While I wait for the/.-ed website to load, I will give the one movie that bothered me when it came to "technology", 2012.
Ok, it was 2012. We're not talking a movie that doesn't have holes the size of planets in the logic. But suspending disbelief (and to just watch the eye candy of CGI), it came down to the Arcs. Here all the main characters are, standing on the bridge of one of the Arcs and they're talking about calculating the time when the big wave will hit them and someone notices an error and needs to recalculate the impact count-down clock...
The DIGITAL clock doesn't just instantly flip to the new time... no! That would be too modern. It has to quickly speed down from the current time to the new, shorter time. With, appropriate sound effects making it sound like a mechanical clock. Ok, I got a kick out of that.
Of course, the other movie I got a kick out of... was Avatar. Sure, there's all kinds of things people can point out about this film when it comes to the science of it all, however, the one thing I loved was how these Avatars (which apparently cost so much money it couldn't be mentioned) didn't have a GPS tracking chip in them. That seems like the most logical thing to embed in this thing... you know, just in case it gets lost.
Something I always wondered about Steam but never bothered looking up. If I have a laptop and a desktop. Steam installed on both. Can my wife play one game on the laptop (say, Plants vs Zombies) and I play another game on the desktop (say, Left 4 Dead 2)? Or will Steam just fail to log the second system in because it's already seeing the first system logged in?
This made me think of a recent news article... it's not Korea, but China, it's not an MMO but an FPS, but it does involve an internet cafe and "trouble". Some poor kid got a kitchen knife through the temple and survived. It's pretty fascinating.
Hmm.. I don't recall TitanQuest having any real DRM. I do recall Vista not wanting to play nice with that game. My friend had to turn UAM off to play online. Even trying to right escalate the executable didn't seem to work. I don't recall if I tried it under Win7. I should give it a shot.
It is a rather sad story that Iron Lore went out of business after releasing a rather good game. The game could have had more patches to fix some of the issues that did happen. I don't believe whoever bought the rights to the game is doing any patching, but I do know they're still selling it through steam.
You've got to lick your fingers well to make sure that you don't leave a mess on your keyboard, but other than that the computer "activity" isn't that much of an obstacle for eating.
Which is exactly why most coders don't eat and code at the same time. Yes, some do, but most have learned it's just not worth it for obvious reasons.
And I can agree that gaming on a PC does make one think less of food and eat less. I found myself eating less playing games than even not playing games.
I'm familiar with the Bartle Test but if anyone could point me to more resources as to why Killer-oriented games have faded out of popularity, I'd be interested.
I feel like I should be marked redundant for how often I mention it, but I feel it worth mentioning on the topic of MMO's and particular since you mentioned the Bartle Test. If you're familiar with the Barlte Test are you familiar with his book: Designign Virtual Worlds?. The book is a bit dated by todays terms but still very insightful in the genre of MMO's. I believe the book mentions a little bit about Dark Age of Camelot as it was the "new" thing that was barely out when the book came out. Even then, the points he makes remains true. It's worth a read. He mentions why "PvP" centric games don't work for the masses and it's as obvious as you would expect: "Griefing". Most people don't want to spend their time playing "their" game to have someone else take most or all away from them, particularly without much recourse as a truly open world allows some much more powerful person to prey on the less powerful for shits and giggles.
There are some people who enjoy that kind of game, but not enough to get some AAA development house to make a game for it. MMO's aren't cheap to develop and their not easy to do right. Even looking at World of Warcraft, the game is pretty different now than it was at release (this might be a good time to mention I started MMOing at the early days of Everquest, missing UO and MUDs, but I've tried most MMOs since that point) and it's still scheduled to change quite a bit with the next expansion. And I mean this by saying, when WoW game out, it was criticized for being far and away the most casual friendly MMO there is... and it pales in comparison to how casual friendly the game is now.
Anyway, I digress. PvP games will always be niche and less successful simply because they can't design around "griefing" without getting to the point that for all the safety measures you put in place to protect the weak from the powerful until some level of equality is reached makes it to the point that you might as well just remove PvP all together and just implement power (often translated into level) restricted "arena/battleground" areas.
Onto the question about player housing. That's more along the lines of a development issue. Do you spend your man-hours working on new dungeons, lands, weapons, content, balance issues, spells, etc or do you spend it on implementing something like housing? And what does housing do to a game? How does it fit with the guided flow and purpose of said game?
Blizzard has recently stated why they haven't implemented housing (as one of the most popular requests for player generated like content or world customization) and that reason is that it both doesn't seem to have the value of spending resources on it vs other things as-well-as housing could (and likely would) have a negative impact on the atmosphere of the game. Guild houses and personal houses will become little cities onto themselves and people will segment farther into their own little cliches and cities will become more and more desolate. You could try to design around that. Force houses to be in cities or to reach it you can only enter leave through a city. Prevent houses from being any more than empty space that you could perhaps put some digital art.
But all developers simply ask themselves, what does this do to make the game better? Not much. Games like WoW can't just popular houses anywhere in the world. Like DAoC, you'll have to create special instanced zones that can have housing, so you can create as much or little space as you need as needs grow. If you allow people to build houses anywhere, then you'll have the issues of people placing stuff that just breaks the atmosphere.
I'm wager that SCII will come out at like $60 and $90 for some "collectors" edition (US pricing). The 'xpacs' will then probably be followed up at $40-50, depending on how soon they're released after the first game. Blizzard marketers know just as well that dropping 3 $60-90 games back to back to back is not a great strategy. Of course that's just my speculation. My crystal ball has been broken before.
I want the Timothy Zahn Trilogy done as three movies.
Absolutely, the Thrawn series is awesome and a great read... but, the problem I have with that is the Luke, Leigh, Han characters are firmly ensconced in Ford, Hammil, and Fisher and they're a little bit past their ability to really pull off the "hey, I'm like a year or so older than RotJ". I don't think SW is in the same place as Star Trek in terms of being able to do a "reboot" of sorts or work like Batman where the lead character could be played by anyone.
However... in the "future" timeline that was written about in great detail, there's lot of potential to create an original series around new characters. As beloved as the Skywalkers are, they've had their lime light and destiny and the SW universe is far more than just that important family.
In terms of quality, I've been rather impressed with the "Clone Wars" animated series. Watching that has really stilled more excitement in Star Wars for me. It almost makes me think episode I-III weren't that bad... until I watch them again.
Of course, Lukas could also go and do series about The Old Republic, but I would hate for that to corrupted the up-coming Bioware Old Republic MMO they're making by writing really bad story-lines that hamstrings that world. I'm playing through Knights of the Old Republic right now and so far that's a pretty good game.
Of course... no matter what, I'll never forgive George for writing the stupid metaclorin or whatever part into the story. *shudder*
Actually, I'm seeing some of this with Dragon Age: Origins and their DLC. I bought the game. I bought some of the DLC. Now, whenever I start the game, I get to the menu and click "Resume Game". I may or may not get a message that "I'm not logged into the game and some content might not be available". Last night, I didn't get the message (I usually do) but I loaded up, get into a battle with some Dark Spawn and see my Warrior (Alistair) running at the bad guys in his skivvies!
Of course, seeing this was absolutely humorous, but also annoying as it didn't take long for me to figure out the game refused to load the special armor that came with the Pre-order of the game. The "some content might not be available" message I've seen before. Logging out and back in fixed the issue (the menu screen *said* I was logged in but in reality the game is actually trying to establish a connection behind the scenes) as it gave the system enough time to verify.
Regardless, I'm more than disappointed by this (after my initial laughter as seeing a mostly naked warrior wade into battle and no one blinked an eye). I've payed for this stuff and yet the system is tied to this very annoying authorization system for a single player game.
I'm not against DLC or micro-transactions. I'm fine with MMO games charging a subscription fee to maintain servers. But I'm pretty bothered that this kind of relentless activation is going on. It's a really poor choice and I certainly won't be buying any more DLC for DA:O. I'm done with that game once I finish what I've got.
@Ubisoft, I certainly won't (knowingly) purchase any games "offline" games that require endless online authorization to play. And this comes from a Steam user. Steam lets me play my games offline. At least, all the games I currently have.
Oh well. These game companies are really getting tin-foil hat about piracy these days when they should be looking at what they're doing to push people away from buying their games, like making them a PITA just to play them.
Now I hope they'll give us a high-resolution, all-new, top-down Zelda game in the caliber of Link to the Past and Link's Awakening.
I've just read about a PS3 game called "3D Dot Game Heroes: Pixilated Parody" or something that's suppose to basically be an original Zelda rip-off but in that "look, we're appreciating retro games" kind of way. However, it's in 3D, maybe partly in 2D, but the screen shoots looked pretty good. It was in Game Informer an issue or two ago.
Unfortunately WC3 is 4 CD-ROM's of data, due to the AVI files. The TIE Fighter game easily fits on one CD-ROM, though.
Indeed. X-Wing was my first game I bought on a PC. It was when my dad bought our first 486 system. It came on like 8 3.5" disks. Tie Fighter, I believe, also came on 3.5" disks. So, yeah. It would have easily fit on a single-layer CD. =) Those where the days.
I believe i bought X-wing vs Tie Fighter was on CD. But I will always remember X-wing for my first "real" experiance flying around the Death Star freely, and blowing up turrets before hitting the trench. I believe I just flew around destroying as many Imperials as I could before doing the run. It was way better than all the other "on-rails" like trench runs in games before that.
I remember TIE Fighter for it's included book that had this pretty interesting back story.
Wing Commander... yeah, there was a lot of talk about it, I recall, but I never cared much for it. I remember the god-awful film though. I saw it in the theater and the real broke. I got a free ticket out of it and only lost a couple hours of my life.
Now if only I could get a copy of Day of the Tentacle. I missed that game back in the day.
Isn't any mmorpg out there capable of offering a stats-based or skill-based character with no classification system?
As I typically do for topics about MMO's and designs, I point people to the excellent and very interesting (and still relavent) book: Designing Virtual Worlds by Richard Bartle. He goes over class vs skill based systems and what happens with them. Their drawbacks and benefits and how, basically, it doesn't matter what you call it, you end up at the same thing anyways. And the topic at hand isn't about classes or skills, it's about "roles". Which is usually associated with classes such as Warrior/Paladin are tanks and Clerics/Druids are healers and skills like Shield and Plate are for tanking and Holy/Light/Nature magic are for healing, etc. (however a game might label them).
Truth is, there are plenty of role-less RPG's out there. They're called Action RPGs like Diablo or X-Men Legends/Ultimate Allinace on consoles. If you take away roles, that's pretty much what you're left with to design a fun yet flavorful game where a "tank", "DPS" or "healer" isn't needed but character A doesn't feel entirely like character B.
The argument of whether to do classes or skills is moot because you end up with the same thing, but creating a fully skills based game takes a lot more time for developers to manage and balance. Or you end up with a game that just because, every character has every ability and little flavor except how someone choose to play their character... at which point they will play them as the typical Healer, Tank or DPS role.
Yes you can talk about buffers/debuffers but those are simply rolled into the "healer" paradigm.
Games like WoW has been trying to hybridize all classes, even if they fill said roles. Tanks are doing more damage and might have buff or debuff capabilities. DPS have buff and debuff abilities or possibly even healing or tanking abilities (at least for a limited time or amount).
Either way, it's sort of one of those topics that come up every once in a while but always just goes in circles of "we need something different!" but no one can come up with anything that's truly different that's still fun. They just find new ways of "hiding" the actual class design in some other system. Or if they get ride of roles, they just create an Action RPG, which could just as much be an MMO as anything else.
it's like they're just making the game easier and easier.
If by easy, you mean faster to level, is there something wrong with that? Now, if only the instance server will stop crashing on the last boss of the Heroic dungeon. lol 3 times I failed to get the heroic daily bonus because of the server crash (I gave up trying) and once I got locked out of a decent Halls of Reflection heroic because the server crashed. lol, I only laugh at the irony of when it crashs. It seems to know when I will succeed and stay stable every other time. =P It's just growing pains, I know.
Good. Let Facebook go the way of the dodo. It's the equivalent of those "personal home pages" people put up when they first discovered the Web.
I wouldn't say it's equivalent but they do share a little bit of similarity. Facebook, unlike personal home pages, is far more intuitive now than "p.h.p."'s where back in the day. Perhaps it's wider exposure to all things web, or perhaps it's better web technologies and tech. adoption (CSS + JS frameworks + "AJAX").
And the biggest difference, I'd say as both a web developer, a Facebook member, and someone who doesn't really like Facebook, I certainly do appreciate it for the easy as which I found I was able to reconnect with old high school friends (and perhaps ones I really wasn't interested in connecting too).
Then again, I put very little info out there. Of course, that doesn't stop my friends from putting stuff out there and tagged to my account. But I am looking it over to try and manage it.
Indeed. I've become a pretty big Steam user/purchaser. I love the simplicity of it and how darn fast they download (getting up to 1Mb/s speeds at times). Even purchased things I wouldn't have purchased otherwise because they where only $2-$10 so I thought I'd try them out. My biggest disappointment has to be Dragon Age: Origins. Darn thing was on sale for like 25% off or 33% off or something and I just bought it a week or two ago and I only just started playing it. doh!
But yes, I picked up:
Batman: Arkham Asylum. 50% (Arguably the best Batman game ever)
Borderlands. 33% off
Trine. 50% ($10, I wouldn't have bought this otherwise)
Resident Evil 5. 50% off. (I'm a fan of Resident Evil but I wasn't going to pay $50 to play it on the PC)
Civilization III: Complete. I think it was 75% off and only a few dollars.
Madballs in... Babo:Invasion. 75% off I think. Or like $2-4. Cheap to try out.
Osmos. $2. This one's not working for some reason.
Dead Space. $17 I think.
There's a few other games I almost jumped on or already own that I would have purchased. Like I said Dragon Age: Online I already own. But I also have Left4Dead, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and City of Hereos. I was going to get Champions Online but realized to just try it, I'd be better off waiting for a free trial as I'm pretty sure I'm not going to keep playing it nor pay for 2 subscription fees (I'm happy with WoW, until Star Wars: The Old Republic comes out).
So yeah, I've been buying a lot online.
But I can't say I'm shocked. Online sales are still growing year in and year out. And "Black Friday" is a hell of a day to go shopping. I'm sure many people would rather pick up deals at home than fight with people at the stores. I just wonder how this is going to effect the "Cyber Monday" sales?
Now, just about 30mins until the new Steam deals are live. Gosh, I hope there's nothing good. hehe. I've spent enough and have enough games to last until next year!
Slashdot Mirror
While I wait for the /.-ed website to load, I will give the one movie that bothered me when it came to "technology", 2012.
Ok, it was 2012. We're not talking a movie that doesn't have holes the size of planets in the logic. But suspending disbelief (and to just watch the eye candy of CGI), it came down to the Arcs. Here all the main characters are, standing on the bridge of one of the Arcs and they're talking about calculating the time when the big wave will hit them and someone notices an error and needs to recalculate the impact count-down clock...
The DIGITAL clock doesn't just instantly flip to the new time... no! That would be too modern. It has to quickly speed down from the current time to the new, shorter time. With, appropriate sound effects making it sound like a mechanical clock. Ok, I got a kick out of that.
Of course, the other movie I got a kick out of... was Avatar. Sure, there's all kinds of things people can point out about this film when it comes to the science of it all, however, the one thing I loved was how these Avatars (which apparently cost so much money it couldn't be mentioned) didn't have a GPS tracking chip in them. That seems like the most logical thing to embed in this thing... you know, just in case it gets lost.
Something I always wondered about Steam but never bothered looking up. If I have a laptop and a desktop. Steam installed on both. Can my wife play one game on the laptop (say, Plants vs Zombies) and I play another game on the desktop (say, Left 4 Dead 2)? Or will Steam just fail to log the second system in because it's already seeing the first system logged in?
Searched YouTube
This made me think of a recent news article... it's not Korea, but China, it's not an MMO but an FPS, but it does involve an internet cafe and "trouble". Some poor kid got a kitchen knife through the temple and survived. It's pretty fascinating.
And oddly enough, old men who smoke pipes and wear tweed jackets have a higher IQ.
Hmm.. I don't recall TitanQuest having any real DRM. I do recall Vista not wanting to play nice with that game. My friend had to turn UAM off to play online. Even trying to right escalate the executable didn't seem to work. I don't recall if I tried it under Win7. I should give it a shot.
It is a rather sad story that Iron Lore went out of business after releasing a rather good game. The game could have had more patches to fix some of the issues that did happen. I don't believe whoever bought the rights to the game is doing any patching, but I do know they're still selling it through steam.
Torchlight is a decent game, but I think TitanQuest gave Diablo II a far better run for it's money.
You've got to lick your fingers well to make sure that you don't leave a mess on your keyboard, but other than that the computer "activity" isn't that much of an obstacle for eating.
Which is exactly why most coders don't eat and code at the same time. Yes, some do, but most have learned it's just not worth it for obvious reasons.
And I can agree that gaming on a PC does make one think less of food and eat less. I found myself eating less playing games than even not playing games.
Someone seems to frequently disagree...
I'm familiar with the Bartle Test but if anyone could point me to more resources as to why Killer-oriented games have faded out of popularity, I'd be interested.
I feel like I should be marked redundant for how often I mention it, but I feel it worth mentioning on the topic of MMO's and particular since you mentioned the Bartle Test. If you're familiar with the Barlte Test are you familiar with his book: Designign Virtual Worlds?. The book is a bit dated by todays terms but still very insightful in the genre of MMO's. I believe the book mentions a little bit about Dark Age of Camelot as it was the "new" thing that was barely out when the book came out. Even then, the points he makes remains true. It's worth a read. He mentions why "PvP" centric games don't work for the masses and it's as obvious as you would expect: "Griefing". Most people don't want to spend their time playing "their" game to have someone else take most or all away from them, particularly without much recourse as a truly open world allows some much more powerful person to prey on the less powerful for shits and giggles.
There are some people who enjoy that kind of game, but not enough to get some AAA development house to make a game for it. MMO's aren't cheap to develop and their not easy to do right. Even looking at World of Warcraft, the game is pretty different now than it was at release (this might be a good time to mention I started MMOing at the early days of Everquest, missing UO and MUDs, but I've tried most MMOs since that point) and it's still scheduled to change quite a bit with the next expansion. And I mean this by saying, when WoW game out, it was criticized for being far and away the most casual friendly MMO there is... and it pales in comparison to how casual friendly the game is now.
Anyway, I digress. PvP games will always be niche and less successful simply because they can't design around "griefing" without getting to the point that for all the safety measures you put in place to protect the weak from the powerful until some level of equality is reached makes it to the point that you might as well just remove PvP all together and just implement power (often translated into level) restricted "arena/battleground" areas.
Onto the question about player housing. That's more along the lines of a development issue. Do you spend your man-hours working on new dungeons, lands, weapons, content, balance issues, spells, etc or do you spend it on implementing something like housing? And what does housing do to a game? How does it fit with the guided flow and purpose of said game?
Blizzard has recently stated why they haven't implemented housing (as one of the most popular requests for player generated like content or world customization) and that reason is that it both doesn't seem to have the value of spending resources on it vs other things as-well-as housing could (and likely would) have a negative impact on the atmosphere of the game. Guild houses and personal houses will become little cities onto themselves and people will segment farther into their own little cliches and cities will become more and more desolate. You could try to design around that. Force houses to be in cities or to reach it you can only enter leave through a city. Prevent houses from being any more than empty space that you could perhaps put some digital art.
But all developers simply ask themselves, what does this do to make the game better? Not much. Games like WoW can't just popular houses anywhere in the world. Like DAoC, you'll have to create special instanced zones that can have housing, so you can create as much or little space as you need as needs grow. If you allow people to build houses anywhere, then you'll have the issues of people placing stuff that just breaks the atmosphere.
And you could say "what's wrong with t
i.e., they will charge full price.
I'm wager that SCII will come out at like $60 and $90 for some "collectors" edition (US pricing). The 'xpacs' will then probably be followed up at $40-50, depending on how soon they're released after the first game. Blizzard marketers know just as well that dropping 3 $60-90 games back to back to back is not a great strategy. Of course that's just my speculation. My crystal ball has been broken before.
I want the Timothy Zahn Trilogy done as three movies.
Absolutely, the Thrawn series is awesome and a great read... but, the problem I have with that is the Luke, Leigh, Han characters are firmly ensconced in Ford, Hammil, and Fisher and they're a little bit past their ability to really pull off the "hey, I'm like a year or so older than RotJ". I don't think SW is in the same place as Star Trek in terms of being able to do a "reboot" of sorts or work like Batman where the lead character could be played by anyone.
However... in the "future" timeline that was written about in great detail, there's lot of potential to create an original series around new characters. As beloved as the Skywalkers are, they've had their lime light and destiny and the SW universe is far more than just that important family.
In terms of quality, I've been rather impressed with the "Clone Wars" animated series. Watching that has really stilled more excitement in Star Wars for me. It almost makes me think episode I-III weren't that bad... until I watch them again.
Of course, Lukas could also go and do series about The Old Republic, but I would hate for that to corrupted the up-coming Bioware Old Republic MMO they're making by writing really bad story-lines that hamstrings that world. I'm playing through Knights of the Old Republic right now and so far that's a pretty good game.
Of course... no matter what, I'll never forgive George for writing the stupid metaclorin or whatever part into the story. *shudder*
What's a "real language" compared to PHP?
JSP, ASP, Python, Perl?
And by 'real language' do you something that's pre-compiled? Something with variable declarations (not loosly typed), etc?
I'm curious to learn. I'm a PHP web developer.
Buying a gaming console should never be a long term financial decision.
I feel the same way about phones.
Actually, I'm seeing some of this with Dragon Age: Origins and their DLC. I bought the game. I bought some of the DLC. Now, whenever I start the game, I get to the menu and click "Resume Game". I may or may not get a message that "I'm not logged into the game and some content might not be available". Last night, I didn't get the message (I usually do) but I loaded up, get into a battle with some Dark Spawn and see my Warrior (Alistair) running at the bad guys in his skivvies!
Of course, seeing this was absolutely humorous, but also annoying as it didn't take long for me to figure out the game refused to load the special armor that came with the Pre-order of the game. The "some content might not be available" message I've seen before. Logging out and back in fixed the issue (the menu screen *said* I was logged in but in reality the game is actually trying to establish a connection behind the scenes) as it gave the system enough time to verify.
Regardless, I'm more than disappointed by this (after my initial laughter as seeing a mostly naked warrior wade into battle and no one blinked an eye). I've payed for this stuff and yet the system is tied to this very annoying authorization system for a single player game.
I'm not against DLC or micro-transactions. I'm fine with MMO games charging a subscription fee to maintain servers. But I'm pretty bothered that this kind of relentless activation is going on. It's a really poor choice and I certainly won't be buying any more DLC for DA:O. I'm done with that game once I finish what I've got.
@Ubisoft, I certainly won't (knowingly) purchase any games "offline" games that require endless online authorization to play. And this comes from a Steam user. Steam lets me play my games offline. At least, all the games I currently have.
Oh well. These game companies are really getting tin-foil hat about piracy these days when they should be looking at what they're doing to push people away from buying their games, like making them a PITA just to play them.
Now I hope they'll give us a high-resolution, all-new, top-down Zelda game in the caliber of Link to the Past and Link's Awakening.
I've just read about a PS3 game called "3D Dot Game Heroes: Pixilated Parody" or something that's suppose to basically be an original Zelda rip-off but in that "look, we're appreciating retro games" kind of way. However, it's in 3D, maybe partly in 2D, but the screen shoots looked pretty good. It was in Game Informer an issue or two ago.
I think the article was rather interesting.
Unfortunately WC3 is 4 CD-ROM's of data, due to the AVI files. The TIE Fighter game easily fits on one CD-ROM, though.
Indeed. X-Wing was my first game I bought on a PC. It was when my dad bought our first 486 system. It came on like 8 3.5" disks. Tie Fighter, I believe, also came on 3.5" disks. So, yeah. It would have easily fit on a single-layer CD. =) Those where the days.
I believe i bought X-wing vs Tie Fighter was on CD. But I will always remember X-wing for my first "real" experiance flying around the Death Star freely, and blowing up turrets before hitting the trench. I believe I just flew around destroying as many Imperials as I could before doing the run. It was way better than all the other "on-rails" like trench runs in games before that.
I remember TIE Fighter for it's included book that had this pretty interesting back story.
Wing Commander... yeah, there was a lot of talk about it, I recall, but I never cared much for it. I remember the god-awful film though. I saw it in the theater and the real broke. I got a free ticket out of it and only lost a couple hours of my life.
Now if only I could get a copy of Day of the Tentacle. I missed that game back in the day.
Isn't any mmorpg out there capable of offering a stats-based or skill-based character with no classification system?
As I typically do for topics about MMO's and designs, I point people to the excellent and very interesting (and still relavent) book: Designing Virtual Worlds by Richard Bartle. He goes over class vs skill based systems and what happens with them. Their drawbacks and benefits and how, basically, it doesn't matter what you call it, you end up at the same thing anyways. And the topic at hand isn't about classes or skills, it's about "roles". Which is usually associated with classes such as Warrior/Paladin are tanks and Clerics/Druids are healers and skills like Shield and Plate are for tanking and Holy/Light/Nature magic are for healing, etc. (however a game might label them).
Truth is, there are plenty of role-less RPG's out there. They're called Action RPGs like Diablo or X-Men Legends/Ultimate Allinace on consoles. If you take away roles, that's pretty much what you're left with to design a fun yet flavorful game where a "tank", "DPS" or "healer" isn't needed but character A doesn't feel entirely like character B.
The argument of whether to do classes or skills is moot because you end up with the same thing, but creating a fully skills based game takes a lot more time for developers to manage and balance. Or you end up with a game that just because, every character has every ability and little flavor except how someone choose to play their character... at which point they will play them as the typical Healer, Tank or DPS role.
Yes you can talk about buffers/debuffers but those are simply rolled into the "healer" paradigm.
Games like WoW has been trying to hybridize all classes, even if they fill said roles. Tanks are doing more damage and might have buff or debuff capabilities. DPS have buff and debuff abilities or possibly even healing or tanking abilities (at least for a limited time or amount).
Either way, it's sort of one of those topics that come up every once in a while but always just goes in circles of "we need something different!" but no one can come up with anything that's truly different that's still fun. They just find new ways of "hiding" the actual class design in some other system. Or if they get ride of roles, they just create an Action RPG, which could just as much be an MMO as anything else.
it's like they're just making the game easier and easier.
If by easy, you mean faster to level, is there something wrong with that? Now, if only the instance server will stop crashing on the last boss of the Heroic dungeon. lol 3 times I failed to get the heroic daily bonus because of the server crash (I gave up trying) and once I got locked out of a decent Halls of Reflection heroic because the server crashed. lol, I only laugh at the irony of when it crashs. It seems to know when I will succeed and stay stable every other time. =P It's just growing pains, I know.
Good. Let Facebook go the way of the dodo. It's the equivalent of those "personal home pages" people put up when they first discovered the Web.
I wouldn't say it's equivalent but they do share a little bit of similarity. Facebook, unlike personal home pages, is far more intuitive now than "p.h.p."'s where back in the day. Perhaps it's wider exposure to all things web, or perhaps it's better web technologies and tech. adoption (CSS + JS frameworks + "AJAX").
And the biggest difference, I'd say as both a web developer, a Facebook member, and someone who doesn't really like Facebook, I certainly do appreciate it for the easy as which I found I was able to reconnect with old high school friends (and perhaps ones I really wasn't interested in connecting too).
Then again, I put very little info out there. Of course, that doesn't stop my friends from putting stuff out there and tagged to my account. But I am looking it over to try and manage it.
So, you just watched Who Killed the Electric Car?, didn't you? =)
Ironic. I've always had a similar phrase that I've sort of lived by. "There's always an exception to the rule. Even this one." ~Me
Indeed. I've become a pretty big Steam user/purchaser. I love the simplicity of it and how darn fast they download (getting up to 1Mb/s speeds at times). Even purchased things I wouldn't have purchased otherwise because they where only $2-$10 so I thought I'd try them out. My biggest disappointment has to be Dragon Age: Origins. Darn thing was on sale for like 25% off or 33% off or something and I just bought it a week or two ago and I only just started playing it. doh!
But yes, I picked up:
There's a few other games I almost jumped on or already own that I would have purchased. Like I said Dragon Age: Online I already own. But I also have Left4Dead, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and City of Hereos. I was going to get Champions Online but realized to just try it, I'd be better off waiting for a free trial as I'm pretty sure I'm not going to keep playing it nor pay for 2 subscription fees (I'm happy with WoW, until Star Wars: The Old Republic comes out).
So yeah, I've been buying a lot online.
But I can't say I'm shocked. Online sales are still growing year in and year out. And "Black Friday" is a hell of a day to go shopping. I'm sure many people would rather pick up deals at home than fight with people at the stores. I just wonder how this is going to effect the "Cyber Monday" sales?
Now, just about 30mins until the new Steam deals are live. Gosh, I hope there's nothing good. hehe. I've spent enough and have enough games to last until next year!
Very interesting. Thanks for the info!