Chances are, they're hoping for just that scenario. Instead of capturing a capital, the measurement of success becomes how long you hold it. It lets them hold off on new end-game material (if any) and works up until guilds band together for rotating defense. Or if they go with a multiple shard/world structure like most other MMOGs do, one faction will end up steamrolling the other like usual.
Cities of X have the mixed benefit of being dead fucking simple. There's very little traditional loot (almost all of which can actually be bought in the in-game stores) and most of the gameplay is based around instanced maps. What world-map hunting there is consists mostly of 'Defeat X of Y Faction' or hunting specific critter types to earn kills toward badges... which, by and large, have no in-game effect. With the exception of the very sparse end-game content, it's focused almost entirely on casual play and very accommodating to solo heroes. On the other hand, it's only slightly deeper than the average petri dish.
Another thing to consider is that almost all of the Korean-developed MMOGs and a sad proportion of North American developed ones are... well, crap. Horizons failed because they began with an utterly insane design document that kept having increasingly unlikely features added; by the time they actually had a functional engine, there was precious little content. Asheron's Call 2 failed for largely the same reason: it had a decent engine and pretty landscapes, but a lack of towns, vendors or life beyond monsters to whack meant that there was precious little content to keep the players interested and occupied. Unless there's story being doled out in bite-sized pieces (like what City of X does, and like the original Asheron's Call did), or a steadily changing menagerie of things to hit and loot to show off, you're going to lose all but the worst fanboys and the most abjectly obsessive-compulsive players.
Last winter, it challenged players to team up and fuel a worldwide war effort.
Aside from the massive battles at the very end of that "story", the teaming up and preparation amounted to nothing more than hunting monsters for relatively common materials and scouring the countryside for herbs and ores that can be extracted with the game's pretty simple trade-skills. It was basically a reputation grind of titanic proportions, not what this guy claims that every gamer wants.
Personally, I'd want a faster base movement rate if I was to return to WoW. Even with a mount, moving long distance is a gruelingly slow and intensely boring proposition.
How appropriate, given that both companies' titles major claim to fame is in-game drama resulting from racketeering, fraud, and other forms of large-scale social engineering.
Of course, there is a downside. Real-time procedural texturing is costly. So if the hardware isn't up to it, the advantages of the texturing will go unrealized. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the first generation merely generates static textures on load, then uses them as if they were bitmaps included with the game.
Having played through the Roboblitz demo, and having sat through about five to ten minutes of it claiming to unpack procedural textures before the game actually began, it's pretty clear that that's what these guys are doing with it. I imagine that it'd be a real boon to something like Vanguard, whose installer purportedly weighs in at 16 gigabytes and expands to over 20, due to massive textures.
As much as I'm inclined to agree... I can't. EA does treat most of its licenses and developers like shit, but there are noteworthy exceptions like Maxis. Given that Hellgate's being developed by the guys behind Diablo, they may have the sense to keep their hands off this golden goose too. We'll have to wait and see how the game fares after launch.
You said it yourself: They're vicious scum. They treat everyone the same way, regardless of whether they have the wrong number, or a deadbeat's roommate, or they're on a direct line to God. As far as they're concerned, you're lying when you tell them that they've got the wrong person. Most of the time, they really don't care if they have the wrong person or not-- if you're a relative or a roommate, they can keep pestering you until you come down on their real target for them or agree to pay the bill just to get them off your ass. They really don't give a shit what happens, as long as they get the fat commission waiting at the finish line for them.
From personal experience, they'll happily lie to you or hang up when you try to turn the tables on them. I had one threaten to take me to court and refuse to discuss the possibility of a payment plan. Fortunately, relatives came through and helped me to pay the lump sum that was owed... and then, two days later, a letter came from the agency offering to sort out the payment plan that their agent flatly ignored.
I was wondering the same thing, myself. If it's a solid piece of costume gear, you're probably looking at a release price comparable to the original Steel Battalion. More likely, it's a sheet of vacuum-formed plastic with a removable bottom or a solid lump the size of a keychain fob. There are plenty of Halo fans out there, some with more money than sense, but unusually bulky packaging doesn't enthuse retailers or the guys packing everything into crates for shipping.
Living just to the north of much of the United States, I often offer Stateside friends crash space in my basement in the event that things go completely pear-shaped where they live. Sure, we could be violently annexed in a depressingly short amount of time (and our supplies of uranium, oil, fresh water and lumber might make us a delectable target), but it's a relatively short trip. Besides, beyond Canadian Bacon, there hasn't really been any real effort to add us to the Axis of Evil.
Because seriously, aside from the graphical angle and the constant downtime issues, the two services are extremely similar. Neither are particularly well policed, both allow for truly godawful site/plot designs, and both are increasingly heavily occupied by corporate PR interfaces.
The whole reason for the existence of both is social networking. Making money is clearly a big deal for some SL users, but without other users to actually buy their virtual goods or rent space to build upon, the creators/sellers wouldn't have a market.
Personally, having been in SL off and on for over a year, I think it's a product with limited shelf-life. The developers have been promising big things, like better physics, rendering and interface tools for next to forever, but between community resistance to change and their own middling competencies (not to mention popular interactive items that depend on bugs and bad scripting to function), their efforts have dwindled to very basic bug-fixing and quality of life tweaks, while doggedly chasing after investment capital. Major changes risk forcing the users to re-learn or rebuild their projects, but at the same time other outfits are developing similar applications that leave SL in the virtual dust.
The average SL businessman's long-term plan involves screaming a lot and threatening class-action suits, if their reactions to server crashes, 'grey goo' attacks or spam are any indication. The ones that are actually making serious money probably have a good chunk of their profits sitting in a real-world bank or investments that aren't tied to the fate of a single small company.
To add to the glitter, in 2004 Gizmondo purchased a 75 percent interest in a London modeling agency called Isis, ensuring that there would be plenty of beautiful young women at its parties and events.
I know that beautiful women unrelated to the product at hand are a time-honoured schtick in the industry (e.g. the "classic" E3 booth babes), but that really, really strikes me as unfathomably scuzzy.
I guess it's like the old saying goes: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, bamboozle 'em with bosoms.
I can't stand Sourceforge as a user. Using Firefox on Windows to try and sign up for an account, so that I can have some neckbeard tell me that it's my fault that popfile is choking on specific keywords, results in literally nothing. No error message, no confirmation message, nothing but another blank account request form. I eventually had to sign up using IE, which struck me as being terribly ironic.
What, like the way iD would sell story/level packs for Wolfenstein 3D or Commander Keen as separate episodes, back in the days of shareware? No. If anything, this is just the evolution of developing extensible engines and licensing them out, or even just a new spin on the old expansion pack routine-- a handful of new levels, maybe a new unit or two, plus a lot of clever scripting to cover up the flaking paint on the parent engine.
And so far, how many companies have hopped onto this apparent bandwagon? Valve at least has actually done something with it. The kids behind Sin: Episodes? We haven't heard a peep out of them since Emergence was released on Steam.
As a series of expansions, I think there's defintely something to episodic content. Coming up with a whole new engine just for a couple of hours worth of gameplay doesn't sound particularly cost-effective, and its likelihood of snagging players' attention in the same way that a full game does is pretty low. I'm interested in Episode 3 because I want to know how the destruction of City 17 pans out (though admittedly, Portal is a huge draw too), but I couldn't care less about the next installment of Sin.
That a social contract is worth exactly as much as the paper it's printed on.
As a user of Adblock Plus (mit Filterset.G!), I'm not really concerned about any advertisements that LJ puts out. As an occasional LJ user, I really have no problem going through my few posts, copying them to local storage and moving them to a new service in the event that it descends into the puddle of diarrhea that Myspace currently has a lock on.
God, yes. I'd love to see some of the classic EA titles like Mail Order Monsters (made by the same folks behind Star Control and the Ur-Quan Masters!), Racing Destruction Set (whose internal track construction system was designed with a joystick/controller in mind) and Realm of Impossibility. Save your MORPHs, tracks or progress through the Thirteen Dungeons to your Wii's non-volatile RAM, transfer them to friends over the 'net, and... oh, god. I think I just had a retrogasm.
You can attach boxes to your HUD? I didn't know that, I thought that was just for scripted objects like SLURLblogger, or a mood HUD or Second Style magazine.:-)
I attached a mop of flexprim hair that I got at Yadni's junkyard to the center of my HUD, once. I swear, I thought it was a bright red facehugger for a second after it rezzed.
Slashdot Mirror
Chances are, they're hoping for just that scenario. Instead of capturing a capital, the measurement of success becomes how long you hold it. It lets them hold off on new end-game material (if any) and works up until guilds band together for rotating defense. Or if they go with a multiple shard/world structure like most other MMOGs do, one faction will end up steamrolling the other like usual.
Another thing to consider is that almost all of the Korean-developed MMOGs and a sad proportion of North American developed ones are... well, crap. Horizons failed because they began with an utterly insane design document that kept having increasingly unlikely features added; by the time they actually had a functional engine, there was precious little content. Asheron's Call 2 failed for largely the same reason: it had a decent engine and pretty landscapes, but a lack of towns, vendors or life beyond monsters to whack meant that there was precious little content to keep the players interested and occupied. Unless there's story being doled out in bite-sized pieces (like what City of X does, and like the original Asheron's Call did), or a steadily changing menagerie of things to hit and loot to show off, you're going to lose all but the worst fanboys and the most abjectly obsessive-compulsive players.
Personally, I'd want a faster base movement rate if I was to return to WoW. Even with a mount, moving long distance is a gruelingly slow and intensely boring proposition.
How appropriate, given that both companies' titles major claim to fame is in-game drama resulting from racketeering, fraud, and other forms of large-scale social engineering.
As much as I'm inclined to agree... I can't. EA does treat most of its licenses and developers like shit, but there are noteworthy exceptions like Maxis. Given that Hellgate's being developed by the guys behind Diablo, they may have the sense to keep their hands off this golden goose too. We'll have to wait and see how the game fares after launch.
There's also the unpleasant possibility of having received a deadbeat's previous phone number when switching service to a new home.
From personal experience, they'll happily lie to you or hang up when you try to turn the tables on them. I had one threaten to take me to court and refuse to discuss the possibility of a payment plan. Fortunately, relatives came through and helped me to pay the lump sum that was owed... and then, two days later, a letter came from the agency offering to sort out the payment plan that their agent flatly ignored.
It's not vandalism. It's terrorism.
I was wondering the same thing, myself. If it's a solid piece of costume gear, you're probably looking at a release price comparable to the original Steel Battalion. More likely, it's a sheet of vacuum-formed plastic with a removable bottom or a solid lump the size of a keychain fob. There are plenty of Halo fans out there, some with more money than sense, but unusually bulky packaging doesn't enthuse retailers or the guys packing everything into crates for shipping.
If he's Vampire Hunter D, it could be both.
Plus, there's the difficulty of finding a doctor to perform the surgery if you're under thirty and/or haven't already had children.
Dude, that's just a cartoon. Everyone knows that cartoons aren't real.
Living just to the north of much of the United States, I often offer Stateside friends crash space in my basement in the event that things go completely pear-shaped where they live. Sure, we could be violently annexed in a depressingly short amount of time (and our supplies of uranium, oil, fresh water and lumber might make us a delectable target), but it's a relatively short trip. Besides, beyond Canadian Bacon, there hasn't really been any real effort to add us to the Axis of Evil.
Endgame Prospero here. Got Staff of Calibashing, still need accolades from earlier tales.
The whole reason for the existence of both is social networking. Making money is clearly a big deal for some SL users, but without other users to actually buy their virtual goods or rent space to build upon, the creators/sellers wouldn't have a market.
Personally, having been in SL off and on for over a year, I think it's a product with limited shelf-life. The developers have been promising big things, like better physics, rendering and interface tools for next to forever, but between community resistance to change and their own middling competencies (not to mention popular interactive items that depend on bugs and bad scripting to function), their efforts have dwindled to very basic bug-fixing and quality of life tweaks, while doggedly chasing after investment capital. Major changes risk forcing the users to re-learn or rebuild their projects, but at the same time other outfits are developing similar applications that leave SL in the virtual dust.
The average SL businessman's long-term plan involves screaming a lot and threatening class-action suits, if their reactions to server crashes, 'grey goo' attacks or spam are any indication. The ones that are actually making serious money probably have a good chunk of their profits sitting in a real-world bank or investments that aren't tied to the fate of a single small company.
I can hardly wait until the feed goes down for half a day, because someone's initiated another Grey Goo attack on the grid.
That's a good idea, actually. Far too many people try to use the term 'pirate' as part of their arguments that software piracy isn't theft.
I guess it's like the old saying goes: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, bamboozle 'em with bosoms.
I can't stand Sourceforge as a user. Using Firefox on Windows to try and sign up for an account, so that I can have some neckbeard tell me that it's my fault that popfile is choking on specific keywords, results in literally nothing. No error message, no confirmation message, nothing but another blank account request form. I eventually had to sign up using IE, which struck me as being terribly ironic.
And so far, how many companies have hopped onto this apparent bandwagon? Valve at least has actually done something with it. The kids behind Sin: Episodes? We haven't heard a peep out of them since Emergence was released on Steam.
As a series of expansions, I think there's defintely something to episodic content. Coming up with a whole new engine just for a couple of hours worth of gameplay doesn't sound particularly cost-effective, and its likelihood of snagging players' attention in the same way that a full game does is pretty low. I'm interested in Episode 3 because I want to know how the destruction of City 17 pans out (though admittedly, Portal is a huge draw too), but I couldn't care less about the next installment of Sin.
As a user of Adblock Plus (mit Filterset.G!), I'm not really concerned about any advertisements that LJ puts out. As an occasional LJ user, I really have no problem going through my few posts, copying them to local storage and moving them to a new service in the event that it descends into the puddle of diarrhea that Myspace currently has a lock on.
God, yes. I'd love to see some of the classic EA titles like Mail Order Monsters (made by the same folks behind Star Control and the Ur-Quan Masters!), Racing Destruction Set (whose internal track construction system was designed with a joystick/controller in mind) and Realm of Impossibility. Save your MORPHs, tracks or progress through the Thirteen Dungeons to your Wii's non-volatile RAM, transfer them to friends over the 'net, and... oh, god. I think I just had a retrogasm.
I attached a mop of flexprim hair that I got at Yadni's junkyard to the center of my HUD, once. I swear, I thought it was a bright red facehugger for a second after it rezzed.