There is both a Shadowrun game for NES and for Genesis. Both totally different games. Suprising, given the costs of developing a video game that they would do 2 totally seperate games for 2 systems based on a RPG, at the same time.
Each one has it's merits, but neither is really compelling, in retrospect. The Genesis one is more accesable, and the SNES one can be irritating, but has a better story and graphics. Had either of these games been great or classic, perhaps the Shadowrun license would be much stronger today.
They definitely do own the electronic rights. There is an E-mail address at microsoft (shadowru@microsoft.com) that you can contact regarding things shadowrun, but no one has ever recieved a response that I know of. Many people have E-mailed in requests that Microsoft develop this property, however.
I heard similar rumors. The novella in question, is really excellent, one of the few really great pieces of literature to be attached to a RPG. Shadowrun always had excellent backround material.
I think that some of the problems with a Shadowrun based movie might be the involvement of Microsoft, who owns all of the electronic rights to FASA's material. So no games or MMO's or possibly even the movie without the interaction of FanPro, Microsoft, the author of the Novella. Might be too many fingers in the pie for the film to get made from that material. I am not sure who owns film rights to FASA's material. That might be a murky area, given the post-FASA state of affairs.
A lot of the rules could get arcane and take a lot of playtime to execute, but I always felt that the level of detail was worth it. Shadowrun, I always thought was too big for pen and paper, it really needed to be computer moderated, with all of the rules running in the backround. It would make an excellent MMO.
An experienced GM and players group can burn through a game pretty quickly, once everyone has a good grasp on the rules and some experience using them.
I always thought that Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0 had a lot of flaws and lacked rules for numerous activities. I'm not a GURPS fan, and am not familiar with those rules.
It doesn't work like that. Players who intend to disrupt an event don't come to fight. They come to scream obscenities and harass people verbally. They don't come with their PvP settings enabled, so you can't do a damn thing about it.
They are there to disrupt via irritation, not to raid.
I'm not saying that I want to throw a wedding in a MMO, or even attend one. I'm just using that as an example of a player created event that can be absolutely ruined by greif play. I have seen this happen personally, and have heard numerous anecdotes that indicate that this is exactly the type of event that a greifer would most enjoy disrupting.
The article doesn't even begin to grasp the scale of greifing in online games. Griefers are not lone misanthropes looking torture the weak, they just start that way. They form their own groups and then use these groups/guilds/mafia to "police" the server in the form of organised greifing. To make matters worse, they are usually the most likely players to take advantage of bugs and/or exploits, which often unbalances the playing field further.
Not being discriminating in their associates often characterises greifers in MMOs. They don't care who their friends are, so long as they can maintain strangth in numbers, and their rules of conduct are so minimal, that they can grow to outnumber any other organisation on thee server, becoming an unbalancing force of extreme inconvenience to other players.
Against such dedicated players, there is often no real recourse, or even means to ignore and avoid, so younger players who have been on the recieving end of greifing behavior often break down and become counter-greifers, themselves. Which just magnifies the problem until the entire server revolves around the personal conflicts of the players who least represent the intention of the game, or the majority of the server population.
It then becomes impossible to oraganise events on a server, or do any of the really interesting "player created content" that MMO developers yearn to inspire. Want to have a well planned wedding? Not a chance when guild X shows up, and starts screaming obscenities at the crowd or attacking people, if the rules allow.
MMO developers are often afraid to take real action against the players involved in a greif oriented organisation. They desperately need the dollars, and can't afford to ban players right and left. Often greifing organisations are led by players who have numerous accounts, and banning the leaders of these organisations would cost hundreds of dollars per month, per individual, and would eventually lead to a noticable drop in revenue.
Greifers are also the most likely poulation to purchase items, characters or money outside of game, to further increase their disporportionate power. They drive inflation on a server, and can further tip the PvP balance towards their favour by means not available to most players, or by means that the majority of players, and the developer feel are unethical.
I had the patch in less than 20 minutes, and I am behind two very serious firewalls. I don't like the patcher, either. It is the worlds most messed up BitTorrent client, IMHO. But it hasn't caused me any problems.
They do have direct downloads, and Fileplanet has them as well. So no worries for folks at school.
No, I wasn't on those servers, and you are correct that that was definitely a bump in the road. I was in SWG on launch day, and no one, on any server could play, at all. So I consider this a relatively smooth launch for a MMO. Especially given the tremendous influx of players and the popularity of the game.I
A lot of us veteran MMO players place a lot of value on the effectiveness of the first patch, post launch. Blizzard appears to be doing its job well. Many areas of the world were slighly modified (addtional mailboxes, npc with repair capabilities, etc...) to make irritations that don't add to gameplay go away. They seem to be struggling with implementing a satisfying fishing system, but are rightfully concerned with keeping fishing from being a botting paradse. Although there is nothing spectacularily ambitious with the first patch, it shows a commitment to quality playing and a dedication to attentive management rarely seen in online games.
Blizzard seems to be aggressively tackling the PvP system, and players, including PvP endgame folks seem hungry for the content that they are promising, but patient for its delivery. If Blizzard is able to add excellent PvP content quickly, and without bugs or hitches, they will pull off a major coup.
One of the critical issues of several other MMOs is that they are often released with critical issues at launch and have to spend the first 6-12 months addressing those issues, or inserting launnch content post launch. WoW's launch was so smooth, that they seem able to really dive straight into the management and improvement role that a developer should be in, as opposed to a crisis management mode, as often is the case with ambitious MMOs, post-launch.
In addition, most of the rteally powerful gear is both level limited, and bind on pickup, which means that it cannot ever be traded once it has been looted. Blizzards binind process basically means that most of the really, really good items in the game have to be looted directly by their user. And the really excellent quest loot is tied to quests that can't be activated until you have finished other quests and you are at the proper level. It is nigh impossible to operate the kind of virtual item for real money economy that we have seen in other games.
It would be far more profitable, in WoW to charge cash for the service of being led through the instance dungeons by a high level player, so that the lower level player can get loot that is usually out of their grasp. Or you could just join an ingame guild and do instances with higher level players without spending a dime, and have a good time to boot.
SWG is basically a long term paid Beta test. Players who love Star Wars are footing the bill for the development process. I played for a year, and the game felt like Beta the whole time. Constant changes, huge balance issues, rampant bugs, etc... The only thing that kept it from going the way of Motor City Online (Fast Crash), was the attached Star Wars license.
The question isn't "will the masochists who still play SWG like it" but "will the hordes of veteran players who left(and may have moved onto newer MMOs) come back for it?" Given the way that trust in Sony has gone downhill, they have a tough job ahead of them, and their team has never really been up to the job.
FYI, in WoW mobs heal back to 100% as soon as you are out of range. If you die on them, you are not unlikely to have to raise yourself, at half health/mana, right on their totally healed ass. And get killed again.
The WoW designers seem very quick to prevent and catch exploits, and that's a good reason to play in itself.
No. As we know from the film Back to the Future, the number 88 is associated with time travel. So obviously, Blizzard is attempting to harness the power of time travel. For good or evil, only the future will tell.
$15 dollars a month is bupkis for quality entertainment. I live in Los Angeles and a movie costs between $10 -$14 dollars, parking anywhere costs $3-$5.
When I buy into a MMO, I want to know that the developer is going to have adequate funding to not only host and support the game, but to be constantly adding content, patching errors, creating new art and code, etc... We have discussed this issue in numerous other threads, coming largely to the conclusion that most of that $15 per month goes to hosting and ongoing development/maintinence costs.
You can join any of the servers. They do reccomend servers in your region to you though. My guild has members in more than a dozen timezones and we are having no problem getting on the same server.
Was this during beta or post launch. They bittorrent client was only for downloading the game client itself. The WoW patcher is not bittorrent, as far as I know. You should have no problems playing the game post launch.
I popped on during my lunch break to put a lock on my name on my Guild's server of choice, and it was rolling smooth as it did during Beta. I opened the box and was ingame in less that n 15 minutes, including creating a toon and creating a new account and doing billing info. Smooth as silk.
If WoW isn't as polished at release as an MMO can get, then what is the ruler we are going to judge these things by?
No game is perfect, or pleases everyone. Frankly, having played about a dozen MMOs, WoW comes off as the most ready for release candidate for the merket that I have seen thus far. I have Beta tested several MMOs in the past year, and the only happier Beta community I have seen was the ATITD2 community(which is, frankly, an niche market).
Regarding WoW, both ingame and out of game, I have seen very little chatter disparaging the game, with the exception of some very legitimate criticism regarding the state of PvP at launch. In defense of WoW's PvP model, people on the Standard Ruleset servers seemed happy as clams, and were having a blast raiding each other.
That individual stores are getting very, very limited quantities of these delivered. Given the numbers I have been hearing from folks who picked theirs up yesterday, many retailers are getting 2-3 copies of the CE per store, irrelevant of their pre-orders, or the size of the store. So it seems likely that we won't be seeing them on the shelves and that some pre-orders won't be filled today.
I pre-ordered the standard version, and according to my store, they have standard versions exceeding their pre-orders. So no problem there, hopefully.
Better than a Volcano
on
Hacking Vodka
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Finally a great science project that the kids can do at home.
It is the consequences of addiction that we should be concerned with.
What business is it of anyone else's if I, or anyone else, enjoys porn, coffee, whatever too much?/rant on
It's not their business, concern or problem unless the addiction causes some kind of criminal behavior or in any way begins to affect other people. If being a drunk makes a person violent, then, yes, arrest said person and charge them with a crime. Encourage them to stop drinking. If looking at porn gets a person off, and "damages their brain" who cares? It isn't anyone else's business.
I can't believe these people. They want to control all behavior, and seperate the "normal" from the "abnormal". Why? Because they are neurotic busybodies with lunatic notions regarding peoples rights, or lack of rights to control their own brain chemistry./rant off
Slashdot Mirror
There is both a Shadowrun game for NES and for Genesis. Both totally different games. Suprising, given the costs of developing a video game that they would do 2 totally seperate games for 2 systems based on a RPG, at the same time. Each one has it's merits, but neither is really compelling, in retrospect. The Genesis one is more accesable, and the SNES one can be irritating, but has a better story and graphics. Had either of these games been great or classic, perhaps the Shadowrun license would be much stronger today.
They definitely do own the electronic rights. There is an E-mail address at microsoft (shadowru@microsoft.com) that you can contact regarding things shadowrun, but no one has ever recieved a response that I know of. Many people have E-mailed in requests that Microsoft develop this property, however.
I heard similar rumors. The novella in question, is really excellent, one of the few really great pieces of literature to be attached to a RPG. Shadowrun always had excellent backround material.
I think that some of the problems with a Shadowrun based movie might be the involvement of Microsoft, who owns all of the electronic rights to FASA's material. So no games or MMO's or possibly even the movie without the interaction of FanPro, Microsoft, the author of the Novella. Might be too many fingers in the pie for the film to get made from that material. I am not sure who owns film rights to FASA's material. That might be a murky area, given the post-FASA state of affairs.
A lot of the rules could get arcane and take a lot of playtime to execute, but I always felt that the level of detail was worth it. Shadowrun, I always thought was too big for pen and paper, it really needed to be computer moderated, with all of the rules running in the backround. It would make an excellent MMO.
An experienced GM and players group can burn through a game pretty quickly, once everyone has a good grasp on the rules and some experience using them.
I always thought that Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0 had a lot of flaws and lacked rules for numerous activities. I'm not a GURPS fan, and am not familiar with those rules.
It doesn't work like that. Players who intend to disrupt an event don't come to fight. They come to scream obscenities and harass people verbally. They don't come with their PvP settings enabled, so you can't do a damn thing about it. They are there to disrupt via irritation, not to raid.
I'm not saying that I want to throw a wedding in a MMO, or even attend one. I'm just using that as an example of a player created event that can be absolutely ruined by greif play. I have seen this happen personally, and have heard numerous anecdotes that indicate that this is exactly the type of event that a greifer would most enjoy disrupting.
The article doesn't even begin to grasp the scale of greifing in online games. Griefers are not lone misanthropes looking torture the weak, they just start that way. They form their own groups and then use these groups/guilds/mafia to "police" the server in the form of organised greifing. To make matters worse, they are usually the most likely players to take advantage of bugs and/or exploits, which often unbalances the playing field further. Not being discriminating in their associates often characterises greifers in MMOs. They don't care who their friends are, so long as they can maintain strangth in numbers, and their rules of conduct are so minimal, that they can grow to outnumber any other organisation on thee server, becoming an unbalancing force of extreme inconvenience to other players. Against such dedicated players, there is often no real recourse, or even means to ignore and avoid, so younger players who have been on the recieving end of greifing behavior often break down and become counter-greifers, themselves. Which just magnifies the problem until the entire server revolves around the personal conflicts of the players who least represent the intention of the game, or the majority of the server population. It then becomes impossible to oraganise events on a server, or do any of the really interesting "player created content" that MMO developers yearn to inspire. Want to have a well planned wedding? Not a chance when guild X shows up, and starts screaming obscenities at the crowd or attacking people, if the rules allow. MMO developers are often afraid to take real action against the players involved in a greif oriented organisation. They desperately need the dollars, and can't afford to ban players right and left. Often greifing organisations are led by players who have numerous accounts, and banning the leaders of these organisations would cost hundreds of dollars per month, per individual, and would eventually lead to a noticable drop in revenue. Greifers are also the most likely poulation to purchase items, characters or money outside of game, to further increase their disporportionate power. They drive inflation on a server, and can further tip the PvP balance towards their favour by means not available to most players, or by means that the majority of players, and the developer feel are unethical.
I had the patch in less than 20 minutes, and I am behind two very serious firewalls. I don't like the patcher, either. It is the worlds most messed up BitTorrent client, IMHO. But it hasn't caused me any problems.
They do have direct downloads, and Fileplanet has them as well. So no worries for folks at school.
No, I wasn't on those servers, and you are correct that that was definitely a bump in the road. I was in SWG on launch day, and no one, on any server could play, at all. So I consider this a relatively smooth launch for a MMO. Especially given the tremendous influx of players and the popularity of the game.I
A lot of us veteran MMO players place a lot of value on the effectiveness of the first patch, post launch. Blizzard appears to be doing its job well. Many areas of the world were slighly modified (addtional mailboxes, npc with repair capabilities, etc...) to make irritations that don't add to gameplay go away. They seem to be struggling with implementing a satisfying fishing system, but are rightfully concerned with keeping fishing from being a botting paradse. Although there is nothing spectacularily ambitious with the first patch, it shows a commitment to quality playing and a dedication to attentive management rarely seen in online games.
Blizzard seems to be aggressively tackling the PvP system, and players, including PvP endgame folks seem hungry for the content that they are promising, but patient for its delivery. If Blizzard is able to add excellent PvP content quickly, and without bugs or hitches, they will pull off a major coup.
One of the critical issues of several other MMOs is that they are often released with critical issues at launch and have to spend the first 6-12 months addressing those issues, or
inserting launnch content post launch. WoW's launch was so smooth, that they seem able to really dive straight into the management and improvement role that a developer should be in, as opposed to a crisis management mode, as often is the case with ambitious MMOs, post-launch.
In addition, most of the rteally powerful gear is both level limited, and bind on pickup, which means that it cannot ever be traded once it has been looted. Blizzards binind process basically means that most of the really, really good items in the game have to be looted directly by their user. And the really excellent quest loot is tied to quests that can't be activated until you have finished other quests and you are at the proper level. It is nigh impossible to operate the kind of virtual item for real money economy that we have seen in other games. It would be far more profitable, in WoW to charge cash for the service of being led through the instance dungeons by a high level player, so that the lower level player can get loot that is usually out of their grasp. Or you could just join an ingame guild and do instances with higher level players without spending a dime, and have a good time to boot.
Why does this not come as a suprise to any of us.
Because if something is possible, someone, somewhere will try to do it, regardless of how reprehensible their motives are.
Why Florida? Florida might want to think about changing its state motto to "The Shame State".
SWG is basically a long term paid Beta test. Players who love Star Wars are footing the bill for the development process. I played for a year, and the game felt like Beta the whole time. Constant changes, huge balance issues, rampant bugs, etc... The only thing that kept it from going the way of Motor City Online (Fast Crash), was the attached Star Wars license. The question isn't "will the masochists who still play SWG like it" but "will the hordes of veteran players who left(and may have moved onto newer MMOs) come back for it?" Given the way that trust in Sony has gone downhill, they have a tough job ahead of them, and their team has never really been up to the job.
FYI, in WoW mobs heal back to 100% as soon as you are out of range. If you die on them, you are not unlikely to have to raise yourself, at half health/mana, right on their totally healed ass. And get killed again. The WoW designers seem very quick to prevent and catch exploits, and that's a good reason to play in itself.
No. As we know from the film Back to the Future, the number 88 is associated with time travel. So obviously, Blizzard is attempting to harness the power of time travel. For good or evil, only the future will tell.
$15 dollars a month is bupkis for quality entertainment. I live in Los Angeles and a movie costs between $10 -$14 dollars, parking anywhere costs $3-$5. When I buy into a MMO, I want to know that the developer is going to have adequate funding to not only host and support the game, but to be constantly adding content, patching errors, creating new art and code, etc... We have discussed this issue in numerous other threads, coming largely to the conclusion that most of that $15 per month goes to hosting and ongoing development/maintinence costs.
You can join any of the servers. They do reccomend servers in your region to you though. My guild has members in more than a dozen timezones and we are having no problem getting on the same server.
Was this during beta or post launch. They bittorrent client was only for downloading the game client itself. The WoW patcher is not bittorrent, as far as I know. You should have no problems playing the game post launch.
I popped on during my lunch break to put a lock on my name on my Guild's server of choice, and it was rolling smooth as it did during Beta. I opened the box and was ingame in less that n 15 minutes, including creating a toon and creating a new account and doing billing info. Smooth as silk.
Have you actually played the game?
Yeah, I'm getting a little miffy about Vivendi as well. They just don't seem to have the ability to serve their customers efficiently.
If WoW isn't as polished at release as an MMO can get, then what is the ruler we are going to judge these things by?
No game is perfect, or pleases everyone. Frankly, having played about a dozen MMOs, WoW comes off as the most ready for release candidate for the merket that I have seen thus far. I have Beta tested several MMOs in the past year, and the only happier Beta community I have seen was the ATITD2 community(which is, frankly, an niche market).
Regarding WoW, both ingame and out of game, I have seen very little chatter disparaging the game, with the exception of some very legitimate criticism regarding the state of PvP at launch. In defense of WoW's PvP model, people on the Standard Ruleset servers seemed happy as clams, and were having a blast raiding each other.
That individual stores are getting very, very limited quantities of these delivered. Given the numbers I have been hearing from folks who picked theirs up yesterday, many retailers are getting 2-3 copies of the CE per store, irrelevant of their pre-orders, or the size of the store. So it seems likely that we won't be seeing them on the shelves and that some pre-orders won't be filled today. I pre-ordered the standard version, and according to my store, they have standard versions exceeding their pre-orders. So no problem there, hopefully.
Finally a great science project that the kids can do at home.
It is the consequences of addiction that we should be concerned with. What business is it of anyone else's if I, or anyone else, enjoys porn, coffee, whatever too much? /rant on
It's not their business, concern or problem unless the addiction causes some kind of criminal behavior or in any way begins to affect other people. If being a drunk makes a person violent, then, yes, arrest said person and charge them with a crime. Encourage them to stop drinking. If looking at porn gets a person off, and "damages their brain" who cares? It isn't anyone else's business.
I can't believe these people. They want to control all behavior, and seperate the "normal" from the "abnormal". Why? Because they are neurotic busybodies with lunatic notions regarding peoples rights, or lack of rights to control their own brain chemistry. /rant off
You have obviously never had sex with Christ. If you had, you'd never look at internet porn again.