Ha, that happened to me too! I wanted to play for 20 min before I had to leave for somewhere. I had done all that bs, and then left the game, thinking my saved game would take me back to the "after credits" state. Oh no. It took about 15 minutes to pass the cut scene and the end credits, and by that time, I had to go.
The best way to get around this is to jump into the game, and do something until you get a "saving game" message. That way, when you quit, you do come back to the animus end state.
I wonder how much of this is really just people being trying to avoid being a braggart in front of their peers? I notice the trend where most people (myself included) try to fit the mold of whatever group they are currently in. Hang out at the rich private school, and you are trying to casually mention your expensive gear you have. Hang out with the people without much money, and you are downplaying the size of your house and disposable income.
It is probably the same when you are hanging out with a bunch of people where computers are still the realm of computer nerds. Why play it up?
Ultimately, I think we kind of have this trend where to be "cool" you downplay your intelligence, but it is still respected as a whole. We still give out awards, and how many people would not respect a Nobel peace prize winner? Does anybody really think of Einstein as a loser who did nothing in his life? And in normal day to day life, we all have a person we know we'd go to for help in a situation, because you know they are "smart" at something, and we respect them for it.
So while society doesn't hold it up like a prestige award, we still write about the virtues of it, and still hold those with knowledge we don't possesses, with respect. For all our past history, we only have writings, and it could just happen to be that the people who knew how to write had lots of great things to say about themselves, while those who couldn't, held them with disdain. Maybe when Socrates was down at the pub, he wasn't sitting around talking about how great he is for being a smart person, and was downplaying his accomplishments. I guess we'll never know:)
I agree here. I read the first three books of ice and fire and instantly they became my favorite books of all time. I even got non fantasy readers to check them out and enjoy them. Finally, FINALLY book 4 came out (a few year wait for me:( ) and, wow, it was a huge bore. I was pretty upset with it. He set up book 3 to advance a few years, and pick up. But then mid write he decides that he has to tell all this other stuff. Fie. All of it irrelevant. It's like in this book he took everything I liked from the other 3 and threw it off to the sidelines.
In any event, from reading his website, it seems like the man is a victim of his own success, and that writing the book is becoming a chore for him as we are all nipping at his heels to finish it up. He probably needs to just lock himself in his basement with all his miniatures until it is finished up.
I will also add that I agree with most posters here about jordan. I got half way through book 9 before I threw it down in disgust, and even then I was pushing it. The problem was the endings had fun, interesting events, but the beginning was the same man hating women and uncertain little boys running around with 10 million different characters, switching plots anytime the one I was reading got remotely interesting. I didn't know he had passed away before finishing the series until reading this post either. I hope the new author can clean up everything, even though people have assured me "it gets good" in later books. I keep hearing that, but it is so hard to find the good:)
Mine broke in just under a year. I put halo 3 in for the first time and all the dark blues were a bright green. My other games were fine except gears of war, which, when put in the xbox, told me to put the dvd in an xbox360 before continuing. I think it somehow is trying to play the game in dvd mode. A friend told me that this was similar to what happened to his before he got the 3 rings of light.
Around n64/ps1 gaming era my NES still worked without having to wiggle the cartridges around. My 5 year old ps2 works fine, hell my xbox works just fine too. Yet my most expensive, and least used, console, is already failing.
Very sad. They really do need to start throwing in hardware updates and making the machine last longer then they seem to be if they want it to have a 7 year life cycle.
That seems about right for me. I remember watching some doom replays with people whipping the guy around 180 faster then you can with a keyboard, or circle strafing perfectly, as opposed to the greater then and less then keys I used to use.
I managed to handle duke 3d with the keyboard, but got owned by mouse players later on. Then when I got into quake, forget it. Trying to aim vertically with the keyboard was hilarious, now that I think about it.
I remember ASDW was always the player two controls on most random older games, which is why I think that got set up as the default.
I do recall using mouse look for some of the elder scrolls games, maybe daggerfall, though still using the arrow keys to move.
But for me, it really was quake 1 that forced to batten down the hatches and learn how to use that quirky mouse + keyboard set up.
I don't know why this is insightful. Anybody can make up some 1984 big brother scenario example to sound scary. Sure, given the data, and enough work, someone could come up with some sort of insurance premium raising thing based on it. But I don't think anybody would do it and keep customers, and employees to maintain it. Just because people can do something, doesn't mean they are going to.
I think sometimes we all forget that everyone else is a person. We lump people who work at companies and government together and they are this entity, with no individuality at all. Someone being a "home consumer" makes us part of this non evil group.
Our culture is based on trust all over. At any given point in the day, my co worker could easily end my life. Seriously, if he chose to do it, it would be all over in a second with no chance for me to survive. At any point, another driver on the road could kill me, by just turning his vehicle into my line as I'm driving past. At any moment if I'm on the subway, someone can shove me in front of the train as it is pulling up. At any point, if I'm walking down the street, someone could take me out GTA style.
There is a basic trust we put in humans around us to have morality. I don't think a moral human being would take part in creating a system as described by the parent. I also don't think people would choose to use an insurance company that did this. If they all started arbitrarily raising the fees based on loosely correlated data, we'll start our own insurance companies, or if it gets so bad, leave the country and go somewhere else, or, heaven forbid, we assemble a party of people who care about an important topic and VOTE.
It's not at this point yet. You can't preemptively worry about a problem that doesn't exist, but COULD exist. This isn't like an environmental hazard that is slowly killing an eco system, where you have to stop early before it is to late. This is all human driven technology, and it can all be gone with the flick of a button. So, as soon as some insurance company decides it wants to start charging increased rates for buying pepto bismal, then we step up and go, woah, WTF, and do something about it.
The tech and data for this info is right there in place to do it. But so is the tech for mass vehicular homicide. Maybe if joe average could take note of an important topic like this, they could stop it all, but nobody cares.
You think it doesn't matter? What about when you are walking down the sidewalk, and some kid who just bought his first SUV decides to take you out, to increase his homicide score and gets a government bond for lowering the already high population...
I am not unsympathetic. I share the same uncomfortable feeling at the fact that everything I do online leaves a "paper trail", that given my cc bill, my ez pass statement, and internet traffic, someone can piece together everywhere I have been and most everything I do. When I do sign up for stuff, yes I am Jim Johnson, Beverly Hills CA 90210.
But you can't live your life in fear of what people can do. A lot of people could really get together and do some really bad stuff, but until it starts happening, and I mean really, something bad, then there is no sense worrying about it. And no, a tracking cookie isn't the prequel to the fall of humanity.
In the running game when you are going to dodge a tackle, instead of juking, you can start a conversation with him, convincing him to follow his dreams and go off to become a ballerina.
Or maybe while you are on a time out you find out that the coach has lost his playbook!! You have to find it and return it to him for an overall AI boost! Unfortunately, it is guarded by the other team's mascot. You will have to use your stats you have developed over the season in the preseason minigames to defeat your foe!!
I have to agree. After all the hype, when they finally demoed the product, I felt.. MEH. I think the procedural animation was really cool, but when I looked at what they had, I felt like there wasn't enough interesting gameplay, and more like a cool concept that is fun to watch. I'd almost rather watch it on autopilot then run around.
I also wonder how different each world will be, especially if certain leg/arm/body combinations are going to end up killing off your species if they don't work well together, that will further limit the variety. Also, when you get up to the building stage, what are you going to end up doing besides picking from like 10 "furniture" sets to make your super duper custom race?
But, maybe this is why they are giving it 6 months.
I find that most small gaming communities are full elitism and multiple sides trying to pull a game in a certain direction. In subspace/continuum people fight over standard vie rules and trench war game play. Investigating the Myth2 sites, there looked like a huge flame war between playmyth and marious. Reading Mount & Blade forums older posters are all over new guys when they suggest something off the "holy vision" of the game.
In the big games, each side has enough people that the two "cultures" don't mix. When the game gets small, people butt heads all the time, and one guy will have enough pull to wreck the game for 100's of other people when he is having PMS one day. Stuff like "Hey guys, some 12 year old said hurtful things to me. Nobody appreciates me, I am a god, therefore, deleted all the artwork I created for the game, k tnx bye".
The small projects are the best and worst of the gaming community at the same time. It seems like it is just human nature for things to end up this way.
Though I read stardock was looking to acquire the license of this and remake...they might have given up on that, and went off to create their own fantasy based game instead... If they do, it will be worth it. Gal civ 2 is what MOO 3 was supposed to be... and then some. If stardock goes for a MoM themed game, it will be good.
But while you wait, check out Age of Wonders. They are very close to the MoM feel, and are great games in their own right.
Cool, thanks for the link! I might have to dust it off and play it again. Myth 1/2 had to be one of my favorite online games ever.
God, I remember running my ghols around harassing the crap out of people. Grabbing heads from fallen bad guys and chucking it at their soldiers and taunting them, then taking off as their whole line followed me across the map before they noticed, while my buddy came round with the main troops from the front.
Or desert between your ears. Great map! Two wights on either side of the bridge, check! 8 Dwarfies waiting behind the archers, CHECK. Taking out their archers with ghols! WIN! When they finally said f it and sent the hoards across the bridge, BIG BADA BOOM!!
Hell, even the FFA's were great, giant cluster fucks in the middle trying to win the king of the hill. Sometimes it would be fun to not even try for the game and just go kill off your buddy, or throw max thrall into the mix just to watch the carnage.
Oh man or the pounding as the trow came thumpping round the corner to start kicking the heads off your berserker's.
Wow, get off my lawn kids. Sorry for the trip down memory lane there. So uh, Bungie, get off halo, and make something new for us to roll around in, pllllleaaaaaaaseeeeeeee.
I'm with you here in trying to understand the hype. As a long time pc gamer, as you sound yourself, I never got what made halo "THE BEST GAME EVAR!!!!"
I think the people you tend to see proclaiming this are young, and/or lack gaming experience. I think console gaming really blew up around the time halo and halo2 were out. A lot of these young guys/new gamers, got their first taste of FPS with halo. Much like people before them got a taste with golden eye on the n64, these guys got halo on the xbox. Couple that with their first online fps experience with xbox live, and you have gold.
Us "old timers" got everything from wolf 3d, doom, duke3d, descent, heritic, rainbow 6, etc etc and have seen all these game mechanics already.
So given all this, I think halo is a good game. When I played through it, I kept asking myself "why am I playing this?" as I back tracked through the same room over and over again.
Halo is just polish. All the weapons and vehicles are FUN to use. The way the AI acts makes it FUN to shoot things. Everything is just "FUN" all around. The art direction to the sound effects make the game fun. Everything falls into place, and it is just a pleasant and easy going fps to play.
I thought far cry was beautiful, but i hated playing it, because shooting people wasn't fun. I didn't really get a good feeling from pulling the trigger at all, consequently, I couldn't bring myself to finish it.
In my opinion, one of the best things halo has to offer long time gamers is its co op game play. Finding good cooperative game play now a days is next to impossible in the gaming scene. The best we can muster up is team vs team fps games, and that isn't really co op.
I spent most of my time playing halo with a friend running through the game on legendary. That is what got me to turn the game on again and again, goofing around with the fun physics system, trying to jam vehicles to parts of the level where they shouldn't be, and just goofing around enjoying the game's system.
But, as much as we know it to not be revolutionary, you are going to have to deal with people who just picked up gaming, playing halo 3, recognizing the game's polish, and getting sucked in. We are ALL nostalgic for the first game played that let us blow the crap out of people, and for some people. For me, that game is going to be serial port doom 2 against my dad, and for these guys, that game is going to be halo.
Seriously, I'm 100% with you there. I think the people who have a problem with me playing a female avatar, see their avatars as "themselves" and are living out that "i'm a badass warrior" fantasy.
Like you both, for me, I really enjoy the strong/sexy female hero archtype, and that is what I seek to create, not my own representation in a pixel world.
I think the free stuff is an excuse too. I've played plenty of female and male characters and I've never gotten any different type reaction from players between the other two.
As for staring at butts, if I want to do that, I'll go outside. When I'm playing an mmo i'm usually looking at health and mana bars. Maybe I have some sick health bar fetish I don't understand yet.
As for the harassment, sometimes you get juvinile people saying things to you, but no more then they would say to your male avatar. If anything you have more stopping power with your female avatar, because as soon as you drop a slight hint that you may be a *REAL LIVE GIRL* you can see the doubt creep in and they slow it down significantly. Just remember the people doing the harassing are the people with confidence issues, especially around women. Just have to pull that card and watch them fluttering in the breeze, like they probably in irl around women.
It is also a good education for guys. Women irl, especially beautiful ones, deal with this all the day, and can be approached out on the street several times by men when out in public. Why do you guys think attractive women are so ready to shoot down guys who approach them the wrong way? They deal with this kind of harassment all day that we get a small dose of as a female avi in wow.
Anyway, as long as the guild wars guys are making those female avi's, I'll be playing them:)
Don't know if you are still reading this, but I agree with you 100%. For a time I like the idea SL was like peeping into someone's head, but that got old fast.
I totally agree with you that SL has clunky interaction. That is why if someone developed a SL like game with EASY interaction, it would demolish sl. The easy build interface brings the geeks, but at the end of the day, the guys who use real 3d tools are the ones deciding what SL looks like. But the masses come for people interaction.
So you are very right, it is straight RP, and even with the difficulty of adding props, it is still really clunky and hard to INTERACT. I was always surprised how little priority SL gives to new avatar features, when that is really what drives SL imho. From about the 2 years I've had an account, the only new feature they added was "flexi prims", and as soon as those came out, it changed all the clothing and hair styles all over SL. Huge impact on the world, and just a simple client side effect. (Well, maybe not so simple to implement, but still).
I think SL can be more immersive then a chat when it is going, and is a great "escape", and I will admit that a long talk on IM with someone isnt the same as a long talk in SL with a person while both your avatars sit out overlooking a waterfall or the ocean. It adds an extra dimension not possible with IRC, but still, not enough to warrant specifically going there for it.
I think the strength of 3d worlds lie in social interaction. What SL and others should really gear itself towards is myspace/facebook in 3d. That is what a "virtual world" offers that is unique.
1. A place to call home (the profile page). Here is my land, I can set it up how I want. I can put a house in or a huge landscaping job or some mix of the two or can exist in space. This is my area.
2. Avatar Interaction. Having superb avatar interaction with people. Built in, handshake, dancing, sex, hugging, pushing, shoving, puching, smiling, jumpping, whatever. Have all these things built in, and have interactivity with other avatars.
3. A place to meet with stuff to do. Make yahoo games online except the lobby is 3d and there is a real chess board for people to play at. Add in the 2d interface to find a game "game search" and have it drop you in there instantly, but also have people be able to walk around and see/talk.
This is what would make 3d online interesting. PEOPLE! I would love to have oblivion online, so I could just chill with a friend in a beautiful world, going around messing stuff up. The whole world is our oyster to play in. So people + interaction = what keeps you coming back online.
I even joked with a friend the other day that in the future our windows will be super high def monitors that are connected up to the net that'll display whatever we want. If I want to live IN secondlife, I just set up my house to be there, ha. Goofy but funny idea.
Anyway, if it's not a game, it needs socialization, and thats why SL still thrives, it is what keeps people coming back again and again, the people. The whole reason I enjoyed sl when it was released was to just see what people had created. Like taking a stroll through someone's mind. I mean it is like asking someone "if you could live anywhere, where would you live and what house would you live in" and throwing the answer out all over the place. (Until I saw that most were just crappy prefabs they bought and threw down somewhere, ha:) But there are some unique builds out there, and every once in a while I step into someone's head, and it is amazing. )
I think that is bs. No matter how "smart" you are iq wise, there are still biological urges. I think the results presented in the summary neglect the amount of people that fall into each IQ slot.
People with HIGH IQ's are DIFFERENT. They sometimes go to college when they are 16, or are in upper level classes with older kids. Most of the high IQ people will have have nothing in common with their classmates. Just becuase you are a freshmen in a senor class doesn't mean you are going to have watched the same tv shows and played with the same toys everybody else grew up with.
So you are this outcast in a sense, there aren't many people around who are going to keep up with you, and at this point in your life, you probalby don't know how to relate to other people and present yourself as an attractive individual.
I think it is really the iq difference creating a barrier for forming close relationships with the opposite sex. People who fall in the middle of the IQ bell curve are going to meet lots of other people that are at the same speed as them, and concequently have an easier time finding a mate, leading to sex.
And sure, some teens do avoid sex. I did...after i had done it, of coarse. I knew all the risks and really didn't want to have a baby at 17. But that still didn't change the fact that I needed to crush the "virgin" status first, and then after the fact, I avoided sex as much as possible with my GF.
Anyway, people chose not to have sex for a multitude of reasons, and IQ alone isn't enough to conclusivly prove that "if you're smart, you don't have sex". I still think the number one reason teens do not have sex is that they do not know anybody who wants to do it with them, and don't know how to open up and present themselves in a way that someone will want to sleep with them.
A little late to the thread, but I thought I'd throw a shout out to your observations. That was exactly what made planetside work for me. Right off the bat, I had an effective weapon. I was low level, and I could play exactly one extreemly specialized role. But I had choices. I could snipe, I could infiltrate, I could be an engineer, I could drive a transport, a tank, or an attack plane. The world was open to me.
As you play, you then start making yourself more versitile and effective. I went the sniper route, and soon i had a whole bunch of tools on me to make myself that much more effective. Now I can hold a shotgun so when people sneak around me I have a surprise. Later I might get a vehicle cert so I can move around on my own much faster, and later still I could play the sniper on a base until it was breached, run up to a spawn point and change gear into a max or medium combat set up and continue the fight effectively on the inside.
With that great skill system the dev's messed up. They copied the same bases and towers all over the map. So while they had these great terrain enviroments and super effective transportation methods, there was hardly a reason to ever get into a fight not outside a base. And they were all the same. Some had different layouts, maybe like 3 or 4 base types, but they all shared the same textures, the same generalized layout and the same features. It was so boring and repetative it was sad.
At the same time I had the most memorable moment huddling in a transport truck on the way to the next base when a loan reaver (attack fighter) spotted us and started the chase. There were 6 of us in this thing shouting over comms on the guys location as he came in at different angles, while the gunners frantically tried to twist and get a shot in as the driver bounced us along the road over bumps and hills, trying to make the truck a hard target.
Unfortunatly most of the time you ended up attacking the same base over and over again. Sometimes having 25 guys vs say 100 swarm zerg, or visa versa. When you got those long protracted fights with 200 or so people invovled in a stalemate, that sure was fun, or if you got caught up in a short side battle with a couple small forces of say 10 vs 10, great. But really when you are basically playing the same base over and over again, it is a snore fest. All they had to do was have a different building style per continent, and the game would have been gold.
So the level progression was perfect. This was also the case with any skill based MMO system. Take shadowbane for example. The game did so many things right, it is a shame the dev's couldn't keep the game from crashing so often.
In shadowbane, you leveled up very quickly, so it did not take too long to hit the "soft" level cap. But your character would be competative at lower levels. All you had to do was dump your points into a specific skill, and then you could effectivly compete in the game against higher level players. Coupled with forcing you into a player run guild to level up and continue to be effective, the game was quite unique and exciting to play.
Get off it. I grew up watching tv 24-7. I played computer games my dad had set up for me (27 now) to play. I lived the typical tv all day, no outside play life everybody makes fun of.
I picked up books in 6th grade and have always kept reading since then. I would play video games, then write a story about them. I wrote a whole bunch of text in a story involving the character classes in the action/strat game "Dark Legions". I wrote some about master of magic, as I put together all the behind the scenes working of the empires I controlled.
At the same time I'd still watch like 4 or 5 hours of tv. I eventually stopped watching when I started working and missing all my shoes. But from time to time now I'll watch a show that I like, like 24 or heros.
I think I have a pretty good imagination as it stands, despite the hours and hours and hours of TV I watched growing up.
Really, people's lack of imagination has to do with the person, and not with the amount of things they were exposed to. There is no such thing as destroying someone's imagination. It is really a question of whether the person choses to exercise that muscle or not.
In fact I'll say that people who are generally happy tend to have a poor imagination vs those who spend most of their time depressed with the world. After all, what better way to escape reality then with a good fantasy story?
So maybe if this guy wants his kid to have a great imagination, he better lock his kid up in the attic and leave him there for a week so he can think about knights in shining armor rescuing him.
He wasn't bragging, he was just pointing out why the game was fun for him. A lot of us do stupid things for our hobbies. When I was younger I played warcraft 2 beating people all summer long every night until 7 am. I didn't get anything from this. We once spent 1 hour building walls to take up the entire map. Another one we built farms across plains of snow map walling in some newbies.
Sometimes I go outside and shoot hoops for an hour or two. I've worked on webpages for subspace when i was playing that. I made a level for doom2. I designed crappy golf courses for jack nickolas golf. I used some cartoon maker when I was really little to make cartoons on the computer.
I could go on and on and on. The point is, for all those hours spent, I never once received 10 dollars.
That was the main reason I didn't buy fight night 3. I enjoyed the other two immensely and felt they were THE best boxing games I had played (next to 4d sports boxing;) ), but the bk and dodge ads were ridiculous.
"This knockout was brought to you by burger king". No, it was brought to you by my fist in the other guy's face.
I could tolerate the underarmor ads, since they are in fact a company about boxing, and therefore add realism. I mean for christ's sakes they had a MINI van as prizes your boxer would get, a god damn mini van for my thugged out rapper boxer guy.
So like I've always said, ads are GOOD in racing and sports games, anything set in this modern world. But the ads have to be the same guys who advertise at the real events, otherwise, it's grossly out of place. That, and the ad should never, ever, ever, interfere or stop gameplay for attention.
Sorry, I'm just repeating comments said over and over, but hey, this is slashdot.
Hey, just chiming in when I hear war 2 and kali in the same sentence (reg #10024!!). I've found I have similar experiences to yours, less so in a clan but more so with the friendships over games.
I still game with guys I met on kali playing war 2 back then. Usually when a new game comes out that has some passing interest we all ping each other back and forth over icq or something and get together gaming.
Not to put this group down but it's not really anything special. Most of the "old school" gamers as we are now called formed tight friendships with one another way back when the gaming population was a lot smaller, and have sence kept up gaming with one another over the years. Some people decided to put a name to their "clan" and invite others in, and some people like me just decided to jump in with a couple friends and play the game at the same time all the time.
If you look at most long standing game guilds, they are populated by maybe 5 to 10 "officers" who are either friends irl or have some tight bonding that keeps the face of the guild running. From here is where everybody else flocks into it and becomes a part of it, but those core 10 guys will always be there keeping the name alive.
Anyway, hey from war 2 kali land, good times back then:)
You know, how do you roleplay in a mmo? I mean, I kind of like the idea, and like one night in EQ way back in the day I decided to use emotes like crazy and describe how I slashed into things and what not, but really I don't know how to do an "accurate" character.
First off, you can't make your character interesting if you just got the game. Where do you add backstory? Where the hell did your character grow up? There's no children in the game, theres no real "towns", where did your character get predjudices, what are the "rumors" floating around about real place ins the game that you can go to.
I mean, after you've played your character up for a long while, you might know the game enough to start making up something plausable that fits within the game world, but when you start out right away, how to do you explain yourself as an adult character who doesn't even know how to walk around, doesn't know how to swing a sword but can kill things, and gets lost in their home town?
You really need to get out in the world and play a while before you can really roleplay to the world.
Meh, I don't know, I guess people who want roleplay, just want you to pretend like you are in the world and what you are doing is real. But anyway, you guys just need to find a dedicated neverwinter nights server somewhere and you will probably be golden.
I think that is more a product of the game style then voice. In FPS games the time for conversation via text is slim to none. In a game with slower pacing, there is time to get to know one another. I've found that must of my online buddies came from games with slower pacing with time to talk, or a game with a chat channel or something associated with it.
But I've had plenty of "online only" friends whom I've known longer then most of my "real life" friends and know them just as well.
For the greater debate, I tend to not like having voice in game. I find it is a product of the genera though which determines if I like it. Often times when I get online and play "random people" I'm looking for an escape for a few from my normal life, to kind of step into another role. Not to act differently, but to just be around different people.
If I step into a high fantasy realm, I don't really want to hear voice chat. It draws away from the "larger then life" persona of people's avatars and characters. When DEATHSTRIKER the most feared player in the game has a tired southern drawl, it just ruins the illusion the game has created. Sometimes it's like seeing your favorite book get turned into a low budget made for tv movie, just... sad.
Now, there are times for voice as well. When I played planetside, the guy in our clan who flew the galaxy (big transport plane) was a pilot irl. When he was talking over voice it was incredibly immersing. The squad leader would call for transport, and he had this perfect airline pilot voice, responding where he was heading and his eta and all that. So in that case, in a situation where you expect to hear the squad you are in talking via comms, it works very well.
But when I want high fantasy and to disappear into a world, I want text, so it's more like a moving book with pictures. Let my mind give the voice to the chat and not the other way around.
Either way, voice is the way of the future and is here to stay. If you want to win any kind of team game, you NEED to talk via voice, and that's really the bottom line.
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Ha, that happened to me too! I wanted to play for 20 min before I had to leave for somewhere. I had done all that bs, and then left the game, thinking my saved game would take me back to the "after credits" state. Oh no. It took about 15 minutes to pass the cut scene and the end credits, and by that time, I had to go.
The best way to get around this is to jump into the game, and do something until you get a "saving game" message. That way, when you quit, you do come back to the animus end state.
I wonder how much of this is really just people being trying to avoid being a braggart in front of their peers? I notice the trend where most people (myself included) try to fit the mold of whatever group they are currently in. Hang out at the rich private school, and you are trying to casually mention your expensive gear you have. Hang out with the people without much money, and you are downplaying the size of your house and disposable income.
:)
It is probably the same when you are hanging out with a bunch of people where computers are still the realm of computer nerds. Why play it up?
Ultimately, I think we kind of have this trend where to be "cool" you downplay your intelligence, but it is still respected as a whole. We still give out awards, and how many people would not respect a Nobel peace prize winner? Does anybody really think of Einstein as a loser who did nothing in his life? And in normal day to day life, we all have a person we know we'd go to for help in a situation, because you know they are "smart" at something, and we respect them for it.
So while society doesn't hold it up like a prestige award, we still write about the virtues of it, and still hold those with knowledge we don't possesses, with respect. For all our past history, we only have writings, and it could just happen to be that the people who knew how to write had lots of great things to say about themselves, while those who couldn't, held them with disdain. Maybe when Socrates was down at the pub, he wasn't sitting around talking about how great he is for being a smart person, and was downplaying his accomplishments. I guess we'll never know
I agree here. I read the first three books of ice and fire and instantly they became my favorite books of all time. I even got non fantasy readers to check them out and enjoy them. Finally, FINALLY book 4 came out (a few year wait for me :( ) and, wow, it was a huge bore. I was pretty upset with it. He set up book 3 to advance a few years, and pick up. But then mid write he decides that he has to tell all this other stuff. Fie. All of it irrelevant. It's like in this book he took everything I liked from the other 3 and threw it off to the sidelines.
:)
In any event, from reading his website, it seems like the man is a victim of his own success, and that writing the book is becoming a chore for him as we are all nipping at his heels to finish it up. He probably needs to just lock himself in his basement with all his miniatures until it is finished up.
I will also add that I agree with most posters here about jordan. I got half way through book 9 before I threw it down in disgust, and even then I was pushing it. The problem was the endings had fun, interesting events, but the beginning was the same man hating women and uncertain little boys running around with 10 million different characters, switching plots anytime the one I was reading got remotely interesting. I didn't know he had passed away before finishing the series until reading this post either. I hope the new author can clean up everything, even though people have assured me "it gets good" in later books. I keep hearing that, but it is so hard to find the good
Reapy
Mine broke in just under a year. I put halo 3 in for the first time and all the dark blues were a bright green. My other games were fine except gears of war, which, when put in the xbox, told me to put the dvd in an xbox360 before continuing. I think it somehow is trying to play the game in dvd mode. A friend told me that this was similar to what happened to his before he got the 3 rings of light.
Around n64/ps1 gaming era my NES still worked without having to wiggle the cartridges around. My 5 year old ps2 works fine, hell my xbox works just fine too. Yet my most expensive, and least used, console, is already failing.
Very sad. They really do need to start throwing in hardware updates and making the machine last longer then they seem to be if they want it to have a 7 year life cycle.
That seems about right for me. I remember watching some doom replays with people whipping the guy around 180 faster then you can with a keyboard, or circle strafing perfectly, as opposed to the greater then and less then keys I used to use.
I managed to handle duke 3d with the keyboard, but got owned by mouse players later on. Then when I got into quake, forget it. Trying to aim vertically with the keyboard was hilarious, now that I think about it.
I remember ASDW was always the player two controls on most random older games, which is why I think that got set up as the default.
I do recall using mouse look for some of the elder scrolls games, maybe daggerfall, though still using the arrow keys to move.
But for me, it really was quake 1 that forced to batten down the hatches and learn how to use that quirky mouse + keyboard set up.
I don't know why this is insightful. Anybody can make up some 1984 big brother scenario example to sound scary. Sure, given the data, and enough work, someone could come up with some sort of insurance premium raising thing based on it. But I don't think anybody would do it and keep customers, and employees to maintain it. Just because people can do something, doesn't mean they are going to.
I think sometimes we all forget that everyone else is a person. We lump people who work at companies and government together and they are this entity, with no individuality at all. Someone being a "home consumer" makes us part of this non evil group.
Our culture is based on trust all over. At any given point in the day, my co worker could easily end my life. Seriously, if he chose to do it, it would be all over in a second with no chance for me to survive. At any point, another driver on the road could kill me, by just turning his vehicle into my line as I'm driving past. At any moment if I'm on the subway, someone can shove me in front of the train as it is pulling up. At any point, if I'm walking down the street, someone could take me out GTA style.
There is a basic trust we put in humans around us to have morality. I don't think a moral human being would take part in creating a system as described by the parent. I also don't think people would choose to use an insurance company that did this. If they all started arbitrarily raising the fees based on loosely correlated data, we'll start our own insurance companies, or if it gets so bad, leave the country and go somewhere else, or, heaven forbid, we assemble a party of people who care about an important topic and VOTE.
It's not at this point yet. You can't preemptively worry about a problem that doesn't exist, but COULD exist. This isn't like an environmental hazard that is slowly killing an eco system, where you have to stop early before it is to late. This is all human driven technology, and it can all be gone with the flick of a button. So, as soon as some insurance company decides it wants to start charging increased rates for buying pepto bismal, then we step up and go, woah, WTF, and do something about it.
The tech and data for this info is right there in place to do it. But so is the tech for mass vehicular homicide. Maybe if joe average could take note of an important topic like this, they could stop it all, but nobody cares.
You think it doesn't matter? What about when you are walking down the sidewalk, and some kid who just bought his first SUV decides to take you out, to increase his homicide score and gets a government bond for lowering the already high population...
I am not unsympathetic. I share the same uncomfortable feeling at the fact that everything I do online leaves a "paper trail", that given my cc bill, my ez pass statement, and internet traffic, someone can piece together everywhere I have been and most everything I do. When I do sign up for stuff, yes I am Jim Johnson, Beverly Hills CA 90210.
But you can't live your life in fear of what people can do. A lot of people could really get together and do some really bad stuff, but until it starts happening, and I mean really, something bad, then there is no sense worrying about it. And no, a tracking cookie isn't the prequel to the fall of humanity.
In the running game when you are going to dodge a tackle, instead of juking, you can start a conversation with him, convincing him to follow his dreams and go off to become a ballerina.
Or maybe while you are on a time out you find out that the coach has lost his playbook!! You have to find it and return it to him for an overall AI boost! Unfortunately, it is guarded by the other team's mascot. You will have to use your stats you have developed over the season in the preseason minigames to defeat your foe!!
I have to agree. After all the hype, when they finally demoed the product, I felt.. MEH. I think the procedural animation was really cool, but when I looked at what they had, I felt like there wasn't enough interesting gameplay, and more like a cool concept that is fun to watch. I'd almost rather watch it on autopilot then run around.
I also wonder how different each world will be, especially if certain leg/arm/body combinations are going to end up killing off your species if they don't work well together, that will further limit the variety. Also, when you get up to the building stage, what are you going to end up doing besides picking from like 10 "furniture" sets to make your super duper custom race?
But, maybe this is why they are giving it 6 months.
I find that most small gaming communities are full elitism and multiple sides trying to pull a game in a certain direction. In subspace/continuum people fight over standard vie rules and trench war game play. Investigating the Myth2 sites, there looked like a huge flame war between playmyth and marious. Reading Mount & Blade forums older posters are all over new guys when they suggest something off the "holy vision" of the game.
In the big games, each side has enough people that the two "cultures" don't mix. When the game gets small, people butt heads all the time, and one guy will have enough pull to wreck the game for 100's of other people when he is having PMS one day. Stuff like "Hey guys, some 12 year old said hurtful things to me. Nobody appreciates me, I am a god, therefore, deleted all the artwork I created for the game, k tnx bye".
The small projects are the best and worst of the gaming community at the same time. It seems like it is just human nature for things to end up this way.
Who is going to pick up carrying the torch for delivering high quality RPG games?
RIP Bioware...
Reapy
YES!
Though I read stardock was looking to acquire the license of this and remake...they might have given up on that, and went off to create their own fantasy based game instead... If they do, it will be worth it. Gal civ 2 is what MOO 3 was supposed to be... and then some. If stardock goes for a MoM themed game, it will be good.
But while you wait, check out Age of Wonders. They are very close to the MoM feel, and are great games in their own right.
Cool, thanks for the link! I might have to dust it off and play it again. Myth 1/2 had to be one of my favorite online games ever.
God, I remember running my ghols around harassing the crap out of people. Grabbing heads from fallen bad guys and chucking it at their soldiers and taunting them, then taking off as their whole line followed me across the map before they noticed, while my buddy came round with the main troops from the front.
Or desert between your ears. Great map! Two wights on either side of the bridge, check! 8 Dwarfies waiting behind the archers, CHECK. Taking out their archers with ghols! WIN! When they finally said f it and sent the hoards across the bridge, BIG BADA BOOM!!
Hell, even the FFA's were great, giant cluster fucks in the middle trying to win the king of the hill. Sometimes it would be fun to not even try for the game and just go kill off your buddy, or throw max thrall into the mix just to watch the carnage.
Oh man or the pounding as the trow came thumpping round the corner to start kicking the heads off your berserker's.
Wow, get off my lawn kids. Sorry for the trip down memory lane there. So uh, Bungie, get off halo, and make something new for us to roll around in, pllllleaaaaaaaseeeeeeee.
I'm with you here in trying to understand the hype. As a long time pc gamer, as you sound yourself, I never got what made halo "THE BEST GAME EVAR!!!!"
/new gamers, got their first taste of FPS with halo. Much like people before them got a taste with golden eye on the n64, these guys got halo on the xbox. Couple that with their first online fps experience with xbox live, and you have gold.
I think the people you tend to see proclaiming this are young, and/or lack gaming experience. I think console gaming really blew up around the time halo and halo2 were out. A lot of these young guys
Us "old timers" got everything from wolf 3d, doom, duke3d, descent, heritic, rainbow 6, etc etc and have seen all these game mechanics already.
So given all this, I think halo is a good game. When I played through it, I kept asking myself "why am I playing this?" as I back tracked through the same room over and over again.
Halo is just polish. All the weapons and vehicles are FUN to use. The way the AI acts makes it FUN to shoot things. Everything is just "FUN" all around. The art direction to the sound effects make the game fun. Everything falls into place, and it is just a pleasant and easy going fps to play.
I thought far cry was beautiful, but i hated playing it, because shooting people wasn't fun. I didn't really get a good feeling from pulling the trigger at all, consequently, I couldn't bring myself to finish it.
In my opinion, one of the best things halo has to offer long time gamers is its co op game play. Finding good cooperative game play now a days is next to impossible in the gaming scene. The best we can muster up is team vs team fps games, and that isn't really co op.
I spent most of my time playing halo with a friend running through the game on legendary. That is what got me to turn the game on again and again, goofing around with the fun physics system, trying to jam vehicles to parts of the level where they shouldn't be, and just goofing around enjoying the game's system.
But, as much as we know it to not be revolutionary, you are going to have to deal with people who just picked up gaming, playing halo 3, recognizing the game's polish, and getting sucked in. We are ALL nostalgic for the first game played that let us blow the crap out of people, and for some people. For me, that game is going to be serial port doom 2 against my dad, and for these guys, that game is going to be halo.
Seriously, I'm 100% with you there. I think the people who have a problem with me playing a female avatar, see their avatars as "themselves" and are living out that "i'm a badass warrior" fantasy.
:)
Like you both, for me, I really enjoy the strong/sexy female hero archtype, and that is what I seek to create, not my own representation in a pixel world.
I think the free stuff is an excuse too. I've played plenty of female and male characters and I've never gotten any different type reaction from players between the other two.
As for staring at butts, if I want to do that, I'll go outside. When I'm playing an mmo i'm usually looking at health and mana bars. Maybe I have some sick health bar fetish I don't understand yet.
As for the harassment, sometimes you get juvinile people saying things to you, but no more then they would say to your male avatar. If anything you have more stopping power with your female avatar, because as soon as you drop a slight hint that you may be a *REAL LIVE GIRL* you can see the doubt creep in and they slow it down significantly. Just remember the people doing the harassing are the people with confidence issues, especially around women. Just have to pull that card and watch them fluttering in the breeze, like they probably in irl around women.
It is also a good education for guys. Women irl, especially beautiful ones, deal with this all the day, and can be approached out on the street several times by men when out in public. Why do you guys think attractive women are so ready to shoot down guys who approach them the wrong way? They deal with this kind of harassment all day that we get a small dose of as a female avi in wow.
Anyway, as long as the guild wars guys are making those female avi's, I'll be playing them
Don't know if you are still reading this, but I agree with you 100%. For a time I like the idea SL was like peeping into someone's head, but that got old fast.
I totally agree with you that SL has clunky interaction. That is why if someone developed a SL like game with EASY interaction, it would demolish sl. The easy build interface brings the geeks, but at the end of the day, the guys who use real 3d tools are the ones deciding what SL looks like. But the masses come for people interaction.
So you are very right, it is straight RP, and even with the difficulty of adding props, it is still really clunky and hard to INTERACT. I was always surprised how little priority SL gives to new avatar features, when that is really what drives SL imho. From about the 2 years I've had an account, the only new feature they added was "flexi prims", and as soon as those came out, it changed all the clothing and hair styles all over SL. Huge impact on the world, and just a simple client side effect. (Well, maybe not so simple to implement, but still).
I think SL can be more immersive then a chat when it is going, and is a great "escape", and I will admit that a long talk on IM with someone isnt the same as a long talk in SL with a person while both your avatars sit out overlooking a waterfall or the ocean. It adds an extra dimension not possible with IRC, but still, not enough to warrant specifically going there for it.
ScummVM and modded xbox...
I think the strength of 3d worlds lie in social interaction. What SL and others should really gear itself towards is myspace/facebook in 3d. That is what a "virtual world" offers that is unique.
:) But there are some unique builds out there, and every once in a while I step into someone's head, and it is amazing. )
1. A place to call home (the profile page). Here is my land, I can set it up how I want. I can put a house in or a huge landscaping job or some mix of the two or can exist in space. This is my area.
2. Avatar Interaction. Having superb avatar interaction with people. Built in, handshake, dancing, sex, hugging, pushing, shoving, puching, smiling, jumpping, whatever. Have all these things built in, and have interactivity with other avatars.
3. A place to meet with stuff to do. Make yahoo games online except the lobby is 3d and there is a real chess board for people to play at. Add in the 2d interface to find a game "game search" and have it drop you in there instantly, but also have people be able to walk around and see/talk.
This is what would make 3d online interesting. PEOPLE! I would love to have oblivion online, so I could just chill with a friend in a beautiful world, going around messing stuff up. The whole world is our oyster to play in. So people + interaction = what keeps you coming back online.
I even joked with a friend the other day that in the future our windows will be super high def monitors that are connected up to the net that'll display whatever we want. If I want to live IN secondlife, I just set up my house to be there, ha. Goofy but funny idea.
Anyway, if it's not a game, it needs socialization, and thats why SL still thrives, it is what keeps people coming back again and again, the people. The whole reason I enjoyed sl when it was released was to just see what people had created. Like taking a stroll through someone's mind. I mean it is like asking someone "if you could live anywhere, where would you live and what house would you live in" and throwing the answer out all over the place. (Until I saw that most were just crappy prefabs they bought and threw down somewhere, ha
I think that is bs. No matter how "smart" you are iq wise, there are still biological urges. I think the results presented in the summary neglect the amount of people that fall into each IQ slot.
People with HIGH IQ's are DIFFERENT. They sometimes go to college when they are 16, or are in upper level classes with older kids. Most of the high IQ people will have have nothing in common with their classmates. Just becuase you are a freshmen in a senor class doesn't mean you are going to have watched the same tv shows and played with the same toys everybody else grew up with.
So you are this outcast in a sense, there aren't many people around who are going to keep up with you, and at this point in your life, you probalby don't know how to relate to other people and present yourself as an attractive individual.
I think it is really the iq difference creating a barrier for forming close relationships with the opposite sex. People who fall in the middle of the IQ bell curve are going to meet lots of other people that are at the same speed as them, and concequently have an easier time finding a mate, leading to sex.
And sure, some teens do avoid sex. I did...after i had done it, of coarse. I knew all the risks and really didn't want to have a baby at 17. But that still didn't change the fact that I needed to crush the "virgin" status first, and then after the fact, I avoided sex as much as possible with my GF.
Anyway, people chose not to have sex for a multitude of reasons, and IQ alone isn't enough to conclusivly prove that "if you're smart, you don't have sex". I still think the number one reason teens do not have sex is that they do not know anybody who wants to do it with them, and don't know how to open up and present themselves in a way that someone will want to sleep with them.
A little late to the thread, but I thought I'd throw a shout out to your observations. That was exactly what made planetside work for me. Right off the bat, I had an effective weapon. I was low level, and I could play exactly one extreemly specialized role. But I had choices. I could snipe, I could infiltrate, I could be an engineer, I could drive a transport, a tank, or an attack plane. The world was open to me.
:)
As you play, you then start making yourself more versitile and effective. I went the sniper route, and soon i had a whole bunch of tools on me to make myself that much more effective. Now I can hold a shotgun so when people sneak around me I have a surprise. Later I might get a vehicle cert so I can move around on my own much faster, and later still I could play the sniper on a base until it was breached, run up to a spawn point and change gear into a max or medium combat set up and continue the fight effectively on the inside.
With that great skill system the dev's messed up. They copied the same bases and towers all over the map. So while they had these great terrain enviroments and super effective transportation methods, there was hardly a reason to ever get into a fight not outside a base. And they were all the same. Some had different layouts, maybe like 3 or 4 base types, but they all shared the same textures, the same generalized layout and the same features. It was so boring and repetative it was sad.
At the same time I had the most memorable moment huddling in a transport truck on the way to the next base when a loan reaver (attack fighter) spotted us and started the chase. There were 6 of us in this thing shouting over comms on the guys location as he came in at different angles, while the gunners frantically tried to twist and get a shot in as the driver bounced us along the road over bumps and hills, trying to make the truck a hard target.
Unfortunatly most of the time you ended up attacking the same base over and over again. Sometimes having 25 guys vs say 100 swarm zerg, or visa versa. When you got those long protracted fights with 200 or so people invovled in a stalemate, that sure was fun, or if you got caught up in a short side battle with a couple small forces of say 10 vs 10, great. But really when you are basically playing the same base over and over again, it is a snore fest. All they had to do was have a different building style per continent, and the game would have been gold.
So the level progression was perfect. This was also the case with any skill based MMO system. Take shadowbane for example. The game did so many things right, it is a shame the dev's couldn't keep the game from crashing so often.
In shadowbane, you leveled up very quickly, so it did not take too long to hit the "soft" level cap. But your character would be competative at lower levels. All you had to do was dump your points into a specific skill, and then you could effectivly compete in the game against higher level players. Coupled with forcing you into a player run guild to level up and continue to be effective, the game was quite unique and exciting to play.
Anyway, long live the "skill point" system.
Thread is old, i'm late to it, but...
Get off it. I grew up watching tv 24-7. I played computer games my dad had set up for me (27 now) to play. I lived the typical tv all day, no outside play life everybody makes fun of.
I picked up books in 6th grade and have always kept reading since then. I would play video games, then write a story about them. I wrote a whole bunch of text in a story involving the character classes in the action/strat game "Dark Legions". I wrote some about master of magic, as I put together all the behind the scenes working of the empires I controlled.
At the same time I'd still watch like 4 or 5 hours of tv. I eventually stopped watching when I started working and missing all my shoes. But from time to time now I'll watch a show that I like, like 24 or heros.
I think I have a pretty good imagination as it stands, despite the hours and hours and hours of TV I watched growing up.
Really, people's lack of imagination has to do with the person, and not with the amount of things they were exposed to. There is no such thing as destroying someone's imagination. It is really a question of whether the person choses to exercise that muscle or not.
In fact I'll say that people who are generally happy tend to have a poor imagination vs those who spend most of their time depressed with the world. After all, what better way to escape reality then with a good fantasy story?
So maybe if this guy wants his kid to have a great imagination, he better lock his kid up in the attic and leave him there for a week so he can think about knights in shining armor rescuing him.
He wasn't bragging, he was just pointing out why the game was fun for him. A lot of us do stupid things for our hobbies. When I was younger I played warcraft 2 beating people all summer long every night until 7 am. I didn't get anything from this. We once spent 1 hour building walls to take up the entire map. Another one we built farms across plains of snow map walling in some newbies.
Sometimes I go outside and shoot hoops for an hour or two. I've worked on webpages for subspace when i was playing that. I made a level for doom2. I designed crappy golf courses for jack nickolas golf. I used some cartoon maker when I was really little to make cartoons on the computer.
I could go on and on and on. The point is, for all those hours spent, I never once received 10 dollars.
That was the main reason I didn't buy fight night 3. I enjoyed the other two immensely and felt they were THE best boxing games I had played (next to 4d sports boxing ;) ), but the bk and dodge ads were ridiculous.
"This knockout was brought to you by burger king". No, it was brought to you by my fist in the other guy's face.
I could tolerate the underarmor ads, since they are in fact a company about boxing, and therefore add realism. I mean for christ's sakes they had a MINI van as prizes your boxer would get, a god damn mini van for my thugged out rapper boxer guy.
So like I've always said, ads are GOOD in racing and sports games, anything set in this modern world. But the ads have to be the same guys who advertise at the real events, otherwise, it's grossly out of place. That, and the ad should never, ever, ever, interfere or stop gameplay for attention.
Sorry, I'm just repeating comments said over and over, but hey, this is slashdot.
Hey, just chiming in when I hear war 2 and kali in the same sentence (reg #10024!!). I've found I have similar experiences to yours, less so in a clan but more so with the friendships over games.
:)
I still game with guys I met on kali playing war 2 back then. Usually when a new game comes out that has some passing interest we all ping each other back and forth over icq or something and get together gaming.
Not to put this group down but it's not really anything special. Most of the "old school" gamers as we are now called formed tight friendships with one another way back when the gaming population was a lot smaller, and have sence kept up gaming with one another over the years. Some people decided to put a name to their "clan" and invite others in, and some people like me just decided to jump in with a couple friends and play the game at the same time all the time.
If you look at most long standing game guilds, they are populated by maybe 5 to 10 "officers" who are either friends irl or have some tight bonding that keeps the face of the guild running. From here is where everybody else flocks into it and becomes a part of it, but those core 10 guys will always be there keeping the name alive.
Anyway, hey from war 2 kali land, good times back then
You know, how do you roleplay in a mmo? I mean, I kind of like the idea, and like one night in EQ way back in the day I decided to use emotes like crazy and describe how I slashed into things and what not, but really I don't know how to do an "accurate" character.
First off, you can't make your character interesting if you just got the game. Where do you add backstory? Where the hell did your character grow up? There's no children in the game, theres no real "towns", where did your character get predjudices, what are the "rumors" floating around about real place ins the game that you can go to.
I mean, after you've played your character up for a long while, you might know the game enough to start making up something plausable that fits within the game world, but when you start out right away, how to do you explain yourself as an adult character who doesn't even know how to walk around, doesn't know how to swing a sword but can kill things, and gets lost in their home town?
You really need to get out in the world and play a while before you can really roleplay to the world.
Meh, I don't know, I guess people who want roleplay, just want you to pretend like you are in the world and what you are doing is real. But anyway, you guys just need to find a dedicated neverwinter nights server somewhere and you will probably be golden.
That, or try a mud.
I think that is more a product of the game style then voice. In FPS games the time for conversation via text is slim to none. In a game with slower pacing, there is time to get to know one another. I've found that must of my online buddies came from games with slower pacing with time to talk, or a game with a chat channel or something associated with it.
But I've had plenty of "online only" friends whom I've known longer then most of my "real life" friends and know them just as well.
For the greater debate, I tend to not like having voice in game. I find it is a product of the genera though which determines if I like it. Often times when I get online and play "random people" I'm looking for an escape for a few from my normal life, to kind of step into another role. Not to act differently, but to just be around different people.
If I step into a high fantasy realm, I don't really want to hear voice chat. It draws away from the "larger then life" persona of people's avatars and characters. When DEATHSTRIKER the most feared player in the game has a tired southern drawl, it just ruins the illusion the game has created. Sometimes it's like seeing your favorite book get turned into a low budget made for tv movie, just... sad.
Now, there are times for voice as well. When I played planetside, the guy in our clan who flew the galaxy (big transport plane) was a pilot irl. When he was talking over voice it was incredibly immersing. The squad leader would call for transport, and he had this perfect airline pilot voice, responding where he was heading and his eta and all that. So in that case, in a situation where you expect to hear the squad you are in talking via comms, it works very well.
But when I want high fantasy and to disappear into a world, I want text, so it's more like a moving book with pictures. Let my mind give the voice to the chat and not the other way around.
Either way, voice is the way of the future and is here to stay. If you want to win any kind of team game, you NEED to talk via voice, and that's really the bottom line.
Reapy