It certainly seems like Bioware might be *the* people to revolutionize the MMO. I mean, they've pretty much put out some of the best RPG's in the last five years, maybe arguably decade. Allowing them to take their storytelling onto the MMO stage, and given what's in this interview... I'm hopeful this will be something different.
There are amtrak subsidiaries servicing phoenix - But they all go NORTH out of town, according to the route atlas on the amtrak site.
There is no such link between Tucson and Phoenix that I can find.
I think that were this the case, Atari could have easily saved their own bacon by coming out and saying 'These reviews are probably based on incomplete code', etc. After all, there are plenty of other games where code was shown or released that wasn't 'up to snuff', and the producer / developer acknowledged that, and the game went on to be a lot better than that initial sneak peek.
Then again, since Atari isn't _Atari_ anymore, and just a boilerplate, I don't feel like I ought to be defending them so much.
These corporate wars?
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/cyberstorm2corporatewars/index.html
I missed not getting to play the original Cyberstorm. Hexes were a much better play surface than squares.
Maybe someone should make sure they're using Hexes for the second operation, might suck less...
Well, keep in mind that they Cannot Win in the whole combat versus social thing. The WOTC boards basically exploded when they announced they would do something along the lines of social conflict resolution that could go beyond the diplomacy skills and what not.
I mean, there's this strong animosity between people who go 'bah, D&D is all tactical combat' and then 'Bah, D&D should leave the talking to roleplaying!" so, you can't make either happy unless all of that social resolution is an optional rule that some GMs can throw away... which means that building it into a core class would be sub-optimal. I mean, sure, bards can take diplomacy, and almost always do, but alot of people want the talky-talky to stay the frak away from their dice. Keeping something like social combat out of a Bard's special abilities might be... tough.
Which is a little weird, because WOD players have looked down their noses at D&d players (in specific cases, it's not actually the true stereotype) and they're talking from a system where social conflict, with dice and all, is just as important as mental or physical confrontation, then alot of people who do the 'ROLEplay not ROLLplay!' schtick insist that there should only be talk, not systems for social conflicts in D&D. I think it's a fundamental idea that talking (diplomacy) can't systematically influence PCs, but magic can in D&D, where both are equally effective in player influencing in WOD.
In a realistic straight forward D&D game, tho... I do like the bard and their role. Of course, if you want to be a real jerk, try taking Bardic Knack (PHBII) and Jack of All trades (Complete Adventurer). Being able to do a little bit of -everything-, even if badly, is how my whip-and-sword wielding Ocean-esque bard leads our party in Red Hand of Doom.
I'm currently playing a 5th level bard in 3.5, so I completely understand. My issue with the MMO thing is that people dismiss it as a dumbing down of D&D and use it as a baseless argument against the new system.
Rather than trip up over myself in a gut reaction based on 'what I've read', take a look at http://www.enworld.org/index.php?page=4e#classes and maybe get a hold of Races and Classes, I'm sure you can acquire a PDF or borrow a copy if you really want to, and not pay for a novelty book. But, there is a discussion of this in there. They basically said, we don't want to take those out of D&D - As I understand, the idea is to put out their class expansions in very focused books that function like additional PHBs, which sounds like a better solution than the plethora of races / complete books that are out now. The reason that some classes aren't in the PHB '1' is because they have not finalized their 4th edition versions.... and in fact, want to avoid the 'patching' problem buy having to fix a 'core' class they released too early to make fans happy, and instead release them all in another book months down the line.
Call me an apologist, but I spend alot, perhaps too much time, ferreting out the 4th edition information, and I have some faith in the R&D people, at least. Marketing... I'm not defending that:D
And.... Druids and bards not 'Broken' in 3.5? Druids became, shall we say, Amazing with splatbooks, and bards really needed splatbooks to fully work in a party of less than 5. Bards straddled too many roles to hold down a party role without some help, but were, undoubtedly, the best 5th party member ever.
The entire 'They're killing off classes' meme is as bad as the 'It's becoming an MMO' meme. They've said, many times, that they don't want to release something that doesn't work. Druids, Bards, and Barbarians all apparently needed more time to work into the design philosophy of the new game. They plan on releasing them, once they work. But for now, the 'core' four classes, and similar mixed-up versions of them that still fill the four basic roles, are what's on the drawing board for initial release.
Examine the above - A complaint that rules in 3.5 were, at times, clunky. I believe that's pretty much Design Element #2 (Right after, make everything fun) that the R&D team is focusing on....
Frankly, Here's the deal... Alot of people here must not have played the same First and Third edition D&D games I did... or, at least, not read what the designers have put out for free about 4th.
You don't have to buy these books to see what 4th is like. They are collectors items, fanboyish treatises... But, there is some cool stuff in these books. My solution was to have one member of our (Large) gaming group buy the books, and then we passed it around for a few weeks and all got a good look.
But, really, there isn't anything in the books you can't find either on ENworld or the official website (And, for a few months, D&D insider is free and you can see everything they post on.)
Alot of the issues commenters are bringing up have also been addressed, directly, by the R&D staff mixed in with the Gleemax Staff blogs.
So, here's where you ought to go if you're on the fence or curious. Then you can come back and contribute to the 4th ed discussion... because most of these comments have been dealt with by -someone- in R&D.
On the contrary, from what I have seen (And I've followed every word from the R&D team religiously,) alot of this is being handled. A recent Design and Development article specifically discussed the magic item problem you've described, and... balor Mining? That's totally in the realm of theoretical D&D, which we save for the forums and expect DMs to put a stop to. I really don't think that kind of player is the real target audience for D&D.
After all, I joke with my friends about the commoner-quarterstaff railgun (Readied action, 0 gp items, vagueness in crafting rules and a dash of physics...) or the infinite-light cone bucket (Again, readied actions), but we know that none of that is a real part of the game.
Just look at how RAW (Rules-as-Written) and RAI (Rules as intended) stack up. Most GMs are smart enough to figure out the few rough edges in the former, and wizards is still making an effort to sand down those edges...
I'm confident. I think that they understand what's going on now.
I only have tenative ties to yahoo through a few newsgroups that use Yahoo (ick, I know) but all... yes, pretty much all of the spam I receive in mail, in IMs, and in 'friends list adds' are all from Yahoo sources. I know it's not technically their fault, but sometimes it's ridiculous. I fire up Pidgin and there's 5 messages, and then two or three newsgroups a week get hit with spam messages. I can pretty much tell because all of it has one handle I only used for a yahoo group.
Frankly, I wish Yahoo would spend more time dealing with the garbage that's ruining their Groups instead of tinkering with their front page every week.
Nope, but it will play Haze when it comes out.... and Killzone 2.
Just because it doesn't have the acceptable, but seriously overhyped MS flaot title doesn't mean it's not a great system. It will have something comparable tho.
Just, so you guys know... Sony Electronics, Sony Pictures, Sony Music, and Sony Playstation (That's SCEA SCEE and SCEJ) are all, for the most part, separate companies. Playstation can't say or do much about the DRM issues the others decide on.
I have to say as someone who both uses a slew of books in my games and runs a lot of modern 3.5 adventures and settings... Munchkinism is common, but the core rule books aren't so much designed with it in mind. Splat-book fishing can create characters like that, but 3.5 D&D does not have to be that way. In my case my players prefer to tweak a bit, so I simply tweak back enough to make things interesting and keep them balanced as my stories developed. It's a matter of player style as much as the system.
i believe, absed on other D20 rules sets, That's +2 for flanking and +1 within 30' if you have point blank shot... just Sayin.
Vista is a trap - For most gamers
on
Is Vista a Trap?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Since I know we have more of the CS, IT crowd than gamers here...
Vista's problems have been mentioned, directly, But another massive issue is the way that Microsoft is beginning to work with game developers. First, it's the 'Games for Windows' tag, and treating the PC like a console in terms of branding. Second, the games for vista is going to slowly force pretty much every gamer on the planet to switch to vista, or try to. Granted, gamers tend to have the rigs that can handle it, at the bleeding edge... But, then there are many casual gamers who buy into the back end of the technology curve. I and many others have absolutely no desire to use vista, but in a year or so the number of playable games will begin to dwindle as titles come out for vista only.
It's bad enough that my friend is punished for running windows 2000 on her gaming rig because many games intended for XP or Vista won't run on the system.
The forced obsolescence thing is la real nightmare in that respect, and it's stupid that many bleeding edge games will be 'Vista/XBOX360 exclusive' titles, and that much of their user base, the reluctant windows users called Gamers, are being hooked into the new software.
Alot of people have pointed out the default page business, but if I'm not mistaken, the current version of Yahoo! instant Messenger defaults to changing your start page to Yahoo, which could certainly compound this problem. A little finesse and the unchecking of a dozen boxes is required to avoid this, and something tells me the kind of user who would search for Google may not be that attentive.
I only skimmed the comments but didn't see anyone pointing out that... I don't have the passage in front of me, but i believe that gold farming is specifically outlawed in the WOW EULA that players are forced to agree to with every single update...
I really don't care to consider myself part of any generation whose title is that of a fox owned sell-out conglomerate. I think that while there are valid applications of the technology and success stories, myspavce is a hot topic type site. I don't mean to bash people for using it, but it seems, from my experience, that the place is, on the whole, not unlike AOL - Internet for the rest of the world, especially teenagers who don't neccessarily consort with anyone they don't know IRL.
Of course, I also think that the people on IMs who only have local people on their lists have no respect for the medium.. I had friends that nonchalantly logged into other people's accounts to propagate lies, create fights and stir tensiosn up, with the whole thing being a joke they can clear up with a face to face meeting... Some of us with friends on other continents don't have that luxury, and I don't appreciate that sort of immaturity. Not that that's everyone of course, just one example of why (what seems to me) a vast majority of teengers who just use the net to talk with local friends may not respect the medium as much as those who do use it to create a smaller world.
On a more positive note, I can foresee one thin coming from myspace that oculd have a huge impact on the net as a whole. Blogging is a huge topic right now.. and, in some ways, part of the popularity of blogs might be pinned on things like Livejournals. While occasionally used for the typical teen angsting and drama that we may not consider an advantage to society, the sort of wide teenage base acceptance of these might have led to more acceptance of the 'True' blogs that sprang up afterwords. Maybe Myspace will spawn something simmilar, in the sense of another generation of large, widely used communities. After all, if myspace's layout does offer some advantage or revolution, I'd hate to think that Murdoch is making money off of it.
Actually, I would hate for AOL to stop giving/sending/forcing out their CDs... I mean, they are pretty much the #1 source of ammo for my home made spinfusor. I might as well have unlimited ammo hacks...
Slashdot Mirror
I posit that through several iterations of the search on google, by the time you got to bing you probably had a much better base query. Just saying...
It certainly seems like Bioware might be *the* people to revolutionize the MMO. I mean, they've pretty much put out some of the best RPG's in the last five years, maybe arguably decade. Allowing them to take their storytelling onto the MMO stage, and given what's in this interview... I'm hopeful this will be something different.
There are amtrak subsidiaries servicing phoenix - But they all go NORTH out of town, according to the route atlas on the amtrak site. There is no such link between Tucson and Phoenix that I can find.
So, how exactly are we planning to run them six million over budget, here?
Then again, since Atari isn't _Atari_ anymore, and just a boilerplate, I don't feel like I ought to be defending them so much.
These corporate wars? http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/cyberstorm2corporatewars/index.html I missed not getting to play the original Cyberstorm. Hexes were a much better play surface than squares. Maybe someone should make sure they're using Hexes for the second operation, might suck less...
Well, keep in mind that they Cannot Win in the whole combat versus social thing. The WOTC boards basically exploded when they announced they would do something along the lines of social conflict resolution that could go beyond the diplomacy skills and what not. I mean, there's this strong animosity between people who go 'bah, D&D is all tactical combat' and then 'Bah, D&D should leave the talking to roleplaying!" so, you can't make either happy unless all of that social resolution is an optional rule that some GMs can throw away... which means that building it into a core class would be sub-optimal. I mean, sure, bards can take diplomacy, and almost always do, but alot of people want the talky-talky to stay the frak away from their dice. Keeping something like social combat out of a Bard's special abilities might be... tough. Which is a little weird, because WOD players have looked down their noses at D&d players (in specific cases, it's not actually the true stereotype) and they're talking from a system where social conflict, with dice and all, is just as important as mental or physical confrontation, then alot of people who do the 'ROLEplay not ROLLplay!' schtick insist that there should only be talk, not systems for social conflicts in D&D. I think it's a fundamental idea that talking (diplomacy) can't systematically influence PCs, but magic can in D&D, where both are equally effective in player influencing in WOD. In a realistic straight forward D&D game, tho... I do like the bard and their role. Of course, if you want to be a real jerk, try taking Bardic Knack (PHBII) and Jack of All trades (Complete Adventurer). Being able to do a little bit of -everything-, even if badly, is how my whip-and-sword wielding Ocean-esque bard leads our party in Red Hand of Doom.
I'm currently playing a 5th level bard in 3.5, so I completely understand. My issue with the MMO thing is that people dismiss it as a dumbing down of D&D and use it as a baseless argument against the new system.
:D
Rather than trip up over myself in a gut reaction based on 'what I've read', take a look at http://www.enworld.org/index.php?page=4e#classes and maybe get a hold of Races and Classes, I'm sure you can acquire a PDF or borrow a copy if you really want to, and not pay for a novelty book. But, there is a discussion of this in there. They basically said, we don't want to take those out of D&D - As I understand, the idea is to put out their class expansions in very focused books that function like additional PHBs, which sounds like a better solution than the plethora of races / complete books that are out now. The reason that some classes aren't in the PHB '1' is because they have not finalized their 4th edition versions.... and in fact, want to avoid the 'patching' problem buy having to fix a 'core' class they released too early to make fans happy, and instead release them all in another book months down the line.
Call me an apologist, but I spend alot, perhaps too much time, ferreting out the 4th edition information, and I have some faith in the R&D people, at least. Marketing... I'm not defending that
And.... Druids and bards not 'Broken' in 3.5? Druids became, shall we say, Amazing with splatbooks, and bards really needed splatbooks to fully work in a party of less than 5. Bards straddled too many roles to hold down a party role without some help, but were, undoubtedly, the best 5th party member ever.
The entire 'They're killing off classes' meme is as bad as the 'It's becoming an MMO' meme. They've said, many times, that they don't want to release something that doesn't work. Druids, Bards, and Barbarians all apparently needed more time to work into the design philosophy of the new game. They plan on releasing them, once they work. But for now, the 'core' four classes, and similar mixed-up versions of them that still fill the four basic roles, are what's on the drawing board for initial release.
Examine the above - A complaint that rules in 3.5 were, at times, clunky. I believe that's pretty much Design Element #2 (Right after, make everything fun) that the R&D team is focusing on....
You don't have to buy these books to see what 4th is like. They are collectors items, fanboyish treatises... But, there is some cool stuff in these books. My solution was to have one member of our (Large) gaming group buy the books, and then we passed it around for a few weeks and all got a good look.
But, really, there isn't anything in the books you can't find either on ENworld or the official website (And, for a few months, D&D insider is free and you can see everything they post on.)
Alot of the issues commenters are bringing up have also been addressed, directly, by the R&D staff mixed in with the Gleemax Staff blogs.
So, here's where you ought to go if you're on the fence or curious. Then you can come back and contribute to the 4th ed discussion... because most of these comments have been dealt with by -someone- in R&D.
http://www.enworld.org/index.php?page=4e Huge dump for 4th edition facts and rumors. http://preview.tinyurl.com/2fe6br Gleemax R&D Staff blogs. Alot of playtesting. http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd The official page. Design and Development and Ampersand are really the informative columns. You need to sign up, but it's free, and wizzards forum accounts / Gleemax transfer over cleanly.
On the contrary, from what I have seen (And I've followed every word from the R&D team religiously,) alot of this is being handled. A recent Design and Development article specifically discussed the magic item problem you've described, and... balor Mining? That's totally in the realm of theoretical D&D, which we save for the forums and expect DMs to put a stop to. I really don't think that kind of player is the real target audience for D&D.
After all, I joke with my friends about the commoner-quarterstaff railgun (Readied action, 0 gp items, vagueness in crafting rules and a dash of physics...) or the infinite-light cone bucket (Again, readied actions), but we know that none of that is a real part of the game.
Just look at how RAW (Rules-as-Written) and RAI (Rules as intended) stack up. Most GMs are smart enough to figure out the few rough edges in the former, and wizards is still making an effort to sand down those edges...
I'm confident. I think that they understand what's going on now.
I only have tenative ties to yahoo through a few newsgroups that use Yahoo (ick, I know) but all... yes, pretty much all of the spam I receive in mail, in IMs, and in 'friends list adds' are all from Yahoo sources. I know it's not technically their fault, but sometimes it's ridiculous. I fire up Pidgin and there's 5 messages, and then two or three newsgroups a week get hit with spam messages. I can pretty much tell because all of it has one handle I only used for a yahoo group. Frankly, I wish Yahoo would spend more time dealing with the garbage that's ruining their Groups instead of tinkering with their front page every week.
Nope, but it will play Haze when it comes out.... and Killzone 2. Just because it doesn't have the acceptable, but seriously overhyped MS flaot title doesn't mean it's not a great system. It will have something comparable tho.
Just, so you guys know... Sony Electronics, Sony Pictures, Sony Music, and Sony Playstation (That's SCEA SCEE and SCEJ) are all, for the most part, separate companies. Playstation can't say or do much about the DRM issues the others decide on.
I do what to servers?....
I have to say as someone who both uses a slew of books in my games and runs a lot of modern 3.5 adventures and settings... Munchkinism is common, but the core rule books aren't so much designed with it in mind. Splat-book fishing can create characters like that, but 3.5 D&D does not have to be that way. In my case my players prefer to tweak a bit, so I simply tweak back enough to make things interesting and keep them balanced as my stories developed. It's a matter of player style as much as the system.
i believe, absed on other D20 rules sets, That's +2 for flanking and +1 within 30' if you have point blank shot. .. just Sayin.
Since I know we have more of the CS, IT crowd than gamers here...
Vista's problems have been mentioned, directly, But another massive issue is the way that Microsoft is beginning to work with game developers. First, it's the 'Games for Windows' tag, and treating the PC like a console in terms of branding. Second, the games for vista is going to slowly force pretty much every gamer on the planet to switch to vista, or try to. Granted, gamers tend to have the rigs that can handle it, at the bleeding edge... But, then there are many casual gamers who buy into the back end of the technology curve. I and many others have absolutely no desire to use vista, but in a year or so the number of playable games will begin to dwindle as titles come out for vista only.
It's bad enough that my friend is punished for running windows 2000 on her gaming rig because many games intended for XP or Vista won't run on the system.
The forced obsolescence thing is la real nightmare in that respect, and it's stupid that many bleeding edge games will be 'Vista/XBOX360 exclusive' titles, and that much of their user base, the reluctant windows users called Gamers, are being hooked into the new software.
Alot of people have pointed out the default page business, but if I'm not mistaken, the current version of Yahoo! instant Messenger defaults to changing your start page to Yahoo, which could certainly compound this problem. A little finesse and the unchecking of a dozen boxes is required to avoid this, and something tells me the kind of user who would search for Google may not be that attentive.
I only skimmed the comments but didn't see anyone pointing out that... I don't have the passage in front of me, but i believe that gold farming is specifically outlawed in the WOW EULA that players are forced to agree to with every single update...
Of course, I also think that the people on IMs who only have local people on their lists have no respect for the medium.. I had friends that nonchalantly logged into other people's accounts to propagate lies, create fights and stir tensiosn up, with the whole thing being a joke they can clear up with a face to face meeting... Some of us with friends on other continents don't have that luxury, and I don't appreciate that sort of immaturity. Not that that's everyone of course, just one example of why (what seems to me) a vast majority of teengers who just use the net to talk with local friends may not respect the medium as much as those who do use it to create a smaller world.
On a more positive note, I can foresee one thin coming from myspace that oculd have a huge impact on the net as a whole. Blogging is a huge topic right now.. and, in some ways, part of the popularity of blogs might be pinned on things like Livejournals. While occasionally used for the typical teen angsting and drama that we may not consider an advantage to society, the sort of wide teenage base acceptance of these might have led to more acceptance of the 'True' blogs that sprang up afterwords. Maybe Myspace will spawn something simmilar, in the sense of another generation of large, widely used communities. After all, if myspace's layout does offer some advantage or revolution, I'd hate to think that Murdoch is making money off of it.
Totally a Tribes Reference :)
Actually, I would hate for AOL to stop giving/sending/forcing out their CDs... I mean, they are pretty much the #1 source of ammo for my home made spinfusor. I might as well have unlimited ammo hacks...