I really only meant with PVP as far as gameplay, sorry I definitely didn't make that clear.
All good. But I would have to ask what's interesting about the PvP? It sounds pretty much like DAoC to me, PvPvE. I think the graphics (beautiful) and flying are the big ticket gimmicks to play this game. I guess I could say the lore/world is fairly cool too. How cool is an "apple core" world? hehe.
Huh, nProtect will terminate applications IT determines IT doesn't want to run on MY computer? WTF? I don't mind it blocking DirectX calls, I want things to go back to OpenGL. =P But seriously, this give me pause, and I'll have to reconsider playing this game.
I hope that SWTOR doesn't do things this drastic, because I'm really looking forward to that game.
For an asian game, it's definitely raising the bar on visual and gameplay quality.
Hmm... the graphics look a lot like every other Korean MMO. This photo-realistic anime-esque like art style, akin to Final Fantasy art. I personally think that's "good thing"(tm) since I like that art style, and it's certainly a good thing because it's semi-fresh to the "western" market. Though, Sword of the New World and other MMO's that have penetrated the Western market have just as beautiful and similar art styles and very good animation to boot. It's not all just beautiful backgrounds, like LotRO is.
Gameplay? I've not heard anything about the gameplay yet. I'm still waiting for the next beta, since I just missed the last one. But I'm going to be very skeptical about it being anything close to WoW's gameplay. Regardless of how "cool" it looks and seems, how it plays is an entirely different ballgame. I would like to hear how "casual" friend it is compared to WoW. Korean MMO's are notorious for grind-mills and micro-transactions. This one claims to be more "western" friendly with tons of quests and such, but I'll have to see it to believe it.
Regardless, I'm looking forward too it. But I also scoff at the system requirements. The summary makes is sounds like it's as requirement friendly as WoW, but that's hardly the case when you look at the system requirements. I looks like my rig will be making the near minimum. Admittedly, my computer is a couple years old, but pure gaming machine.
Left 4 Dead is a great co-op. There's also a similar genre PC game from Steam called "Killing Floor", but I've never tried it. Left 4 Dead 2 will be having the same Co-op. I guess you can consider every MMO a co-op game. But as far as RTS, there's not been a whole lot in that category for a while. I just finished Bioshock and while that would have been awesome with a co-op feature, it just wouldn't have been the same. Of course, we're talking PC games. The new Ghostbusters game has great Co-op features. I just saved $100 on Guitar Hero: World Tour, which is definitely co-op.
So, you'd have to clarify what "co-op" you're talking about.
Wikipedia to the rescue!. DotA is it's own kind of mini-genre but it does share some similarities to a Tower Defense game. More of a "Tower Offense and Defense" and instead of "Tower" you have "hero character". More of a "tug-of-war" kind of game where you stream of soldiers is trying to push back your enemies stream of soldiers to their base so your guys can kill their "boss" or "Ancient".
Some games have a "tower" builder making it possible to play it similarly to a tower defense with offense.
I love Warcraft 3 mods. I would probably call these things their own style of mini-games:
Defense of the Ancients
Tower Defense
Castle Defense
Team Survival (or Enfo's Team Survival)
I think Enfo's was one of my favorites and they're all fairly similar, but just different enough. No doubt some where inspired by others.
This is true, but we also have a MUCH different driving condition than Europe. My French fiancee joked about how easy it was to drive in the US given that our roads are so much damn bigger. The hardest part is not falling asleep at the boring drive down the interstate.
I also find European drivers are for more reckless or risky. Particularly motorcyclists who tend to freely drive down the center line between cars in Europe. It's a completely different mentality and alertness in Europe than America.
Though, "larger" cars in Europe tend to be more like the size of a Vibe/Matrix and "average" cars tend to be around the Chevy Aveo size or Toyota Yaris. Though, I've seen my share of Hummers and Jeeps on the roads there on rare occasion. Still, they have plenty of semi's (aka lorry's) on the roads, which will still flatten a 250 lbs car. It kind of scares me that this car almost weights as much as a lot of American men. heh
it's more about gaining levels, skill has nothing to do with it. it's a game.
TFS is a little misleading. They're talking about skill "points" vs levels. Not "Player Skill" vs levels. In WoW terms, it would be what your Axe weapon skill is. WoW's really a level based game with a marginalized skill system. If WoW removed levels and based your bonus HP's on your defense skill and make your skill points harder to gain, it would then, effectively be a "skill" based game. Though, there's variations of skill point games as well.
There can be. The problem with search is knowing where to start. If you're really a beginner, that can be the "hard part".
I have the first edition of this book. I got a lot out of it. There's a LOT of information. However, I found a lot of times some rather important information, like a specific command, was just mentioned in passing, instead of being called out clearly with examples. I would have liked to have seen more with that. Otherwise, it was a good book.
Not to mention, I didn't have a web enabled computer near by to use when I was setting up Ubuntu, making the whole "google it" thing rather hard to do.
Why can't I help but remember my daily Dilbert a few weeks back where the Pointy Haired Boss outsources Asok the Intern's job to India. Even better when Asok got the same job from said outsourcing company but "worked from home", which changed nothing from his perspective.
Ironically, I will put money down that one of the biggest selling games this Xmas will be "New" Super Mario Bros. Wii. In all it's SNES graphical glory. And relatively no-one will complain about the lack of photo-realistic graphics, 10k count polygon 3D models, and real time shadows and water effects.
I agree with much you said. However, I would like to inject my opinion that graphics, while very capable on the Wii or PS2 (God of War was awesome) do have a big role play in some games. Take Dead Rising for example. The Wii version was just god awful terrible and I attribute most of it to graphics. The biggest reason... immersion. The mall I ran around in on my buddies 360 did not feel as real as the one I ran around in on my Wii. I couldn't see the covers of books and magazines in the shops and I just felt like the whole thing was flat.
With that said, I do think the Wii has plenty of graphical power to make good games, but I find too many devs. jumping on the "motion sensing" band wagon and making motion sensing controls when none are needed. Don't make me 'waggle' the controller to attack. Just let me smash a button.
Though, the 360/PS3 are far more than just "graphical machines". Their ability to do impressive FPS while having far far more enemies on screen at the same time is a big boost to the potential games one can make. Again, Dead Rising is an example of this. That's the other side of just making things look photo-realistic. Cramming a lot of things on the screen at once and animating them. =)
_
And why is the HTML formatting all messed up? There's no magin's between paragraph elements anymore.
The "Eco" GForce isn't even part of the $799.00 price tag and will add $99.00 for the cheapest option. Likewise, you can upgrade to 8BG (64-bit Vista requried) for ~$100 as well as a Quad-Core 2.6 Processor. It certainly isn't the $5k Alienware you can get, but it's not a terrible gaming PC for the price. And you can increase your e-peen for "green gaming" despite gaming itself not being very eco-friendly by any means.
I'm deeply hoping for a new series with this cast... which of course will never happen, but I think it would be awesome. It would give the chance to actually develop each character properly, instead of trying to shoe horn character development into a couple hours while trying to entertain with lots of action and special effects.
To be honest, I've not played a whole lot of other games on the PC. I play Titan Quest a few times and it did feel like there was some graphic struggles for it. Likewise, I've recently bought Bioshock and it felt to run relatively smooth with high graphics, but I've not clocked a lot of time on it or have a standard to compare it too. And Left4Dead didn't have any issues either, but I stopped playing that before I started noticing this slowdown.
I did, however, manage to turn off a couple video setting and have been getting around 60 FPS in some WoW cities with it dropping to around low 30's FPS for particularly bad areas (while having actually turned up more of my video settings). I believe I turned off Triple buffering and I think something else on that page and then upped my refresh rate to 75mhz from 60mhz. It seems to have helped a lot for my case. And no, my card hasn't been crashing, so that's a good point. The only freezing has always been related to a specific spot in WoW, which leads me to believe it must be a game issue related to my video settings.
But I do have to check the temperature. One of the troubleshooting steps I need to take is to blow out the dust from the case and make sure there's no cords blocking the air path.
It's a 3GH Pentium D, 2GB RAM. Odd thing is WoW use to run well until like a couple of months ago. I've done some research. Checked if there was any processes that where spiking to cause the problems. I've not found anything.
The only thing I can think of is either my video card is starting to die or just getting out-dated./shrug I can't even turn my shadows up a couple notches without dropping to 1 FPS.
So, would one of these $100 cards be better than my GeForce 7800 GTX? It's been painful playing WoW lately. I don't know if my card is just dying or WoW's been updated, but I can't run it as well as I use too. And that's with a lot of the extreme graphic settings turned down (like shadows). I know my system is like 4 years old now.
Off topic to the article, but to your point about sponsors... KFC is actually spending money to fill pot holes and spray-paint their logo on them. Complete with Col. Sanders standing around with a bright green jacket.
You're pretty good in your analysis. 4E doesn't not foster RP, infact, it pretty much states this to some degree in the PHBI as well as being easily inferred through how they deal with "flavor text" for each spell (what they now call powers).
However, I reject the claim that this prevents RP or interesting characters. Since when was an interesting character determined by their role? Be it that they're a healer(4E Leaders), a DPS (4E Strikers), tank (4E Defenders) or utility (4E Controllers). I still find the biggest problem people who have an issue with D&D(and 4E in particular) with regards to role playing isn't the system, it's the people. Everyone who complains about role play complain the *book* doesn't allow role play. That precise point is the real truth. Role play has never and should never be the responsibility of the gaming system. The whole point of role play is freedom and creativity. The game system is to try and balance the mechanical parts of it. And that's exactly what 4E does well.
Everything is still possible to do in 4E and I find it actually better for role playing than at least 3E (my only other P&P RPG experiance) because the underlying mechanics are much more simple to adjust and modify and that's, in my opinion.
What 4E really does need is a good book on how to role play. A guide on how to make interesting characters with back story and how to define them by their actions, powers and such. How to use powers to affect the environment to perform things you wouldn't normally need. Actually, the DM guide for 4E covers some of this pretty well already and the DM guide is very much a guide by most means. The PHB... not so much. But the PHB had a lot of ground to cover so I cannot blame it for skimping on the "how to RP" section.
I believe it's the people who are missing RP because they've gotten too comfortable with books and systems that told them how to RP their character. You don't need a book to tell you how to role play. As for "class based". With a little experiance with 4E, you can easily mix/match class powers to fit whatever type of character you want to play. That's the whole point behind how you multiclass in 4E. With some creativity and a willing DM, you can easily create whole new classes out of the parts you're given by swapping like-level abilities because the mechanics behind 4E are very easily modular and swappable. Of course, 4E won't tell you how to do this, that's the part where you have to be creative.
I still haven't heard one example of something you can't role play in 4E that you can in other games. I've even seen the 4E rule set lend itself well to other genre's such as survival/horror or future Sci-Fi really well.
As for the WoW / Video Game assertions... it's also true the mechanics were developed to easily transition into other mediums besides P&P, such as video games, TCG, Minis, etc. I believe WotC stated this at some point.
I don't think this means your wrong, I think this just means you're looking for something else in a product. But at the same time, it also doesn't mean the product is incapable of doing the things you claim it does.
Slashdot Mirror
I really only meant with PVP as far as gameplay, sorry I definitely didn't make that clear.
All good. But I would have to ask what's interesting about the PvP? It sounds pretty much like DAoC to me, PvPvE. I think the graphics (beautiful) and flying are the big ticket gimmicks to play this game. I guess I could say the lore/world is fairly cool too. How cool is an "apple core" world? hehe.
The solution, I think, is something that'll never come to pass: a waiting period on trading in games.
Solution? What's the problem?
Not everything should be a compromise, especially when talking about freedoms. People have the right to resell something they own.
Ultimately, this isn't a huge issue, but it could exasperate other issues that might be more critical.
It's certainly not an issue. Do you think renting is a "huge issue" as well? Because it's pretty much the same thing.
Huh, nProtect will terminate applications IT determines IT doesn't want to run on MY computer? WTF? I don't mind it blocking DirectX calls, I want things to go back to OpenGL. =P But seriously, this give me pause, and I'll have to reconsider playing this game.
I hope that SWTOR doesn't do things this drastic, because I'm really looking forward to that game.
For an asian game, it's definitely raising the bar on visual and gameplay quality.
Hmm... the graphics look a lot like every other Korean MMO. This photo-realistic anime-esque like art style, akin to Final Fantasy art. I personally think that's "good thing"(tm) since I like that art style, and it's certainly a good thing because it's semi-fresh to the "western" market. Though, Sword of the New World and other MMO's that have penetrated the Western market have just as beautiful and similar art styles and very good animation to boot. It's not all just beautiful backgrounds, like LotRO is.
Gameplay? I've not heard anything about the gameplay yet. I'm still waiting for the next beta, since I just missed the last one. But I'm going to be very skeptical about it being anything close to WoW's gameplay. Regardless of how "cool" it looks and seems, how it plays is an entirely different ballgame. I would like to hear how "casual" friend it is compared to WoW. Korean MMO's are notorious for grind-mills and micro-transactions. This one claims to be more "western" friendly with tons of quests and such, but I'll have to see it to believe it.
Regardless, I'm looking forward too it. But I also scoff at the system requirements. The summary makes is sounds like it's as requirement friendly as WoW, but that's hardly the case when you look at the system requirements. I looks like my rig will be making the near minimum. Admittedly, my computer is a couple years old, but pure gaming machine.
Left 4 Dead is a great co-op. There's also a similar genre PC game from Steam called "Killing Floor", but I've never tried it. Left 4 Dead 2 will be having the same Co-op. I guess you can consider every MMO a co-op game. But as far as RTS, there's not been a whole lot in that category for a while. I just finished Bioshock and while that would have been awesome with a co-op feature, it just wouldn't have been the same. Of course, we're talking PC games. The new Ghostbusters game has great Co-op features. I just saved $100 on Guitar Hero: World Tour, which is definitely co-op.
So, you'd have to clarify what "co-op" you're talking about.
Wikipedia to the rescue!. DotA is it's own kind of mini-genre but it does share some similarities to a Tower Defense game. More of a "Tower Offense and Defense" and instead of "Tower" you have "hero character". More of a "tug-of-war" kind of game where you stream of soldiers is trying to push back your enemies stream of soldiers to their base so your guys can kill their "boss" or "Ancient".
Some games have a "tower" builder making it possible to play it similarly to a tower defense with offense.
I love Warcraft 3 mods. I would probably call these things their own style of mini-games:
Defense of the Ancients
Tower Defense
Castle Defense
Team Survival (or Enfo's Team Survival)
I think Enfo's was one of my favorites and they're all fairly similar, but just different enough. No doubt some where inspired by others.
This is true, but we also have a MUCH different driving condition than Europe. My French fiancee joked about how easy it was to drive in the US given that our roads are so much damn bigger. The hardest part is not falling asleep at the boring drive down the interstate.
I also find European drivers are for more reckless or risky. Particularly motorcyclists who tend to freely drive down the center line between cars in Europe. It's a completely different mentality and alertness in Europe than America.
Though, "larger" cars in Europe tend to be more like the size of a Vibe/Matrix and "average" cars tend to be around the Chevy Aveo size or Toyota Yaris. Though, I've seen my share of Hummers and Jeeps on the roads there on rare occasion. Still, they have plenty of semi's (aka lorry's) on the roads, which will still flatten a 250 lbs car. It kind of scares me that this car almost weights as much as a lot of American men. heh
it's more about gaining levels, skill has nothing to do with it. it's a game.
TFS is a little misleading. They're talking about skill "points" vs levels. Not "Player Skill" vs levels. In WoW terms, it would be what your Axe weapon skill is. WoW's really a level based game with a marginalized skill system. If WoW removed levels and based your bonus HP's on your defense skill and make your skill points harder to gain, it would then, effectively be a "skill" based game. Though, there's variations of skill point games as well.
There can be. The problem with search is knowing where to start. If you're really a beginner, that can be the "hard part".
I have the first edition of this book. I got a lot out of it. There's a LOT of information. However, I found a lot of times some rather important information, like a specific command, was just mentioned in passing, instead of being called out clearly with examples. I would have liked to have seen more with that. Otherwise, it was a good book.
Not to mention, I didn't have a web enabled computer near by to use when I was setting up Ubuntu, making the whole "google it" thing rather hard to do.
Why can't I help but remember my daily Dilbert a few weeks back where the Pointy Haired Boss outsources Asok the Intern's job to India. Even better when Asok got the same job from said outsourcing company but "worked from home", which changed nothing from his perspective.
Wait? Tums now have 33% more new flavor?!? Where do I sign up?
Mike Judge just might be right.
Ironically, I will put money down that one of the biggest selling games this Xmas will be "New" Super Mario Bros. Wii. In all it's SNES graphical glory. And relatively no-one will complain about the lack of photo-realistic graphics, 10k count polygon 3D models, and real time shadows and water effects.
I agree with much you said. However, I would like to inject my opinion that graphics, while very capable on the Wii or PS2 (God of War was awesome) do have a big role play in some games. Take Dead Rising for example. The Wii version was just god awful terrible and I attribute most of it to graphics. The biggest reason... immersion. The mall I ran around in on my buddies 360 did not feel as real as the one I ran around in on my Wii. I couldn't see the covers of books and magazines in the shops and I just felt like the whole thing was flat.
With that said, I do think the Wii has plenty of graphical power to make good games, but I find too many devs. jumping on the "motion sensing" band wagon and making motion sensing controls when none are needed. Don't make me 'waggle' the controller to attack. Just let me smash a button.
Though, the 360/PS3 are far more than just "graphical machines". Their ability to do impressive FPS while having far far more enemies on screen at the same time is a big boost to the potential games one can make. Again, Dead Rising is an example of this. That's the other side of just making things look photo-realistic. Cramming a lot of things on the screen at once and animating them. =)
_
And why is the HTML formatting all messed up? There's no magin's between paragraph elements anymore.
Obligatory Onion Video.
Here's the companies website and order page for this product. http://www.maingear.com/products/desktops/pulse/.
The "Eco" GForce isn't even part of the $799.00 price tag and will add $99.00 for the cheapest option. Likewise, you can upgrade to 8BG (64-bit Vista requried) for ~$100 as well as a Quad-Core 2.6 Processor. It certainly isn't the $5k Alienware you can get, but it's not a terrible gaming PC for the price. And you can increase your e-peen for "green gaming" despite gaming itself not being very eco-friendly by any means.
They need to explain that a bit better in the article and on the product website
So... that's how it works. I wonder if this is the graphic illustration the engineer use to sell the product?
Wolfram is located a few blocks from me in Champaign Illinois
Or just do what I did and "wolfram Alpha it"* (well, that doesn't quite have the same ring too it).
* © 2009 Wolfram Alpha LLCâ"A Wolfram Research Company
I'm deeply hoping for a new series with this cast... which of course will never happen, but I think it would be awesome. It would give the chance to actually develop each character properly, instead of trying to shoe horn character development into a couple hours while trying to entertain with lots of action and special effects.
Do other games show the same problem?
To be honest, I've not played a whole lot of other games on the PC. I play Titan Quest a few times and it did feel like there was some graphic struggles for it. Likewise, I've recently bought Bioshock and it felt to run relatively smooth with high graphics, but I've not clocked a lot of time on it or have a standard to compare it too. And Left4Dead didn't have any issues either, but I stopped playing that before I started noticing this slowdown.
I did, however, manage to turn off a couple video setting and have been getting around 60 FPS in some WoW cities with it dropping to around low 30's FPS for particularly bad areas (while having actually turned up more of my video settings). I believe I turned off Triple buffering and I think something else on that page and then upped my refresh rate to 75mhz from 60mhz. It seems to have helped a lot for my case. And no, my card hasn't been crashing, so that's a good point. The only freezing has always been related to a specific spot in WoW, which leads me to believe it must be a game issue related to my video settings.
But I do have to check the temperature. One of the troubleshooting steps I need to take is to blow out the dust from the case and make sure there's no cords blocking the air path.
thanks for the links and the advice.
It's a 3GH Pentium D, 2GB RAM. Odd thing is WoW use to run well until like a couple of months ago. I've done some research. Checked if there was any processes that where spiking to cause the problems. I've not found anything.
The only thing I can think of is either my video card is starting to die or just getting out-dated. /shrug I can't even turn my shadows up a couple notches without dropping to 1 FPS.
So, would one of these $100 cards be better than my GeForce 7800 GTX? It's been painful playing WoW lately. I don't know if my card is just dying or WoW's been updated, but I can't run it as well as I use too. And that's with a lot of the extreme graphic settings turned down (like shadows). I know my system is like 4 years old now.
Yes. In-fact, the only war they won was the French Revolution, primarily because they fought themselves. =P
(re: Pizza hut advertising on a NASA rocket http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=2202 [spaceref.com])
Off topic to the article, but to your point about sponsors... KFC is actually spending money to fill pot holes and spray-paint their logo on them. Complete with Col. Sanders standing around with a bright green jacket.
You're pretty good in your analysis. 4E doesn't not foster RP, infact, it pretty much states this to some degree in the PHBI as well as being easily inferred through how they deal with "flavor text" for each spell (what they now call powers).
However, I reject the claim that this prevents RP or interesting characters. Since when was an interesting character determined by their role? Be it that they're a healer(4E Leaders), a DPS (4E Strikers), tank (4E Defenders) or utility (4E Controllers). I still find the biggest problem people who have an issue with D&D(and 4E in particular) with regards to role playing isn't the system, it's the people. Everyone who complains about role play complain the *book* doesn't allow role play. That precise point is the real truth. Role play has never and should never be the responsibility of the gaming system. The whole point of role play is freedom and creativity. The game system is to try and balance the mechanical parts of it. And that's exactly what 4E does well.
Everything is still possible to do in 4E and I find it actually better for role playing than at least 3E (my only other P&P RPG experiance) because the underlying mechanics are much more simple to adjust and modify and that's, in my opinion.
What 4E really does need is a good book on how to role play. A guide on how to make interesting characters with back story and how to define them by their actions, powers and such. How to use powers to affect the environment to perform things you wouldn't normally need. Actually, the DM guide for 4E covers some of this pretty well already and the DM guide is very much a guide by most means. The PHB... not so much. But the PHB had a lot of ground to cover so I cannot blame it for skimping on the "how to RP" section.
I believe it's the people who are missing RP because they've gotten too comfortable with books and systems that told them how to RP their character. You don't need a book to tell you how to role play. As for "class based". With a little experiance with 4E, you can easily mix/match class powers to fit whatever type of character you want to play. That's the whole point behind how you multiclass in 4E. With some creativity and a willing DM, you can easily create whole new classes out of the parts you're given by swapping like-level abilities because the mechanics behind 4E are very easily modular and swappable. Of course, 4E won't tell you how to do this, that's the part where you have to be creative.
I still haven't heard one example of something you can't role play in 4E that you can in other games. I've even seen the 4E rule set lend itself well to other genre's such as survival/horror or future Sci-Fi really well.
As for the WoW / Video Game assertions... it's also true the mechanics were developed to easily transition into other mediums besides P&P, such as video games, TCG, Minis, etc. I believe WotC stated this at some point.
I don't think this means your wrong, I think this just means you're looking for something else in a product. But at the same time, it also doesn't mean the product is incapable of doing the things you claim it does.
Cheers!
Fozzy