PVP is great in our minds before mmo's were popular and it was just cool to be in a virtual world. In the long run, world style pvp sucks for just what you said.
In addition... it is always a gank fest. 1 in 10 fights would be 'even to close', usually numbers swing wildly in one direction or the other that the fight is just not interesting.
Wow's BG's are a good solution but you end up with a "pub FPS game" feel to it and that has its own set of problems.
PVP with an RPG combat system is tricky. I don't think anyone has done it perfectly yet.
Agree, my comcast probably goes down about 25 times a year, which isn't that much...but when my internet is down is generally when I want to play a game...so... yeah.
I've gamed a while, and while I wasn't an atari guy I was into PC games when atari's were around (thanks to my father). I think being a long term gaming guy yourself, you can see that while the gameing tech and moding tools and just general production that goes into games is AMAZING, the creativity and daring experimentation in gameplay is gone.
What I see within these last two years are the huge effects of consoles finally making their way to the pc. Everything is becoming proprietary. No more connection. When I do meet a player in a game I want to talk to, I have to check with one of likfe 15 different IM tools to stay connected...aim, msn, yahoo, icq, jabber, steam, xfire, blah blah blah. Sure things like miranda-im help here but it is still not easy to stay connected to people, even though there are more tools then ever before to do it.
Not only that, but games are losing things. We've seen this from the decline of 'stuff' in the box. Even when you buy a collector edition with fancy things, it still doesn't top what you used to get. Thick manuals with history lessons just demonstrating a passion for the subject of the game that you don't find anymore. Dragon age just released with a 0 day pay for DLC and a fucking character in game telling you how to buy it. Talk about immersion breaking.
This year people are getting rid of dedicated servers in their game. Why do we never move beyond the 64 player server? Where is the tech to do it? Some rare exceptions, but the amount of players per game seems to be getting smaller, not larger. Why isn't there a company out there (maybe MAG now? ) trying to figure out how to make an interesting gameplay experience, via tech and gameplay, for a huge amount of players in an action game?
So trust me, I like the eye candy now a days, and I still love gaming in general, and there are still games that make me go "oooooooo", but so many of the games now a days are well done rehashes of the same thing that came out 3 years ago, it is pretty hard to feel like I've played anything new.
I think if I stepped back I'd be pretty mad at the industry in general too...but when you think about it, it is just nature of success. Everything becomes generalized because generalized sells best, and generalized is easier to mass produce and generalized makes more money, period. All entertainment mediums are like this, books, tv, movies, music, whatever.
So, it sucks. We can find the variety we want with 'indie games', but we are spoiled by big budget production values so we miss them when they are gone.
Anyway, don't worry, eventually all the new gamers now are going to grow up and get sick of the same ol shit...except there are a lot more of those old fogies then us old fogies, so the market will have to respond... I hope:)
When I played wow it was at the end of TBC and mid way into the latest expansion.
We had a group of friends and a small guild. We wanted to 25 man raid. This usually meant bringing in PUGS sometimes.
We armoried anybody that came in. Gearscore matters. Generally you have to look farther to see if people have gemmed their gear and are in fact wearing the correct gear. Class/specs are so defined now a days that yes, there is correct and incorrect gear to wear.
If you take some guy in who isn't pulling his weight, who hasn't done the work before hand to get ready for a raid, you are generally looking at a person who is going to consistently wipe the raid and/or not contribute to getting bosses down.
Yeah, douchebags kicking people out of 5 man for a gearscore is a dushebag, but gearscore is a really quick way to make the job easier when picking up raiders for a PUG. It is always not the best filter, but it can make it a little bit easier to weed through the people.
The unfortunate fact of that game is no matter how 'good' of a player you are, if your gear isn't good enough for an encounter, there is nothing you can do in it. That's the nature of an MMO though.
Anyway, this entire comment section cracks me up, that people pissed off for having more features. People are weird.
Back then the community was small. You knew everyone cause you saw them everyday.
I used to play warcraft 2 on kali when I was 15 (am 30 now). You could could count how many people were on kali by reg numbers. I was number 10024, and that was still considered early...but sort of second generation. None the less, the community was split out to different servers, but in general the good players were in one spot, and the newbies were in another. That was it, two spots, one server for games organized via good players in chat, another server that you go over to with your friends and curb stomp newbies.
Even then the newbies would now who you are. The popular players who were good at the game were well known. No one would play them. They changed their names, to smurf names. Hence, the term smurfing was born.
When battle.net came out, esp for starcraft, it was so vast. I would play random games and never bump into the same person twice in the same night. And it's like this with most communities, so big, you never see the same person ever again, and no community forms.
I've been playing the mount and blade warband beta a ton, and I am having a very similar experience to playing war2 on kali, the community has been somewhat small, and I see mostly the same faces day in and day out, to the point that I know who I am fighting based on their playing style without even seeing their name.
It just opened up though so there are a lot more players, but none the less, you CAN still find that experience if it is small enough.
But the point of all this is, that communities that are as large as the ones in bliz games need tools to manage it. You have to somehow isolate and connect people to familiar faces amongst the larger subset of players to create that feeling of community.
Gaming is too popular and too big and vast to rely just on news websites and meet ups at the same server anymore, it needs the tools.
I honestly think what happens is that as you grow up, you are learning about all these new emotions and feelings you have. When you hit a tough spot, a religious family will often give a religious answer or method as to get through this tough time. During hard times we are also more malable, many of my most powerful emotion/personality shifts came at moments of great sorrow or trouble.
So, if you grow up this way, I think that a part of you will always feel comforted or at least familiar with the feeling that comes with faith.
I myself am an athiest, but can't dismiss the idea of faith, and often wonder if it is not just some part of our universe or humanity we are in tune with that we don't quite understand yet, and choose to manifest it in the form or faith in a deity.
My wife is catholic. During one of our discussions (very few of these) I asked her if she thought she would believe in another faith besides Catholicism like Islam or Shinto if she grew up in a society where the people around her and her parents were that, and she admitted that yes she probably would be that other religion if it were the case.
But the things that are ingrained in our early lives like religion, beliefs, ethics, morals, and even sense of humor or lifestyles, stay with us our whole lives. They haunt and help us. You can't pry a person loose from those beliefs.
If you want to change something, you need to start with children, and get them thinking and looking at the world differently. By the time we get older, in general, it is too late. Churches have figured this it, and I think that is one of the reasons that many have contracts parents must sign specifically promising their children entering their faith.
Since being with my wife I had had much more exposure to church, and really amd quite upset by the tactics employed to ensure followers of their belief. I have always gotten the feeling that their business is your family, home life, and teaching your children to believe their belief system, all in the guise of love.
Quite frankly one of the most frightening experiences for me was in my mid 20's being in a large room for the first time while the prayer of the faithful was recited. I felt like I was watching a brain washing movie. I didn't understand how people could say the believe in something that, if it was true, would be the most profound amazing thing ever, yet attend church as though it was another day at work. It made no sense to me. I could never understand how people could recite their beliefs in this monotone delivery for many years, only to have it CHANGED by some random guy and quite happily go along with it. It feels sheep and robot like.
I have also later seen more upsetting things taught to children in several Methodist churches (two different times, two different churches, both the same twist), where they spoke about accepting everyone, always with the added stipulation "so long as they believe in jesus". It really upset me, as it takes a nice moral lesson and twists and bends it around to their agenda.
Anyway, the point I'm getting at here is that if we want to change things like religion, we have to start with our children, and only then when we've all died off or have become too old for our beliefs to matter, could change happen (if that is what our children even want! )
I found ac and ac2's climbing/running system to the most interesting thing in both games. Before AC, I had never seen a 3d climbing and jumping system done better. It was easy and hard all at the same time. If you try to run full out and do not know the route, you mess up and jump to the wrong roof or get stuck up on an object.
It is easy and hard all at the same time. Very well done IMHO.
For me the only thing I really liked about star wars was the ship designs, sound effects, and the fact that the jedi were fantasy sorcerers in space, with technology. Later on I kinda liked the plot a bit, but really for me it was about the world the effects team created. (Am 30 now for age reference).
In the new movies, I hate the ship designs, and sound effects were trying to be 'almost' like star wars ones. If they had just used the same ship tech or more similar design concepts it would have been better. Otherwise they did jedi in the new one way better then in the older movies.
Whoever came up with that tie fighter sound and light saber hum is a genius, that's really what its about:)
Played it and didn't like it:( Something about the circle strafing shooting didn't really sit right with me. Also, while giving it a lot of time in terms of reading/learning about it, was just still confusing for me to understand what was going on or where I needed to be when playing.
Anyway I still think the game is awesome and definitely has its place in the world.
You didn't think much of it, because it is the most normal thing for a human to do when making a map. I think everyone's first map in any 3d engine was either their house, their school, or their workplace. I know my first map was my friend's house, followed later on by me doing a rainbow 6 map of my apartment. The first doom map my father did was of his workplace, he'd place certain demons in certain cubicles depending who sat there:) I had great fun play testing this map, and the first time I went to his office in real life, I knew my away around like the back of my hand.
It is quite natural and funny to make where you live. I wish I was more motivated, as I know where I'd put the boomer in my current office:)
One could argue that lack of experience in dealing with life's 'ugly' side leads to people having unrealistic expectations of what to expect in their life from friends, partners, and family. It can lead to poor decisions when choosing a partner, choosing to have kids, or choosing to even get married. These poor decisions in turn can lead to horribly broken homes, full of grief, misery, or just general lack of "life", which are terrible places for kids to grow up, kids who will continue on developing their own issues from growing in those homes, continuing the cycle.
One of this country's (US) biggest problems has always been the refusal to even acknowledge half of these problems and examine alternative lifestyles with an open mind. I don't mean just gay/lesbian couples either. I mean a couple who may choose to not have kids, a couple who may live together but refuse marriage, a couple who has an open relationship, having multiple 'friends with benefits'. All of these and more exist out there and work for other people, but if you dare make the mistake of admitting in public that you don't want to be married forever and have 2.5 kids, wooh buddy, something must be wrong with you!
The more exposure, and even better parental guided exposure, to life that a person (not just a kid) can have, the better. Yes, your 6 year old does not need to know the ins and out's of your divorce, but they do not need to remain ignorant forever. Maturing as a person is experiencing life and understanding more then you did when younger. If you are not experiencing and learning, you aren't growing, and you aren't maturing.
It's a video game... It is supposed to dispense pellets as rapidly as possible. Have you looked at any game developed in the last, what 10 years? When is the last time you actually had to struggle to beat a game and see the content? I had hordes of nintendo games where I never even saw the last few bosses. If it didn't have a cheat code that was pretty much the end. Even something like mike tyson's punch out, I couldn't even get to macho man, let alone tyson, thank god for the cheat code.
Game design has been refined. Now, you get to play the game and enjoy it. Then, if you want to break your balls trying something hard, they give you the option to do it, either through achievements, alternate game modes opening, or whatever.
Wow continues this design by having easy and hard modes, and surprise, the hard modes...are HARD. Perfect design IMHO.
Looking at this list of changes, sounds to me like they are taking steps to remove long waits to play the game. Are you so hung up on EQ that you thought those late night 4am 'get my corpse before it rots or quit the game' runs were fun? Hey, you really should WORK for those jboots, have fun camping the most boring fucking zone in the world for 18 hours for the quest drop.
Does anybody want that in a game? Why is that even there? We want to get in to a dungeon with people and play the GD game. If you want to play those old instances that most of the player base has been doing over and over for the past 5 years (hence boring, who wants to do that?), congrats, look at the patch notes. Now you can probably queue up for that instance and from a huge pool of players you can find the rare 4 others that want to run the old instance at the proper level. Why is this a bad thing again?
Agree here, I had a similar experience when younger. I had played driving games a ton, but didn't have much real driving experience. I was going down a straight road with a road on my right. It had cars waiting on my road to make a left into that turn, and cars waiting to come out. Well this woman in a mini van on the right street, stops, looks, then apparently looks through my car coming, and pulls out about 30ish feet in front of me while I'm going 40. I slammed on brakes, realized I was still going to hit her, turned to go around her, which put me on a head on with the guy waiting to make a left, turned back into my lane to avoid him, and THEN the car started fishtailing madly as i brought it down to the side of the road.
Would like to thank ABS and mad video game playing for no one dieing that day as I either was going to drive side impact that woman or slam head on to the other guy if anything went bad.
Yeah, and on all honesty, we probably waste as much time as this guy, except we spend it on multiple different video games, tv shows, movies, drinking, etc. So this guy has been hyper focused on thing, big whoop. I'd argue also with the amount of realm firsts this guy has, he probably spends LESS time then the average wow user does in a dungeon. Realm first guys power through and kill everything one shot spending a fraction of the time most 'normal' guilds do at it.
Anyway, cool, I like seeing people do stuff to the extreme:)
Actually most people post about wow saying how they read the story and nobody else did. Then a bunch of other people chime in saying they read it and nobody else did. I think most people did read the story or get a little bit out of it...but still overall, while wow has a story, fun world design and great artistry, the plot is still very shallow and unchanging. I know in the last expansion they finally figured out a way for you to effect the world, which is great, but at the end of the day, if you want plot, you are better served playing a true RPG game, or reading a book.
Also, WOW is 4 years old, meaning many players have leveled up multiple characters through all the zones in the game and have done most all quest lines already, so there is no reason to stop and smell the roses.
Every player has their way to play the game. While I enjoy exploring and seeing new areas in the game, I find the plots somewhat boring and repetitive after having played games for most of my life. Up above people managed to pretty much sum up every game plot cliche off the top of their head. We've all seen it before. So, if a player wants to rush up and get into raiding and improve their character, that is just fine. It may not be your style, but it doesn't hurt you that they are playing that way.
I know some players really enjoy finding holes in game geometry and getting outside the gameworld. For me, this is not so exciting, since you can just fire up most games in a level editor and see what it is like, and getting outside the gameworld in one game is pretty much the same in every other world, more often then not annoying me. In assassin's creed 2 I accidentally got stuck in a corner and got pushed outside the level. This annoyed me rather then excited me, as I had to restart to continue playing. But other players really love finding those gaps and messing around underneath cities walking around on the 'floor' of the 3dspace. Good on them.
To each their own, really. Life is more relaxing that way...try it!
Will you people never understand this? The fucking games. THE GAMES MAN! Damn, seriously. We'll put up with any amount of dumb bullshit when there is a game we want to play.
Yeah what a slap in the face that was. The PC version feels hardly playtested at all, glaring errors like no mouse look in a vehicle, probably because they bound it to an analog stick and game stopping bugs. If you have a chopper extraction, and lose a team member, cross a check point (oh did i mention no freaken quick saves?), then die... if you continue playing from the last check point you will never finish the mission, as the chopper won't take off as it waits to check for all the team mates.
That is a pretty reasonable way of playing the game too, losing AI who can't take cover, then dieing later yourself. Worse is the game has been out for a month and still no hot fix for bugs like this. Oh wait, friday we get a list of bugfixes in the next patch... wow, good work guys.:(
I've observed this too. I think it is why I used to stay away from 'the classics' where people seemed like a story could only be good if it was difficult to understand. The summary of this thing read like some 17 year old's AP english paper. He knows a lot of SAT words and what they mean, but just doesn't quite know how to lay them together in a readable format.
On top of that it seems like his point is the usual academic BS where they think that people treat their entertainment seriously and there is some deep psychological meaning behind the character choice, when it is probably just up to how the person was feeling at the time they made the avatar.
I often wondered this as the trend seems to be more and more to pay extra for what was once included for free. Remember those game boxes full of cloth maps and cool little themed things, now to get that you pay 15 bucks extra for the 'collectors edition', which isn't even as good as some of the stuff in the past. Same with DLC now and upcoming 'micro-transaction' games.
Honestly I think the answer though is the most obvious, because people will pay for it. *shrug*. At the end of the day it is about the $$ you take home from your product.
Honestly bioware should have at least pretended to develop the DLC after the fact and release it a month later. No matter what the dev's say, it was a separate team blah blah blah, that team could/should have been part of the original one, constructing one game for release. They constructed this thing in parts, and are now selling it as such.
Honestly the more info that comes out about dragon age the less and less I even want to play it. I'm at the point now where i'm going to let it pass by, unless people start going batshit insane about it, then I might give it a try.
I would like to second this. If Dust goes casual, there are already 8 copies of this game in existence or in the works. I mean, most notably as the article said, it is battlefield 2142 titan mode. What new gameplay will dust offer me casually? A game just as good as battlefield when i have a decent commander, and a crappy game when you have a crappy commander. There are plenty of sci fi shooters out there, bf2142, global agenda, planetside, halo etc. It'll just be another FPS with vehicles and get lost in a sea of mediocrity.
I know there is a little debate going on here on console vs fps, but I just want to throw in here, for me personally, FPS is meant for a mouse and keyboard. I own consoles and play them as frequently as my PC, but I save the sports/action/racing games for the console, and leave the strat and FPS games for the PC. Still, it is just what you like, I know some people could headshot me with easily with a joystick and no autoaim vs my mouse and keyboard. We are geezer gamers:)
I'd grab this thing for sure on the PC, but don't see myself investing in it to get stuck with a controller to aim with and then having to wrestle my wife for the TV to play. It is a shame the devs are so die hard console oriented, but I will still be following this game to see how it shapes up.
Interesting series of links. I have been watching darkfall but after reading the forums a bit and investigating around on the web about it, decided to give it a year or two and come back. Anyway, it may be worth noting that while that first review is trash, the second one has what seems to be a much more fair and balanced view of the game.
It gave it a 4 of 10, but rather then mocking the game, presented a more factual oriented review, and when moving to opinions, was very clear it was a personal preference of the game.
The first reviewer stuck me as a guy who's first FPS was halo. The other guy seemed as though he had been around a while and gave the different a mechanics a fair review in their scope.
If it offers any biaas, I had drawn the same conclusions that the reviewer found while playing. I can tell the control scheme is somewhat weak, they are still ironing out bugs and oddities and there would be too much macroing going on in the beginning for my taste. It is funny as much as I thought skill based systems superior to classic MMO leveling, skills lend yourself to doing the same dumb stuff over and over (IE playing oblivion I would jam down a key on cast and forward and run against a wall casting a cheap spell when I went to work). People seem to do this pretty frequently in DFO, even though it is bannable.
Anyway, this game has shadowbane syndrome, a risky themed mmo that is finally different, oriented on PVP, but just not enough cash and developers to pull it off correctly.
Slashdot Mirror
Nail == Head.
PVP is great in our minds before mmo's were popular and it was just cool to be in a virtual world. In the long run, world style pvp sucks for just what you said.
In addition... it is always a gank fest. 1 in 10 fights would be 'even to close', usually numbers swing wildly in one direction or the other that the fight is just not interesting.
Wow's BG's are a good solution but you end up with a "pub FPS game" feel to it and that has its own set of problems.
PVP with an RPG combat system is tricky. I don't think anyone has done it perfectly yet.
Agree, my comcast probably goes down about 25 times a year, which isn't that much...but when my internet is down is generally when I want to play a game...so... yeah.
I think everyone is just getting old.
I've gamed a while, and while I wasn't an atari guy I was into PC games when atari's were around (thanks to my father). I think being a long term gaming guy yourself, you can see that while the gameing tech and moding tools and just general production that goes into games is AMAZING, the creativity and daring experimentation in gameplay is gone.
What I see within these last two years are the huge effects of consoles finally making their way to the pc. Everything is becoming proprietary. No more connection. When I do meet a player in a game I want to talk to, I have to check with one of likfe 15 different IM tools to stay connected...aim, msn, yahoo, icq, jabber, steam, xfire, blah blah blah. Sure things like miranda-im help here but it is still not easy to stay connected to people, even though there are more tools then ever before to do it.
Not only that, but games are losing things. We've seen this from the decline of 'stuff' in the box. Even when you buy a collector edition with fancy things, it still doesn't top what you used to get. Thick manuals with history lessons just demonstrating a passion for the subject of the game that you don't find anymore. Dragon age just released with a 0 day pay for DLC and a fucking character in game telling you how to buy it. Talk about immersion breaking.
This year people are getting rid of dedicated servers in their game. Why do we never move beyond the 64 player server? Where is the tech to do it? Some rare exceptions, but the amount of players per game seems to be getting smaller, not larger. Why isn't there a company out there (maybe MAG now? ) trying to figure out how to make an interesting gameplay experience, via tech and gameplay, for a huge amount of players in an action game?
So trust me, I like the eye candy now a days, and I still love gaming in general, and there are still games that make me go "oooooooo", but so many of the games now a days are well done rehashes of the same thing that came out 3 years ago, it is pretty hard to feel like I've played anything new.
I think if I stepped back I'd be pretty mad at the industry in general too...but when you think about it, it is just nature of success. Everything becomes generalized because generalized sells best, and generalized is easier to mass produce and generalized makes more money, period. All entertainment mediums are like this, books, tv, movies, music, whatever.
So, it sucks. We can find the variety we want with 'indie games', but we are spoiled by big budget production values so we miss them when they are gone.
Anyway, don't worry, eventually all the new gamers now are going to grow up and get sick of the same ol shit...except there are a lot more of those old fogies then us old fogies, so the market will have to respond... I hope :)
Hrm.
When I played wow it was at the end of TBC and mid way into the latest expansion.
We had a group of friends and a small guild. We wanted to 25 man raid. This usually meant bringing in PUGS sometimes.
We armoried anybody that came in. Gearscore matters. Generally you have to look farther to see if people have gemmed their gear and are in fact wearing the correct gear. Class/specs are so defined now a days that yes, there is correct and incorrect gear to wear.
If you take some guy in who isn't pulling his weight, who hasn't done the work before hand to get ready for a raid, you are generally looking at a person who is going to consistently wipe the raid and/or not contribute to getting bosses down.
Yeah, douchebags kicking people out of 5 man for a gearscore is a dushebag, but gearscore is a really quick way to make the job easier when picking up raiders for a PUG. It is always not the best filter, but it can make it a little bit easier to weed through the people.
The unfortunate fact of that game is no matter how 'good' of a player you are, if your gear isn't good enough for an encounter, there is nothing you can do in it. That's the nature of an MMO though.
Anyway, this entire comment section cracks me up, that people pissed off for having more features. People are weird.
I think you are confused with the problem.
Back then the community was small. You knew everyone cause you saw them everyday.
I used to play warcraft 2 on kali when I was 15 (am 30 now). You could could count how many people were on kali by reg numbers. I was number 10024, and that was still considered early...but sort of second generation. None the less, the community was split out to different servers, but in general the good players were in one spot, and the newbies were in another. That was it, two spots, one server for games organized via good players in chat, another server that you go over to with your friends and curb stomp newbies.
Even then the newbies would now who you are. The popular players who were good at the game were well known. No one would play them. They changed their names, to smurf names. Hence, the term smurfing was born.
When battle.net came out, esp for starcraft, it was so vast. I would play random games and never bump into the same person twice in the same night. And it's like this with most communities, so big, you never see the same person ever again, and no community forms.
I've been playing the mount and blade warband beta a ton, and I am having a very similar experience to playing war2 on kali, the community has been somewhat small, and I see mostly the same faces day in and day out, to the point that I know who I am fighting based on their playing style without even seeing their name.
It just opened up though so there are a lot more players, but none the less, you CAN still find that experience if it is small enough.
But the point of all this is, that communities that are as large as the ones in bliz games need tools to manage it. You have to somehow isolate and connect people to familiar faces amongst the larger subset of players to create that feeling of community.
Gaming is too popular and too big and vast to rely just on news websites and meet ups at the same server anymore, it needs the tools.
The only surprising thing about this comment is it took someone 5 minutes to make it :) +1 !!
That's not how you lay webpages out anymore? Geeze... It's been a while since I made one :)
I honestly think what happens is that as you grow up, you are learning about all these new emotions and feelings you have. When you hit a tough spot, a religious family will often give a religious answer or method as to get through this tough time. During hard times we are also more malable, many of my most powerful emotion/personality shifts came at moments of great sorrow or trouble.
So, if you grow up this way, I think that a part of you will always feel comforted or at least familiar with the feeling that comes with faith.
I myself am an athiest, but can't dismiss the idea of faith, and often wonder if it is not just some part of our universe or humanity we are in tune with that we don't quite understand yet, and choose to manifest it in the form or faith in a deity.
My wife is catholic. During one of our discussions (very few of these) I asked her if she thought she would believe in another faith besides Catholicism like Islam or Shinto if she grew up in a society where the people around her and her parents were that, and she admitted that yes she probably would be that other religion if it were the case.
But the things that are ingrained in our early lives like religion, beliefs, ethics, morals, and even sense of humor or lifestyles, stay with us our whole lives. They haunt and help us. You can't pry a person loose from those beliefs.
If you want to change something, you need to start with children, and get them thinking and looking at the world differently. By the time we get older, in general, it is too late. Churches have figured this it, and I think that is one of the reasons that many have contracts parents must sign specifically promising their children entering their faith.
Since being with my wife I had had much more exposure to church, and really amd quite upset by the tactics employed to ensure followers of their belief. I have always gotten the feeling that their business is your family, home life, and teaching your children to believe their belief system, all in the guise of love.
Quite frankly one of the most frightening experiences for me was in my mid 20's being in a large room for the first time while the prayer of the faithful was recited. I felt like I was watching a brain washing movie. I didn't understand how people could say the believe in something that, if it was true, would be the most profound amazing thing ever, yet attend church as though it was another day at work. It made no sense to me. I could never understand how people could recite their beliefs in this monotone delivery for many years, only to have it CHANGED by some random guy and quite happily go along with it. It feels sheep and robot like.
I have also later seen more upsetting things taught to children in several Methodist churches (two different times, two different churches, both the same twist), where they spoke about accepting everyone, always with the added stipulation "so long as they believe in jesus". It really upset me, as it takes a nice moral lesson and twists and bends it around to their agenda.
Anyway, the point I'm getting at here is that if we want to change things like religion, we have to start with our children, and only then when we've all died off or have become too old for our beliefs to matter, could change happen (if that is what our children even want! )
I found ac and ac2's climbing/running system to the most interesting thing in both games. Before AC, I had never seen a 3d climbing and jumping system done better. It was easy and hard all at the same time. If you try to run full out and do not know the route, you mess up and jump to the wrong roof or get stuck up on an object.
It is easy and hard all at the same time. Very well done IMHO.
For me the only thing I really liked about star wars was the ship designs, sound effects, and the fact that the jedi were fantasy sorcerers in space, with technology. Later on I kinda liked the plot a bit, but really for me it was about the world the effects team created. (Am 30 now for age reference).
In the new movies, I hate the ship designs, and sound effects were trying to be 'almost' like star wars ones. If they had just used the same ship tech or more similar design concepts it would have been better. Otherwise they did jedi in the new one way better then in the older movies.
Whoever came up with that tie fighter sound and light saber hum is a genius, that's really what its about :)
Played it and didn't like it :( Something about the circle strafing shooting didn't really sit right with me. Also, while giving it a lot of time in terms of reading/learning about it, was just still confusing for me to understand what was going on or where I needed to be when playing.
Anyway I still think the game is awesome and definitely has its place in the world.
You didn't think much of it, because it is the most normal thing for a human to do when making a map. I think everyone's first map in any 3d engine was either their house, their school, or their workplace. I know my first map was my friend's house, followed later on by me doing a rainbow 6 map of my apartment. The first doom map my father did was of his workplace, he'd place certain demons in certain cubicles depending who sat there :) I had great fun play testing this map, and the first time I went to his office in real life, I knew my away around like the back of my hand.
It is quite natural and funny to make where you live. I wish I was more motivated, as I know where I'd put the boomer in my current office :)
If I were a child and had any of those titles replaced with the alternative I would probably start crying :)
One could argue that lack of experience in dealing with life's 'ugly' side leads to people having unrealistic expectations of what to expect in their life from friends, partners, and family. It can lead to poor decisions when choosing a partner, choosing to have kids, or choosing to even get married. These poor decisions in turn can lead to horribly broken homes, full of grief, misery, or just general lack of "life", which are terrible places for kids to grow up, kids who will continue on developing their own issues from growing in those homes, continuing the cycle.
One of this country's (US) biggest problems has always been the refusal to even acknowledge half of these problems and examine alternative lifestyles with an open mind. I don't mean just gay/lesbian couples either. I mean a couple who may choose to not have kids, a couple who may live together but refuse marriage, a couple who has an open relationship, having multiple 'friends with benefits'. All of these and more exist out there and work for other people, but if you dare make the mistake of admitting in public that you don't want to be married forever and have 2.5 kids, wooh buddy, something must be wrong with you!
The more exposure, and even better parental guided exposure, to life that a person (not just a kid) can have, the better. Yes, your 6 year old does not need to know the ins and out's of your divorce, but they do not need to remain ignorant forever. Maturing as a person is experiencing life and understanding more then you did when younger. If you are not experiencing and learning, you aren't growing, and you aren't maturing.
It's a video game... It is supposed to dispense pellets as rapidly as possible. Have you looked at any game developed in the last, what 10 years? When is the last time you actually had to struggle to beat a game and see the content? I had hordes of nintendo games where I never even saw the last few bosses. If it didn't have a cheat code that was pretty much the end. Even something like mike tyson's punch out, I couldn't even get to macho man, let alone tyson, thank god for the cheat code.
Game design has been refined. Now, you get to play the game and enjoy it. Then, if you want to break your balls trying something hard, they give you the option to do it, either through achievements, alternate game modes opening, or whatever.
Wow continues this design by having easy and hard modes, and surprise, the hard modes...are HARD. Perfect design IMHO.
Looking at this list of changes, sounds to me like they are taking steps to remove long waits to play the game. Are you so hung up on EQ that you thought those late night 4am 'get my corpse before it rots or quit the game' runs were fun? Hey, you really should WORK for those jboots, have fun camping the most boring fucking zone in the world for 18 hours for the quest drop.
Does anybody want that in a game? Why is that even there? We want to get in to a dungeon with people and play the GD game. If you want to play those old instances that most of the player base has been doing over and over for the past 5 years (hence boring, who wants to do that?), congrats, look at the patch notes. Now you can probably queue up for that instance and from a huge pool of players you can find the rare 4 others that want to run the old instance at the proper level. Why is this a bad thing again?
Agree here, I had a similar experience when younger. I had played driving games a ton, but didn't have much real driving experience. I was going down a straight road with a road on my right. It had cars waiting on my road to make a left into that turn, and cars waiting to come out. Well this woman in a mini van on the right street, stops, looks, then apparently looks through my car coming, and pulls out about 30ish feet in front of me while I'm going 40. I slammed on brakes, realized I was still going to hit her, turned to go around her, which put me on a head on with the guy waiting to make a left, turned back into my lane to avoid him, and THEN the car started fishtailing madly as i brought it down to the side of the road.
Would like to thank ABS and mad video game playing for no one dieing that day as I either was going to drive side impact that woman or slam head on to the other guy if anything went bad.
Yeah, and on all honesty, we probably waste as much time as this guy, except we spend it on multiple different video games, tv shows, movies, drinking, etc. So this guy has been hyper focused on thing, big whoop. I'd argue also with the amount of realm firsts this guy has, he probably spends LESS time then the average wow user does in a dungeon. Realm first guys power through and kill everything one shot spending a fraction of the time most 'normal' guilds do at it.
Anyway, cool, I like seeing people do stuff to the extreme :)
Actually most people post about wow saying how they read the story and nobody else did. Then a bunch of other people chime in saying they read it and nobody else did. I think most people did read the story or get a little bit out of it...but still overall, while wow has a story, fun world design and great artistry, the plot is still very shallow and unchanging. I know in the last expansion they finally figured out a way for you to effect the world, which is great, but at the end of the day, if you want plot, you are better served playing a true RPG game, or reading a book.
Also, WOW is 4 years old, meaning many players have leveled up multiple characters through all the zones in the game and have done most all quest lines already, so there is no reason to stop and smell the roses.
Every player has their way to play the game. While I enjoy exploring and seeing new areas in the game, I find the plots somewhat boring and repetitive after having played games for most of my life. Up above people managed to pretty much sum up every game plot cliche off the top of their head. We've all seen it before. So, if a player wants to rush up and get into raiding and improve their character, that is just fine. It may not be your style, but it doesn't hurt you that they are playing that way.
I know some players really enjoy finding holes in game geometry and getting outside the gameworld. For me, this is not so exciting, since you can just fire up most games in a level editor and see what it is like, and getting outside the gameworld in one game is pretty much the same in every other world, more often then not annoying me. In assassin's creed 2 I accidentally got stuck in a corner and got pushed outside the level. This annoyed me rather then excited me, as I had to restart to continue playing. But other players really love finding those gaps and messing around underneath cities walking around on the 'floor' of the 3dspace. Good on them.
To each their own, really. Life is more relaxing that way...try it!
Will you people never understand this? The fucking games. THE GAMES MAN! Damn, seriously. We'll put up with any amount of dumb bullshit when there is a game we want to play.
Yeah what a slap in the face that was. The PC version feels hardly playtested at all, glaring errors like no mouse look in a vehicle, probably because they bound it to an analog stick and game stopping bugs. If you have a chopper extraction, and lose a team member, cross a check point (oh did i mention no freaken quick saves?), then die... if you continue playing from the last check point you will never finish the mission, as the chopper won't take off as it waits to check for all the team mates.
That is a pretty reasonable way of playing the game too, losing AI who can't take cover, then dieing later yourself. Worse is the game has been out for a month and still no hot fix for bugs like this. Oh wait, friday we get a list of bugfixes in the next patch... wow, good work guys. :(
I've observed this too. I think it is why I used to stay away from 'the classics' where people seemed like a story could only be good if it was difficult to understand. The summary of this thing read like some 17 year old's AP english paper. He knows a lot of SAT words and what they mean, but just doesn't quite know how to lay them together in a readable format.
On top of that it seems like his point is the usual academic BS where they think that people treat their entertainment seriously and there is some deep psychological meaning behind the character choice, when it is probably just up to how the person was feeling at the time they made the avatar.
Meh academia, good riddence :)
I often wondered this as the trend seems to be more and more to pay extra for what was once included for free. Remember those game boxes full of cloth maps and cool little themed things, now to get that you pay 15 bucks extra for the 'collectors edition', which isn't even as good as some of the stuff in the past. Same with DLC now and upcoming 'micro-transaction' games.
Honestly I think the answer though is the most obvious, because people will pay for it. *shrug*. At the end of the day it is about the $$ you take home from your product.
Honestly bioware should have at least pretended to develop the DLC after the fact and release it a month later. No matter what the dev's say, it was a separate team blah blah blah, that team could/should have been part of the original one, constructing one game for release. They constructed this thing in parts, and are now selling it as such.
Honestly the more info that comes out about dragon age the less and less I even want to play it. I'm at the point now where i'm going to let it pass by, unless people start going batshit insane about it, then I might give it a try.
I would like to second this. If Dust goes casual, there are already 8 copies of this game in existence or in the works. I mean, most notably as the article said, it is battlefield 2142 titan mode. What new gameplay will dust offer me casually? A game just as good as battlefield when i have a decent commander, and a crappy game when you have a crappy commander. There are plenty of sci fi shooters out there, bf2142, global agenda, planetside, halo etc. It'll just be another FPS with vehicles and get lost in a sea of mediocrity.
I know there is a little debate going on here on console vs fps, but I just want to throw in here, for me personally, FPS is meant for a mouse and keyboard. I own consoles and play them as frequently as my PC, but I save the sports/action/racing games for the console, and leave the strat and FPS games for the PC. Still, it is just what you like, I know some people could headshot me with easily with a joystick and no autoaim vs my mouse and keyboard. We are geezer gamers :)
I'd grab this thing for sure on the PC, but don't see myself investing in it to get stuck with a controller to aim with and then having to wrestle my wife for the TV to play. It is a shame the devs are so die hard console oriented, but I will still be following this game to see how it shapes up.
Interesting series of links. I have been watching darkfall but after reading the forums a bit and investigating around on the web about it, decided to give it a year or two and come back. Anyway, it may be worth noting that while that first review is trash, the second one has what seems to be a much more fair and balanced view of the game.
It gave it a 4 of 10, but rather then mocking the game, presented a more factual oriented review, and when moving to opinions, was very clear it was a personal preference of the game.
The first reviewer stuck me as a guy who's first FPS was halo. The other guy seemed as though he had been around a while and gave the different a mechanics a fair review in their scope.
If it offers any biaas, I had drawn the same conclusions that the reviewer found while playing. I can tell the control scheme is somewhat weak, they are still ironing out bugs and oddities and there would be too much macroing going on in the beginning for my taste. It is funny as much as I thought skill based systems superior to classic MMO leveling, skills lend yourself to doing the same dumb stuff over and over (IE playing oblivion I would jam down a key on cast and forward and run against a wall casting a cheap spell when I went to work). People seem to do this pretty frequently in DFO, even though it is bannable.
Anyway, this game has shadowbane syndrome, a risky themed mmo that is finally different, oriented on PVP, but just not enough cash and developers to pull it off correctly.