Richard Garriot's Future... More Swords and Dragons Online

[rk47]

I never played Ocarina cause I don't own the console, but yeah U9 was a disaster in graphic, gameplay and writing. There wasn't really much positives to be taken from the bug ridden piece of shit that concludes a saga. What a horrible way to end a series. After the disappointment of U 8, I get treated to this rapid click combat with jumping puzzle in a 3D world filed with characters devoid of any personality when they had done so back then with Ultima 7? I'm sorry, tech improves but design seems to go backwards to stone age = Fail.

[LC]

Someone needs to preserve these for the future:

http://kotaku.com/5123159/where-bad-games-go-to-die-rip-tabula-rasa

[Nija]

When 64v64 FPS matches become commonplace, then the line will have blurred. In the meantime, "massive" to me is the old SB banes, any given Eve war, and old Planetside fights (unless they're still big?).

I'm not sure we'll ever see that. You need some kind of dynamic map or world that expands and contracts as players join and leave. BF2 almost had it right, but they couldn't do it on the fly. You need to do it on the fly. You need to be able to start out a game with a small group of people and have the combat be fun and engaging. Then as others join it can ramp up to make it fun and engaging for everyone. I'm not sure what Planetside ever did, as I quit in beta before they added the grid system to it (where you had to fight on the front lines, you couldn't sneak around and capture a base behind enemy lines) which I didn't particularly like. They should have taken the approach with a tiny area that expanded as more people started playing. Maybe they did take that approach. I don't know.

I remember playing 32 player qwtf matches in 1997 and imagining amazing things will be when everyone is off modems and more data can be sent around. They could have more location based damage, destructable terrain, all kinds of cool things right on the horizon there in 1997. I just never really saw it. Ever. After qwtf, I spent most of my time playing what I thought was the best Q2 mod at the time - Rocket Arena. The maps had less people. Then CS came along, and every fps player on the entire damned internet was playing it. Yet the best CS was with 12 people or less. Now I still play TF2 off and on, and the best TF2 is 24 players. L4D? 8 players.

I tried raiding in WoW near release, and I couldn't stand being around 39 other random people who had to do everything right to accomplish some goal. It was then that I kind of realized that I'd never see the big 128 player FPS games working, cause you hit a point where with that many people you need solid goals. In order to reach those goals, you'll need people working together. That just seems impossible when you're talking about video games on the internet. Is it a coincidence that WoW is repeatedly lowering the number of people required to raid?

[MahrinSkel]

On the flip side, you have Eve, where their biggest technical problem is trying to breed mutant hamsters big enough to power the servers for 1500+ person battles, but also scales all the way down to a single individual raiding hostile territory or camping a low-sec gate for careless cargo ships.  Even if you set aside WW2O or Planetside, you've got a tradition going back to Air Warrior of 100+ person battles in combat sims.

It seems more to be the case that if you start from human-scale avatars and spaces, with the wide variety of intuitive options people expect from those settings, you can't get beyond 30-40 people before there's simply too much going on for meaningful battles.  We've got the wrong problem space, our desired solution (massive, meaningful battles that are still fun for the loser) simply isn't in it.

--Dave

[sidereal]

I don't think there's a technical impediment to having battles in the thousands on each side as long as the combat code is well and efficiently coded.  There are technical impediments to quickly rendering 2,000 avatars on the screen at the same time, but that's a separate issue.  Just getting 2,000 entities moving and shooting at each other is computationally trivial, even on commodity hardware.  I forget what my point was going to be, but I think there's a big market for very large scale battles (Battlefield 1942 times 10 and up) but the limiting factors are the increasing demand for high-quality graphics and decreasing appetite for risk among developers.  I suspect an indie will profitably fill this gap in the next couple of years (although indies tend to be averse to client-server apps, because they don't have resources for maintaining servers).

[DLRiley]

In a 10000 man PVE battle, sure that can be fun. Cause who cares really, the NPC by sheer number can provide individual challenge, without showing what will realistically happen to you in such a battle (people don't die in 3 secs) while allowing a very low degree on team work to be needed. Massive battles, especially in the RPG settings are going to suck massive balls. One you die, fast, very, very, very, very, very fast. You will spend most of your time on rez timer. No mmorpg, no matter how crap tastic the balance is, doesn't allow anyone to survive massive amounts of focus fire, hell depending on how idiotic the aoe damage is, battles assuming you don't lag, will be very messy and very unsightly. Then there is the organization, again large battles to feel like something remotely special has to have some semblance of intelligent thought, beyond the focus fire assist trains. Ultimately that breaks apart at even 20 vs 20, let alone 2000 vs 2000. And yes there will be lag, huge god awful lag. Till someone feels it will be a good idea to instances large battles, the shear number of spell effects spammed at any given time will lag the hell out of not only you the player, but the server, causing big cranky crashes. There are no persistent worlds now or forever that will EVER allow 100 vs 100 to be played consistently. Let alone 1000 vs 1000, AoC couldn't even handle 20 vs 20... It just ain't happening and that's just the way it is.

There may be a FPS that will do it, but it will be something like 20 vs 20 / 20 vs 20/ 20 vs 20. With each bracket fighting each other in separate parts of the map over different objectives. I don't think any duck and cover fps can truly do a 100 man battle let alone a 100 vs 100 battle without the outcome being "10 different snipers just scored a head shot on you at the exactly the same time. The server has no idea how to handle it so that just means you die 10 times at your spawn" (looking at you WolfTeam...)

[sidereal]

There are an enormous number of inaccuracies in your claims.

First, you're incredibly assumptive that MMO combat will always look like what MMO combat looks like now (AoE spells, the possibility of focused fire, rez timers as a mechanic, fast death as a necessary consequence, that something like a 'focus fire assist train' is even remotely intrinsic to multiplayer gaming, processor intensive 'spell effects', etc).

Second, the assumption that 'huge godawful lag' is a necessary consequence of large scale multiplayer combat is based on nothing.  And a 'shear number of spell effects' (I assume you mean the graphics) lagging the server would be an astounding programming feat, since graphics are rendered on the client.  If you mean the state transitions and damage from the spell effects, they're computationally trivial.  I can't promise that every developer can do trivial calculations without fucking it up and making it laggy, but a very large number can.

Not that there's any profound, world-stopping consequence to you being wrong about this.  It just means that you're not going to help develop such a game, but I expect you'll enjoy it when it does come out and you'll have completely forgotten about this comment.

[DLRiley]

There are an enormous number of inaccuracies in your claims.

First, you're incredibly assumptive that MMO combat will always look like what MMO combat looks like now (AoE spells, the possibility of focused fire, rez timers as a mechanic, fast death as a necessary consequence, that something like a 'focus fire assist train' is even remotely intrinsic to multiplayer gaming, processor intensive 'spell effects', etc).

Second, the assumption that 'huge godawful lag' is a necessary consequence of large scale multiplayer combat is based on nothing.  And a 'shear number of spell effects' (I assume you mean the graphics) lagging the server would be an astounding programming feat, since graphics are rendered on the client.  If you mean the state transitions and damage from the spell effects, they're computationally trivial.  I can't promise that every developer can do trivial calculations without fucking it up and making it laggy, but a very large number can.

Not that there's any profound, world-stopping consequence to you being wrong about this.  It just means that you're not going to help develop such a game, but I expect you'll enjoy it when it does come out and you'll have completely forgotten about this comment.

I'm assuming this post was made while playing darkfall.

[Lantyssa]

No, it's just means Darkfall's developers fall into the category of can't even perform trivial calculations without messing things up, along with a host of other problems.

[Sophismata]

I tried to say the same thing to him in the Darkfall thread, but your eloquence exceeds my own.

[DLRiley]

For every game with large scale pvp that's actually fun, there is a functioning bipedal mecha.

(should have used that first)

[SnakeCharmer]

Eh?

[Lantyssa]

For every game with large scale pvp that's actually fun, there is a liberal who doesn't believe in global warming.

You're an idiot who doesn't understand things don't exist in black and white.

Sorry to disappoint you, but two of my colleagues are quite liberal and don't believe in global warming.  They have doctorates in the hard sciences, by the way.  This has nothing to do with games.  Politics is it's own little domain.  I suggest not bringing things outside of it.  (I was going to qualify that, but no.  The nuances would be lost on you.  Don't bring Politics outside of it's forum.  And really, with your wit, you shouldn't be there in the first place.)

[DLRiley]

For every game with large scale pvp that's actually fun, there is a liberal who doesn't believe in global warming.

You're an idiot who doesn't understand things don't exist in black and white.

Sorry to disappoint you, but two of my colleagues are quite liberal and don't believe in global warming.  They have doctorates in the hard sciences, by the way.  This has nothing to do with games.  Politics is it's own little domain.  I suggest not bringing things outside of it.  (I was going to qualify that, but no.  The nuances would be lost on you.  Don't bring Politics outside of it's forum.  And really, with your wit, you shouldn't be there in the first place.)

I was just posting a sterotype to prove a point. My dinosaur analogy can't be used twice you know.

-prepares for extended vacation-

[Triforcer]

For every game with large scale pvp that's actually fun, there is a liberal who doesn't believe in global warming.

You're an idiot who doesn't understand things don't exist in black and white.

Sorry to disappoint you, but two of my colleagues are quite liberal and don't believe in global warming.  They have doctorates in the hard sciences, by the way.  This has nothing to do with games.  Politics is it's own little domain.  I suggest not bringing things outside of it.  (I was going to qualify that, but no.  The nuances would be lost on you.  Don't bring Politics outside of it's forum.  And really, with your wit, you shouldn't be there in the first place.)

I am carving a new statue in the F13 mausoleum, next to Darksign, Dash, and others in their royal line.  Why do all of my potential apprentices die so young?    

[DLRiley]

For every game with large scale pvp that's actually fun, there is a liberal who doesn't believe in global warming.

You're an idiot who doesn't understand things don't exist in black and white.

Sorry to disappoint you, but two of my colleagues are quite liberal and don't believe in global warming.  They have doctorates in the hard sciences, by the way.  This has nothing to do with games.  Politics is it's own little domain.  I suggest not bringing things outside of it.  (I was going to qualify that, but no.  The nuances would be lost on you.  Don't bring Politics outside of it's forum.  And really, with your wit, you shouldn't be there in the first place.)

I am carving a new statue in the F13 mausoleum, next to Darksign, Dash, and others in their royal line.  Why do all of my potential apprentices die so young?    

  oh sweet sorrow...

[Arthur_Parker]

hmm.

[Lantyssa]

It's not like I wield the ban stick.  Even if I was right, it wasn't us bitching about it but a mod getting sick of Dash for him to get the boot.

So you're safe for now Tri.  You still have someone to make you look good in comparison.  Enjoy not being our puppy to kick around for a bit longer.

[Rasix]

He's likely Dash anyhow. Sure acts like it.  Otherwise, we're just blessed to have 2 retards in less than a year cut from the same annoying-colored cloth.

Anyhow, back to Richard Garriot and his lack of any meaningful future in the industry.

[Signe]

I don't usually like to poke at our lovely nubbies but this guy acts like Dash uses uses tenses like HRose.  Gah!  I need tea and saltines!

[IainC]

He sounds superficially like Dash but she could at least put sentences together. It's possibly Dash on meth I suppose. Dash at Grunk's rehab clinic perhaps?

[Merusk]

Given the litany of names Tri just listed, I propose a ban on ALL new usernames that start with a "D." 

[Draegan]

For every game with large scale pvp that's actually fun, there is a liberal who doesn't believe in global warming.

You're an idiot who doesn't understand things don't exist in black and white.

Sorry to disappoint you, but two of my colleagues are quite liberal and don't believe in global warming.  They have doctorates in the hard sciences, by the way.  This has nothing to do with games.  Politics is it's own little domain.  I suggest not bringing things outside of it.  (I was going to qualify that, but no.  The nuances would be lost on you.  Don't bring Politics outside of it's forum.  And really, with your wit, you shouldn't be there in the first place.)

I am carving a new statue in the F13 mausoleum, next to Darksign, Dash, and others in their royal line.  Why do all of my potential apprentices die so young?    

They all begin with the letter D too.  Coincidence?

[Rasix]

You just posted the same thing as Merusk.  The "D" purge shall begin shortly.  We apologize for the delay.

[Signe]

Did we already ban DLRiley?  He hasn't said anything in minutes.  Don't delete Draegan.  I think he's nice.

[tazelbain]

He's such a whammy.

[sidereal]

Darniaq's always been a little suspicious, too

[Signe]

NOOOO!  I LOVE Darniaq!  And TripleDes, too.  I know it's 3 Ds but he's so lovely!  STOP DELETING ALL THE D PEOPLE!!!   

[Mrbloodworth]

Yay for "B"!

[Slyfeind]

That made me google for images of "D People" and the results were really boring.

[Mrbloodworth]

That made me google for images of "D People" and the results were really boring.

LOOK WHAT YOU HAVE DONE!

 

[Signe]

You are not a B, you are an M. 

[Righ]

Stop reaming all the Ds. Things can only get better.

[UnSub]

First they came for the Ds, then the Bs, then the Ms. Soon, nothing stood against them. If only I'd been part of the RST cartel...

[Mrbloodworth]

You are not a B, you are an M. 

Oh #@%!