Please stop killing SWG, Let it die with a semblance of dignity.
Everytime I read about SWG I get sad inside. I was in the last beta and played from retail until arount Jump to Lightspeed when it was clear that they had no idea of balance and weren't going to fix certain things.
At the start the game was really quite amazing and wonderful and promising.
It started out at about 75% complete (it was definately incomplete). Most professions I chose were broken: chef, squadleader. We all thought that after 3 or so months of patches it could be excellent, but instead of fixing things, the overwhealming majority of changes made things worse, less balanced, less interesting.
Basically they did a decent job and instead of polishing it up they smashed it up. I imagine there are alot of people who worked on the game who knew what was going on and who's efforts and suggestions to make the game go in the RIGHT direction were ignored by 'higher ups' I feel really sorry for those people.
It makes me mad, I wish that the release version of SWG was given to Mythic to 'finish' and improve. They would have done right by it I think. They certainately seem to listen to their customerbase and provide what their customers wants rather than tell the customers what kind of experiance they should want.
Those comments a while ago from some head SOE guy about how (paraphrased, but not much) "People don't want to be Uncle Owen! They want to be Chewie or Luke! They want to kill things for loot!" REALLY hit a nerve for me. Such ABSOLUTE IGNORANCE in regard to who is actually playing their game and what THEY want. SWG when I left was full of roleplayers and social players, People who just wanted to run their moisture farm and have a chat in the cantina over some blue milk, perhaps with the odd jaunt into the deep desert to collect some animal skins.
I really liked the whole surveying/harvester/factory thing, it meant I could spend an hour or so finding a mineral deposit and then mine it for what I needed while offline. But they tell us that "Nooo you find that too boring! You want to kill big monsters! And you want faster paced combat! And you want to be a central character in the galactic war! you want to be a hero!". Part of the charm of the game was that you were a 'nobody' in amongst the galactic war. Even if you were a member of the rebel or the empire you were still a lowly soldier. People liked it that way.
Why couldn't they have let SWG go in the direction it was going and started another SW battlefront / planetside type action MMORPG. I don't know much about business but I really think someone made a REALLY stupid decision (SOE or Lucasarts I dunno) and they lost out on ridiculous amounts of $ over their handling of Starwars in massively multiplayer format.
I can't go back to SWG now, even if I wanted to because they erased my favoured professions. Imagine if in an MMORPG they decided to simply REMOVE your class. Well, I think they just did something similar in EQ2 actually, though I don't know that game very well.
I can't believe how riled up I get about SWG when I start typing....
Nice comment, I didn't think about small vs large like that but it makes sense.
Large is less versatile.
My favourite modern controller is the GC, but I can play on any. Least favourite (even than the large xbox) is the PS 1/2 controller, but I'm guessing it's because I haven't had much experiance with it and haven't found my optimal grip for it yet. I find the handles too short and that the "face" slopes away/down too much.
(I'm used to playing with my thumbs in more of a "thumbs up" position, wheras the PS controller's buttons require you to bend the thumb down more, does that make any sense to anyone? - like the angle the face of the controller makes with the line of the handles is too much... but yeah I think it's just I'm not used to it.)
Seriously though, some things in that article seemed wrong to me.
One:
He mentions Magic The Gathering, which is the king of examples when it comes to money > skill seeing as some of the best cards are so rare you have to buy heaps of booster packs to get one or pay the going rate from a collector.
Seems hypocritical.
(Disclaimer I like MTG but haven't played in years.)
Also there is skill in WoW, a total newbie who has read the manual and some forums for 2 hours and played for 1 hour, with a level 60 decked out in purple will still lose to an experianced player in half decent gear.
I will concede that I agree that gear plays too large a role in the game, wearing great purple gear is the equivilent of wearing like 3 sets of green gear in extreme cases, and that seems pretty wrong.
But the author focuses on winning all the time. He ignores the fact that I the barely level 60 character with one purple item to my name came OH SO CLOSE to beathing that other character who has been raiding for 1 year is actually fun, and the gear gap lets me convince myself that I'd have won given equal gear and I feel I accomplished something.
If you need to wait to see who wins and check that you got your valuable Honourable Kill before deciding if you had fun or not then I don't think you're having fun at all.
Noone is saying that it's a great game, they're saying it SHOULDN'T BE BANNED.
I think that harry potter and the philosopher's stone for GBA is the crapiest game on the planet, does that mean it should be banned?
I'd like the right to actually judge for myself if the game is worth buying rather than someone I don't know playing it and deciding for me thankyou very much.
I can still hear the poor twinsen making that "Duh!" noise when he ran into a wall in sporty mode or got hurt.
And I can still hear some of the songs (from the second one I think).
"Ferry Man, If you please. Take me o'er the raging seas. For a few gems I'll take your boat, I cannot swim I cannot float."
or or
"Sendel is the prettiest, Funfrock is a dirty beast."
But I can also still remember my EXTREME FRUSTRATION at the weirdo saving mechanism in the first game. (second game was fine).
A 3rd would be SO awesome.
Hey by the way.. Is there any way to get the pharmacist and the guy who has a crush on the pharmacist together in LBA2? I'll have to check out your fansite...
"This is the real flaw in the back to the future style scenarios, they only work in terms of the macro variables. Marty is born, the parents get married. For the series to converge it has to at a minimum end in Marty getting into the time machine at the precise instant he did in the original universe."
He does. Well his previous self does. Does that not count? (I'm getting a little lost following this conversation so I'll stick to analysing the movie:P)
Presumably in the "converged" version of the world. His parents actually met the way we saw it happen in the past and the version of the present we see at the start of the movie is one of the points on the way to convergence? Or really the version of events at the end of all the movies is the converged state and the states in between are all points on the convergence, meaning that the universe is continually converging and will never fully converge... until people quit time traveling... or it's not possible... But for Marty he gets to see multiple different points on the way, HIS timeline does't change, only that of his past self, so his world is already converged... unless other people are timetravelling aswell and he is not with them... but he wouldn't notice them doing it...
Ok, I admit it, I'm lost and have no business being in this conversation...
This is exactly what I was going to say including the car manufacturer refute.
There may well end up being 5 or so MAJOR players in the MMORPG industry but there will always be room for other games. The companies operating the smaller games just need to keep costs down to be profitable. It's the same with most industries. 90% of mind/market share may be controlled by only a few companies who have the huge turnover and huge profits (and huge costs) but that still leaves 10% for all the smaller companies to provide a more specific product for those who want it.
Once a game is written the majority of MMORPG cost is proportional to the number of subscribers (for bandwidth, server maintenance and customer service). I admit that content creation cost doesn't generally scale with subscribers though, which may work against the smaller players a bit. But that's The same with films, which don't cost more if you have more people see it. And theres precedent for cheaper creation cost when you are expecting a smaller audience (smaller artsy films don't generally spend big $ on special effects or huge actor salaries).
I'm pretty sure that mythic are still making money off DAoC, they released an expansion just a couple months ago. The numbers are dwindling but they've been clustering servers to keep the game from getting too empty and presumably to save on hardware costs.
Also they are working on an MMORPG based on the Warhammer franchise.
To the GP (or GGP? I forget) Successful means making money, not just large or market share %. (see MS vs Sony vs Nintendo arguments for more on this).
King of the PvP hill belongs to Dark Age of Camelot which is entirely built around 3 realms fighting for land and control of powerful artifacts. It has siege machines, tower and keep capture and repair, guild ownership of towers and keeps, whole dungeons that are pvp areas. You can have sieges against massive castles with catapults, rams and trebuchets that last hours.
Or possibly guildwars for smaller scale pvp, but thats a bit light on some other elements of mmorpgs.
But to call World of Warcraft king of the pvp hill at the moment with it's 3 battlegrounds which play a like counterstrike or a FPS CTF is plain wrong. Hell they didn't even show a screenshot of PvP in WoW. Everyone is WoW crazy and forget about the mmorpgs that came before.
And you'd think they could have at least mentioned UO in passing.
*Disclaimer* I'm currently enjoying WoW and quite like the odd round of AB.
I'm not being funny or insulting, it had many many diablo2, starcraft and warcraft3 players who were totally new to MMORPGs. They got a whole slew of people interested in the genre that was previously quite 'hardcore'.
I remember reading newsgroup postings about wow before it was released saying things like: "WTF? monthy fee for the next warcraft game?! why don't they just put it on battle.net like the last one?".
Also WoW isn't some sort of grandfather of MMORPG, it copied alot of things from the games before it. Most of these 'properties' you are talking about probably originated long before WoW.
Ok, take 2 scenarios. Me driving my regular car on the freeway (highway, w/ever) and you driving your gamecube controller car on the same highway.
We both have mild hay fever and suddenly sneeze (or hit a small pothole, or hear a loud bang and flinch slightly).
Who runs off the road or into the oncoming traffic?
It's 16 bits per channel per sample yes, and that is only 65535 possible different values for that one sample yes. But there are 44 thousand samples recorded/played back per second.
Sound is only variations in air pressure. At any one instant in time the pressure is at a particular single level (per channel). So you only need one value for each instant of time. And for human ears 44 thousand times in one second is enough. And 65535 discreet levels is enough to represent the sample. (though some people would say they prefer higher).
It's like, how many different shades of gray do you need for a black and white photograph? You might only need 256 shades of grey to show a very convincing picture (the huge majority of computer monitors can only show 256 different shades of gray).
But basically most musicians should be familiar with the notion that sound can be represented as a waveform. A sound waveform is basically a drawing of how the speaker paper moves over time. Digitizing a waveform is just a case of recording the height of the wave to a certain accuracy (16 bits) every so often (44k times per second).
Well There is at least some overlap in the target markets.
Nintendo are stealing at least one customer from sony or MS, me. Unless it gets very poor reviews or is wildly expensive etc I'm getting a revolution and probably no other console. If it weren't for revolution I'd probably get one of the other 2. (Same goes at the moment for current gen, I only have a cube and if it weren't for the cube I'd probably have a PS2.)
So there you have it.
But I agree that nintendo doesn't care about having the highest market penetration or mind share etc. They are about making good games and making good money.
Also, getting into game dev myself, and valuing original game ideas, I think it's a very good thing that N is trying to reduce game budgets rather than help to blow out game budgets to movie like costs of 10 million etc where only the really 'safe' games ever get produced and theres no room for anything even slightly quirky.
And lastly, I'm sick of the 'street cool' attitude that gaming companies are trying to force. Computer games used to be geeky and us geeks were fine with that. Now they're all about being hip and edgey and something that the drug dealers would do in their spare time when they're not really beating people with bats. I actually feel sick when I think of things coming out these days like "Fifty Cent" the game.
Too many crap games are made, not for the purpose of making a game, but for the purpose of extending a product to more different types of media. Noone asks "Is it a good idea to make this into a game?" they only ask "What else is big on tv/film/radio that we can make into a crap game?"
Well that ranted on a bit, and made me seem like a Nintendo fanatic... I do realise that there are awesome titles for all consoles that don't fit this formula of crap. Like stuff from bioware, fable, burnout (though that one is starting to wear thin) for xbox, and lots of stuff for ps2. I also realise that Nintendo attracts all the spongebob and harry potter etc games which are equally stupid and formulaic. So I guess that last rant about crap games isn't something that is console specific.
It's not your fault that they provided stupid things like doctor buffs.
(Doctor buffs are what drove me away, before the boost to food and drink was in).
In SWG a character that is buffed with doctor buffs is something like 5x as effective, as in they can kill 5 creatures at once that they could only have killed one of before. That is a game design DISASTER.
There were queues of people lined up in the streets of major cities waiting for the doctor at the end to buff them.
It's not the players fault, it's the completly negligent and ridiculous game design that brought SWG down.
And now I have no idea WTF they are doing to the game I once thought was fantastic. Kill, get treasure, repeat? UM NO THANKS?!
In short I have absolutely no respect for anyone who had anything to do with that game post launch. Apart from actual bugs (like there being no certification for a particular blaster for like a year) the game was at it's best on launch.
I agree,
In UO it was a little worse because the speed you can run was based on ping, a person with a ping of 20 could literally run faster than a player with a ping of 100. I played from australia with a ping of 500+ so I didn't pvp much.
But consider that you have to push a button every time you shoot. If they aren't careful with the code then you can easily imagine a situation where the server notifies the client when your gun is ready to shoot again and then enables the shoot button on the client, the user then presses shoot and the shoot command is sent back to the server. That would mean, with a gun that shoots once per second, a 50 ms higher ping would shoot 9 times in 10 seconds as opposed to 10 times in 10 seconds. Granted you can code around this a bit, it's possible they wont bother to.
Speaking of UO, I think that it has gone through more dramatic changes than this is going to be. (In regard to the quote: "This marks the most dramatic change ever made to a MMOG already live").
Splitting the world into 2 mirror images (that you can travel between) with different rulesets and therefore doubling the world size was IMO a bigger change. It also drastically changed the game dynamic, people hated and loved the new version (where anyone who didn't want to get PKed could finally move to the world where they were immune, and people who liked to PK ended up with far fewer targets, same thing for thieves who could steal items from other, sometimes without them noticing until after the fact when they checked their inventory.).
Aswell as that it's had a melee skill system added, a party system added, changed the weapon and damage system to have various damage types such as elemental damage types. Changed magic weapons from having only flat damage bonuses to having all sorts of bonuses. They did a flat 50% reduction for all pvp combat damage at one point to make fights last longer. Completely changed the way your (3) stats effect your character. They also made it so that player houses (which were in from launch or at least VERY early) are now completely customizable, you can design your own house, the walls, the stairs etc, sims style.
I guess alot of the above changes are evolutionary and which change is "most dramatic" probably depends on personal opinion but I think that the splitting of britannia into trammel and felluca is the most dramatic thing so far. (it wasn't just an expansion or anything). Bigger than consolidating classes and changing the combat system anyway.
Mafia had a neat storyline and interesting thing going on with the stealing of cars.
You had to learn how to steal each model of car, and you steal it by breaking into a parked car without anyone seeing, not just walking in front of it while it's moving and then pulling the driver out.
You have a garage at your hideout (well it's an italian restaurant) where you can keep very many cars that you've previously stolen, and you can drive whichever one you wanted for any mission.
Also you often had to drive very sensibly in the game, you'd get police on you by speeding and things.
And there was alot of FPS action in it. The missions were pretty cool, I'm just remembering them and there was alot to them. Stopping the bad guy from leaving at the airport and stuff. (And the whole morality thing going on - you start as just a driver but end up doing some very bad things that you really don't want to do, so you decide you have to get out somehow...)
Yeah that game was very cool... Pretty much a ripoff of the gta's but really well done and better IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
Please stop killing SWG, Let it die with a semblance of dignity.
Everytime I read about SWG I get sad inside. I was in the last beta and played from retail until arount Jump to Lightspeed when it was clear that they had no idea of balance and weren't going to fix certain things.
At the start the game was really quite amazing and wonderful and promising. It started out at about 75% complete (it was definately incomplete). Most professions I chose were broken: chef, squadleader. We all thought that after 3 or so months of patches it could be excellent, but instead of fixing things, the overwhealming majority of changes made things worse, less balanced, less interesting.
Basically they did a decent job and instead of polishing it up they smashed it up. I imagine there are alot of people who worked on the game who knew what was going on and who's efforts and suggestions to make the game go in the RIGHT direction were ignored by 'higher ups' I feel really sorry for those people.
It makes me mad, I wish that the release version of SWG was given to Mythic to 'finish' and improve. They would have done right by it I think. They certainately seem to listen to their customerbase and provide what their customers wants rather than tell the customers what kind of experiance they should want.
Those comments a while ago from some head SOE guy about how (paraphrased, but not much) "People don't want to be Uncle Owen! They want to be Chewie or Luke! They want to kill things for loot!" REALLY hit a nerve for me. Such ABSOLUTE IGNORANCE in regard to who is actually playing their game and what THEY want. SWG when I left was full of roleplayers and social players, People who just wanted to run their moisture farm and have a chat in the cantina over some blue milk, perhaps with the odd jaunt into the deep desert to collect some animal skins.
I really liked the whole surveying/harvester/factory thing, it meant I could spend an hour or so finding a mineral deposit and then mine it for what I needed while offline. But they tell us that "Nooo you find that too boring! You want to kill big monsters! And you want faster paced combat! And you want to be a central character in the galactic war! you want to be a hero!". Part of the charm of the game was that you were a 'nobody' in amongst the galactic war. Even if you were a member of the rebel or the empire you were still a lowly soldier. People liked it that way.
Why couldn't they have let SWG go in the direction it was going and started another SW battlefront / planetside type action MMORPG. I don't know much about business but I really think someone made a REALLY stupid decision (SOE or Lucasarts I dunno) and they lost out on ridiculous amounts of $ over their handling of Starwars in massively multiplayer format.
I can't go back to SWG now, even if I wanted to because they erased my favoured professions. Imagine if in an MMORPG they decided to simply REMOVE your class. Well, I think they just did something similar in EQ2 actually, though I don't know that game very well.
I can't believe how riled up I get about SWG when I start typing....
> I was also hoping that the mouse would make the list. I've always hated using a mouse for game controls.
Yeah I much prefer playing Command and Conquer and Spider Solitare with a D-Pad.
Nice comment, I didn't think about small vs large like that but it makes sense.
Large is less versatile.
My favourite modern controller is the GC, but I can play on any. Least favourite (even than the large xbox) is the PS 1/2 controller, but I'm guessing it's because I haven't had much experiance with it and haven't found my optimal grip for it yet. I find the handles too short and that the "face" slopes away/down too much.
(I'm used to playing with my thumbs in more of a "thumbs up" position, wheras the PS controller's buttons require you to bend the thumb down more, does that make any sense to anyone? - like the angle the face of the controller makes with the line of the handles is too much... but yeah I think it's just I'm not used to it.)
OMG I forgot all the stupid br's
(Why can't slashdot function like every other message board?)
Seriously though, some things in that article seemed wrong to me. One: He mentions Magic The Gathering, which is the king of examples when it comes to money > skill seeing as some of the best cards are so rare you have to buy heaps of booster packs to get one or pay the going rate from a collector. Seems hypocritical. (Disclaimer I like MTG but haven't played in years.) Also there is skill in WoW, a total newbie who has read the manual and some forums for 2 hours and played for 1 hour, with a level 60 decked out in purple will still lose to an experianced player in half decent gear. I will concede that I agree that gear plays too large a role in the game, wearing great purple gear is the equivilent of wearing like 3 sets of green gear in extreme cases, and that seems pretty wrong. But the author focuses on winning all the time. He ignores the fact that I the barely level 60 character with one purple item to my name came OH SO CLOSE to beathing that other character who has been raiding for 1 year is actually fun, and the gear gap lets me convince myself that I'd have won given equal gear and I feel I accomplished something. If you need to wait to see who wins and check that you got your valuable Honourable Kill before deciding if you had fun or not then I don't think you're having fun at all.
Noone is saying that it's a great game, they're saying it SHOULDN'T BE BANNED.
I think that harry potter and the philosopher's stone for GBA is the crapiest game on the planet, does that mean it should be banned?
I'd like the right to actually judge for myself if the game is worth buying rather than someone I don't know playing it and deciding for me thankyou very much.
I love LBA and LBA2.
I can still hear the poor twinsen making that "Duh!" noise when he ran into a wall in sporty mode or got hurt.
And I can still hear some of the songs (from the second one I think). "Ferry Man, If you please. Take me o'er the raging seas. For a few gems I'll take your boat, I cannot swim I cannot float."
or or
"Sendel is the prettiest, Funfrock is a dirty beast."
But I can also still remember my EXTREME FRUSTRATION at the weirdo saving mechanism in the first game. (second game was fine).
A 3rd would be SO awesome.
Hey by the way.. Is there any way to get the pharmacist and the guy who has a crush on the pharmacist together in LBA2? I'll have to check out your fansite...
"This is the real flaw in the back to the future style scenarios, they only work in terms of the macro variables. Marty is born, the parents get married. For the series to converge it has to at a minimum end in Marty getting into the time machine at the precise instant he did in the original universe."
:P)
He does. Well his previous self does. Does that not count? (I'm getting a little lost following this conversation so I'll stick to analysing the movie
Presumably in the "converged" version of the world. His parents actually met the way we saw it happen in the past and the version of the present we see at the start of the movie is one of the points on the way to convergence? Or really the version of events at the end of all the movies is the converged state and the states in between are all points on the convergence, meaning that the universe is continually converging and will never fully converge... until people quit time traveling... or it's not possible... But for Marty he gets to see multiple different points on the way, HIS timeline does't change, only that of his past self, so his world is already converged... unless other people are timetravelling aswell and he is not with them... but he wouldn't notice them doing it...
Ok, I admit it, I'm lost and have no business being in this conversation...
You'll have to ask Robert Zemenkis (sp?).
Er, his NAME is "Baby Mario".
Sheesh
This is exactly what I was going to say including the car manufacturer refute.
There may well end up being 5 or so MAJOR players in the MMORPG industry but there will always be room for other games. The companies operating the smaller games just need to keep costs down to be profitable. It's the same with most industries. 90% of mind/market share may be controlled by only a few companies who have the huge turnover and huge profits (and huge costs) but that still leaves 10% for all the smaller companies to provide a more specific product for those who want it.
Once a game is written the majority of MMORPG cost is proportional to the number of subscribers (for bandwidth, server maintenance and customer service). I admit that content creation cost doesn't generally scale with subscribers though, which may work against the smaller players a bit. But that's The same with films, which don't cost more if you have more people see it. And theres precedent for cheaper creation cost when you are expecting a smaller audience (smaller artsy films don't generally spend big $ on special effects or huge actor salaries).
Mythic - DAoC
I'm pretty sure that mythic are still making money off DAoC, they released an expansion just a couple months ago. The numbers are dwindling but they've been clustering servers to keep the game from getting too empty and presumably to save on hardware costs.
Also they are working on an MMORPG based on the Warhammer franchise.
To the GP (or GGP? I forget) Successful means making money, not just large or market share %. (see MS vs Sony vs Nintendo arguments for more on this).
Just reread this and I take back the counterstrike statement, it's nothing like counterstrike, more like Unreal Tournament.
Seconded.
King of the PvP hill belongs to Dark Age of Camelot which is entirely built around 3 realms fighting for land and control of powerful artifacts. It has siege machines, tower and keep capture and repair, guild ownership of towers and keeps, whole dungeons that are pvp areas. You can have sieges against massive castles with catapults, rams and trebuchets that last hours.
Or possibly guildwars for smaller scale pvp, but thats a bit light on some other elements of mmorpgs.
But to call World of Warcraft king of the pvp hill at the moment with it's 3 battlegrounds which play a like counterstrike or a FPS CTF is plain wrong. Hell they didn't even show a screenshot of PvP in WoW. Everyone is WoW crazy and forget about the mmorpgs that came before.
And you'd think they could have at least mentioned UO in passing.
*Disclaimer* I'm currently enjoying WoW and quite like the odd round of AB.
WoW _started_ with a community of noobs.
I'm not being funny or insulting, it had many many diablo2, starcraft and warcraft3 players who were totally new to MMORPGs. They got a whole slew of people interested in the genre that was previously quite 'hardcore'.
I remember reading newsgroup postings about wow before it was released saying things like: "WTF? monthy fee for the next warcraft game?! why don't they just put it on battle.net like the last one?".
Also WoW isn't some sort of grandfather of MMORPG, it copied alot of things from the games before it. Most of these 'properties' you are talking about probably originated long before WoW.
Joke release date?
Ok, take 2 scenarios. Me driving my regular car on the freeway (highway, w/ever) and you driving your gamecube controller car on the same highway. We both have mild hay fever and suddenly sneeze (or hit a small pothole, or hear a loud bang and flinch slightly). Who runs off the road or into the oncoming traffic?
Or Andy.
You missed one point.
It's 16 bits per channel per sample yes, and that is only 65535 possible different values for that one sample yes. But there are 44 thousand samples recorded/played back per second.
Sound is only variations in air pressure. At any one instant in time the pressure is at a particular single level (per channel). So you only need one value for each instant of time. And for human ears 44 thousand times in one second is enough. And 65535 discreet levels is enough to represent the sample. (though some people would say they prefer higher).
It's like, how many different shades of gray do you need for a black and white photograph? You might only need 256 shades of grey to show a very convincing picture (the huge majority of computer monitors can only show 256 different shades of gray).
But basically most musicians should be familiar with the notion that sound can be represented as a waveform. A sound waveform is basically a drawing of how the speaker paper moves over time. Digitizing a waveform is just a case of recording the height of the wave to a certain accuracy (16 bits) every so often (44k times per second).
It's monkeys.
Well There is at least some overlap in the target markets.
Nintendo are stealing at least one customer from sony or MS, me. Unless it gets very poor reviews or is wildly expensive etc I'm getting a revolution and probably no other console. If it weren't for revolution I'd probably get one of the other 2. (Same goes at the moment for current gen, I only have a cube and if it weren't for the cube I'd probably have a PS2.)
So there you have it.
But I agree that nintendo doesn't care about having the highest market penetration or mind share etc. They are about making good games and making good money.
Also, getting into game dev myself, and valuing original game ideas, I think it's a very good thing that N is trying to reduce game budgets rather than help to blow out game budgets to movie like costs of 10 million etc where only the really 'safe' games ever get produced and theres no room for anything even slightly quirky.
And lastly, I'm sick of the 'street cool' attitude that gaming companies are trying to force. Computer games used to be geeky and us geeks were fine with that. Now they're all about being hip and edgey and something that the drug dealers would do in their spare time when they're not really beating people with bats. I actually feel sick when I think of things coming out these days like "Fifty Cent" the game.
Too many crap games are made, not for the purpose of making a game, but for the purpose of extending a product to more different types of media. Noone asks "Is it a good idea to make this into a game?" they only ask "What else is big on tv/film/radio that we can make into a crap game?"
Well that ranted on a bit, and made me seem like a Nintendo fanatic... I do realise that there are awesome titles for all consoles that don't fit this formula of crap. Like stuff from bioware, fable, burnout (though that one is starting to wear thin) for xbox, and lots of stuff for ps2. I also realise that Nintendo attracts all the spongebob and harry potter etc games which are equally stupid and formulaic. So I guess that last rant about crap games isn't something that is console specific.
damn forgot to preview :/
It's not your fault that they provided stupid things like doctor buffs. (Doctor buffs are what drove me away, before the boost to food and drink was in). In SWG a character that is buffed with doctor buffs is something like 5x as effective, as in they can kill 5 creatures at once that they could only have killed one of before. That is a game design DISASTER. There were queues of people lined up in the streets of major cities waiting for the doctor at the end to buff them. It's not the players fault, it's the completly negligent and ridiculous game design that brought SWG down. And now I have no idea WTF they are doing to the game I once thought was fantastic. Kill, get treasure, repeat? UM NO THANKS?! In short I have absolutely no respect for anyone who had anything to do with that game post launch. Apart from actual bugs (like there being no certification for a particular blaster for like a year) the game was at it's best on launch.
My mouse is larger than my monitor you insensitive clod!
I agree, In UO it was a little worse because the speed you can run was based on ping, a person with a ping of 20 could literally run faster than a player with a ping of 100. I played from australia with a ping of 500+ so I didn't pvp much.
But consider that you have to push a button every time you shoot. If they aren't careful with the code then you can easily imagine a situation where the server notifies the client when your gun is ready to shoot again and then enables the shoot button on the client, the user then presses shoot and the shoot command is sent back to the server. That would mean, with a gun that shoots once per second, a 50 ms higher ping would shoot 9 times in 10 seconds as opposed to 10 times in 10 seconds. Granted you can code around this a bit, it's possible they wont bother to.
Speaking of UO, I think that it has gone through more dramatic changes than this is going to be. (In regard to the quote: "This marks the most dramatic change ever made to a MMOG already live").
Splitting the world into 2 mirror images (that you can travel between) with different rulesets and therefore doubling the world size was IMO a bigger change. It also drastically changed the game dynamic, people hated and loved the new version (where anyone who didn't want to get PKed could finally move to the world where they were immune, and people who liked to PK ended up with far fewer targets, same thing for thieves who could steal items from other, sometimes without them noticing until after the fact when they checked their inventory.).
Aswell as that it's had a melee skill system added, a party system added, changed the weapon and damage system to have various damage types such as elemental damage types. Changed magic weapons from having only flat damage bonuses to having all sorts of bonuses. They did a flat 50% reduction for all pvp combat damage at one point to make fights last longer. Completely changed the way your (3) stats effect your character. They also made it so that player houses (which were in from launch or at least VERY early) are now completely customizable, you can design your own house, the walls, the stairs etc, sims style.
I guess alot of the above changes are evolutionary and which change is "most dramatic" probably depends on personal opinion but I think that the splitting of britannia into trammel and felluca is the most dramatic thing so far. (it wasn't just an expansion or anything). Bigger than consolidating classes and changing the combat system anyway.
I loved Mafia, and I'm not too hot on GTA3+.
Mafia had a neat storyline and interesting thing going on with the stealing of cars. You had to learn how to steal each model of car, and you steal it by breaking into a parked car without anyone seeing, not just walking in front of it while it's moving and then pulling the driver out.
You have a garage at your hideout (well it's an italian restaurant) where you can keep very many cars that you've previously stolen, and you can drive whichever one you wanted for any mission.
Also you often had to drive very sensibly in the game, you'd get police on you by speeding and things.
And there was alot of FPS action in it. The missions were pretty cool, I'm just remembering them and there was alot to them. Stopping the bad guy from leaving at the airport and stuff. (And the whole morality thing going on - you start as just a driver but end up doing some very bad things that you really don't want to do, so you decide you have to get out somehow...)
Yeah that game was very cool... Pretty much a ripoff of the gta's but really well done and better IMO.