Mr. Smart is the Best Forum Poster [INTERNET HISTORY ITT]

[Khaldun]

What's really special, if I read it right: you can keep playing the game while they completely redo the art assets? How's that work? "Hey, look, that night elf just became a vampire?"

[schild]

"Hey, look, that night elf just became a vampire?"

I'd play that.

[dusematic]

"Hey, look, that night elf just became a vampire?"

I'd play that.

nice ff6 avatar holmes.

[Daeven]

What's really special, if I read it right: you can keep playing the game while they completely redo the art assets? How's that work? "Hey, look, that night elf just became a vampire?"

No.  Coke machines and usenet posts obviously.

[UnSub]

This is the best PR move Alganon could have made. Everyone's talking about the game now!

[Signe]

So they launched in December, went some sort of bizarro free to play a week or so ago and will launch it again in April.  Is that right or have I accidentally made that up?   I had a beta invite for this game that I didn't bother with after seeing who was making it.  Now, based on who is finishing it, I can't imagine buying it.  I might peek at the trial just for a laugh.  From what I've read the free trial is on it's own sever which is very lonely... lonely... lonely....

[Ratman_tf]

WTF? Serek Dmart got grey hairs and is all still in the gaming industry? I had blissfully forgotten about him, aside from a few jokes almost as old as "All Your Base", until now.

[Shatter]

My interest meter is not moving...

[Mrbloodworth]

That is a ton of assets and animations that need to be redone. Art and animations touch so many parts of a game, thats rather scary. Just one single combat animation can ruin a combat system, or at the very least invalidate the work done on it to this point. I don't envy that team of artists. Poor guys, the "like wow" I bet, was not even there idea.

[Falwell]

That post is like some great national or religious treasure. It's the fucking Shroud of Turin of internet artifacts. If you look close enough you can even see the faint outline of professionalism.

[Daeven]

That post is like some great national or religious treasure. It's the fucking Shroud of Turin of internet artifacts. If you look close enough you can even see the faint outline of professionalism.

National Treasure: The Search for Narcissism.

[Bzalthek]

That post is like some great national or religious treasure. It's the fucking Shroud of Turin of internet artifacts. If you look close enough you can even see the faint outline of professionalism.

National Treasure: The Search for Narcissism.

So the sequel will be a 30 second short?

[schild]

That post is like some great national or religious treasure. It's the fucking Shroud of Turin of internet artifacts. If you look close enough you can even see the faint outline of professionalism.

National Treasure: The Search for Narcissism.

So the sequel will be a 30 second short?

A 2-hour dramatic reading of his forum post by an Elcor actually.

[Nonentity]

That is a ton of assets and animations that need to be redone. Art and animations touch so many parts of a game, thats rather scary. Just one single combat animation can ruin a combat system, or at the very least invalidate the work done on it to this point. I don't envy that team of artists. Poor guys, the "like wow" I bet, was not even there idea.

He seems to indicate the game UI and web UI specifically, not the assets.

[Mrbloodworth]

That is a ton of assets and animations that need to be redone. Art and animations touch so many parts of a game, thats rather scary. Just one single combat animation can ruin a combat system, or at the very least invalidate the work done on it to this point. I don't envy that team of artists. Poor guys, the "like wow" I bet, was not even there idea.

He seems to indicate the game UI and web UI specifically, not the assets.

Then he missed the point of most peoples comparisons. But you are right, I assumed more from that, but yes, it reads as if constrained to just the GUI.

[sam, an eggplant]

The art, animation, and even playstyle you could defend as "inspired" by WoW. The UI was simply not defensible. It was a nearly exact clone.

I'm looking forward to Derek's first post in a forum he doesn't control. That's the next step on the golden path towards total lulzlightenment.

[Khaldun]

I also read him as saying that all of the art assets would need to be changed so the game wasn't a WoW clone. It's really not just the UI, if you've seen it.

[Dtrain]

Unless I read this wrong:

a) This whole "WoW look-a-like" rubbish, is gone. I've essentially asked them to throw it all out and for the artists to come up with the game's own unique look and feel for for both the web UI as well as the game UI itself.

Your night elf is still a night elf. Although I would prefer a vampire. Or a wolfman.

[Khaldun]

I was picking up on the "throw it all out" phrase.

So it'll be a game with almost-WoW graphics but a really distinctive UI. Awesome.

[Stabs]

If there is any doubt where the WoW clone allegation came from please see this blog post from October just after the NDA lifted clearly showing plagiarism.
http://blog.eldergoth.com/2009/10/alganon-nda-lifted-here-are-my-thoughts.html

Now this was fixed when I tried the free trial in January. It was probably fixed before the launch (now described as a soft launch).

In October the game was visually very like WoW. Possibly to the extent of "passing off" (a copyright offence). Passing off is where you make your commercial product look like someone else's with the intent to deceive consumers. For instance a Scottish man called MacDonald was found to be passing off when he opened a hamburger restaurant with the distinctive red and yellow style and similar lettering to the McDonald's hamburger chain called MacDonald's even though it was his name.

In particular there was a non-functioning key ring down by the bags that mimicked the key ring in the WoW UI. Why would they include an element in their UI that didn't work that was identical to a WoW UI feature unless the intention was to deceive consumers? What was that keyring doing there? - it certainly wasn't being storage space for keys.

As I said though this degree of similarity has already been removed from the game. It still looks pretty generic WoW/Champions/Runes of Magic but it doesn't have the degree of cosmetic similarity that it did when Eldergoth reviewed it.

In fact they've already done the cosmetic tidying up that Mr Smart is taking credit in advance for.

All-in-all it's wonderful games industry soap opera without being a game that is actually worth playing. One of the few neat features - the skill queue they ripped from Eve - can be bypassed by buying training time in the shop. Which kills the beauty of that feature. I honestly don't think Alganon can be rescued.

[Signe]

Well, at least the familiar UI made it easy to play for the half hour before I was distracted by an exciting mark on the wall above the door frame which turned out to actually be a shadow.

[Musashi]

You're lucky it wasn't a spider.

[Samprimary]

It's so ... strange, thinking about this. Like, I don't need to know anything about this game other than

1. It's called Alganon

2. Voldemort is making it

and I already have this absolutely crystal-clear, PERFECT understanding of the game in my head. Like, I already know everything about it. I can touch the future, see a thousand quantum outcomes. I can know what it would be to play the game on release. I see myself, plodding through five hours worth of derivative, milquetoast content. The bugs, I see them too. I fell through the world, can't get a GM. It crashed to desktop. Now I am growing bored. I am .. yes, I'm uninstalling. Now I'm bitching about it in F13 and drawing a comic about he who must not be named. He throws a coke machine on my head. I have lived all these lives, and more. It's .. it's beautiful.

[Ratman_tf]

It's so ... strange, thinking about this. Like, I don't need to know anything about this game other than

1. It's called Alganon

2. Voldemort is making it

and I already have this absolutely crystal-clear, PERFECT understanding of the game in my head. Like, I already know everything about it. I can touch the future, see a thousand quantum outcomes. I can know what it would be to play the game on release. I see myself, plodding through five hours worth of derivative, milquetoast content. The bugs, I see them too. I fell through the world, can't get a GM. It crashed to desktop. Now I am growing bored. I am .. yes, I'm uninstalling. Now I'm bitching about it in F13 and drawing a comic about he who must not be named. He throws a coke machine on my head. I have lived all these lives, and more. It's .. it's beautiful.

Precient game review!

[Sheepherder]

He throws a coke machine on my head. I have lived all these lives, and more.

I've won again, Samprimary.

[HaemishM]

I also read him as saying that all of the art assets would need to be changed so the game wasn't a WoW clone. It's really not just the UI, if you've seen it.

I played it in beta. Yeah, it's not just a WoW-lookalike. It might as well have been called "World of Warcraft's Mentally Retarded Red-Head Step Cousin that We Locked in a Mental Hospital and Don't Talk About."

I always wondered how fucking bad a game would have to be to call in a complete egomaniacal sociopathic assbag to fix it.

[Samprimary]

Precient game review!

"This game is essentially what WoW would be if Blizzard were a company that was mismanaged to a malevolent degree by a revolving door of the questionably sane, who were trying to copy it whole-cloth as a much more successful game, but then had to spend the latter half of the design implementation timeframe covering up their earlier plagiarism with even less inspired genericism. Then, when the end product ends up being a piece of shit without even so much as a breath of compelling gameplay that rises out of the mire of second-rate, derivative MMO hackwork, they push it out anyway, preferring to let it die as a morbid, mewling accident on the delivery room floor rather than give it the decency of a quiet, dignified stillbirth."

*cokemachine'd*

[Ratman_tf]

Precient game review!

"This game is essentially what WoW would be if Blizzard were a company that was mismanaged to a malevolent degree by a revolving door of the questionably sane, who were trying to copy it whole-cloth as a much more successful game, but then had to spend the latter half of the design implementation timeframe covering up their earlier plagiarism with even less inspired genericism. Then, when the end product ends up being a piece of shit without even so much as a breath of compelling gameplay that rises out of the mire of second-rate, derivative MMO hackwork, they push it out anyway, preferring to let it die as a morbid, mewling accident on the delivery room floor rather than give it the decency of a quiet, dignified stillbirth."

*cokemachine'd*

*applause*

Truly, I didn't know jack about this game before, and now I know that it's a WoW ripoff with Serek Dmart somewhere posting about it on message boards. I think Blizzzard's subscription base is safe.

[Cheddar]

 

I love shitty MMO's.  Even this missed my radar.  The name that must not be spoken makes it soooo much better!

[Der Helm]

If there is PvP and a free trial, I will give it a try. 

[IainC]

It's going to be free to play apparently and while PvP may not necessarily be in, we know that there will certainly be PvD.

[sam, an eggplant]

Say PvPhD, rather. Nice ring to it.

[UnSub]

Wait, how does impact on the release of the Battlecruiser MMO? Does this mean it will launch before or after Jumpgate Evolution?

 

[raydeen]

Wait, how does impact on the release of the Battlecruiser MMO? Does this mean it will launch before or after Jumpgate Evolution?

 

It'll be the first expansion. ELVES...IIIIIN...SPAAAAAAACE!

[tmp]

Alganon is Battlecruiser MMO. The artists just need to get done with reworking these assets.