I never though LeGuin was that great of a writer. If I could have gotten past her pretentious, stodgy writing style, perhaps I would have enjoyed her books more.
The mini series was ok, not great but ok. To digress, a two part movie is NOT, at least to me, a mini series. But anyways...
Any writer that's had their material made into a movie or television has experienced the changes that happen. The writer has to be willing to let go. Ms. LeGuin has yet to learn that. Most of her complaints were pointless whining about changes that made no difference to viewers.
I'm sure if she keeps bitching and whining that fewer of her books will be adapted in the future.
It seems strange to see me write that as a subject, because I'm really not a Warcraft or Starcraft fan, but Blizzard has historically made pretty darn good quality games. And they have a tendency to support the Mac for many of their titles too, which I think is a nice bonus.
I own a Powerbook G4 (latest model), but I don't really game on it, nor did I buy it for that reason. But a company that's willing to support what I consider in general to be a superior OS gets plus marks from me. Windows as an OS pretty much sucks, but all the gaming hardware and software development happens there. So I have a PC that gets used almost exclusively for gaming and very little else. Meanwhile, I get my email (virus free) on the Mac, surf the web on the Mac, do shell scripting on the Mac. Hell, I even compiled our custom BSD tools at work for my Mac just so I can run them off my mactop if I want to. Flexibility is beautiful. And you still can't beat a Mac for creative applications like graphics, video and music. You can get by doing that on a PC, but on a Mac, you're in the groove.
Each Platform has it's strengths and weaknesses. That's why I run a huge variety at home. It keeps my skills up and my employability higher. Since I have a PC for gaming, I shouldn't really care if company X supports the Mac or Linux, and I don't expect them to. But when they do, that scores big points with me. And when a company tries to weasel their way in to a large percentage of games as a standard and fails to be platform agnostic, especially after supporting multi platform, that gets my ire up.
And it didn't help that I bought the useless lifetime subscription to GameSpy3D only to have them create the same thing more or less in the 'new' GameSpy Arcade and try to charge me for it AGAIN. They're slime.
The gamespy interface in games is weak and lame and devoid of basic features. And half the time, the filter features don't even work in the released game! I've bought a couple games in the last year where filters had no effect at all and another game where I have yet to see a single game server pop up in 9 months, with all filters off (no connection to master server).
If they want to be the defacto game search interface for the industry, they need to get off their lazy butts and do it right. And while Macs aren't raking in the market share, they are part of the market, DEAL WITH IT! It's not like GameSpy code is rocket science anyways. Yet they STILL manage to hose it often enough.
I wouldn't be surprised if the core of the problem is that 'the' Mac guy at GameSpy got sick of doing the same amount of work that 15 people do for the PC version and quit.
This sounds like a geniune market opportunity for someone to come into the market and develop a nice cross platform (win/osx/X11) interface and service for games.
Make one app and keep improving and supporting it - instead of the GameSpy approach of making one, raking in fees from suckers (like me) and then dumping it for a new product which is basically the same only web based and slow and buggy and trying to charge your lifetime customers for it.
If GameSpy actually had the PC side of their stuff working well, it might be a lost cause, but they can't even get their core market right, so screw em. Time for some better company to squish them....
"the top two Lifetime Achievers and top four Games/Characters."
That's why it's listed as Halo and not Master Chief.
And for those that think it doesn't deserve to be in a Hall of Fame...
It singlehandedly MADE the xbox a viable platform and has been one of the most successful games of all time. It's also been out for over 4 years. And lastly, it's sequel did $100 million on day one. I'd say that's worthy of Hall of Fame recognition.
I'm not a huge Halo fan because I can't stand console controllers for FPS games, but Halo's popularity comes from it's multiplayer component. Screw the story line, screw the solo game. Who cares? You can SPNK your friends! It's weaponry and maps are well done for Multiplayer and Bungie has a history of doing pretty well in that area. As a long time Marathon fan, it came as no surprise to me that Marathon 4 (uh.. Halo) became a huge hit in a new market.
I pay the cable company and I get ads, I pay tivo a service fee and they're going to force me to see ads?
I hope this only affects fast forward and not the skip button.
If the tivo service was really cheap I wouldn't mind so much, but it's fairly pricey. They're trying so hard not to piss off the big media that they're going to alienate their customers and therefore confront head on their biggest fear - loss of their business.
Actually, it did have nothing to do with Steve Jobs owning it. He didn't come back to Apple until NeXT bought Apple... uh... Apple bought NeXT.
The story is incorrect in the choices Apple had. Apple was looking at developing it's own OS, which failed yet again. Copland, if it had enough time, might have proven to be a solid OS. But it was poorly managed and died. Apple never seriously considered licensing NT and I doubt Solaris was a serious consideration. The main contender at the time was BeOS, run by former Apple big wig, Jean Gasse. He wanted $400 million for the OS. Some serious talks ensued.
Then Gil Amelio talked to Steve Jobs. OpenStep ran on Motorola chips and they'd even done some work to get it going on PPCs. Steve wanted $400 million for everything NeXT had. That included OpenStep, WebObjects, the donut boy, etc...
And it got them Steve. The choice was obvious, although it cost Gil his job in short order as Steve stabbed him in the back for getting his job back (some thanks, eh?)
I remember putting NeXTStep on a PC back in those days to get familiar with the OS. There was the rainbow spinning beach ball that showed up for no apparent reason as a wait cursor. Even when you weren't doing anything. It remains as an annoyance in OS X, spinning annoyance your way for no apparent reason.
30fps is sluggish if you have no headroom in cpu/gpu processing power. That's because the moment you get into heavy combat your fps drops considerably.
30fps handles smooth motion for video and corresponds to about 33ms of time per frame. So in severe twitch situations it wouldn't cut the mustard, but 60fps would have a time of 16.6ms per frame which is more than adequate for any human being's reaction time in any situation.
All of that is, however, irrelevant to the fact that you move slower in Halo than in Quake, Doom or Unreal. If Halo were allowed to run at 200 fps and you had the horsepower to do so, you wouldn't move any faster.
Is there any other mode worth playing? Not really. I've never maintained interest long enough to finish most single player and those that I did finish, no matter how good they were, I felt I had to force myself to finish the game. Somewhere in the middle, be it fairly early or fairly late, they always lose me.
When compared to the PC equivalents of the day, Marathon owned them.
Better graphics. Multi mode weapons Better maps Better net play Net play modes other than Deathmatch (KotH and Kill the Guy with the Ball for example) Ambient enviornment sounds
I used to work tradeshows during those days setting up computers for booths and meetings. The PC guys I worked with were always playing Doom. When I showed them Marathon, they were stunned because it was so much better.
Re:Never having played either myself....
on
Halo 2 Reviews
·
· Score: 5, Informative
30fps is video speed. The 'sluggish' speed of movement in Halo isn't because of the frames per second.
The movement speed is intentionally coded to be slower than Quake. It's far more realistic a movement speed. Let's face it, you can't run 60 mph. But if you just play Quake and HL and UT, it takes some getting adjusted to. That and you have to think ahead about what you're doing instead of just reacting to everything.
Re:Emphasis on AGAIN
on
Halo 2 Reviews
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I think you've been jaded with time.
Halo 1 Creativity:
weapons - manly rockets, not those pussy quake type ones
alien weapons that can't be reloaded, and overheat
vehicles - first game I know of that you could DRIVE vehicles in an FPS game.
enemies - while only a few types existed, the AI was very good, unlike the 'huge hit games' like CoD.
Bungie didn't do the PC port, although they supervised it. And shame on them for shipping it with utter garbage for net code. Can you say milking the customer base?
outdoor sequences - first FPS with halfway decent outdoor levels and graphics in those levels. Sure, the graphics look dated now, but they were pretty hot back then.
Indoor sequences - walls tend to be flat, that's what walls are. The dark, moody ship levels were interesting early on, but the rubber stamp action of a rushed ship job became rather boring. Given enough time, I think they would have done it well.
Bungie invented dual wielding and weapons with more than one firing mode back in the mid 90s with Marathon. They also veered from the overly fast, unrealistic movement of the DooMs and Quakes and went for a slower, more realistic run speed. This forces you to think more and makes it a bit less of a twitch game. You can still twitch to take out a target that suddenly appeared, but escaping from danger isn't so easy.
No, I'm not a Bungie fan boi. But they have been historically innovative in game design, often a step ahead of the competition. But they fail to listen to fans just as much as the next game company and they ship a game too soon just like every other game company. People still buy the stuff anyways to feed their crack habit, so why put some quality into it? It's a disgusting trend in the industry, but there's no avoiding it now unless we stop thanking them for slop with the all mighty dollar.
I did the portupgrade dance on a FreeBSD 4.9 system. I'd have been better off formatting the drive and installing 4.10. Which is essentially what I wound up doing after several weeks of hassles.
Packages are older. Ports are newer. If you want anything in a reasonable amount of time after release, you HAVE to use ports. If you stick to JUST ports, it WORKS.
Enough of portupgrade chant timesink. As I said above, been there, done that, got the t-shirt, rebuilt the hard drive. No thanks. It's UN-RE-LI-A-BLE.
Stick to ports and live a pain free upgrade experience. Those that have used portupgrade and had no problems have been lucky. Perhaps I was unlucky (I DID read the docs). But if you've never used it or tried it, ask yourself one thing... "Do I feel lucky?"
Seeing as iD Software has never in its entire existence released a game that was interesting and fun to play, I'm not surprised. Every game iD has ever released has pushed the envelope for graphics engines, but the gameplay left much to be desired.
When it really became fun was when other companies licensed the engine and made their own games (like Half Life).
I did not await Doom3 with eagerness, but I do await games using it's engine. And the same goes for HL2. Single Player FPS games don't thrill me at all - scripted, limited AI. Net play is FAR more interesting to me. Half Life 1's story line bored me, never even finished it. But it's VERY rare that a single player shooter can keep my interest long enough for me to finish it.
I use FreeBSD on an in-depth basis daily in a FreeBSD based development house. I wouldn't call myself a guru, but I know wtf I'm talking about.
I know what packages to get for my system. Packages are rarely updated. Ports are updated frequently. Use both and you're mixing old code with new requirements and you will feel pain.
Packages work fine by themselves. But if you ever want to upgrade your browser with the current release, you'll need to use a port. If you ever want to upgrade gnome, you'll need to use a port. If you ever want to upgrade just about anything, you'll need to use a port.
By keeping to just ports on your system, you only have to resolve the needs of one mechanism. And that pretty much works. Since I took that approach, my upgrades have been headache free.
If you don't agree, fine, suit yourself. Spend hours futzing with builds. I'd rather be USING the system or be off doing something more enjoyable with my time.
ports and packages are good ideas, but never the twain should meet.
Simply installing FreeBSD will most likely (unless you try hard to avoid it) will install some packages. Seemingly harmless, but try to upgrade one of those packages via the ports mechanism and you will begin to feel true pain, young jedi.
Ports are a better path, IMO, because they are far more frequently updated. But mixing an installation of ports and packages will send you down a compatibility and non-compiling path to hell.
Fortunately, I've figured out the trick. Avoid any packages during the initial CD install and then install everything from ports. Then you can update your ports using cvsup and upgrade your apps and likely never have a problem. Worked like a champ for me and I can run the latest releases of Firefox and Thunderbird while others have compiles of the same apps barf on them.
"...Players will be able to complete quests and experience the world at their own pace-whether it be a few hours here and there, or week-long adventuring marathons..."
Yeah, we've all heard that before. All it means is you're a wimp compared to the no life junkies that play 12 hours a day who own the server and all it's content, holding you back even more.
WOWs graphics look chincy. EQ2's kick it's butt to hell and back. And while there are loads of Blizzard fans, I'm sure as hell not one of them. Warcraft=Starcraft=whoever masters the building algorithm wins. No battle tactics or 'chess games' here. The original warcraft was fun until it just became a battle of the building, then it was boring beyond belief. Same for Warcraft 2, 3 and Starcraft. Only the sprite have been changed to protect the guilty.
And Blizzard has ZERO experience with RPGs. One person here said WOW was already a better game than EQ was after 3 years. Considering WOW wasn't in development until EQ was 3 years old isn't saying much. EQ broke new ground. WOW is just an also ran in a saturated market now.
MMOs have hit a brick wall because developers don't get it. People WANT to slay the dragon without having to play 12 hours a day. Stop holding everyone back with ridiculous chokepoints! Hire more people to create content and people will keep playing and be MUCH happier because they'll feel they can accomplish something.
It shouldn't have to take 5-8 hours to organize a boss raid. You shouldn't need 70 people to kill the boss mob. I sure as hell only need 5 to 7 of my friend when I played D&D so many years ago and we killed all kinds of major stuff. And when we finished that, did we diss the DM and never cancel our game sessions? Hell no! It only got us rearing up to play MORE.
I haven't heard anything about WOW that excites me. The graphics look weak and I know several jerkwads from my old EQ server that moved to WOW, so that's reason enough to avoid it to me!:-)
I don't mind a huge install, but what worries me is that it's going to restrict new content.
In the old days, SOE could push a new quest live and it was a small DL. With all NPCs having associated audio files for voice, pushing a quest live could mean a pretty hefty download.
Fortunately, it's unlikely I'll be playing EQ2. Ever since I quit EQ a couple years back, I've decided that I enjoy having what little life I have...
I'd get back into MMORPG gaming if someone would get a clue that you shouldn't have to play 60 hours a week for years straight in order to be a hero. They're so paranoid you'll feel you 'finished' the game if you slay the dragon and get that awesome loot that they make sure you can hardly ever achieve any progress in the game... it constantly holds you back.
In reality, people would just take breaks after a big conquest. If it's fun to play, they won't quit and their precious revenue stream will keep pouring in.
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I never though LeGuin was that great of a writer. If I could have gotten past her pretentious, stodgy writing style, perhaps I would have enjoyed her books more.
The mini series was ok, not great but ok. To digress, a two part movie is NOT, at least to me, a mini series. But anyways...
Any writer that's had their material made into a movie or television has experienced the changes that happen. The writer has to be willing to let go. Ms. LeGuin has yet to learn that. Most of her complaints were pointless whining about changes that made no difference to viewers.
I'm sure if she keeps bitching and whining that fewer of her books will be adapted in the future.
It seems strange to see me write that as a subject, because I'm really not a Warcraft or Starcraft fan, but Blizzard has historically made pretty darn good quality games. And they have a tendency to support the Mac for many of their titles too, which I think is a nice bonus.
I own a Powerbook G4 (latest model), but I don't really game on it, nor did I buy it for that reason. But a company that's willing to support what I consider in general to be a superior OS gets plus marks from me. Windows as an OS pretty much sucks, but all the gaming hardware and software development happens there. So I have a PC that gets used almost exclusively for gaming and very little else. Meanwhile, I get my email (virus free) on the Mac, surf the web on the Mac, do shell scripting on the Mac. Hell, I even compiled our custom BSD tools at work for my Mac just so I can run them off my mactop if I want to. Flexibility is beautiful. And you still can't beat a Mac for creative applications like graphics, video and music. You can get by doing that on a PC, but on a Mac, you're in the groove.
Each Platform has it's strengths and weaknesses. That's why I run a huge variety at home. It keeps my skills up and my employability higher. Since I have a PC for gaming, I shouldn't really care if company X supports the Mac or Linux, and I don't expect them to. But when they do, that scores big points with me. And when a company tries to weasel their way in to a large percentage of games as a standard and fails to be platform agnostic, especially after supporting multi platform, that gets my ire up.
And it didn't help that I bought the useless lifetime subscription to GameSpy3D only to have them create the same thing more or less in the 'new' GameSpy Arcade and try to charge me for it AGAIN. They're slime.
The gamespy interface in games is weak and lame and devoid of basic features. And half the time, the filter features don't even work in the released game! I've bought a couple games in the last year where filters had no effect at all and another game where I have yet to see a single game server pop up in 9 months, with all filters off (no connection to master server).
If they want to be the defacto game search interface for the industry, they need to get off their lazy butts and do it right. And while Macs aren't raking in the market share, they are part of the market, DEAL WITH IT! It's not like GameSpy code is rocket science anyways. Yet they STILL manage to hose it often enough.
I wouldn't be surprised if the core of the problem is that 'the' Mac guy at GameSpy got sick of doing the same amount of work that 15 people do for the PC version and quit.
This sounds like a geniune market opportunity for someone to come into the market and develop a nice cross platform (win/osx/X11) interface and service for games.
Make one app and keep improving and supporting it - instead of the GameSpy approach of making one, raking in fees from suckers (like me) and then dumping it for a new product which is basically the same only web based and slow and buggy and trying to charge your lifetime customers for it.
If GameSpy actually had the PC side of their stuff working well, it might be a lost cause, but they can't even get their core market right, so screw em. Time for some better company to squish them....
"the top two Lifetime Achievers and top four Games/Characters."
That's why it's listed as Halo and not Master Chief.
And for those that think it doesn't deserve to be in a Hall of Fame...
It singlehandedly MADE the xbox a viable platform and has been one of the most successful games of all time. It's also been out for over 4 years. And lastly, it's sequel did $100 million on day one. I'd say that's worthy of Hall of Fame recognition.
I'm not a huge Halo fan because I can't stand console controllers for FPS games, but Halo's popularity comes from it's multiplayer component. Screw the story line, screw the solo game. Who cares? You can SPNK your friends! It's weaponry and maps are well done for Multiplayer and Bungie has a history of doing pretty well in that area. As a long time Marathon fan, it came as no surprise to me that Marathon 4 (uh.. Halo) became a huge hit in a new market.
I pay the cable company and I get ads, I pay tivo a service fee and they're going to force me to see ads?
I hope this only affects fast forward and not the skip button.
If the tivo service was really cheap I wouldn't mind so much, but it's fairly pricey. They're trying so hard not to piss off the big media that they're going to alienate their customers and therefore confront head on their biggest fear - loss of their business.
Actually, it did have nothing to do with Steve Jobs owning it. He didn't come back to Apple until NeXT bought Apple... uh... Apple bought NeXT.
The story is incorrect in the choices Apple had. Apple was looking at developing it's own OS, which failed yet again. Copland, if it had enough time, might have proven to be a solid OS. But it was poorly managed and died. Apple never seriously considered licensing NT and I doubt Solaris was a serious consideration. The main contender at the time was BeOS, run by former Apple big wig, Jean Gasse. He wanted $400 million for the OS. Some serious talks ensued.
Then Gil Amelio talked to Steve Jobs. OpenStep ran on Motorola chips and they'd even done some work to get it going on PPCs. Steve wanted $400 million for everything NeXT had. That included OpenStep, WebObjects, the donut boy, etc...
And it got them Steve. The choice was obvious, although it cost Gil his job in short order as Steve stabbed him in the back for getting his job back (some thanks, eh?)
I remember putting NeXTStep on a PC back in those days to get familiar with the OS. There was the rainbow spinning beach ball that showed up for no apparent reason as a wait cursor. Even when you weren't doing anything. It remains as an annoyance in OS X, spinning annoyance your way for no apparent reason.
30fps is sluggish if you have no headroom in cpu/gpu processing power. That's because the moment you get into heavy combat your fps drops considerably.
30fps handles smooth motion for video and corresponds to about 33ms of time per frame. So in severe twitch situations it wouldn't cut the mustard, but 60fps would have a time of 16.6ms per frame which is more than adequate for any human being's reaction time in any situation.
All of that is, however, irrelevant to the fact that you move slower in Halo than in Quake, Doom or Unreal. If Halo were allowed to run at 200 fps and you had the horsepower to do so, you wouldn't move any faster.
except that if you add 1 to a prime, it's divisible by 2 and therefore, not a prime.
Better multiplayer? Of course.
Is there any other mode worth playing? Not really. I've never maintained interest long enough to finish most single player and those that I did finish, no matter how good they were, I felt I had to force myself to finish the game. Somewhere in the middle, be it fairly early or fairly late, they always lose me.
When compared to the PC equivalents of the day, Marathon owned them.
Better graphics.
Multi mode weapons
Better maps
Better net play
Net play modes other than Deathmatch (KotH and Kill the Guy with the Ball for example)
Ambient enviornment sounds
I used to work tradeshows during those days setting up computers for booths and meetings. The PC guys I worked with were always playing Doom. When I showed them Marathon, they were stunned because it was so much better.
30fps is video speed. The 'sluggish' speed of movement in Halo isn't because of the frames per second.
The movement speed is intentionally coded to be slower than Quake. It's far more realistic a movement speed. Let's face it, you can't run 60 mph. But if you just play Quake and HL and UT, it takes some getting adjusted to. That and you have to think ahead about what you're doing instead of just reacting to everything.
I think you've been jaded with time.
Halo 1 Creativity:
weapons - manly rockets, not those pussy quake type ones
alien weapons that can't be reloaded, and overheat
vehicles - first game I know of that you could DRIVE vehicles in an FPS game.
enemies - while only a few types existed, the AI was very good, unlike the 'huge hit games' like CoD.
Bungie didn't do the PC port, although they supervised it. And shame on them for shipping it with utter garbage for net code. Can you say milking the customer base?
outdoor sequences - first FPS with halfway decent outdoor levels and graphics in those levels. Sure, the graphics look dated now, but they were pretty hot back then.
Indoor sequences - walls tend to be flat, that's what walls are. The dark, moody ship levels were interesting early on, but the rubber stamp action of a rushed ship job became rather boring. Given enough time, I think they would have done it well.
Bungie invented dual wielding and weapons with more than one firing mode back in the mid 90s with Marathon. They also veered from the overly fast, unrealistic movement of the DooMs and Quakes and went for a slower, more realistic run speed. This forces you to think more and makes it a bit less of a twitch game. You can still twitch to take out a target that suddenly appeared, but escaping from danger isn't so easy.
No, I'm not a Bungie fan boi. But they have been historically innovative in game design, often a step ahead of the competition. But they fail to listen to fans just as much as the next game company and they ship a game too soon just like every other game company. People still buy the stuff anyways to feed their crack habit, so why put some quality into it? It's a disgusting trend in the industry, but there's no avoiding it now unless we stop thanking them for slop with the all mighty dollar.
Pssst! hey, what's that gap in the center?
That's the cornhole.
It's not the same Atari. The original Atari folded for good in the mid to late 90s. Somehow, these pretenders managed to snake the name.
I did the portupgrade dance on a FreeBSD 4.9 system. I'd have been better off formatting the drive and installing 4.10. Which is essentially what I wound up doing after several weeks of hassles.
Packages are older. Ports are newer. If you want anything in a reasonable amount of time after release, you HAVE to use ports. If you stick to JUST ports, it WORKS.
Enough of portupgrade chant timesink. As I said above, been there, done that, got the t-shirt, rebuilt the hard drive. No thanks. It's UN-RE-LI-A-BLE.
Stick to ports and live a pain free upgrade experience. Those that have used portupgrade and had no problems have been lucky. Perhaps I was unlucky (I DID read the docs). But if you've never used it or tried it, ask yourself one thing... "Do I feel lucky?"
Well, do ya?
Seeing as iD Software has never in its entire existence released a game that was interesting and fun to play, I'm not surprised. Every game iD has ever released has pushed the envelope for graphics engines, but the gameplay left much to be desired.
When it really became fun was when other companies licensed the engine and made their own games (like Half Life).
I did not await Doom3 with eagerness, but I do await games using it's engine. And the same goes for HL2. Single Player FPS games don't thrill me at all - scripted, limited AI. Net play is FAR more interesting to me. Half Life 1's story line bored me, never even finished it. But it's VERY rare that a single player shooter can keep my interest long enough for me to finish it.
I use FreeBSD on an in-depth basis daily in a FreeBSD based development house. I wouldn't call myself a guru, but I know wtf I'm talking about.
I know what packages to get for my system. Packages are rarely updated. Ports are updated frequently. Use both and you're mixing old code with new requirements and you will feel pain.
Packages work fine by themselves. But if you ever want to upgrade your browser with the current release, you'll need to use a port. If you ever want to upgrade gnome, you'll need to use a port. If you ever want to upgrade just about anything, you'll need to use a port.
By keeping to just ports on your system, you only have to resolve the needs of one mechanism. And that pretty much works. Since I took that approach, my upgrades have been headache free.
If you don't agree, fine, suit yourself. Spend hours futzing with builds. I'd rather be USING the system or be off doing something more enjoyable with my time.
ports and packages are good ideas, but never the twain should meet.
Simply installing FreeBSD will most likely (unless you try hard to avoid it) will install some packages. Seemingly harmless, but try to upgrade one of those packages via the ports mechanism and you will begin to feel true pain, young jedi.
Ports are a better path, IMO, because they are far more frequently updated. But mixing an installation of ports and packages will send you down a compatibility and non-compiling path to hell.
Fortunately, I've figured out the trick. Avoid any packages during the initial CD install and then install everything from ports. Then you can update your ports using cvsup and upgrade your apps and likely never have a problem. Worked like a champ for me and I can run the latest releases of Firefox and Thunderbird while others have compiles of the same apps barf on them.
Word is that this French version is so buggy that the only controls you can get to work are drop weapon and retreat...
"...Players will be able to complete quests and experience the world at their own pace-whether it be a few hours here and there, or week-long adventuring marathons..."
:-)
Yeah, we've all heard that before. All it means is you're a wimp compared to the no life junkies that play 12 hours a day who own the server and all it's content, holding you back even more.
WOWs graphics look chincy. EQ2's kick it's butt to hell and back. And while there are loads of Blizzard fans, I'm sure as hell not one of them. Warcraft=Starcraft=whoever masters the building algorithm wins. No battle tactics or 'chess games' here. The original warcraft was fun until it just became a battle of the building, then it was boring beyond belief. Same for Warcraft 2, 3 and Starcraft. Only the sprite have been changed to protect the guilty.
And Blizzard has ZERO experience with RPGs. One person here said WOW was already a better game than EQ was after 3 years. Considering WOW wasn't in development until EQ was 3 years old isn't saying much. EQ broke new ground. WOW is just an also ran in a saturated market now.
MMOs have hit a brick wall because developers don't get it. People WANT to slay the dragon without having to play 12 hours a day. Stop holding everyone back with ridiculous chokepoints! Hire more people to create content and people will keep playing and be MUCH happier because they'll feel they can accomplish something.
It shouldn't have to take 5-8 hours to organize a boss raid. You shouldn't need 70 people to kill the boss mob. I sure as hell only need 5 to 7 of my friend when I played D&D so many years ago and we killed all kinds of major stuff. And when we finished that, did we diss the DM and never cancel our game sessions? Hell no! It only got us rearing up to play MORE.
I haven't heard anything about WOW that excites me. The graphics look weak and I know several jerkwads from my old EQ server that moved to WOW, so that's reason enough to avoid it to me!
That's Christopher REEVE who died recently. Not Reeves.
First, Superman could fly. Then, Superman couldn't even walk. And now, Superman can fly again. Peace be with you, Christopher.
You flame SOE's hailing and poor questing and then laud the upcoming game by many of the creators of the very same questing and bs you so hate....
I don't mind a huge install, but what worries me is that it's going to restrict new content.
In the old days, SOE could push a new quest live and it was a small DL. With all NPCs having associated audio files for voice, pushing a quest live could mean a pretty hefty download.
Fortunately, it's unlikely I'll be playing EQ2. Ever since I quit EQ a couple years back, I've decided that I enjoy having what little life I have...
I'd get back into MMORPG gaming if someone would get a clue that you shouldn't have to play 60 hours a week for years straight in order to be a hero. They're so paranoid you'll feel you 'finished' the game if you slay the dragon and get that awesome loot that they make sure you can hardly ever achieve any progress in the game... it constantly holds you back.
In reality, people would just take breaks after a big conquest. If it's fun to play, they won't quit and their precious revenue stream will keep pouring in.
curl http://www.hackersite.com/deletefiles
DOH!
Curse you RedBaron!
Simple. Burners cost more than players. I'd rather put the hours on the player, so as to lengthen the life of the burner.