This is mostly correct. If you like, you can solo most everything easily. The only places these break down are against elite mobs (mobs of a certain level for hit/miss purposes, but which have much more hp and hit harder. These generally take 2-3 people of equal level to take down, at a minimum.) and in instances (which are all full of elite mobs).
I really enjoy both solo and duo play, and WoW does both wonderfully.
One thing of note; groups are pretty fluid in WoW. You might advertise that you're looking for a group for a particular mission in the zone channel. Three other people join up, you go do the mission for 20 minutes, you're done, and everyone goes about their way. It's very nice to be able to find groups easily if you want them, and even nicer to not require a group most of the time.
Seconded. I played a human paladin up to 45, a tauren shaman, an undead mage, and a night elf rogue up to 10-20 apiece, and each one was just fantastic.
Odd as it may sound, I'm highly considering not buying it when it goes retail, because it is MUCH too addictive.
For what it's worth, this is coming from someone that thought SWG was a steaming pile of crap.
But there's a mass limit on the ship that's fairly restrictive
...which makes a lot of sense in a frictionless, effectively gravity-less environment like outer freaking space. I'd expect decreased turning/accelerating capabilities with increased mass, but Mechwarrior-style weight limits on starships? Just another example (IMHO, naturally) of SOE's utterly horrid shortcut-style design surrounding the entire project.
My roommate and I are both ex-SWGers. He was in the JTL beta before he quit (I quit long before he did). Neither of us was impressed. I started with brilliant hopes for the game, which SOE proceeded to trash in more ways than I'd thought mortally possible. You'll have to forgive me if I'm a little bitter/cynical about the whole thing.
Heh. You think Double Dash is bad? Try four-player Legend of Zelda: Four Swords. That game can turn even the most kind-hearted friends into enemies out for your blood. The sorts of language I've observed in theoretically cooperative games would make a sailor blush.
Remember Battletech 2035? I played the beta for a few weeks, and it was a lot of fun. Not quite an MMORPG in the traditional sense, but it was an MMO game nonetheless.
That would be pretty badass, actually. Raise ambient light slightly over time. Each time you can see a strong light source, fire your weapon, or use your flashlight, you drop the ambient back to its original value. This would be even more evil that the gun/flashlight choice because it makes you choose whether to fire and blind yourself, or run and be able to see.
That's fairly standard these days, really. You write your engine and performance-critical things in C++ and then drive it all with a scripting language. Makes for easy development, at least.
Uhm...offtopic, but do you think it's a good idea to have that fresh, new gmail address unobfuscated in your sig, where every spam scraper and its mother will pick it up?
There are already md5 cracking utilities out there that are extremely fast. It'd probably be faster to brute force the hash on your own machine, really.
Now, distributed md5 cracking would be quite interesting.
Another good one is Ogre. It's purely a rendering engine, which lets you choose your collision/sound/networking/whatever else libraries, but there are a few engine frameworks springing up around it. It's fast, very clean, and capable of a lot of current generation effects (well, it has full shader support, so I guess it supports most anything you can code a shader for). If C# is your flavor, Ogre has a cousin called Axiom that is just as functional. Axiom is intended to be a game engine, but is very much in its infancy, so there isn't too much besides (rock solid) rendering in place there yet. Still, though, both are very clean and excellently designed, and are both well worth a look.
Not quite. It is only a browser, but the plugin structure and all that is different from Mozilla. Firefox is based on the Mozilla source, but it's been gutted and reworked to be leaner and meaner, and a lot of things have changed, so plugins and skins have to be Firefox-specific. However, it's tons faster than Mozilla and much smaller, too, and there are already tons of skins and plugins for it. The authoritative resource for Firefox skins/plugins is here, and more are being ported every day, so chances are, if there's a plugin or skin you love for Mozilla, you can find it for Firefox.
It's all about budgeting, really. Communicate to her that this is something you enjoy doing with your friends, much like other guys might go to bars or whatever. Work out time to play, and time to be with her. Let her know that if she really needs some together time, that she should let you know, and then you'll need to be aware of her needs and give where appropriate. Relationships are more about giving than taking - if she can give you time to play, and you can give her time to be together/talk/communicate, things'll work out rather well.
I have a girlfriend of almost 3 years now, and she's very much not a geek. Try as I might, I just can't really get her interested in games and such (well, she loved Kingdom Hearts, but that was it). However, she knows that I love gaming and such, and I know that she loves spending time together, so we just communicate our needs to each other and make allowances to each other, and everything has worked out wonderfully so far.
Like any relationship issue, communication and giving is often the key.
Man, I know the feeling. I first got UT when I was 15 or 16, and practically lived for that game. I was pretty good at it, IMO, and spent a good deal of time in both regular DM and instagib matches, and would usually come out on top. Now, I've been playing UT2K4 a lot, and I've come to realize that I'm much better at Assault and Onslaught than I am at DM and CTF, simply because my twitch skills have degraded. Onslaught is a great strategy game, and if you can coordinate a team of average players, you can usually beat an uncoordinated team of great players. I'm almost always the score leader in most of the Onslaught matches I play, but I have about a 1:1 frag:death ratio, which is obviously not going to be winning matches in DM. I popped into an instagib CTF game last night and was amazed at how badly I lagged behind the rest of the players in frags. For every frag, I'd have 2-3 deaths, because by the time I pulled the trigger, I was already dead. It's pretty humbling (and a little frustrating) to realize that you can't compete in that gametype simply because you no longer have the reflexes you had a few years ago.
Of course, it was fairly easy to tell how old the other players were, judging by the constant "faggot", "gay", and "n00b" trash talk being thrown around.
I dunno. While it'd be great to get paid for gaming, playing one game 10 hours a day, every day, would get rather monotonous and dull after a while. I enjoy gaming because I can play whatever game I want for however long I want. I might play some UT2K4 in three game modes, or Viewtiful Joe, or NWN, or whatever suits my fancy. Any one game after a while gets to be rather boring. My initial UT2K4 craze (ie, spending every spare moment on it) lasted about 2 weeks - now, I play maybe 2 hours a week. I mix it up with Legendary Halo when I don't feel like competing online, or maybe Soul Calibur when my roommate's in the mood for an ass-kicking. I'm a gamer, no doubt - I've sunk hundreds into building a capable gaming machine, and the living room is jammed with consoles - but any one pursuit, especilly forced, would just get dull. Gaming is a hobby, a release, and to have to "train" for it would be rather unenjoyable, I think.
Of course, I'm very much not a powergamer, and I have an actual 9-5 that I work and come home to relax from, so my perspective is probably quite different from the younger crowd's.
That'd be my guess. Multiple characters can make the game go a lot faster, but you have the overhead of $50 per client + $15/month per account. One of my more obsessive friends have four accounts, which amounts to $200 initial startup and $48-$60 month, depending on her billing setup. That's...a lot of money to put into a game for most anyone, really.
Heh...I understand what you mean. I avoided Halo for a while for that exact reason - I figured it was overhyped, and what have you. However, I gave it a shot when my roommate picked up a copy for the PC, and while it's not the second coming of Jesus that some fanboys tend to make it out to be, it's a very solid game, and I can honestly say that it was one of the more solid and enjoyable FPSes I've played in a long time. The single player campaign is a lot of fun, and throws you for some interesting loops at times, and the multiplayer is a different kind of multiplayer - halfway between WW2 sims and Unreal Tournament. It's paced a lot like WW2 FPSes, but the vehicles, weapons, and shields are very much more in the vein of the UT and Quake type of games. I enjoyed it enough that I ended up buying my own copy, for what it's worth.
Regardless of the marketing, Halo was a very solid game, and from the looks of it, Halo 2 will be, as well. For all the hype, if Bungie delivers a product on par with the original, they'll have another satisfied customer here.
Same here. I'm a firm believer in FPSes being done with mice, but I'm also a "precision" player. I don't like to get kills by spamming lead everywhere. I have played through Halo multiple times on both the XBox and the PC, and while the XBox is more than sufficient for single and co-op player modes (and I'm still a little miffed that co-op didn't make it into the PC version), it's frustrating to someone with my play style in multiplayer. My favorite weapon on the PC, by far, is the pistol, because I can take someone with full shields down in 3-4 headshots, even at long range. That's just not feasable on the console, unless your target is camping. When I'm in the living room, it always ends up being about the shotgun, rocket launcher, and grenades - close is good enough - because it's just too frustrating to play as I do with console controls.
That said, Halo got FPS controls done about as perfectly as you can get them on a console, and the game is still a ton of fun. It's just more precise on the PC. An FPS is really less about the analog run or fire controls, and more about hair-trigger responsive aiming controls. You generally have three move states: Stopped, walking, and running. Easy enough, no input, regular input (up arrow), modified input (shift+up). Fire, likewise, is either on or off. On a given gun, either the trigger is pulled far enough to fire, or it isn't - it's essentially a boolean state, and is suited just fine to a key/mouse setup. The analog controller argument is a good one in many games, but for FPSes, the only analog control really necessary is the aiming control, and a mouse's wide range of movement is just better suited to that application.
Pity. You missed a spectacular game that felt a lot more like "classic" Zelda than originally feared. It was very much its own game, but there were points in the game that I was just bowled ovr by nostalgia. I thought it was brilliant.
Uhm...they do have one character per account (per server), unless you unlock your Jedi slot. I have friends that actually have multiple accounts, but they're certainly in the minority, given the financial burden inherent in supporting multiple accounts. IIRC, this was done specifically to prevent the usage of mule/buffer characters.
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I almost halfway expect them to string us along until Nov 9, personally.
This is mostly correct. If you like, you can solo most everything easily. The only places these break down are against elite mobs (mobs of a certain level for hit/miss purposes, but which have much more hp and hit harder. These generally take 2-3 people of equal level to take down, at a minimum.) and in instances (which are all full of elite mobs).
I really enjoy both solo and duo play, and WoW does both wonderfully.
One thing of note; groups are pretty fluid in WoW. You might advertise that you're looking for a group for a particular mission in the zone channel. Three other people join up, you go do the mission for 20 minutes, you're done, and everyone goes about their way. It's very nice to be able to find groups easily if you want them, and even nicer to not require a group most of the time.
Seconded. I played a human paladin up to 45, a tauren shaman, an undead mage, and a night elf rogue up to 10-20 apiece, and each one was just fantastic.
Odd as it may sound, I'm highly considering not buying it when it goes retail, because it is MUCH too addictive.
For what it's worth, this is coming from someone that thought SWG was a steaming pile of crap.
My roommate and I are both ex-SWGers. He was in the JTL beta before he quit (I quit long before he did). Neither of us was impressed. I started with brilliant hopes for the game, which SOE proceeded to trash in more ways than I'd thought mortally possible. You'll have to forgive me if I'm a little bitter/cynical about the whole thing.
Heh. You think Double Dash is bad? Try four-player Legend of Zelda: Four Swords. That game can turn even the most kind-hearted friends into enemies out for your blood. The sorts of language I've observed in theoretically cooperative games would make a sailor blush.
...and I need to go pay a ticket at the Department of Redundant Redundancy for that "FPS framerates" phrase.
Don't you know? Your FPS numbers are directly related to your penis length! Only girlie men need sub-100 FPS framerates! ;)
Remember Battletech 2035? I played the beta for a few weeks, and it was a lot of fun. Not quite an MMORPG in the traditional sense, but it was an MMO game nonetheless.
Pity it was canceled.
That would be pretty badass, actually. Raise ambient light slightly over time. Each time you can see a strong light source, fire your weapon, or use your flashlight, you drop the ambient back to its original value. This would be even more evil that the gun/flashlight choice because it makes you choose whether to fire and blind yourself, or run and be able to see.
That's fairly standard these days, really. You write your engine and performance-critical things in C++ and then drive it all with a scripting language. Makes for easy development, at least.
Uhm...offtopic, but do you think it's a good idea to have that fresh, new gmail address unobfuscated in your sig, where every spam scraper and its mother will pick it up?
There are already md5 cracking utilities out there that are extremely fast. It'd probably be faster to brute force the hash on your own machine, really.
Now, distributed md5 cracking would be quite interesting.
If I could get a farming sim with Warthogs, I'd be all over it. :D
Another good one is Ogre. It's purely a rendering engine, which lets you choose your collision/sound/networking/whatever else libraries, but there are a few engine frameworks springing up around it. It's fast, very clean, and capable of a lot of current generation effects (well, it has full shader support, so I guess it supports most anything you can code a shader for). If C# is your flavor, Ogre has a cousin called Axiom that is just as functional. Axiom is intended to be a game engine, but is very much in its infancy, so there isn't too much besides (rock solid) rendering in place there yet. Still, though, both are very clean and excellently designed, and are both well worth a look.
Wait, you're pidgeonholing a game because of the engine it uses? That's like pidgeonholing a book because of the paper it's printed on.
Not quite. It is only a browser, but the plugin structure and all that is different from Mozilla. Firefox is based on the Mozilla source, but it's been gutted and reworked to be leaner and meaner, and a lot of things have changed, so plugins and skins have to be Firefox-specific. However, it's tons faster than Mozilla and much smaller, too, and there are already tons of skins and plugins for it. The authoritative resource for Firefox skins/plugins is here, and more are being ported every day, so chances are, if there's a plugin or skin you love for Mozilla, you can find it for Firefox.
It's all about budgeting, really. Communicate to her that this is something you enjoy doing with your friends, much like other guys might go to bars or whatever. Work out time to play, and time to be with her. Let her know that if she really needs some together time, that she should let you know, and then you'll need to be aware of her needs and give where appropriate. Relationships are more about giving than taking - if she can give you time to play, and you can give her time to be together/talk/communicate, things'll work out rather well.
I have a girlfriend of almost 3 years now, and she's very much not a geek. Try as I might, I just can't really get her interested in games and such (well, she loved Kingdom Hearts, but that was it). However, she knows that I love gaming and such, and I know that she loves spending time together, so we just communicate our needs to each other and make allowances to each other, and everything has worked out wonderfully so far.
Like any relationship issue, communication and giving is often the key.
Man, I know the feeling. I first got UT when I was 15 or 16, and practically lived for that game. I was pretty good at it, IMO, and spent a good deal of time in both regular DM and instagib matches, and would usually come out on top. Now, I've been playing UT2K4 a lot, and I've come to realize that I'm much better at Assault and Onslaught than I am at DM and CTF, simply because my twitch skills have degraded. Onslaught is a great strategy game, and if you can coordinate a team of average players, you can usually beat an uncoordinated team of great players. I'm almost always the score leader in most of the Onslaught matches I play, but I have about a 1:1 frag:death ratio, which is obviously not going to be winning matches in DM. I popped into an instagib CTF game last night and was amazed at how badly I lagged behind the rest of the players in frags. For every frag, I'd have 2-3 deaths, because by the time I pulled the trigger, I was already dead. It's pretty humbling (and a little frustrating) to realize that you can't compete in that gametype simply because you no longer have the reflexes you had a few years ago.
Of course, it was fairly easy to tell how old the other players were, judging by the constant "faggot", "gay", and "n00b" trash talk being thrown around.
I dunno. While it'd be great to get paid for gaming, playing one game 10 hours a day, every day, would get rather monotonous and dull after a while. I enjoy gaming because I can play whatever game I want for however long I want. I might play some UT2K4 in three game modes, or Viewtiful Joe, or NWN, or whatever suits my fancy. Any one game after a while gets to be rather boring. My initial UT2K4 craze (ie, spending every spare moment on it) lasted about 2 weeks - now, I play maybe 2 hours a week. I mix it up with Legendary Halo when I don't feel like competing online, or maybe Soul Calibur when my roommate's in the mood for an ass-kicking. I'm a gamer, no doubt - I've sunk hundreds into building a capable gaming machine, and the living room is jammed with consoles - but any one pursuit, especilly forced, would just get dull. Gaming is a hobby, a release, and to have to "train" for it would be rather unenjoyable, I think.
Of course, I'm very much not a powergamer, and I have an actual 9-5 that I work and come home to relax from, so my perspective is probably quite different from the younger crowd's.
That'd be my guess. Multiple characters can make the game go a lot faster, but you have the overhead of $50 per client + $15/month per account. One of my more obsessive friends have four accounts, which amounts to $200 initial startup and $48-$60 month, depending on her billing setup. That's...a lot of money to put into a game for most anyone, really.
Heh...I understand what you mean. I avoided Halo for a while for that exact reason - I figured it was overhyped, and what have you. However, I gave it a shot when my roommate picked up a copy for the PC, and while it's not the second coming of Jesus that some fanboys tend to make it out to be, it's a very solid game, and I can honestly say that it was one of the more solid and enjoyable FPSes I've played in a long time. The single player campaign is a lot of fun, and throws you for some interesting loops at times, and the multiplayer is a different kind of multiplayer - halfway between WW2 sims and Unreal Tournament. It's paced a lot like WW2 FPSes, but the vehicles, weapons, and shields are very much more in the vein of the UT and Quake type of games. I enjoyed it enough that I ended up buying my own copy, for what it's worth.
Regardless of the marketing, Halo was a very solid game, and from the looks of it, Halo 2 will be, as well. For all the hype, if Bungie delivers a product on par with the original, they'll have another satisfied customer here.
Same here. I'm a firm believer in FPSes being done with mice, but I'm also a "precision" player. I don't like to get kills by spamming lead everywhere. I have played through Halo multiple times on both the XBox and the PC, and while the XBox is more than sufficient for single and co-op player modes (and I'm still a little miffed that co-op didn't make it into the PC version), it's frustrating to someone with my play style in multiplayer. My favorite weapon on the PC, by far, is the pistol, because I can take someone with full shields down in 3-4 headshots, even at long range. That's just not feasable on the console, unless your target is camping. When I'm in the living room, it always ends up being about the shotgun, rocket launcher, and grenades - close is good enough - because it's just too frustrating to play as I do with console controls.
That said, Halo got FPS controls done about as perfectly as you can get them on a console, and the game is still a ton of fun. It's just more precise on the PC. An FPS is really less about the analog run or fire controls, and more about hair-trigger responsive aiming controls. You generally have three move states: Stopped, walking, and running. Easy enough, no input, regular input (up arrow), modified input (shift+up). Fire, likewise, is either on or off. On a given gun, either the trigger is pulled far enough to fire, or it isn't - it's essentially a boolean state, and is suited just fine to a key/mouse setup. The analog controller argument is a good one in many games, but for FPSes, the only analog control really necessary is the aiming control, and a mouse's wide range of movement is just better suited to that application.
Pity. You missed a spectacular game that felt a lot more like "classic" Zelda than originally feared. It was very much its own game, but there were points in the game that I was just bowled ovr by nostalgia. I thought it was brilliant.
Uhm...they do have one character per account (per server), unless you unlock your Jedi slot. I have friends that actually have multiple accounts, but they're certainly in the minority, given the financial burden inherent in supporting multiple accounts. IIRC, this was done specifically to prevent the usage of mule/buffer characters.
Of course, if you use the preloader. :)