big chain like the AH. Which carries in all its stores, fresh vegetables.
They are still relatively expensive however.
If you do the math, then cheap fast food (the cheapest no-brand frozen pizza's) can be a LOT cheaper then even buying healthy base products and making your own. Good luck making a meal for 99 euro cents (cost of a frozen pizza). That of course assumes that such fresh products are even available, which in america they apparently aren't always.
You do get fat from eating to much, but you also get fat from eating the wrong things. Eat only frozen meals and your waist line will expand.
What europeans forget is the sheer scale of america. Everything is really bigger over there and this includes the slums. What might a be a bad neighbourhood in holland, consisting of maybe a few streets, is an entire suburb housing the same number of people as major town in holland.
Amsterdam, the dutch capitol has 750.000 people and is surrounded by farm land. It would fit several times into a large american city. In fact, the entire country is less then a 1/3rd of the state of new york.
Being poor can make it very hard to eat right especially if you are in a poor area where there just ain't a market for expensive healthy food.
Compare the prices, cheapo no-brand coke vs apple juice (and I am not even talking about the stuff with no sugars or artificial flavors added).
Frozen poptarts vs fresh bread (and wonder bread does not count as bread, it is a building material).
Remember, it is not the expensive fast foods that make people fat (well they do) but the stuff we are talking about here is the no-brand really crappy cheapo kind that is decades away from cutting down on articficial flavors and saturated fats.
When I buy fries, mine are made from real potatoes, cut on the spot, properly fried in expensive fluid fat that is replaced often. When you do it on a budget, you have cheapo thin fries (more fat) that are fried in your own cooker with months old solid fat.
Poor people eat unhealthy because healthy food is really expensive. live on a budget for your whole life to find out.
He is a comic effect character, his non-speech is a great writing trick in that it allows him to say the greatest lines, without them ever having to be written. It is a similar trick to the never seen characters in tv. They can be ANYTHING because they never have to be real.
C-3PO
The other half of the comedy paring. He is the talker and plays the role of the well english aristrocate who is utterly useless but by being such a poofter allows everyone else to be really macho. If you want a really spicy sauce, add some sugar. He walks like he does and looks the way he does because the people who build him had to come up with a design that could be worn by a human yet not look like all the REALLY gigantic and unwieldy man-inside-a-plastic-suit-robots that had come before. R2-D2 and C-3PO might look crappy and make little practical sense, but have you actually watched robots of previous movies? Or even of movies like Battlestar Galactica and The Black Hole?
Lightsabers.
Lucas wanted sword fights because they look cool. Regular swords wouldn't look very sci-fi and flaming swords would look even less sci-fi. Light-sabers look cool. They have no other reason. As for hand guards, that would have ruined the futuristic look. There are only so many hand-guard designs you could come up with and any of them would look like an existing design ruining the notion that this adventure is taking place in another universe. Remember, unlike say LoTR or Star Trek, EARTH DOES NOT EXIST. The lightsaber is designed the way it is designed for no other reason then to look sci-fi and not like a futuristic version of a saber or samuri-sword or whatever.
Blasters.
They don't shoot light because a concentrated beam of light does a lot of damage, it shoots light because it looks cool. The effect is similar to watching a gun battle with tracer rounds. It is the same reason why bullets spark when they hit steel, because just wathing some small holes appear in a car is boring. They make a sound, because you don't sit in a theather with massive boxes to watch a silent flick. It is the same reason star ships make a sound. It isn't for any reason other then to give the audience something to listen to. People see guns, they expect bangs. Just like in Star Trek the transporter whines (this is explained in a later book as being a carrier wave that apparently give a minute improvement to the safety, the klingons don't have it. Yes this is after the fact science mumbo-jumbo but the original reason was simple, it sounds better)
Landspeeders.
Now he is REALLY reaching. Lucas is A: an american, a country that hates seatbelts and B: he forgets that on motor cycles you don't wear seat belts either. Seatbelts are boring and in the era the movie was made they were rarely worn by characters in any vehicle. Come on, I can come up with better crap then this (and will)
Storm troopers.
The in universe idea behind the uniforms is to make for a faceless, anonymous killing machine to inspire fear through intimidation. You can kill a hundred storm troopers and you would never know as a hundred identical ones take his place. The real reason however is simple, lucas needed a cheap uniform that looked nothing like anything else and could completly hide the actor inside so he could interchange them and re-use them. He could see dozens "die" and next scene the same actors are there again and the audience never notices. It is brilliant. Remember, a new hope was made on a budget. The proof of lucas brilliance? A storm trooper uniform is about the only uniform a sci-fi festival attendee doesn't look like a total dork in, but actually a bit like a real (if impractically equipped soldier).
The Death Star
It is called a MORAL you idiot. David vs Goliath. That the biggest can be felled by the smallest. Does this guy GET story telling? At ALL? Did he whine that there is no way any prince would kiss a woman who hasn't had a bath in 100 years (sl
I recently downloaded Cheers. All 11 seasons. That would cost an ungodly amount for a series I have really already seen. So, what would they charge for it? I am also downloading Star Wars in HD. Bought the movies in VHS years ago, so certainly not going to pay full price for it again.
A few bucks a month, I might be willing to pay and you could run a succesful business with that because of the large number of buyers and the cheapness of doing business over the net. But the media companies want every last penny. iTunes makes this bloody clear, it hasn't give a single cent of the savings in logistics to the consumer. All the money that used to go to truck-drivers, factory workers and shop assistents now goes straight to the media-moguls.
TPB going commercial is the end, just as the media wants it to end because the simple fact is they want to charge the maximum amount possible and then complain about dropping sales.
You are really have to wonder about the guys behind this deal. Are they dying to loose money? Or maybe there is a hidden connection here?
Age of Conan is a comedy of errors. There are so many mistakes made that you have to wonder just what the hell they were thinking.
Lets start with the start. There are four main classes, the heavy fighter, the damage dealing mages, the health restorers and the light fighters. You may notice that I do NOT mention the usual tank, healer, dps. That is because these roles really just don't exist in the game, but more on that later.
You choose your race and that determines the classes you can choose. You then crash on an island, every race does it, every class does it. EXACTLY the same island.
For the next 20 levels you will do the EXACT same quest except for some minor variations in the main story line quest that are different for every main class.
Does this sound odd? That's right, almost all western MMO's give you different starting points, so that if you create an alt, you spend at least the first few hours in a new area with new quests. Not AoC. As nice as Tortage seems the first time, many a player has commented just how much they hated doing it again and again. In fact, if you want to start in the new area that comes with expansion, you have to go through Tortage ALL OVER AGAIN!
Another huge mistake is the new combat system. In most MMO's you have a thing called auto-attack. This is evil. Nobody actually uses auto-attack (you attack an enemy and you keep hitting with a basic attack until you or the enemy are death, almost certainly you) outside korean MMO's because you get a rich set of special skills that you use to make the fight go in your favor. What these skills are depend highly on your class and a skilled player will learn what skills to use when for maximum effect.
But it can be said that pressing the buttons for these attacks can be become rather routine.
So AoC in a brilliant move did NOT make enemies more intelligent or force more tactical/strategic thinking on how to survive. Rather they introduced a system where you press a button for a skill, then have to press 1-4 more arrow buttons (ALWAYS THE SAME ONE FOR EACH MOVE), for the move to fire. The "trick" is that enemies can have their defences up randomly in each direction and you get best result of your attack has the direction where the enemy is defending least.
It sounds intresting, on paper. But since defence is random it is mostly based on luck and the skills themselves are all pretty much the same "do some damage". There is precious little beyond the direction to choose between the moves.
The effect is that in PvE you could just was well macro the "combo's" and be done with it, you are then left with the simplest of korean MMO's. Those games attract HUGE audiences and are a valid genre in their own right, but AoC made the mistake of marketing itself to a WESTERN audience, the kind of people who cut their teeth on EQ, WOW and LOTRO. They expect roles, tactics even a bit of strategy. Not, go into a dungeon, find enemies randomly standining around in a very wide series of hallways, each of which requires no more then to attack them for a minute or so in an endless slapdown. There really is nothing to it. No thinking, just endlessly pushing the same buttons over and over again. I played it one time with a looping macro and did perfectly. There is not even the satisfaction of finding a masterly put together macro. Just take three skills that hit different directions and you got it.
People put up with SWG and remember it fondly because beyond the bugs was a marvelous deep game. Age of Conan is bugs on top of an extremely shallow hack&slash.
If you are tired of WoW or EQ, then this is not the game for you. If you loved Lineage, then you might like this.
AoC is the example of the game that tried to be different for the sake of being different. They seemed to have thought, "maybe there is reason everyone else do it that way".
The MMO market certainly can do with some new ideas, but square wheels on a car would be new.
Such skill based systems are the domain of the min-maxers. People who combine skills to get the ultimate figthing machines who then scream like babies because they still lack some skills like healing and nobody wants to heal their min-maxed asses.
The class system is the best way to enforce at least a minimum of variance where not all the kiddies are running out as max-dps while the entire system falls apart because DPS only works for some fights.
Go ahead, come up with a better system and then let it loose into the hands of the min-maxers, your system will fail.
If you go to The Sims 3 website and look at some DLC that was user generated and do the math on the costs in euros for say a colored funiture set... well, then you head over to the piratebay or whatever and download the extra's instead. Or stay legal and use pure-user created content from free sites that do NOT charge 10 dollars for a funiture set.
The problem is greed. The first sign is the POINTS system. Don't matter what you call them, they exist for one reason alone, to hide the dollar/euro cost.
There is NOT a single other reason for them, you can just say this DLC costs 10 dollars and not 2000 M$ (MS dollars).
BUT then it would be far to clear just how bloody expensive DLC is.
It wouldn't be so bad if DLC were like the old school expansions but often they are nothing more then an extended patch. Some extra maps, maybe a quests that didn't make it into the main game.
Take the DLC for recent Bioware games like Kotor and Mass Effect. It is nice but barely a fraction of the original gameplay, so why is its price NOT a fraction of the full price?
Mostly it is pure greed. Not just by the game publishers but by the console owners. ALL the console companies LOVE the idea of the media-center. They have a wet dream of the consumer hooked into their grid for their entertainment with their wallet hooked up as a constant infusion of cash. Watch a show, pay. Play a game, pay. Download a trailer, pay. Listen to music, pay. Download a ringtone, pay. Watch an ad, pay. It is the dream behind the AOL and all the portal ISP's that dreamed of selling you every bit of content and it is the dream of Sony (why do you think a hardware company has a media division?) and MS (MSNBC, X-box, media-center etc etc) and to a lesser extent Nintendo (they don't want to sell you media, just games).
The console companies are VASTLY different from the PC companies. You will NEVER see a console company release old titles for free just for the hell of it. It is not the way they work. The console companies and those that produce for them are USED to demand payment for everything and get paid for everything. Think just how odd it is that a game publisher has to pay a console company to be allowed to produce a game for its platform. That would be like the canned anchovy company having to pay the frozen pizza companies to be allowed to release their product. Decal makers to pay car manufacturers.
But that is the way consoles work and it is the reason that console owners pay often a HIGHER price for their games despite the fact that the producer saves himself a fortune for not having to test it on a hundred different configurations. Console owners pay the price for the system that allows consoles makers to reap fast profits on all fronts.
Remember, ID does NOT make a profit when their game forces you to upgrade your PC to the next generation. But Sony does make money if you upgrade your PS2 to a PS3 to play the latest EA game that EA is already paying them for. That is a nice deal!
The problem is that console makers have little choice. They picked a format that is produced by companies that want to milk every last cent from them.
PC gamers are on the whole not going to put up for it. We pay more for our hardware but expect a different attitude from our suppliers. So far it seems clear that a LOT of publishers understand this and we get the silly situation that Console owners pay MORE for their games, have to pay for any DLC and not get any user-made content while PC owners pay LESS for their games, get DLC for free and tons of free content made users.
Anyone remember the old x-wing and tie-fighter games? What did these games have? Relative long gameplay, you couldn't finish those games in a weekend. And then when you were done, there were TWO expansions for both games, released at a small price that offered another few days of gameplay.
Compare that to Kotor and Kotor2. You can't of course compare gameplay of an RPG with a space-sim but you can compare the expansions. Or rather the lack of them. Had Kotor2 been produced as an expansion right from the start and not been shuffled out of house AFTER lucasarts realized that a sequel might make some extra money (gosh, a SW rpg might be a success, who would have thought).
If games were tv, then they would produce a pilot to test the audience, tear down the set, kill the actors and de-invent the camera. If the pilot happens to be liked, they start filming. One episode at the time. But no more pussy-footing about. They don't just tear down the set but nuke the state. Kill the actors entire lineage through time-travel and get god himself to remove light from the universe.
What exactly is taking so long with Mass Effect 2? They seems to be adding a lot of stuff (yet more planet surveying, my favorite part of the game) but the delay really shouldn't be necessary to tell a story. The series really should have ended now OR at LEAST we should have had a few expansions produced for some quick cash and extra gameplay.
Games really just don't to be produced sensibly.
Of cours the tech has to advance, but it doesn't have to happen for every game.
Tell me this, if a producer had simple done Planescape: Torment 2 with absolutely no advances to the engine, just purely another story, would you have bought it? I think the answer is yes.
So why do companies produce so few "expansions" and so many year long sequels that look fantastic but are the equivelant of making a television series with episodes 2-3 years apart.
Slashdot Mirror
Especially if you didn't feed it before going to bed.
Kids work as well, but... well... that requires women, cats are easier.
Do you know who is REALLY to blame for all those illegal downloads that help fund terrorism?
The movie industry. Without any regard to their fellow man and society they keep on producing movie after movie drawing their poor victims into a downwards spiral of constantly try to download the latest of their poison.
Why, I say that if we ban the movie industry (and really, only a communist could be against that) then the act of pirating movie will be wiped of the face of the earth and our youngsters will be saved from this destructive path the pinko's and homosexuals from hollywood have set them on.
Save a child, kill a hollywood producer.
I dare you to find a single flaw in my resoning. No movies, no piracy.
But you forget, you pay for the OS so get the real support from a real company that cares about its customers and not a collection of hairy hippies who tell you to RTFM when you try to install Linux on a crappy old dell with a busted harddrive.
Amazing, really, tomorrow there will be a story about linux and someone will post a story that paying MS means you got proffesional support. Denial, it must be a wonderful place to live.
Read it carefully, remembering things that were said in previous paragraphs and it quickly becomes clear that the reviewer WANTS to be positive. A deadly sin, a reviewer should always be neutral.
Easily fixable bugs are okay? If they are easy to fix, then why haven't they been fixed?
He has to grind between content and as you say, there is a reasonable amount of content? Didn't the reviewer say at the beginning that this ain't the dark ages anymore, MMO's have been around for a long time and dev's should know better now.
CO is Yet Another MMO that doesn't innovate as much as try to chase the twitch/PvP crowd, or worse the console crowd. Others have complained about how simple the game is to play, almost as if designed for a gamepad. No kidding, the game is going to the 360.
As I like MMO's a lot I have spend a lot of time thinking about MMO's and frankly, I think the drive for both twitch and PvP are hopelessly flawed for an MMORPG.
Why? The proof is in other games.
There are TWO games we play often and more importantly for LONG times, long past their graphical lifetime.
The first are the multiplayer FPS. I have long since grown past it, but you didn't play Quake for the pretty graphics, you played it for the instant hard action. But these games all have one thing in common. You are equal. Think about it, everything about multiplayer FPS games, tries to balance the players to extreme, often by simply making them exactly the same, or by playing both sides of the battle in turns.
Why is the RTS Starcraft so loved? Because the sides are superbly balanced.
But this goes against the heart of a (western) RPG, to build your own character, different from others. In a game like Neverwinter Nights, you get to choose from several classes and it is very clear that not all are equal in combat. Dungeon and Dragons Online even warns for this. Some classes are harder to play then others. How do you balance completly different classes with totally different roles? You can't.
This is like starting a game of counterstrike, and one side is given pistols and the other machine guns. Ouch! But an MMO never forces you to switch side and the session never ends. In multiplayer FPS/RTS any advantage you do take, ends at the end of the session.
There are however other games we play for long times, but these games tend to be more about strategy, development. Slow process where we carefully plan our actions. Wether that is an empire building game or the sims or a strategy or a (civilian) flightsimulator, in these games we have a set of skills/capabilities and the game is to learn them and how to use them best. Wether that is sorting our what sims need to do what to get all the stuff done and still advance, or plot the course of an aircraft, or direct a battle doesn't matter. These games are NOT about twitch, they are about tactics, stategy and thinking.
WoW and EQ and all similar games are like this. You have a character, you learn its skills and then you use these skills. It ain't about twisting and turning but using the right skills at the right time. Twitch is NOT what is needed here, it only distracts.
The proof is in Champions Online "block" skills. As another poster has explained, it has nothing to do with blocking, let alone predicting when an enemy has to be blocked. A meter is displayed, when it is full you should have pressed a button or you take a massive amount of damage. Bugs (mentioned in the review) or design mean your actual skills are interrupted while this is going on. Gone all your plans, all your tactics. And it goes on constantly. The combat quickly ends up as nothing more then pressing your cheap attack, power attack when you got power and BLOCK whenever the light comes on.
But isn't that fine for dozens if not hundreds of console action games? Yes, but those games ain't player for hundred of hours. Action games come and go very quickly.
MMO's shouldn't. They are very expensive to develop so a publisher needs the kind of a
If they want a shot at faking another moonlanding they really need to hire a better set designer, that didn't look anything like the moon!
Yes your honor, I raped this girl and then she kicked me, she should go to jail!
eBay is not a forum like slashdot (and if there ever was an example of bad code, /. is it) but an auction site. This means that for one thing, it has to rely on being up-to-date and handling requests in order. If you don't see my post for half an hour, who cares. If you don't see my bid until after the auction ended, well you might be pretty pissed off because I was going to bid way higher then the current offer.
As a webdeveloper myself, it is often pretty hard to imagine just how different an application needs to be, to suit a different need. There is a definite tendency for people to think "oh it is the web, I can do html, I do a web application". Nope. Even if you got experience with one type of webapp, don't presume you know how to another. Especially on a gigantic scale.
You start to run into all sorts of problems once you have to scale up, especially when you got to the point scaling don't work no more and you got to split things up.
Even simple things, like cross-domain scripting start to get in the way.
Lets give the ebay developers at least a little bit of credit, they might not do things perfectly but the site has run succesfully for years. So maybe, just maybe, they know what they are talking about when they say caching don't work for them.
Sometimes you just know the wrong people are playing a game. Go play sonic, that should suit your attention span.
Else you are a liar.
The story mentions an AK-47. Everyone here knows what an AK-47 looks like, that gun looks nothing like it and that becomes the whole focus of the story.
The 911 call went probably something like this "Help, I see someone walking with a big gun. What kind I dunno one of those big things like an AK-47."
What next? An elephant breaks loose and the story focusses on how the caller said it was an african when it was actually an indian elephant?
If there is a god, each and everyone of the idiots that went "haha, that ain't an AK-47 will be attacked by alligator, call the police for help, then have the police show up and walk away again because the thing using them for a chew toy is a crocodile.
This story has the idiocracy tag, I know who the real idiots are here.
And really, carrying a semi-realistic looking replica weapon in public. What are you thinking.
The poster seems to claim that Star Wars The Old Republic is going hardcore, but that just seems to be a wish from a lot of WoW players, there is little indication this will be true.
For those who are lost, hardcore has become term in the MMO market to describe those players who like World of Warcrafts end-game raiding system. In this system there are a series of dungeons populated by though bosses you fight with a group that drop 1 piece of armour each time. You need said armour piece to stand a chance in the next dungeon. Since only one piece drops for a group, you either got to be very lucky or repeat the dungeon multiple times. Say it is a 24 man raid, then you need to do the raid 24 times for everyone to get it. To support this, complex point systems have been created (Suicide kings and others) to arrange who can win what and when.
Some would call this a grind, doing the same thing over and over for a piece of gear that will just enable you to do the same again in another dungeon. Other call this hard. The idea is that hard and a lot of work are the same thing. Hardcore for some means "though challenge" for others it is closer to "spending lots and lots of effort". Gear in WoW is "special" because it would have either cost you a lot of time or you been very lucky on the rolls. Sadly, for some, this is translated into skill.
The debate on hardcore vs "easymode" then becomes that certain gamers who are willing to spend a lot of time into a game get upset if EVERYONE gets that special item just by completing a quest. It is not the thougness of the quest that is the issue but that in quest mode EVERYONE gets the reward, not just one person. There for in quest mode if a special item is rewarded, you only need to do it once.
Some people (like me) claim that the people who can sink a lot of time into a game are kids with little else happening in their lifes. They get upset when normal people with jobs and responsibilties can get as far in the game as them. If everyone can achieve the same, then they are no longer special.
For an MMO developer it is a though choice. There are a LOT of kiddies out there (and please note, being a kiddie has NOTHING to do with your real age) but there are also a lot of carebears out there. Ideally, you want both to pay for your game but that is unlikely to happen. So, you got to make a choice and it doesn't matter what choice you make, the other side will claim that you are failing because of that choice. Yes, some people claim WoW has failed because it only attracts the "kiddies". I wish I had a failure like that.
Almost every new MMO forums will be overrun by basically two groups. On the one hand the people who think the sandbox MMO's like Ultima Online and (especially in this case) SWG should make a comeback and on the other hand the WoW kiddies who think WoW is so great every game should be a carbon copy.
Bioware has "competed" against Blizzard before. Baldur's gate vs Diablo. Yeah really, both are RPG's so obviously they compete against each other. Read some players posts on the subject. Plenty a diablo player slams the heavy talking in Bioware games and many a Bioware player calls Diablo gameplay an endless boring hack&slash. In reality, the games are of course completly different and will generally appeal to different people. Only the true gamer, the totally cool and fantastic (like me) will play both games and enjoy them for what they are and not for what they are not. Yes, I am that good, worship me.
But when Kotor came out, many a diablo player posted that it should have less talking and more slashing.
And the exact same thing is happening right now with SWTOR.
Bioware has not been extremely clear on exactly what the gameplay is going to be like in SWTOR. But what they have told so far is that there is going to be a LOT of story and the you make choices similar to the ones we have come to expect from Biowares single player RPG's. Raiding often forms the endgame in an MMORPG (well, it does in WoW and WoW is
SWG didn't have quests.
Better luck trolling next time.
Have you actually bothered to read the other story about the cannon build by a dad?
Notice anything? As big as it is, there is no way you can fit a laywer in there to fire them. Not unless you chop them into little bit firsts and that would get the gun powder wet and unable to fire.
No sir, firing lawyers is NOT the solution. Try again, or build a bigger cannon.
Just look at the slashdot page. Read the article about the Indian satalite? Note how the BBC does NOT report that the satalite did what it was supposed to do and was nearly a year in operation. No, instead they make a snarky comment about India spending an insignificantly small amount of their GDP on a space program that keeps its scientists busy and not leaving for greener pastures in the west.
Could the British BBC possibly be a little bit biased against their former colony having a space program while they do not? Nah. British reporting is not biased against Israel because those pesky jews kicked their butts post WW2 and upset all the carefully aranged middle east politics that had kept britain in control by having the natives fight each other.
Everyone has a bias, it is created by how they were raised, what version of history they read in their history books. Britain has a markedly different version then the rest of the world.
To give you the most basic example of just how engrained bias can be, take this. Palestine, is this the original name of the area now known as Israel? Answer, no. It was RENAMED after the second jewish uprising from "Provincia Judaea". History records (not biblical) show this name change. Of course the "original" name was already the name giving by ROME, an occupier. Yet a LOT of the argument about the current conflict from the BBC point of view tries to make it appear that Israel is the newcomer. It is, from a certain point of view.
For an even clearer example. What is the name of the continent to the west of the BBC studio? America? Really? So it had no name before europeans discovered it? When americans complain about immigrants, the story change significantly if it became "Immigrants, complaining about immigrants".
There are three free news papers in Holland. "De spits", "De Metro", "De Pers". It is intresting to read the news in all three of them. The first two are mostly in the business of reprinting press releases while the third on occasion does its own reporting (well, at least translates someones elses reporting). What is intresting to note then is what is included, what is excluded and on what page.
The recent war in gaza is an obvious example. Amnesty released a report blaming both sides for attrocities. You might argue with the report, BUT if you are reporting on said report, then the facts are that both sides get blaimed. That is not what all media reported however. A few said focusses only on the blame on Israel, a few mentioned in a single line that Hamas was also mentioned and a few mentioned the full story. ALL reported the facts, but by choosing what facts they reported, they showed bias.
Often bias is needed to keep an article readable, if you mention every option, every opinion then you would need a forklift to carry a newspaper. You can't go over the entire history of religion and the world everytime you mention the middle east (despite the fact that this entire history of religion and the world make the situtation what it is).
If you want to watch the BBC's reporting and see if it is unbiased you should attempt to look at it from the position of someone with whose opinions you do not agree.
The truth, the whole of the truth and nothing but the truth. It is the SECOND bit that is the kicker. I am the sexiest man. This is the truth. The whole of the truth is that " I am the sexiest man, in my house, right now".
If you think the BBC is unbiased, then you need to become more skeptical.
Subject says it all.
As others have pointed out, but it is worth repeating. Dell DOES sell Windows PC's WITHOUT office. So all they have to do, is use that existing and presumably tested image that they have used for years.
Dell is blowing smoke here. It is basically saying: "Dear Judge, we sell coffee with sugar, taking the sugar out would be insanely hard. Please don't tell us to sell coffee with the sugar taken out."
The only issue here is Dell's bottom line. The profit margins on software are insane. Sure, it costs a fortune to produce, but the cost of selling it is nearly zero for these PC's. Just an option checked, different image used and foila. Money in the bank.
Dell has been very helpful in creating a monopoly for office and now it is once again lying on MS behalf.
There ARE images, that DELL is using RIGHT now, that do NOT include office. That is ALL they need to do. Oh but the issue is with Word, not with office? So? That is MS problem. Nobody is going to buy office without word, for that matter you can't.
Dell can just stop selling office and let MS take the damage for trying to come with a way to still sell office without word. Not their problem.
Sufficiently free society.
Sufficient as far as I know means something like good enough. Not compleet. My income is sufficient to live on does not mean I am rich or I am without money worries. A diet that is suffcient to survive on would hardly be called optimal.
So just how free should society be? Completly free?
One of the problems in the world is that we wants simple things, left/right, while politics tend to be very complex. Take Cuba, you had a system before Castro that had the majority of the public living in oppression, and after Castro, the exact same thing. Of course, the people who had it good before are complaing that now it is so much worse. Well duh!
That is what is fuels a lot of the violence in Iraq. You had a minority who controlled the country who suddenly had to give it all up and be ruled by the people they previously controlled. That sets bad blood. So the freedom of one means the restraint of another.
South American countries can be divided into two groups, those that are friendly to the US and can kill as many people as they want, with US backing and those that are not friendly to the US and get slammed for building hospitals.
Chavez is doing EXACTLY the same thing as the US has been trying to and a lot of european countries as well. So why does Chavez get so much more flak?
Why the mentioning of weapon purchases? The US spends far more on killing tech and its senators are trying for the same laws. Where is the link? Oh, there isn't one.
Chavez is running a country where the rich used to have their way completly. Now things changed and guess what, the rich don't like it and the US don't like it that a source of oil is no longer run by people who like them. It makes any reporting by any US citizen on Chavez in my opinion extremely suspect and this article is just a confimation of my susipicions.
Yes this law is stupid, but the reporting on it is so biased that its simpler message is lost in the propoganda.
The US has the largest number of people incarcerated. Period. Yes, MORE people are in jail in the US then in China or India. Countries with populations over a billion. (4-5 times the population).
Granted, China's figures might not be accurate, but India is a democracy. Not a perfect one and India has many wrongs but still, the figures say a lot about the US of A.
Then again, in far more liberal countries, the crime figures are really not all that different.
Personal use has been legal in holland for some time, and we still got crime and crime-ridden area's.
One thing I learned about the US that is hard to grasp for someone from say Holland is that there are areas in the US where you just can't buy produce. No vegetables.
Sure, you can DRIVE to another area, but that costs money.
Now I can't say exactly how true this is, but the simple fact is that even in "poor" areas in holland you can easily WALK (in less then 5 minutes) to a supermarket. Often one of a regular big chain like the AH. Which carries in all its stores, fresh vegetables.
They are still relatively expensive however.
If you do the math, then cheap fast food (the cheapest no-brand frozen pizza's) can be a LOT cheaper then even buying healthy base products and making your own. Good luck making a meal for 99 euro cents (cost of a frozen pizza). That of course assumes that such fresh products are even available, which in america they apparently aren't always.
You do get fat from eating to much, but you also get fat from eating the wrong things. Eat only frozen meals and your waist line will expand.
What europeans forget is the sheer scale of america. Everything is really bigger over there and this includes the slums. What might a be a bad neighbourhood in holland, consisting of maybe a few streets, is an entire suburb housing the same number of people as major town in holland.
Amsterdam, the dutch capitol has 750.000 people and is surrounded by farm land. It would fit several times into a large american city. In fact, the entire country is less then a 1/3rd of the state of new york.
Being poor can make it very hard to eat right especially if you are in a poor area where there just ain't a market for expensive healthy food.
Compare the prices, cheapo no-brand coke vs apple juice (and I am not even talking about the stuff with no sugars or artificial flavors added).
Frozen poptarts vs fresh bread (and wonder bread does not count as bread, it is a building material).
Remember, it is not the expensive fast foods that make people fat (well they do) but the stuff we are talking about here is the no-brand really crappy cheapo kind that is decades away from cutting down on articficial flavors and saturated fats.
When I buy fries, mine are made from real potatoes, cut on the spot, properly fried in expensive fluid fat that is replaced often. When you do it on a budget, you have cheapo thin fries (more fat) that are fried in your own cooker with months old solid fat.
Poor people eat unhealthy because healthy food is really expensive. live on a budget for your whole life to find out.
R2D2
He is a comic effect character, his non-speech is a great writing trick in that it allows him to say the greatest lines, without them ever having to be written. It is a similar trick to the never seen characters in tv. They can be ANYTHING because they never have to be real.
C-3PO
The other half of the comedy paring. He is the talker and plays the role of the well english aristrocate who is utterly useless but by being such a poofter allows everyone else to be really macho. If you want a really spicy sauce, add some sugar. He walks like he does and looks the way he does because the people who build him had to come up with a design that could be worn by a human yet not look like all the REALLY gigantic and unwieldy man-inside-a-plastic-suit-robots that had come before. R2-D2 and C-3PO might look crappy and make little practical sense, but have you actually watched robots of previous movies? Or even of movies like Battlestar Galactica and The Black Hole?
Lightsabers.
Lucas wanted sword fights because they look cool. Regular swords wouldn't look very sci-fi and flaming swords would look even less sci-fi. Light-sabers look cool. They have no other reason. As for hand guards, that would have ruined the futuristic look. There are only so many hand-guard designs you could come up with and any of them would look like an existing design ruining the notion that this adventure is taking place in another universe. Remember, unlike say LoTR or Star Trek, EARTH DOES NOT EXIST. The lightsaber is designed the way it is designed for no other reason then to look sci-fi and not like a futuristic version of a saber or samuri-sword or whatever.
Blasters.
They don't shoot light because a concentrated beam of light does a lot of damage, it shoots light because it looks cool. The effect is similar to watching a gun battle with tracer rounds. It is the same reason why bullets spark when they hit steel, because just wathing some small holes appear in a car is boring. They make a sound, because you don't sit in a theather with massive boxes to watch a silent flick. It is the same reason star ships make a sound. It isn't for any reason other then to give the audience something to listen to. People see guns, they expect bangs. Just like in Star Trek the transporter whines (this is explained in a later book as being a carrier wave that apparently give a minute improvement to the safety, the klingons don't have it. Yes this is after the fact science mumbo-jumbo but the original reason was simple, it sounds better)
Landspeeders.
Now he is REALLY reaching. Lucas is A: an american, a country that hates seatbelts and B: he forgets that on motor cycles you don't wear seat belts either. Seatbelts are boring and in the era the movie was made they were rarely worn by characters in any vehicle. Come on, I can come up with better crap then this (and will)
Storm troopers.
The in universe idea behind the uniforms is to make for a faceless, anonymous killing machine to inspire fear through intimidation. You can kill a hundred storm troopers and you would never know as a hundred identical ones take his place. The real reason however is simple, lucas needed a cheap uniform that looked nothing like anything else and could completly hide the actor inside so he could interchange them and re-use them. He could see dozens "die" and next scene the same actors are there again and the audience never notices. It is brilliant. Remember, a new hope was made on a budget. The proof of lucas brilliance? A storm trooper uniform is about the only uniform a sci-fi festival attendee doesn't look like a total dork in, but actually a bit like a real (if impractically equipped soldier).
The Death Star
It is called a MORAL you idiot. David vs Goliath. That the biggest can be felled by the smallest. Does this guy GET story telling? At ALL? Did he whine that there is no way any prince would kiss a woman who hasn't had a bath in 100 years (sl
I recently downloaded Cheers. All 11 seasons. That would cost an ungodly amount for a series I have really already seen. So, what would they charge for it? I am also downloading Star Wars in HD. Bought the movies in VHS years ago, so certainly not going to pay full price for it again.
A few bucks a month, I might be willing to pay and you could run a succesful business with that because of the large number of buyers and the cheapness of doing business over the net. But the media companies want every last penny. iTunes makes this bloody clear, it hasn't give a single cent of the savings in logistics to the consumer. All the money that used to go to truck-drivers, factory workers and shop assistents now goes straight to the media-moguls.
TPB going commercial is the end, just as the media wants it to end because the simple fact is they want to charge the maximum amount possible and then complain about dropping sales.
You are really have to wonder about the guys behind this deal. Are they dying to loose money? Or maybe there is a hidden connection here?
Age of Conan is a comedy of errors. There are so many mistakes made that you have to wonder just what the hell they were thinking.
Lets start with the start. There are four main classes, the heavy fighter, the damage dealing mages, the health restorers and the light fighters. You may notice that I do NOT mention the usual tank, healer, dps. That is because these roles really just don't exist in the game, but more on that later.
You choose your race and that determines the classes you can choose. You then crash on an island, every race does it, every class does it. EXACTLY the same island.
For the next 20 levels you will do the EXACT same quest except for some minor variations in the main story line quest that are different for every main class.
Does this sound odd? That's right, almost all western MMO's give you different starting points, so that if you create an alt, you spend at least the first few hours in a new area with new quests. Not AoC. As nice as Tortage seems the first time, many a player has commented just how much they hated doing it again and again. In fact, if you want to start in the new area that comes with expansion, you have to go through Tortage ALL OVER AGAIN!
Another huge mistake is the new combat system. In most MMO's you have a thing called auto-attack. This is evil. Nobody actually uses auto-attack (you attack an enemy and you keep hitting with a basic attack until you or the enemy are death, almost certainly you) outside korean MMO's because you get a rich set of special skills that you use to make the fight go in your favor. What these skills are depend highly on your class and a skilled player will learn what skills to use when for maximum effect.
But it can be said that pressing the buttons for these attacks can be become rather routine.
So AoC in a brilliant move did NOT make enemies more intelligent or force more tactical/strategic thinking on how to survive. Rather they introduced a system where you press a button for a skill, then have to press 1-4 more arrow buttons (ALWAYS THE SAME ONE FOR EACH MOVE), for the move to fire. The "trick" is that enemies can have their defences up randomly in each direction and you get best result of your attack has the direction where the enemy is defending least.
It sounds intresting, on paper. But since defence is random it is mostly based on luck and the skills themselves are all pretty much the same "do some damage". There is precious little beyond the direction to choose between the moves.
The effect is that in PvE you could just was well macro the "combo's" and be done with it, you are then left with the simplest of korean MMO's. Those games attract HUGE audiences and are a valid genre in their own right, but AoC made the mistake of marketing itself to a WESTERN audience, the kind of people who cut their teeth on EQ, WOW and LOTRO. They expect roles, tactics even a bit of strategy. Not, go into a dungeon, find enemies randomly standining around in a very wide series of hallways, each of which requires no more then to attack them for a minute or so in an endless slapdown. There really is nothing to it. No thinking, just endlessly pushing the same buttons over and over again. I played it one time with a looping macro and did perfectly. There is not even the satisfaction of finding a masterly put together macro. Just take three skills that hit different directions and you got it.
People put up with SWG and remember it fondly because beyond the bugs was a marvelous deep game. Age of Conan is bugs on top of an extremely shallow hack&slash.
If you are tired of WoW or EQ, then this is not the game for you. If you loved Lineage, then you might like this.
AoC is the example of the game that tried to be different for the sake of being different. They seemed to have thought, "maybe there is reason everyone else do it that way".
The MMO market certainly can do with some new ideas, but square wheels on a car would be new.
It will be intresting to see what The
Such skill based systems are the domain of the min-maxers. People who combine skills to get the ultimate figthing machines who then scream like babies because they still lack some skills like healing and nobody wants to heal their min-maxed asses.
The class system is the best way to enforce at least a minimum of variance where not all the kiddies are running out as max-dps while the entire system falls apart because DPS only works for some fights.
Go ahead, come up with a better system and then let it loose into the hands of the min-maxers, your system will fail.
If you go to The Sims 3 website and look at some DLC that was user generated and do the math on the costs in euros for say a colored funiture set... well, then you head over to the piratebay or whatever and download the extra's instead. Or stay legal and use pure-user created content from free sites that do NOT charge 10 dollars for a funiture set.
The problem is greed. The first sign is the POINTS system. Don't matter what you call them, they exist for one reason alone, to hide the dollar/euro cost.
There is NOT a single other reason for them, you can just say this DLC costs 10 dollars and not 2000 M$ (MS dollars).
BUT then it would be far to clear just how bloody expensive DLC is.
It wouldn't be so bad if DLC were like the old school expansions but often they are nothing more then an extended patch. Some extra maps, maybe a quests that didn't make it into the main game.
Take the DLC for recent Bioware games like Kotor and Mass Effect. It is nice but barely a fraction of the original gameplay, so why is its price NOT a fraction of the full price?
Mostly it is pure greed. Not just by the game publishers but by the console owners. ALL the console companies LOVE the idea of the media-center. They have a wet dream of the consumer hooked into their grid for their entertainment with their wallet hooked up as a constant infusion of cash. Watch a show, pay. Play a game, pay. Download a trailer, pay. Listen to music, pay. Download a ringtone, pay. Watch an ad, pay. It is the dream behind the AOL and all the portal ISP's that dreamed of selling you every bit of content and it is the dream of Sony (why do you think a hardware company has a media division?) and MS (MSNBC, X-box, media-center etc etc) and to a lesser extent Nintendo (they don't want to sell you media, just games).
The console companies are VASTLY different from the PC companies. You will NEVER see a console company release old titles for free just for the hell of it. It is not the way they work. The console companies and those that produce for them are USED to demand payment for everything and get paid for everything. Think just how odd it is that a game publisher has to pay a console company to be allowed to produce a game for its platform. That would be like the canned anchovy company having to pay the frozen pizza companies to be allowed to release their product. Decal makers to pay car manufacturers.
But that is the way consoles work and it is the reason that console owners pay often a HIGHER price for their games despite the fact that the producer saves himself a fortune for not having to test it on a hundred different configurations. Console owners pay the price for the system that allows consoles makers to reap fast profits on all fronts.
Remember, ID does NOT make a profit when their game forces you to upgrade your PC to the next generation. But Sony does make money if you upgrade your PS2 to a PS3 to play the latest EA game that EA is already paying them for. That is a nice deal!
The problem is that console makers have little choice. They picked a format that is produced by companies that want to milk every last cent from them.
PC gamers are on the whole not going to put up for it. We pay more for our hardware but expect a different attitude from our suppliers. So far it seems clear that a LOT of publishers understand this and we get the silly situation that Console owners pay MORE for their games, have to pay for any DLC and not get any user-made content while PC owners pay LESS for their games, get DLC for free and tons of free content made users.
It would be a real tragedy. If I owned a console.
Anyone remember the old x-wing and tie-fighter games? What did these games have? Relative long gameplay, you couldn't finish those games in a weekend. And then when you were done, there were TWO expansions for both games, released at a small price that offered another few days of gameplay.
Compare that to Kotor and Kotor2. You can't of course compare gameplay of an RPG with a space-sim but you can compare the expansions. Or rather the lack of them. Had Kotor2 been produced as an expansion right from the start and not been shuffled out of house AFTER lucasarts realized that a sequel might make some extra money (gosh, a SW rpg might be a success, who would have thought).
If games were tv, then they would produce a pilot to test the audience, tear down the set, kill the actors and de-invent the camera. If the pilot happens to be liked, they start filming. One episode at the time. But no more pussy-footing about. They don't just tear down the set but nuke the state. Kill the actors entire lineage through time-travel and get god himself to remove light from the universe.
What exactly is taking so long with Mass Effect 2? They seems to be adding a lot of stuff (yet more planet surveying, my favorite part of the game) but the delay really shouldn't be necessary to tell a story. The series really should have ended now OR at LEAST we should have had a few expansions produced for some quick cash and extra gameplay.
Games really just don't to be produced sensibly.
Of cours the tech has to advance, but it doesn't have to happen for every game.
Tell me this, if a producer had simple done Planescape: Torment 2 with absolutely no advances to the engine, just purely another story, would you have bought it? I think the answer is yes.
So why do companies produce so few "expansions" and so many year long sequels that look fantastic but are the equivelant of making a television series with episodes 2-3 years apart.