f13.net

Oh man, I don't even know why I tried to do that.  I'm bleeding from the asshole right now.

Who the fuck plays this?  Who are these people?  I figured a demented UO veteran like myself would be desensitized enough to tough it out for a while and maybe find a few good points, but no.  Uninstalled with extreme prejudice after 30 minutes of play.

It's like I woke up, opened the fridge, and said "Hey I bet this chunky green milk is still good, OH GOD WHY DO I VOMIT?!"  I don't know what came over me.

Lulz

Yeah, I did that about a year and a half ago.

PEOPLE - POLISHED TURD CONCEPT. No, you know what? It's not even that. It's a jagged pointy turd that makes your poo red.

Come on now.

Honestly though, what were you thinking?

Horizons sucks. And this is coming from someone who likes playing TR.

Was there anything at all you liked about it?

Once upon a time, Horizons had some interesting crafting ideas. Particularly in light of how busted SW:G's were at the time. The game however, was shit.

I don't know.  There was a free trial and it didn't require any CC info.

I mean, don't get me wrong.  It didn't CTD or anything.  If the game had anything interesting going in it's favor one might charitably describe it as "crude" and just muddle through.  But on top of looking and feeling totally amateurish, it was overwhelmingly, offensively generic.  "Here's a stupid short sword, newbie, go kill spiders and beetles!"  Fuck.

It made me think back upon and appreciate my newbie experience in WoW, where they gave my paladin a giant smashy hammer to start, and had him killing actual armed human beings almost immediately.

I can't find the review I did of Horizons years ago. Good to know nothing has changed.

CoH's was good that way too. "Welcome, Hero. Blow up a drone there, just to show you can. NO GO KILL THUGS!".

Sure, they were rats at heart -- but on screen, they were thugs assaulting a citizen. And you were generally fighting them two or three at once, which is pretty much stock hero fare.

I think that's one of those design things -- they can be rats, stats-wise, but make them look like more if you want the players to care. Players see the picture, not whatever variables comprise the actual mob.

WUA were you drunk or something? Noone cares what horrible game you are playing from week to week. ;)

I'd like to see a game that started off with a raid boss... get together five or ten newbies and then put them up against something that throws them around, hits them with crazy debuffs, stuns them at random and generally abuses them. It'd be rough to balance, and its AI would have to  avoid concentrating on anybody in particular or they'd all die fairly quickly... but it would make them feel simultaneously weak (I need to up my abilities!) and strong (that thing was totally awesome, and we beat it!)

The MMOG equivalent of starting God of War with that fight against the hydra in the hallway.

Horizons combat was never fantastic, then they decided to fuck it in the asshole when the first guy reached level 200 (as one of the super-broken classes) and the combat-catassers complained the game was too easy.  Combat was made harder and they did the "In Soviet Russia, resource nodes mine you" thing, so even crafters had to learn combat classes.  As far as crafting, Horizons wasn't bad.  Some might say good, even.  Still, the combat revamp killed anything fun there, and forcing combat on crafters was the final nail.

Also, I think only fifty people are playing it.

Yeah no shit....Why do we really ever need to kill rats?

I'm too lazy to find the screenshots, but the long-dead UO2 project had screens of newbies with daggers felling 20 foot tall minotaurs. 

EQ2 kind of did this at launch. The "boss" on Trial Isle required a group. There always seemed to be people willing to join up and help. Don't know the current state of Trial Isle today.

It's solo-able now.  I guess enough people whined.  Actually the two new trial/newbie grounds don't even have a 'kill the boss to exit' block at all.

Be nice if more of the rest of EQ2 were that way.  I hate having to wait until quests are green/gray to finish them. 

As for the Horizons bit... you're a brave man WUA, very brave. 

How many races did they actually launch with?  I remember the big claim to fame was all the playable races that were going to be available.  I'd be down to try it if I can actually be a demon or angel or one of those bug guys.

Does it still patch through IE? That alone was a deal breaker for me. Can't tell you how many times iE would crash on me during some stupid patch. And IIR there was no resume from where the patch dropped. Don't know if it was IE or Horizons. Probably a little bit from Column A and a little bit from Column B. I can't believe it's still around.  Next you'll be trying Ryzom.

As to the EQ2 bugs. You can be a good or evil bug. Putting fear in the hearts of bunnies every where. I recommend evil as I think Darklight woods is the best newbie ground in a MMORPG yet. I would recommend shadowknight. You just might enjoy. In fact I will almost garuntie enjoyment until level 20. Hows that for a dare?

Damn dude.

At least you didn't have to enter credit card information for them to charge on the sly a few months down the road I guess.

Somehow i am reminded of the WoW video where a dozen or so level 2 and 3 characters go "raid" hogger, the level 11 or 12 nasty quest Gnoll in the alliance starter zone.

That game would fail, unless such boss dies from simply everyone auto-attacking without actually killing anyone (so its all smoke and mirrors). Reason you get to bash critters that don't agro and hardly fight back is so you can learn to control your character, attack, interact with environment and so on. While there are a lot of mmorpg veterans that could wing most of what you describe A LOT of people are new and will get beaten badly.

Unless its highly optional content... so you could get your 'raiding' from get go, while rest of people could skip it all-together or join-in at some later point.

Was that the review that included the line "I didn't know which empire he (the newbie trainer) was referring to, but I vowed to serve Lord Vader well!" or something to that effect?  Because that line surfaced from the depths of my brain about the third time some NPC brought up "the empire" without the game having given me any clue WTF he was talking about.

Oh I know, I know. I always shudder at the piles of corpses lurking around in any given newbie area... the people who couldn't figure out how to face what they were attacking and went into a panic before they could decide to run away. I don't mean the raid boss is the FIRST thing you meet. A couple goons to whack to teach basic foozle slaughter, sure... but have that exciting raid boss be a necessary part of leaving the first zone.

Newbie quests should also teach the basics of PvE: when to run away and how, how to avoid aggro without stealth, how to use CC abilities to make a fight easier or to grab quest items. Class specific crap that will make or break them laster on. It's all well and good to morph rats into more fearsome beasts, but I'd rather see instruction with a purpose. Really explicit "THIS IS WHAT YOUR CLASS CAN DO FOR A GROUP" stuff, too. PvE as puzzle solving rather than foozle whacking.

Like the dojo in Guild Wars: Factions.

Warrior! Quick taunt this bear off me! - NPC Wizard

Priest! I require healing! -  NPC Warrior

Rogue, sap that mage before we take out the rest!

First, we polymorph the warrior so we can reduce their numbers at the start of the fight

It's not that hard, isn't it?

The final quest in the blood elf 'semi-newbie' zone (up to L20) involves killing the local leader of the Scourge invasion of the blood elf lands, and recommends a full group for the quest (and the NPC does have the odd trick up his sleeve too). You don't have to run that quest, but it gives you a nice, shiny blue weapon plus the follow-up drags you to Orgrimmar and gives you a nice +rest_of_the_Horde faction boost. I think the Draenei semi-newbie zone does something similar.

And speaking of WoW...
There's a Horde quest in the Barrens where you are told to go kill x rats (not even rats mobs, but critters) and bring the bodies back for stew. The quest text has a line something along the lines of "You can't call yourself an adventurer until you've killed some rats!"

That amused me, the first time I saw it.

Horizons had one strong concept that I never even saw happen (I did play for a couple of months way back early on): the world community contributing to world changing events. They were the first to try it as a core mechanic after the whole EQ 1 "Wake the Sleeper" fiasco, and since Horizon's failed, I've not seen any indication of this concept coming back.

Another one of those "the game sucked, therefore everything about the game sucked" issues that I wish didn't happen quite so much :(

I'm not sure. The part I do remember is making great fun of the "Monsters" signs, and asking where the sign was that pointed to "Fun."

I enjoyed that bit, too.  Construction was probably the reason we played.  Everyone working to open up a new area, discover a new playable race, etc. was very cool.  The first bit of the game our server opened up wasn't even ready.  We crashed the whole server.  Still, it was a hoot.  We stuck around for a short bit after hoping they'd fix the game (everything was pretty much borked) but they never bothered.  I'd enjoy seeing something like that in a game again.

I did see the infamous Horizons "Monsters -->" sign.  I should have kept a screenshot.

(http://pandadesigns.com/f13/tabula_rasa_front_lines_640.jpg) (http://pandadesigns.com/f13/tabula_rasa_front_lines.jpg)

Yeah, I saw a few of those signs in TR but just didn't want to acknowledge what that said about the game. It was disappointing enough already.

Goddamnit. That is made of fail.

Destroy the bases and airships, but make sure you leave the portable signs! /bane

They never bothered me given the context of the rest of it.

I have a feeling that the next time I do this, it'll be with Matrix Online.  It has guns, karate, super-jumps, and nifty clothes.  There's an insane little part of my brain that thinks it must be cool and that everyone else just didn't realize it for some reason.  So expect a "WTF I PLAYED MATRIX AND NOW I'M BLIND!" post next time I get really bored.

Well it was infinitely better than Horizons. I was jacked into the Matrix for a little while, enough to be worth it's free trial and IF you like it enough to keep going past that I'd say plink down for the StationAccess pass, because I really couldn't see paying for just that game. I'd actually play it again, and can compare the experience to CoH/CoV, with the same boredom, lack of groups, and no real point, except you could swap skills or "classes" from hardlines.

The FRONTLINES picture is classic.  Does TR have anchors?

What do you mean by "anchors"?

You can try the Matrix if you want, but it's really shitty. I managed about 3 hours out of it. I never felt like I was playing a game so much as controlling a kung-fu marionette who was immersed in water.

That is possibly the most accurate and succinct description of the Matrix online that exists to date.  I laughed not because it was funny so much as it was dead on.

Is there some structure or enemy from which other, smaller enemies spawn and once destroyed will free up the area from enemy invasion?

I probably answered my own question.  I think the battlefields were described as static?  How about cargo disks, does TR have those?

Nope.

Nope.

Hey!
Ryzom is a great game (that I sort of can't find a reason to log into lately)!

Sounds like EVE.

I wasn't putting Ryzom down. It's just one of those games that was on the radar for a brief blip then disappeared. I'd forgotten all about Horizons till this thread brought it up. Maybe I'll go try Ryzom. Looked somewhat interesting from what I remember.

Mmm...
Ryzom is showing its age, not so much graphically (if you like the style, that is) but the player base is getting smaller and smaller and... it's a bit depressing.
The game was supposed to have a progressive story, but that never really happened. And the current owner, Gameforge, isn't telling us much.

Well, I'm just whining...

The big draw for Horizon's was people's desire to be a dragon.  Was that race ever released? I never bothered with the game.

They were in at launch.  Dragons are most likely working as intended now... meaning they probably still suck.

From memory (and not really a pleasant one) hatchlings were in at launch and the later stages of dragon were some time after release. I remember the game mechanic of becoming a dragon by sacrificing treasure into your hoard (which ablates over time) was perhaps the most obvious money sink I had ever seen.

Yes, that was definitely the same review.  And I must say, reading that review was vastly more entertaining than playing the game.  I think my favorite quote though, was "Apparently, the island is made of some form of rotting meat. It didn’t look like rotting meat, and I can’t honestly say it smelled like rotting meat. But it had to be. How else would you explain the presence of fifty thousand maggots wandering around every square inch of the path out of town?"

Do they still have maggots to kill?  Only game I've seen that starts you out killing a lifeform even lower than rats.  Here you are, a young Dragon, and you're out killing...maggots.

Maggots, yes, but those things were the size of a young dragon's leg! Har! I hated killing those things. I thought it was more ridiculous than rats and bats.

Ryzom wasn't a bad game, it just lacked direction, I think. Combine that with a shrinking playerbase and you have a recipe for a dying MMOG. Pity, I enjoyed it for a bit. But then again, I'm the only living soul who liked AC2, so... grain of salt.