I'll be psyched up to try this if they get it out on a PC at all, which I am doubtful of. I think the pub server area will be a mess just like games like allegiance, savage, natural selection, battlefield, etc...
This is solved somewhat when you step into the 'eve' area of the game. What will be interesting here is effectively forcing players to form rank and structure. This is somewhat what shadowbane did with PVP and it worked well.. in that game if you wanted to go farther you HAD TO join a guild. It should be similar here, if you want to participate in an EVE battle you HAVE TO join a guild/squad. This would allow each unit to set up its own strategies and leaders, even set up training mode for new potential leaders.
The problems here of coarse are going to be the unchecked teabagging matches where people that have spent $$ or ISK are going to steamroll your newbie squad. Also, I hesitate at a FPS who wants to have micro-transactions for items.
Still, going to watch this one closely, nobody else is doing anything like it.
Well what I love about slashdot is that the only retribution from mentioning a stain on my shirt was that my life is boring, followed by vampire jokes...not the 10000 other jokes that were all possible based on that one line... Humanity has hope...maybe:)
When given the choice between targeted and non targeted advertising, I would pick targeted. When given the choice between any form of advertising and no advertising, I would pick no advertising.
But more importantly, I don't think I, or the majority of people, like knowing that a company is rifling through my 'personal stuff' to find out what I like and dislike. It gives you a feeling of having your privacy invaded. Just a few hours ago I wrote my wife to say I had gotten a stain on my shirt from lunch, and google was nice enough to put up a stain remover advertisement right after I fired off the email. It is a little bit off putting.
Re:Some would call X3 the successor...
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Oh nice description. I have x3:runion collecting dust. I liked the idea of it and got all psyched up to play it, but the upfront work confused the living hell out of me and I kind of let it just go before I could really get myself into it. That and securom!:) I'll take a look at the terran conflict game since I didn't catch its release or anything. Thanks!
Exactly. I am always reminded of this when I walk into a museum. I enjoy them much more now a days then when a kid. I remember going to a few that I did field trips to, always making a joke, yeah I remember when school sucked the fun right out of this place.
It is funny because now a days I sit and read all the plaques about stuff that is interesting and learn a whole bunch, but back then when I had limited time and a handout full of dumb questions to fill out, it just wasn't fun at all. I never had time to sit and stare that the animals and develop that sense of wonder which created the curiosity to learn more about them.
Wow has always been casual friendly, from the beginning. The leveling up process change in wow was the biggest thing around at its release. Back then you only had like EQ or DAOC leveling models, no way in hell you were soloing your way to max level. Even the concept of 40 man raiding was a WHEW SIGH OF RELIEF from all the other games out there... Ahhh ONLY 40 people, great!
Wow has always been casual, it is just our idea of what is casual and hardcore that has changed over the years.
Try darkfall online, pvp oriented game. I like world pvp as much as the next guy, but unless the game is defined around it, world pvp is generally a gankfest, either you are horribly outnumbered or they are horrible outnumbered. It took a lot of work to find one of those memorably equal battles that take place.
Anyway DFO might be your place to go. I'll check it out eventually but I want to give it a bit of time, also the idea of afk macroing my way to competitiveness isn't fun either.
I am having trouble figuring out what they mean by new features? Other games seem to have these things they are mentioning.
I think we have all forgotten what the vision of an MMO is supposed to be. We need to drop all this leveling bs all together. It has been done to death, and quite frankly, who really wants to level up ANOTHER character. It also leads to all sorts of weird ass game design decisions and limitations so you don't have people getting one shot by monsters.
But I don't get it, where is the Massive Multiplayer part of MMO? Seriously, think about it, when is the last time you saw or played a game where 200+ people were in the same area doing the same thing? Why don't we see any games working on technology to bring more players together playing a game at the same time? More massive!
Is this all we have, at most 100 players doing the same thing at the same spot until we have more bandwith? Most games I have played that even come close to packing in around 100 players are laggy fuck fests that just remove all ounces of gameplay.
Secret world...blah, what is it going to have, go out and collect random skills that you can use, then participate in the same style MMO combat you've enjoyed since fucking merdian 59. Jesus christ can we get some innovation please?!?
Honestly, bliz and eq2 seeem to have the genera pretty much done right. Great, close the book on it, lets see something new, I have a fist full of cash I'm waiting to toss at somebody who make something new, give me a reason to spend it.
Yeah, I think 1/3 through book 9 I just put the thing down in disgust. What a waste of paper. But I think the books might be good if you sorta cut out the last few chapters of each book and combine them down into one, might have an interesting story then, maybe.
I honestly don't think it makes sense to have kids 'think' on a test. I think I lucked out and had a pretty good HS education, my teachers had been teaching for a long while, I think a number of them retired a year or so after I graduated.
We had sections where we'd do class debates and come up with what we thought of certain situations and what not.
But on a test, meh, how do you grade an opinion? If it is English class, easy, you grade on grammer and presentation, but what about history? Most history tests have essay parts assigned to them, and if you start making dumb assertions on the test, you are going to fail, most teachers want you to just recite back what they taught, but some better teachers will accept other answers, if you have sufficient proof.
Math is another deal, math is taught in the US like, here is the format of the problem, here is the formula to use to solve it, plug it in and go. Being a random teacher down the line breaking that stride on a student is somewhat cruel, as they are still going to face that technique for tests their entire schooling career in the US.
The "thinking" part should be a part of the day to day lessons, not a part of a test imho.
But as for the rest of your post I'm pretty much 100% on that, most of what is taught in school could be crammed into a lot less time.
God, there are snobs for everything, aren't there? Maybe you should read twilight yourself (you said zombies so that is probably not the book you meant:) ).
But anyway, to illustrate my point; I somewhat enjoyed the first book, the rest I could do without...but what really is fascinating about reading something so popular, and trying to figure out what about it makes it so popular. The chick who wrote twilight REALLY REALLY gets young girls, so much so that older women read it, and remember what it was like to be 15, or those sort of fantasy's that never left them. It's actually pretty cool if you stop and think about it, you know have a pretty good idea of how a large percentage of the population's brain works.
Maybe you could write your own novel with a similar style and be as successful? Maybe this might make it easier for you to understand your daughter and her friends at that age?
Meh I don't know. I just sort of always hated snobery of any kind. If a person enjoys something, why shit all over them and belittle it? In the case of your wife, is she is so sucked into her hobby that is affecting your relationship, thats a problem, but it is independent of reading crappy books, and more to do with maybe trying to figure out why zombies and vampires banging is more fascinating then having a conversation with you. I'm not saying you suck, I know how easy it is to get caught up into something and 'forget' your relationship, esp if you have been together a long time.
But still, meh, I find that reading 'the classics' makes me think a bit, but ultimately when I come down from one of those little brain activity sessions, nothing really changes. Plenty of good art (movies books whatever) have left me in that 'high thought' state where you can just sit in a quite room while your thoughts pound all over the inside of your head and you feel on the verge of comprehending the entirety of the WORLD. I've also come to find that state is just about as productive as getting caught up with harry potter running from some giant 3 headed dog.
Anyway, yeah, random rant here that servers no purpose, such is slashdot posting.
Yeah, I've found depression is sort of this feedback loop that just leads you down the path of suck. Its sort of like, you get depressed cause you have no friends, you probably have no friends cause you are depressed all the time, and who wants to be around someone depressed 24x7. Eventually if you walk down the depressed path long enough, your view of the world is distorted, and everything has a dark hue to it. You only see cruelty, your brain wont accept kindness or interest other people show in you, if you do see it, its a trick, they are just messing with you!
I walked this line for a while in my life, and at some point you just have to try to start over and stay optimistic about people. My way (easy when younger) to fix myself was to move away from my hometown and start over at college. I had a whole other set of things to learn, but for the most part it was the right move for me.
What stinks is that, being fun to be around and a happy person takes a lot of work (for me at least). It sucks, it is very easy to fall into a nice routine of work, home and entertaining things (games, movies, etc), but you really do have to make an effort to break that. At one point I joined a volleyball league, and some days I would really not want to go play, meh let me just stay home. Every time I got back from it though, i was in an awesome mood and had a great time, but getting my butt out the door took a lot of effort.
It is somewhat depressing (ha see?) that it takes constant vigilance to not turn into the walking dead, but with some awareness about what you want out of life, it is not so bad. Besides, if you ARE happy going home and playing wow 24x7, I don't really see a problem with that at all. But again, it's about evaluating your state of happy, if you are NOT happy with things, or they depress you, then that really is a good time to make some changes.
Also, meetup.com is great for trying to get out of the house. I just found that site and I flagged a few groups in my area I want to try to go out (saw a eurogame boardgame group in the area, sweet).
Yeah, PS was always on the cusp of amazing but still hasn't figured itself out. One of my biggest gripes with the game was that all towers and all bases on all continents looked the same. So you have these really cool continents with varied terrain and what not, but at the end of the day, you fight over the same guard tower or same main tower over and over again. It was sorta like playing a FPS that had one level.
Which is a shame, because organizing and transporting your unit from one place to another was amazing. Max charges, gal drops from towers, hell even just catching that once a 5 minute orbital drop thing was amazing.
The way you leveled up was cool. All the weapons you had were good to start, but you increased versatility as you leveled up, making you all the more deadly. I had many a relaxing days on a ridge with a sniper rifle and shotgun waiting for one of the 200+ players swarming around to stop so send one down range.
Honestly, if they had actually taken the time to create different style bases and towers, I would have still been playing that game on and off to this day.
I'll go check out those games, mag, global agenda... can you think of any others?
Yeah this is actually pretty freaken amazing if they pull this off correctly. I'm not sure how they will actually run it so planets win. I'm worried they may try to do something like, 5 'maps' each named after a planet, then a +win/loss for a side at the end of the day decides who gets the resources from the planet. Have to watch out for win trading and other stuff like that.
I hope they can pull this off, and go deeper with it. Its kind of like the mech warrior leagues that I always wanted to be um, more detailed. They would have a star map, then basically fight quick mech warrior battles, but they were set up such that the mechs and weapons they used were based on what resources were available on the strategic map. Based on the outcome, control of the planet or whatever would be determined on the in game play.
I'm with you though, I really won't be touching this on the console, my hands are wired for pc FPS and something about paying for xbox live gold itches me the wrong way. It's definitely a 'get off my lawn' move on my part, but meh. If they had this for the pc I'd be all over it.
I know they are tapping a bigger audience here with consoles, AND they have the chance to suck in people who play and enjoy dust to try out EVE, potentially reaching a bigger audience. Still, I would almost see dust as something that would work well with the PC, since all EVE players are by nature pc users, and I am sure a lot of eve people would love to mine crap in one window and blow up people while on dust. But I guess they can do that on the console, maybe thats another of their thought patterns.
Anyway, this is a pretty unique and cool idea, I hope they pull it off, I'd love to see it in action.
Seriously, there is only so long you can eat the crap he shoveled out. I think his talk big thing started with black and white and continued on from there. Maybe I just didn't read about him or know about him before then for his other games, but I distinctly remember it starting with b&w.
Fable is a neat series, I guess. I sort of hated them. Each one felt like your vast world was contained into a little arena box as you went from area to area. Did they improve this with fable 2?
I do like what he is saying though, I think a very cool game to play would be a hybrid between an RPG and strategy game, where you are managing a kingdom zoomed out, but then when you need to, you zoom in with your hero and take control of battles or significant events like a good RPG fight.
There are all sorts of fidelity between the layers you could have. You could have one very strategy light, and heavy on the action and fighting, or the opposite, heavy strat and light on the action.
Games in the past have sort of hit on this combination before. Master of magic and Age of Wonders both had some tactical combat at a small scale that was somewhat RPGish. Kingdom Under Fire also did it from the other end up, sort of an action RTS game, where you control your troops from a little map on the ground, then run your leader in to clean up key groups of guys with some action RPG. X-COM had perhaps the best combo of this, with a global overall strategy map, then dropping into tactical combat with very RPG like guys that you level up, outfit, and get to know really well.
Elemental, from stardock, looks to be going the Master of Magic route, with probably a slightly deeper then MoM tactical combat. They are saying x-com lite is an idea for the combat. Should be interesting.
But still, this combination of generas could be explored further still, I would really like to see a very RPG flavor game, that has some elements of 'grand strategy' and elements of squad based combat. I haven't played it, but imagine say taking the map from Daggerfall, give it a modern random generated terrain(know they can do better then 1990:) ), then let you pop around the world ala oblivion. Drop the quest lines, but instead add in a whole strategic layer to it, where you have the kingdoms engaging in diplomacy, troop movement, even work in dungeon crawling at some point. When it is combat time, you can deploy troops, take control of one of them as weaker PC's, or even dispatch your main guy. Don't make everything happen super fast, so you can still take your main guy out and explore or level up or whatever.
Obviously what i'm talking about has just as much possibility of happening as if Peter Molyneux were saying it, but us gamers like to dream.:)
Yeah these lists are pretty bad and assume that kids grow up in a vacuum and don't have older siblings or talk to their parents, or friends of parents, or uncles and aunts, or grandparents...
I read the class of 02 list. It took me a bit to figure out they meant start class at 1998. Using 02 and meaning the class 4 years before it is pretty inaccurate, as a lot of kids don't even make it in 4 years through college.
Anyway, pretty much all the stuff on the list I didn't know about, I did. My wife who is about 3 years older then me, gets odd looks from people because she knows about tv shows and stuff that are about +5 years or so off her age group, but she just had two older sisters.
I find this list pretty downright insulting. I know plenty of people going into college that these things are not true, let alone the blatant falsehoods like britny spears being played on a classic rock station. Classic rock stations play bands like the who, boston, billy joel. I listen to new yorks classic rock station every day in to work. Trust me, they ain't playing britney spears.
Its like these guys assume that kids "these days" dont have the capacity to understand things outside their generation, or put blinders on to the things their parents use or talk about. For all this shock about finding a kid who doesn't know what a card catalog was, I could probably find a few 30 year old adults who don't know what one is either.
Sure, we all have wake up calls as to how old we are. I found myself bobbing my head to music in walmart and stuff like that, thinking, 'oh shit, i'm finally the target audience'. But man, using this list to stay in touch with the generation you are teaching is just plain stupid. Try talking to your students, crazy, but it works.
Man every time someone brings up a mud system on slashdot it really really interests me. MMO's like you said are kinda the lowest common denominator, and you sort of have to make it that way, since you just can't be as flexible as a mud due to text being easy, and size. When things get big, you can't maintain those really cool cultures that develop in small communities. Your example with a templar is something that just wouldn't work in an mainstream MMO, which is unfortunate.
Regardless of this, I always like reading up on the different systems that popular muds have. Is there a site that kinda breaks down how things work, or unique muds out there? One of the ones that interested me a ton was achaea mud, enough so that I acutally tried to play it for a bit. Can't play muds though, takes too much attention to keep up with scrolling text then to be able to look up and talk to people randomly like in another style of game.
But anyway, the joy of exploring achaea for me was looking at the classes and the skills they had set up, very different from many systems out there. In the same light, I'm going to google up on armageddon and explore the classes there now. Are there any other mud's you know of that have varied systems like this?
Also, I too share your dream of the "small" mmo community. The best times to be had online in games are when you roll yourself into a small community, then interact with a large community together. When I played warcraft 2 on kali, I would have a group of people I'd hang out with on one server, then when it was game time, I would grab a friend or two, then hop over to the 'over populated' kali central server, create a game with my friends, then own noobs all night. That was fun.
As kali got larger, and bliz games took place on battle.net, the community just sort of breaks down. Larger amounts of people yield more potential to meet, but it also multiplies the amount of people you DONT want to meet. On top of that, you just never see the same person twice in large communities when randomly playing, which also robs some of the experience.
In mmo games, we create guilds, and play and talk almost exclusively with these people. In FPS games we have servers we frequent. In most we create leagues and rankings and 'groups', or whatever, all in an attempt to narrow down the scope of a large body of people playing a game.
So yeah, RPGs especially, NWN and NWN2 were ALMOST on the way to giving us the MUD experience with graphics. I think that is what we are really looking for, and the company that'll be able to that 'correctly' will really find a niche in the market.
Right, that is why I think a lot of people don't understand class balance. A lot of class balance comes from practical application of the skill in the game.
One thing I liked about skill based systems in PVP was the contribution factor. Vs mob's, well, you can just tweak the mob and dungeon layout to work, vs people, you really need to have a way to contribute. In a skill system I can max my sword out to 100 and kill a high level player. The high level player though, might have his shield block to 100, and might have fire magic to 100, and sword magic to 100, so this higher level guy has a lot more options at his disposal, but oh boy, if I can catch him with my 100 sword, hes gone. That makes for a fun gaming experience, more so then, oh well, he is level 100, so maybe if he is asleep at the keyboard I can win.
Again, levels work great for PVE, you can craft the gameplay to the current power level, but with humans at the helm, you need something different.
Also, in terms of what you said, in the skill based system, you are 100% right, that each skill must have a compelling reason to take it, esp in a computer game, where roleplaying reaons barely exist.
In d&d though, it is easy for the DM to take a look and say, well, I know Zoblar is a chef in his spare time, why don't I have a cooking based event take place here, the party sneaks in and replaces the kitchen staff at a banquet, and has to prepare a meal of sufficient quality in order to avoid being discovered.
For a game to come up with this on the fly, is next to impossible. Another problem is, as you said the magic problem, which I don't know personally, but I assume it's like two things cost the same amount, serve the same function, but one is fundamentally stronger then the other. That is a big no no.
Skill design is HAAARD in a game. In a pvp computer game, it is really hard to get player to give up doing more damage for versatility. Older MMO's had the problem in PVP with range dominating, so you see now a days they add in stealth, things like the warrior charge, and stuns/mezes to counter someone running away shooting.
My brain hurts from trying to balance the classic RPG skill sets (warriors, archers, mages, healers) against one another. They just work fundamentally different from one another, and the format of an MMO style game has to be generic enough to fit most odd combination of these things, that either the world is generic, or the class lines start blurring where there is a lot of overlap.
I think wow is taking the rout of blurring the class lines in order to have more interesting environments to play in, while at the same time allowing you to play more with your friends then class combos. I think for an MMO this is the right direction, but really, I'd like to see more games where this is not the case and are more specialized.
You might be able to get somewhat of a dungeon keeper fix with evil genius or even dwarf fort (free). I recall waiting endlessly for dungeon keeper, only to be somewhat dissapointed in it, I just couldn't figure out how to play it correctly. I think I was just too young, I had trouble defending my place and usually ended up just picking up a ton of monsters then dropping them on top of the bad guys to slow it down.
But yeah, the theme of this game was pretty amazing, and would like to see this one go farther where the point is just to accumulate treasure and keep it in disgustingly hard to penetrate dungeons. The multiplayer would have to drop two competing dungeons, but instead have one player play the heroes , and the other the dungeon keeper rigging the traps. That would make for a really interesting game.
Honestly...WC was great for mind blowing graphics. I remember installing all 13+ disks taking over an hour and waiting patiently to get the thing going. The story was pretty cool, but what sucked me in were the incredible graphics. The story was pretty cool, but it always came down to how cool it looked to be flying around capitol ships and dog fighting such nice looking things. That is what WC sold me on.
But then I started playing tie fighter much later, then freespace 2. Sorry guys, the space combat in those games is MUCH MUCH better. The variety of capitol ships and the ability to take them out with small ships (needed torps in WC if i recall correctly) and the way the missions played out were much much more dynamic then anything I recall in WC.
If the space flight sim genera needs a reboot, it should be from freespace or the xwing/tie fighter games, not wing commander, unless of coarse they are going to blow my skirt up with disgustingly awesome graphics again.
I used to play company of heros this way, rather then just finishing the level, I had to make the worlds biggest defensive wall in over the entire map that would annihilate anything that came near it rather then just pushing on and finishing maps. For some reason it was just great fun, perhaps a hold over from playing too much stronghold.
Agreed for coconut monkey being the stupidest thing on the planet.
But the biggest killer as you said was just broadband. Why wait for a print mag that will have less screenshots then a website can put up? Reviews are fun to find out about features, you still have to get to know a reviewer before you can figure out if you like the same kinds of games as them.
But really, all you need now a days to judge a game is a video. 5 minutes on gametrailers.com and you can pretty much see if the gameplay is for you or not, no sense even reading a review. Seeing the game in motion is something a gaming mag will never be able to do, and the main reason I think they are on the way out.
Just about the only gap left to fill in gaming world is coverage of indie games, mods, and multiplayer communities. I know indie games get covered on some sites, (not sure what they are), but mods and an up to date opinion about whether you can even find opponents for a game online still would be super helpful.
My favorite example of this is the movie "The Secretary". Sure it's a movie, but it illustrates a great point, perfection does not exist. Weirdness is normal, and when you find another person whos weirdness locks into your own, and are happier for it, throw it all in, fuck the rules of whats 'normal'.
Hell you don't even have to say it was bad, just suggest something that might be more fun. "Oh, you know what would be cool, is next time could you bend your ankle around your head from the RIGHT and put the monkey over on the LEFT of the bed, that would be sweet I think, what do you think?"
This is all my opinion of course... but I do not think marriage should be a surrender of things that existed before marriage in the relationship. I know it seems crazy now, but in 2 years, 4 more years, 8, 16.. do you really think you will never, ever, want to go out drinking with your friends again? That has to end? I would assume before you got married, you still went out with the boys, but of coarse being in a relationship you aren't going to get all crazy with another woman... this should be the same before and after the relationship. I mean, think about it, by your words, for longer then you have been alive, all those things you enjoyed doing are now closed to you forever? Is that what marriage is supposed to be?
I think your partner having suspicions and beingupset with you is a product of your partners psychology. It could be something you did in the past, or something an EX of hers did in the past, or hell a friend's ex did to the friend, and you have to pay for it. Trust me, not all women are suspicious and jealous of their husbands.
My wife and I get odd looks sometimes. I have a bunch of female friends. We cuddle and lay on top of each other, we joke around and slap asses, we have a good time being friends. When my wife is around, I tone it down, and spend just as much time flirting with her as I do with my other female friends. Sometimes I go out with just my female friends for dinner. My wife's best friend is a guy, they go out every week for food, then come back and we all play rock band together.
I tell this to people they think there's some problem in our relationship because of it. "I would NEVER let my husband do that." "You LET your wife go out with a dude by herself?!?". Odd looks if we go do separate things on weekends, she goes to hang with her friends and I go hang with mine.
Thing is, we have this crazy thing called trust and honesty. It is a pattern that's worked for 8 years and still works very well. At the end of the day between the two of us we are the people we want to spend the most time with, and I think a big reason for that not changing is allowing each other to trust one another.
Each person is different, and each person reacts differently to marriage and their partners in a relationship, and unfortunately, the older we get the more jaded I think we all become. Either that should tell us something about ourselves, or society as a whole.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll be psyched up to try this if they get it out on a PC at all, which I am doubtful of. I think the pub server area will be a mess just like games like allegiance, savage, natural selection, battlefield, etc...
This is solved somewhat when you step into the 'eve' area of the game. What will be interesting here is effectively forcing players to form rank and structure. This is somewhat what shadowbane did with PVP and it worked well.. in that game if you wanted to go farther you HAD TO join a guild. It should be similar here, if you want to participate in an EVE battle you HAVE TO join a guild/squad. This would allow each unit to set up its own strategies and leaders, even set up training mode for new potential leaders.
The problems here of coarse are going to be the unchecked teabagging matches where people that have spent $$ or ISK are going to steamroll your newbie squad. Also, I hesitate at a FPS who wants to have micro-transactions for items.
Still, going to watch this one closely, nobody else is doing anything like it.
Well what I love about slashdot is that the only retribution from mentioning a stain on my shirt was that my life is boring, followed by vampire jokes...not the 10000 other jokes that were all possible based on that one line... Humanity has hope...maybe :)
When given the choice between targeted and non targeted advertising, I would pick targeted. When given the choice between any form of advertising and no advertising, I would pick no advertising.
But more importantly, I don't think I, or the majority of people, like knowing that a company is rifling through my 'personal stuff' to find out what I like and dislike. It gives you a feeling of having your privacy invaded. Just a few hours ago I wrote my wife to say I had gotten a stain on my shirt from lunch, and google was nice enough to put up a stain remover advertisement right after I fired off the email. It is a little bit off putting.
Oh nice description. I have x3:runion collecting dust. I liked the idea of it and got all psyched up to play it, but the upfront work confused the living hell out of me and I kind of let it just go before I could really get myself into it. That and securom! :) I'll take a look at the terran conflict game since I didn't catch its release or anything. Thanks!
Exactly. I am always reminded of this when I walk into a museum. I enjoy them much more now a days then when a kid. I remember going to a few that I did field trips to, always making a joke, yeah I remember when school sucked the fun right out of this place.
It is funny because now a days I sit and read all the plaques about stuff that is interesting and learn a whole bunch, but back then when I had limited time and a handout full of dumb questions to fill out, it just wasn't fun at all. I never had time to sit and stare that the animals and develop that sense of wonder which created the curiosity to learn more about them.
Wow has always been casual friendly, from the beginning. The leveling up process change in wow was the biggest thing around at its release. Back then you only had like EQ or DAOC leveling models, no way in hell you were soloing your way to max level. Even the concept of 40 man raiding was a WHEW SIGH OF RELIEF from all the other games out there... Ahhh ONLY 40 people, great!
Wow has always been casual, it is just our idea of what is casual and hardcore that has changed over the years.
Try darkfall online, pvp oriented game. I like world pvp as much as the next guy, but unless the game is defined around it, world pvp is generally a gankfest, either you are horribly outnumbered or they are horrible outnumbered. It took a lot of work to find one of those memorably equal battles that take place.
Anyway DFO might be your place to go. I'll check it out eventually but I want to give it a bit of time, also the idea of afk macroing my way to competitiveness isn't fun either.
I am having trouble figuring out what they mean by new features? Other games seem to have these things they are mentioning.
I think we have all forgotten what the vision of an MMO is supposed to be. We need to drop all this leveling bs all together. It has been done to death, and quite frankly, who really wants to level up ANOTHER character. It also leads to all sorts of weird ass game design decisions and limitations so you don't have people getting one shot by monsters.
But I don't get it, where is the Massive Multiplayer part of MMO? Seriously, think about it, when is the last time you saw or played a game where 200+ people were in the same area doing the same thing? Why don't we see any games working on technology to bring more players together playing a game at the same time? More massive!
Is this all we have, at most 100 players doing the same thing at the same spot until we have more bandwith? Most games I have played that even come close to packing in around 100 players are laggy fuck fests that just remove all ounces of gameplay.
Secret world...blah, what is it going to have, go out and collect random skills that you can use, then participate in the same style MMO combat you've enjoyed since fucking merdian 59. Jesus christ can we get some innovation please?!?
Honestly, bliz and eq2 seeem to have the genera pretty much done right. Great, close the book on it, lets see something new, I have a fist full of cash I'm waiting to toss at somebody who make something new, give me a reason to spend it.
Yeah, I think 1/3 through book 9 I just put the thing down in disgust. What a waste of paper. But I think the books might be good if you sorta cut out the last few chapters of each book and combine them down into one, might have an interesting story then, maybe.
I honestly don't think it makes sense to have kids 'think' on a test. I think I lucked out and had a pretty good HS education, my teachers had been teaching for a long while, I think a number of them retired a year or so after I graduated.
We had sections where we'd do class debates and come up with what we thought of certain situations and what not.
But on a test, meh, how do you grade an opinion? If it is English class, easy, you grade on grammer and presentation, but what about history? Most history tests have essay parts assigned to them, and if you start making dumb assertions on the test, you are going to fail, most teachers want you to just recite back what they taught, but some better teachers will accept other answers, if you have sufficient proof.
Math is another deal, math is taught in the US like, here is the format of the problem, here is the formula to use to solve it, plug it in and go. Being a random teacher down the line breaking that stride on a student is somewhat cruel, as they are still going to face that technique for tests their entire schooling career in the US.
The "thinking" part should be a part of the day to day lessons, not a part of a test imho.
But as for the rest of your post I'm pretty much 100% on that, most of what is taught in school could be crammed into a lot less time.
God, there are snobs for everything, aren't there? Maybe you should read twilight yourself (you said zombies so that is probably not the book you meant :) ).
But anyway, to illustrate my point; I somewhat enjoyed the first book, the rest I could do without...but what really is fascinating about reading something so popular, and trying to figure out what about it makes it so popular. The chick who wrote twilight REALLY REALLY gets young girls, so much so that older women read it, and remember what it was like to be 15, or those sort of fantasy's that never left them. It's actually pretty cool if you stop and think about it, you know have a pretty good idea of how a large percentage of the population's brain works.
Maybe you could write your own novel with a similar style and be as successful? Maybe this might make it easier for you to understand your daughter and her friends at that age?
Meh I don't know. I just sort of always hated snobery of any kind. If a person enjoys something, why shit all over them and belittle it? In the case of your wife, is she is so sucked into her hobby that is affecting your relationship, thats a problem, but it is independent of reading crappy books, and more to do with maybe trying to figure out why zombies and vampires banging is more fascinating then having a conversation with you. I'm not saying you suck, I know how easy it is to get caught up into something and 'forget' your relationship, esp if you have been together a long time.
But still, meh, I find that reading 'the classics' makes me think a bit, but ultimately when I come down from one of those little brain activity sessions, nothing really changes. Plenty of good art (movies books whatever) have left me in that 'high thought' state where you can just sit in a quite room while your thoughts pound all over the inside of your head and you feel on the verge of comprehending the entirety of the WORLD. I've also come to find that state is just about as productive as getting caught up with harry potter running from some giant 3 headed dog.
Anyway, yeah, random rant here that servers no purpose, such is slashdot posting.
Yeah, I've found depression is sort of this feedback loop that just leads you down the path of suck. Its sort of like, you get depressed cause you have no friends, you probably have no friends cause you are depressed all the time, and who wants to be around someone depressed 24x7. Eventually if you walk down the depressed path long enough, your view of the world is distorted, and everything has a dark hue to it. You only see cruelty, your brain wont accept kindness or interest other people show in you, if you do see it, its a trick, they are just messing with you!
I walked this line for a while in my life, and at some point you just have to try to start over and stay optimistic about people. My way (easy when younger) to fix myself was to move away from my hometown and start over at college. I had a whole other set of things to learn, but for the most part it was the right move for me.
What stinks is that, being fun to be around and a happy person takes a lot of work (for me at least). It sucks, it is very easy to fall into a nice routine of work, home and entertaining things (games, movies, etc), but you really do have to make an effort to break that. At one point I joined a volleyball league, and some days I would really not want to go play, meh let me just stay home. Every time I got back from it though, i was in an awesome mood and had a great time, but getting my butt out the door took a lot of effort.
It is somewhat depressing (ha see?) that it takes constant vigilance to not turn into the walking dead, but with some awareness about what you want out of life, it is not so bad. Besides, if you ARE happy going home and playing wow 24x7, I don't really see a problem with that at all. But again, it's about evaluating your state of happy, if you are NOT happy with things, or they depress you, then that really is a good time to make some changes.
Also, meetup.com is great for trying to get out of the house. I just found that site and I flagged a few groups in my area I want to try to go out (saw a eurogame boardgame group in the area, sweet).
Yeah, PS was always on the cusp of amazing but still hasn't figured itself out. One of my biggest gripes with the game was that all towers and all bases on all continents looked the same. So you have these really cool continents with varied terrain and what not, but at the end of the day, you fight over the same guard tower or same main tower over and over again. It was sorta like playing a FPS that had one level.
Which is a shame, because organizing and transporting your unit from one place to another was amazing. Max charges, gal drops from towers, hell even just catching that once a 5 minute orbital drop thing was amazing.
The way you leveled up was cool. All the weapons you had were good to start, but you increased versatility as you leveled up, making you all the more deadly. I had many a relaxing days on a ridge with a sniper rifle and shotgun waiting for one of the 200+ players swarming around to stop so send one down range.
Honestly, if they had actually taken the time to create different style bases and towers, I would have still been playing that game on and off to this day.
I'll go check out those games, mag, global agenda... can you think of any others?
Yeah this is actually pretty freaken amazing if they pull this off correctly. I'm not sure how they will actually run it so planets win. I'm worried they may try to do something like, 5 'maps' each named after a planet, then a +win/loss for a side at the end of the day decides who gets the resources from the planet. Have to watch out for win trading and other stuff like that.
I hope they can pull this off, and go deeper with it. Its kind of like the mech warrior leagues that I always wanted to be um, more detailed. They would have a star map, then basically fight quick mech warrior battles, but they were set up such that the mechs and weapons they used were based on what resources were available on the strategic map. Based on the outcome, control of the planet or whatever would be determined on the in game play.
I'm with you though, I really won't be touching this on the console, my hands are wired for pc FPS and something about paying for xbox live gold itches me the wrong way. It's definitely a 'get off my lawn' move on my part, but meh. If they had this for the pc I'd be all over it.
I know they are tapping a bigger audience here with consoles, AND they have the chance to suck in people who play and enjoy dust to try out EVE, potentially reaching a bigger audience. Still, I would almost see dust as something that would work well with the PC, since all EVE players are by nature pc users, and I am sure a lot of eve people would love to mine crap in one window and blow up people while on dust. But I guess they can do that on the console, maybe thats another of their thought patterns.
Anyway, this is a pretty unique and cool idea, I hope they pull it off, I'd love to see it in action.
Seriously, there is only so long you can eat the crap he shoveled out. I think his talk big thing started with black and white and continued on from there. Maybe I just didn't read about him or know about him before then for his other games, but I distinctly remember it starting with b&w.
Fable is a neat series, I guess. I sort of hated them. Each one felt like your vast world was contained into a little arena box as you went from area to area. Did they improve this with fable 2?
I do like what he is saying though, I think a very cool game to play would be a hybrid between an RPG and strategy game, where you are managing a kingdom zoomed out, but then when you need to, you zoom in with your hero and take control of battles or significant events like a good RPG fight.
There are all sorts of fidelity between the layers you could have. You could have one very strategy light, and heavy on the action and fighting, or the opposite, heavy strat and light on the action.
Games in the past have sort of hit on this combination before. Master of magic and Age of Wonders both had some tactical combat at a small scale that was somewhat RPGish. Kingdom Under Fire also did it from the other end up, sort of an action RTS game, where you control your troops from a little map on the ground, then run your leader in to clean up key groups of guys with some action RPG. X-COM had perhaps the best combo of this, with a global overall strategy map, then dropping into tactical combat with very RPG like guys that you level up, outfit, and get to know really well.
Elemental, from stardock, looks to be going the Master of Magic route, with probably a slightly deeper then MoM tactical combat. They are saying x-com lite is an idea for the combat. Should be interesting.
But still, this combination of generas could be explored further still, I would really like to see a very RPG flavor game, that has some elements of 'grand strategy' and elements of squad based combat. I haven't played it, but imagine say taking the map from Daggerfall, give it a modern random generated terrain(know they can do better then 1990 :) ), then let you pop around the world ala oblivion. Drop the quest lines, but instead add in a whole strategic layer to it, where you have the kingdoms engaging in diplomacy, troop movement, even work in dungeon crawling at some point. When it is combat time, you can deploy troops, take control of one of them as weaker PC's, or even dispatch your main guy. Don't make everything happen super fast, so you can still take your main guy out and explore or level up or whatever.
Obviously what i'm talking about has just as much possibility of happening as if Peter Molyneux were saying it, but us gamers like to dream. :)
Yeah these lists are pretty bad and assume that kids grow up in a vacuum and don't have older siblings or talk to their parents, or friends of parents, or uncles and aunts, or grandparents...
I read the class of 02 list. It took me a bit to figure out they meant start class at 1998. Using 02 and meaning the class 4 years before it is pretty inaccurate, as a lot of kids don't even make it in 4 years through college.
Anyway, pretty much all the stuff on the list I didn't know about, I did. My wife who is about 3 years older then me, gets odd looks from people because she knows about tv shows and stuff that are about +5 years or so off her age group, but she just had two older sisters.
I find this list pretty downright insulting. I know plenty of people going into college that these things are not true, let alone the blatant falsehoods like britny spears being played on a classic rock station. Classic rock stations play bands like the who, boston, billy joel. I listen to new yorks classic rock station every day in to work. Trust me, they ain't playing britney spears.
Its like these guys assume that kids "these days" dont have the capacity to understand things outside their generation, or put blinders on to the things their parents use or talk about. For all this shock about finding a kid who doesn't know what a card catalog was, I could probably find a few 30 year old adults who don't know what one is either.
Sure, we all have wake up calls as to how old we are. I found myself bobbing my head to music in walmart and stuff like that, thinking, 'oh shit, i'm finally the target audience'. But man, using this list to stay in touch with the generation you are teaching is just plain stupid. Try talking to your students, crazy, but it works.
Man every time someone brings up a mud system on slashdot it really really interests me. MMO's like you said are kinda the lowest common denominator, and you sort of have to make it that way, since you just can't be as flexible as a mud due to text being easy, and size. When things get big, you can't maintain those really cool cultures that develop in small communities. Your example with a templar is something that just wouldn't work in an mainstream MMO, which is unfortunate.
Regardless of this, I always like reading up on the different systems that popular muds have. Is there a site that kinda breaks down how things work, or unique muds out there? One of the ones that interested me a ton was achaea mud, enough so that I acutally tried to play it for a bit. Can't play muds though, takes too much attention to keep up with scrolling text then to be able to look up and talk to people randomly like in another style of game.
But anyway, the joy of exploring achaea for me was looking at the classes and the skills they had set up, very different from many systems out there. In the same light, I'm going to google up on armageddon and explore the classes there now. Are there any other mud's you know of that have varied systems like this?
Also, I too share your dream of the "small" mmo community. The best times to be had online in games are when you roll yourself into a small community, then interact with a large community together. When I played warcraft 2 on kali, I would have a group of people I'd hang out with on one server, then when it was game time, I would grab a friend or two, then hop over to the 'over populated' kali central server, create a game with my friends, then own noobs all night. That was fun.
As kali got larger, and bliz games took place on battle.net, the community just sort of breaks down. Larger amounts of people yield more potential to meet, but it also multiplies the amount of people you DONT want to meet. On top of that, you just never see the same person twice in large communities when randomly playing, which also robs some of the experience.
In mmo games, we create guilds, and play and talk almost exclusively with these people. In FPS games we have servers we frequent. In most we create leagues and rankings and 'groups', or whatever, all in an attempt to narrow down the scope of a large body of people playing a game.
So yeah, RPGs especially, NWN and NWN2 were ALMOST on the way to giving us the MUD experience with graphics. I think that is what we are really looking for, and the company that'll be able to that 'correctly' will really find a niche in the market.
Right, that is why I think a lot of people don't understand class balance. A lot of class balance comes from practical application of the skill in the game.
One thing I liked about skill based systems in PVP was the contribution factor. Vs mob's, well, you can just tweak the mob and dungeon layout to work, vs people, you really need to have a way to contribute. In a skill system I can max my sword out to 100 and kill a high level player. The high level player though, might have his shield block to 100, and might have fire magic to 100, and sword magic to 100, so this higher level guy has a lot more options at his disposal, but oh boy, if I can catch him with my 100 sword, hes gone. That makes for a fun gaming experience, more so then, oh well, he is level 100, so maybe if he is asleep at the keyboard I can win.
Again, levels work great for PVE, you can craft the gameplay to the current power level, but with humans at the helm, you need something different.
Also, in terms of what you said, in the skill based system, you are 100% right, that each skill must have a compelling reason to take it, esp in a computer game, where roleplaying reaons barely exist.
In d&d though, it is easy for the DM to take a look and say, well, I know Zoblar is a chef in his spare time, why don't I have a cooking based event take place here, the party sneaks in and replaces the kitchen staff at a banquet, and has to prepare a meal of sufficient quality in order to avoid being discovered.
For a game to come up with this on the fly, is next to impossible. Another problem is, as you said the magic problem, which I don't know personally, but I assume it's like two things cost the same amount, serve the same function, but one is fundamentally stronger then the other. That is a big no no.
Skill design is HAAARD in a game. In a pvp computer game, it is really hard to get player to give up doing more damage for versatility. Older MMO's had the problem in PVP with range dominating, so you see now a days they add in stealth, things like the warrior charge, and stuns/mezes to counter someone running away shooting.
My brain hurts from trying to balance the classic RPG skill sets (warriors, archers, mages, healers) against one another. They just work fundamentally different from one another, and the format of an MMO style game has to be generic enough to fit most odd combination of these things, that either the world is generic, or the class lines start blurring where there is a lot of overlap.
I think wow is taking the rout of blurring the class lines in order to have more interesting environments to play in, while at the same time allowing you to play more with your friends then class combos. I think for an MMO this is the right direction, but really, I'd like to see more games where this is not the case and are more specialized.
You might be able to get somewhat of a dungeon keeper fix with evil genius or even dwarf fort (free). I recall waiting endlessly for dungeon keeper, only to be somewhat dissapointed in it, I just couldn't figure out how to play it correctly. I think I was just too young, I had trouble defending my place and usually ended up just picking up a ton of monsters then dropping them on top of the bad guys to slow it down.
But yeah, the theme of this game was pretty amazing, and would like to see this one go farther where the point is just to accumulate treasure and keep it in disgustingly hard to penetrate dungeons. The multiplayer would have to drop two competing dungeons, but instead have one player play the heroes , and the other the dungeon keeper rigging the traps. That would make for a really interesting game.
Honestly...WC was great for mind blowing graphics. I remember installing all 13+ disks taking over an hour and waiting patiently to get the thing going. The story was pretty cool, but what sucked me in were the incredible graphics. The story was pretty cool, but it always came down to how cool it looked to be flying around capitol ships and dog fighting such nice looking things. That is what WC sold me on.
But then I started playing tie fighter much later, then freespace 2. Sorry guys, the space combat in those games is MUCH MUCH better. The variety of capitol ships and the ability to take them out with small ships (needed torps in WC if i recall correctly) and the way the missions played out were much much more dynamic then anything I recall in WC.
If the space flight sim genera needs a reboot, it should be from freespace or the xwing/tie fighter games, not wing commander, unless of coarse they are going to blow my skirt up with disgustingly awesome graphics again.
I used to play company of heros this way, rather then just finishing the level, I had to make the worlds biggest defensive wall in over the entire map that would annihilate anything that came near it rather then just pushing on and finishing maps. For some reason it was just great fun, perhaps a hold over from playing too much stronghold.
Agreed for coconut monkey being the stupidest thing on the planet.
But the biggest killer as you said was just broadband. Why wait for a print mag that will have less screenshots then a website can put up? Reviews are fun to find out about features, you still have to get to know a reviewer before you can figure out if you like the same kinds of games as them.
But really, all you need now a days to judge a game is a video. 5 minutes on gametrailers.com and you can pretty much see if the gameplay is for you or not, no sense even reading a review. Seeing the game in motion is something a gaming mag will never be able to do, and the main reason I think they are on the way out.
Just about the only gap left to fill in gaming world is coverage of indie games, mods, and multiplayer communities. I know indie games get covered on some sites, (not sure what they are), but mods and an up to date opinion about whether you can even find opponents for a game online still would be super helpful.
My favorite example of this is the movie "The Secretary". Sure it's a movie, but it illustrates a great point, perfection does not exist. Weirdness is normal, and when you find another person whos weirdness locks into your own, and are happier for it, throw it all in, fuck the rules of whats 'normal'.
Hell you don't even have to say it was bad, just suggest something that might be more fun. "Oh, you know what would be cool, is next time could you bend your ankle around your head from the RIGHT and put the monkey over on the LEFT of the bed, that would be sweet I think, what do you think?"
This is all my opinion of course... but I do not think marriage should be a surrender of things that existed before marriage in the relationship. I know it seems crazy now, but in 2 years, 4 more years, 8, 16.. do you really think you will never, ever, want to go out drinking with your friends again? That has to end? I would assume before you got married, you still went out with the boys, but of coarse being in a relationship you aren't going to get all crazy with another woman... this should be the same before and after the relationship. I mean, think about it, by your words, for longer then you have been alive, all those things you enjoyed doing are now closed to you forever? Is that what marriage is supposed to be?
I think your partner having suspicions and beingupset with you is a product of your partners psychology. It could be something you did in the past, or something an EX of hers did in the past, or hell a friend's ex did to the friend, and you have to pay for it. Trust me, not all women are suspicious and jealous of their husbands.
My wife and I get odd looks sometimes. I have a bunch of female friends. We cuddle and lay on top of each other, we joke around and slap asses, we have a good time being friends. When my wife is around, I tone it down, and spend just as much time flirting with her as I do with my other female friends. Sometimes I go out with just my female friends for dinner. My wife's best friend is a guy, they go out every week for food, then come back and we all play rock band together.
I tell this to people they think there's some problem in our relationship because of it. "I would NEVER let my husband do that." "You LET your wife go out with a dude by herself?!?". Odd looks if we go do separate things on weekends, she goes to hang with her friends and I go hang with mine.
Thing is, we have this crazy thing called trust and honesty. It is a pattern that's worked for 8 years and still works very well. At the end of the day between the two of us we are the people we want to spend the most time with, and I think a big reason for that not changing is allowing each other to trust one another.
Each person is different, and each person reacts differently to marriage and their partners in a relationship, and unfortunately, the older we get the more jaded I think we all become. Either that should tell us something about ourselves, or society as a whole.