f13.net

Link (http://forums.ryzom.com/showthread.php?t=32216)

I'm sure it'll only die again.  It's totally boring! (although the migrating critters who pee on your leg were sort of cute)

There are a lot of redeeming qualities about this game i liked.

I won't argue that if your not a sandbox purist, thats its not boring.

The make your own skill, Skill system is awesome, the make your own adventure (The rysom ring) is awesome, the crafting system, also awesome.

The complete lack of quests after the initial trial isle, not so much.

The Stanza sounded much better than they ended up making it.  It turned out to be very meh. Crafting was interesting, but harvesting was unnecessarily complicated and tedious.  I found "tedious" to be the perfect word to describe the game, actually.  I never got to try out the whole Ryzom Ring thing because the game was too tedious to go back and check out.

I'm not quite sure what "I won't argue that if your not a sandbox purist, thats its not boring" means.  Not being snarky, I'm really having trouble understanding it.

yeah, it was oddly worded to begin with. I mean to say, unless you are a sandbox purist, it probably was boring on the whole.

I just always found a lot of the system really cool, and the art was fantastic.

Heh - I'm not any sort of purist, I don't think, and I did find it boring overall.  I also thought that Stanza system could have been something special and I think I even said so on F13 ages ago. Hopefully, this time around, if they can last, they'll use the clever ideas and make them way more fun than they did initially. 

well, the only thing i could every think of that would be a more quick fix to the "fun" is quests, after the trial land, the mainland was devoid of quests. The ring does make up for some of this (or it did), but its user generated content (very structured, but user none the less).

Its the first mmog that i know of that had has an entire tool set for users to make there own scenarios with, that others can do.

Surely this new team wont just let it be in its original forum, i wonder what they plan to do to make it have more mass appeal.

I gave this game an honest try. Signe is right about the boring part. 

So am i the only one that played around with the ring?

What happens in the bedroom stays in the bedroom.

 :rimshot:

... ahh, so many possible jokes ...

They got it for $324,000. Bargain.

Where did you get that number?

I tried Ryzom. The stanza thing - frankly, I had no idea what most of the blocks meant. If I'm trying to put something together then I should know what kind of weights to give the components. Especially since there were like 50 level-gated versions of every stinkin' block you could put in there.

Same thing goes with their vaunted crafting system. 10 different armor variables and every resource affects like 6 or 7 of them? Obtuse. There was just too much going on to really get a grip on.

DOES NOT COMPUTE

"Hey we have this game that failed once, lets get some retarded investors interested and relaunch the fail again!"

Suggestions for dealing with Ryzom this time around:

Place coin in mouth, decapitate with ax
Bury at crossroads
Chain to grave with wild roses
Boil head in vinegar
Cut off and burn head
Stake through heart, nail through temples
Pile stones on grave
Pour boiling oil on, drive nail through navel
Put poppy seeds in grave
Remove heart, cut in two; garlic in mouth, nail in head
Cut off toes, drive nail through neck

Ninja school.

http://sor.warcry.com/news/view/82027-Ryzom-Ryzom-Possible-New-Owners

WTB Asheron's Call 1.

Bargin? What makes you think Ryzom is worth that much? Art assets? Not a chance. It's outdated tech, outdated art, and a pretty boring game.

AC1 however? Yea, I'd buy that for $324k. Just to own AC1.

In an age where everyone is trying to create mmos that run on anything, "Outdated" Tech is not a bad word. The art for that game was always amazing to kme, it may use old tech, but the art style, and execution was always quite well done for that game. Made for some stunning visuals. The particle system is also nothing to sneeze at. The swarm system was also impressive, even today. The combinations of fantasy, Si-fi and alien was really well done IMO. The hearding system also put a very nice feel to the world, and i would love to see this in other games instead of the static "Come kill me, im here all week" mob system of other MMO's.

But i would love to know what they are going to change to make it  "ahem" - less boring for the masses.

(http://vaultmedia.ign.com/rpgvault/image/article/652/652405/ryzom05092102a_1127268769.jpg)

(http://www.ryzom.com/data/screenshots/TR_perso01.jpg)

(http://www.ryzom.com/data/screenshots/beau_matis.jpg)

(http://www.ryzom.com/data/screenshots/screenshots2_150404.jpg)

(http://www.ryzom.com/data/screenshots/welcome.jpg)

Some of the art is about the only thing I found to be interesting in Ryzom.  Some of the ideas were clever SOUNDING but they did a horrible job of everything, ultimately.  I don't really see any point in launching this game again.  Maybe some really clever people could salvage the bits that sounded clever and actually make them clever and use them in a new MMO.  This one was over before it started.

FWIW, I loved the Ryzon Ring. I wish all MMOs provided something like it.

Truly an awesome feature that hearkens back to MMO roots of pen and paper gameing and Game Masters.

If it takes 100,000 man hours to make an MMO that means they picked it up for $32.40 an hour. The Hero Engine is somewhere around a million dollars which would put it at $100 an hour and you still have to build all the graphics. On top of that it is a complete working MMO without the 2+ years time it takes to build one from scratch. Graphics are expensive as fuck.

They could:
-License the server out for $1k each.
-Sell all the graphics individually.
-Implement a Diabloesque fighting and loot system for their own version.
-License out the game engine w/ graphics for $50k-$100k a pop (though isn't it open source?).

Arbitrage for the win. Of coarse they probably won't do any of those things. Fail.


Edit:

Just as an example. I received a quote from a Chinese browser game company which would clone this www.fantage.com for $200k-$250k and would take 4-6 months.

Well, since you asked so nicely.

1) Fuck the skill system. No, seriously. Adventuring XP and Crafting XP, a la EQ. Two level tracks. Adventuring XP comes from killing and quests that require killing, crafting XP comes from harvesting and quests that require harvesting or crafting.

2) Take a cue from CoH on the blocks system. You no longer have 500 different "power attack" blocks, you have ONE "power attack" block which scales with level. Also normalize endurance, mana, and focus points to 100.

3) There are no more "cost" blocks. Once you've factored in all other blocks, a skill costs an amount of endurance/mana/focus proportional to what remains. Lifetap blocks hit for a percentage of max health to provide a fixed discount.

4) Light "classes". At character creation you default to progressing 8/8 in arms/magic per adventuring level, and 8/8 in harvest/craft per crafting level. You can tweak these to 9/6 in either direction.

5) Point reductions. As you increase your arms/magic/harvest/craft, you get X number of points you can place in any skill you build. Putting in 1/3/7/15/31 points will drop the cost of a skill 5 points at a time, or halve it if it's 5 or below. You can also use the points to slightly increase the size of any power bar or boost its regeneration, capped by your adventuring/crafting level.

6) Crafting revamp. Crafting works like harvesting in that it's an ongoing task that you can use different skills to input into, at the cost of focus and/or lifetap.

7) Block unlocking. Some blocks open up as you progress, others require you to complete quests. Probably put in some in-game mechanic to let you retroactively change any choices you make here. (like, choose a weapon to specialize in at Arms 50, or do a quest for an axe master to get Beheading Strike or Knockdown Sweep)

That's just some off-top-of-head stuff based on what I remember from the beta forever ago.

Speaking as someone who was playing this up until WoW critical mass dragged me away...

What the hell is a 'block'?  :|

1. Cover the randomized quest mechanic a little better, for god's sake!...Don't break the covenant!
2. Dispose of the pure kill grind, and let some of the excellent art direction work. So many of the mobs no one would touch, because they barfed out some ungodly negative status, and that impeded the killgrind...Oh, yeah, and come up with advancement that's not pure killgrind.
3. Don't be so afraid of balancing your unconventional implemented features (Stanzas, in particular) that you make them useless out of fear...so you'll have to nerf something, welcome to hell!

I think they renamed them stanzas before launch, or the name was always stanzas and they were introduced to me as "blocks".

Because they're the fundamental building blocks of every power, is why the name stuck. "Stanza" just doesn't sound as right.

But was it still like that? Power Attack 1-20, Accuracy 1-20, Arm Aim 1-20? And you had like 5 or 6 different cost stanzas in geometrical progression?

Anyway, does that make more sense?

Ohhhh, yeah, that sounds similar. Basically, a hotkey was made up of individual bits, so you would create an action based on various parts, each of which would provide an effect, but would have a corresponding sap or stam or HP (or focus, if you were into farming) cost and you would have to balance it with stanzas that soaked up enough of the required stat, in sort of a zero-sum system.

Yes, it does; thanks. :)

Wasn't asking you, i was wondering what the company that is relaunching it was going to do. Your suggestions rip the soul out of the game and even make me not interested in it.  :uhrr: (http://www.clicksmilies.com/s1106/wuerg/vomit-smiley-020.gif)

IMO, there was nothing wrong with the crafting or skill system (some polish would be nice) or the combat or anything. The game lacked Grats/Ding/Loot/quests.

Hey man, if the soul of the game lies in bonking giant insects on the head 500 times with Power Blow 6 and Insect Bane 10 just so you can run halfway across the world to bonk giant insects on the head with Power Blow 7 and Insect Bane 11, it's better off gone.

Outdated or not, $324,000 USD is a bargain for that game. You could not buy all of the art assets for it with that cash. Running the servers will be the costly part. If I had known the price was that low, I might have tried to purchase it myself. I would like to purchase AC2 and make it AC1 with the new graphics. That would be a win.

Apparantly they are giving away accounts for a limited time... if anyone is interested in looking at this game again.

http://forums.ryzom.com/showthread.php?t=32434

Those accounts were all gone a week ago.

They must have added more I got one a few hours ago and am just waiting to do the big download.

i've been on for an hour and so far i'm not impressed. There wasn't really anything that interest me in the game world and most of the time I'm just throwing acid balls at wolves to ding.

Seems they added more this morning.

Use the torrent, over 100 seeds and its faster than any of the FTP links. YMMV.

Yup the torrent quickly maxed out my available bandwidth and went at 500k per second.

They have 1608 accounts available!  Says how many on the sign-up page.

Yep, they add some every day. Last night, when we signed up again, it was down to 5. =)

I was reminded all over again why i liked this game. Skill based sandbox. Much of it feels like SWG Pre-cu. Good times. I'm sure i will hit my non-sticky-wall again.

I'm unimpressed so far. I'm on my second newbie mission and spent an hour wandering around looking for different animals of various ages and types. The mission window is so crappy that it doesn't even tell me which ones are left that I have to find. If they can't even inject some fun into the newbie experience it's no wonder they're a failed game.

I may end up emulating Margalis and uninstalling before I make it out of the tutorial.

Grab a diffrent quest from a diffrent sphere trainer, you'll complete that one by proxy.

Maybe I'll try that if I get bored enough to log back in.  But really, in this day and age I just don't have the patience for this kind of crap. I managed in UO, I even played EQ and got myself killed by my first quest-giver and fell off of Kelethin like every good newbie should.  No more. If the fun doesn't pop right out and kick me in the butt I'm not going out of my way to look for it.

Just wanted to post this. But anyone checking this out, you should really look at the Ryzom ring (http://www.ryzom.com/en/ryzom_ring.html), and the "Create your own skill" systems. If nothing else.

Link to above. (http://www.ryzom.com/en/features.html)

The game is free to play for anyone right now. At least that appears to be the case on the Ryzom site. Now, if only I had the time to play again...

I'm digging being able to play a game with a skill system.  Unique monsters and a couple of other tidbits such as being able to design my own skills make me happy.

The joy may not last, we'll have to see how the rest of the game shapes up, however this at least has the basis for a lot of what I want in an MMO.

Reading regional chat makes me want to kill small furry animals.  I haven't seen a pack of vicious, elitist, egotistical, circle-jerkers since high school. 

The game is interesting in that quint sense, and I love the in-depth skill system.  Don't quite like having to walk 5 miles to get around a small fence, though.

If you look past the slightly dated graphics, the skill based system seems to have plenty of potential.  Will try it a bit more over the next few days, but definitely worth looking at if you are sandbox advocate.

Unfortunately, while the skill system is solid, it's what you do with it that ends up lacking unless they've massively changed something. Wen I left it pained me that the world was fairly massive and well-designed and not just the same goblins-riding-wolves Tolkienesque; nevertheless the interesting visual and environmental design was wasted on a by-the-numbers get a group and go to so-and-so Vale and grind on Pissy Kippies for three hours.
Since a good 50% of the mobs were shit that you would never want to grind on because they packed some kind of devastating negative status (like a flatulent, infectious reek PBAoE that would move from group member to group member as fast as you could cure it), the balance of the sandbox went to waste except for the occasional invasion, group run to a foreign teleporter, of raid on massive desert insect. I know that they added the Ring, and there were things that were going in in a broken form when I quit (I seem to remember something about an encyclopedia, not sure if that ever made it), but last time I dropped by I didn't see the major changes that would make it more sticky. It had a lot of interesting fiddly bits (and don't get me started on the joy of a pure-crafting no-loot-drop world) , but it all got very samey after a while.

I really do have a lot of fond memories of the game, since I ran with a really great bunch of folks on the server I was on, but it just didn't have any appeal when I tried going back. It's like that stripper you dated in college just because she could hold herself up on the pole using nothing but her thighs....A hell of a change of pace, but there's no way you could go back and deal with any more of those goddamn bikers.

Well, I stuck with it and am having a pretty good time. I'm out of the newbie area and in a guild of fairly nice people. I might even be willing to pay for it if they start charging.

I Tried it. Made a character, got the kill 10 foozles quest, killed 10 foozles, then wandered around for 20 minutes because I couldn't figure out how to make my compass tell me where the quest contact was.

Then I uninstalled.

Walking between quest givers is my least favorite part of any MMO; I would seriously rather just grind mobs and forgo quests altogether except that that's not viable in most MMOs because quests are worth so much more xp. Is this the case here? If the combat a little later is mildly entertaining/rewarding in its own right I might try it again, but goddamn do I hate quest running.

I understand your temptation to uninstall and give up. I felt exactly the same way.  I ended up staying in the newbie area and doing all of the quests though and they actually did teach me a lot about the game. Don't be shy about asking questions in the Universal channel.

You absolutely don't have to do that though if you don't want. You can go to the mainland at any time.  I've found that the high levels are all mind-bogglingly friendly and anxious to give out free stuff to newbies.

They probably think giving stuff away to nubbies will help get a decent population.  It won't.  I beta tested this game and played it for a month, then I recently checked it out again.  It's as numbingly boring as it ever was for me.  Clever ideas are nice and all but useless if you don't know what to do with them.

I gave this game a try and was expecting not to find anything much, but fortunately it's actually very good.

They've added a Newbie Island to teach you most of the basics that you'll need to know by the time you hit the mainland.
And it does indeed teach you pretty much what you need to know. If you have enough intelligence to read what they are asking you to do.
If that fails don't be afraid to ask in Region chat as many players actually stay in the Newb Zone just to help the greenhorns along with their first steps.
It reminds me pretty much of the kind of reception I got in SWG, when you got players with a little bit of game experience grabbing hold of the new players landing in Tatooine for the first time,  having no clue what to do, and taking them through the basics of doing missions and showing how to use the transportation, weapons, heals etc.

What it doesn't do, is treat you like a sheep getting your ass shifted from this area here, now get over to this other area for another mindless repeat of the same shit you did 5 minutes ago.

It's a sandbox. It's much more open game and it actually lets you do some weird things like explore and try stuff for yourself.

Some of the things that always piss me off in some MMOs are gladly missing here.
 
Mobs that automatically agro you more because you are lower level. Whoever introduced this idea should be shot after at least some mild torture. Well the mobs AI in Ryzom isn't done this way. If someone with maxxed out everything walks right up to a Hungry Carnivore right outside the newbie town, then the thing will attack. Why shouldn't it?
What this means is that if you ever wanted to challenge yourself to a real adventure, like treking through some dangerous zone, you can do it. Doesn't matter much that you are 20 minutes into the game or 2 years. An adventure like this will be dangerous and rewarding for anyone. Of course you won't have the option to kill everything in your way, but you could still do it.
The mobs have behaviour that changes depending on the seasons and all manner of things. They kill other types, they help others, they act like real animals. This means that if you study the way they are operating you can get around them eventually. Try this in WoW and see how far you get.

There's depth to every aspect of the game that isn't obvious from the first glance. The crafting system is deep and even the foraging is interesting once you get to know how it works.
You can invest the time in crafting with the confidence that all the effort isn't thrown into the shitcan by some of the drops. All the crafting has purpose as you will be changing gear as you get more powerful. Also the way things are sold is very neat too. Walk up to any NPC and right click on trade. You have the option to sell to the NPC or sell to players. The sell to players automatically displays the goods for sale to others, but the great bit is you actually get the money you would off an NPC and if some player actually buys the item, then you get a nice bonus on top. Basically the only time you want to use the sell to NPC option is if the items have been used as damaged goods can't be sold to players.

Every character can be a Caster, or a Melee, or a Healer, or anything they want to be, you can just train up in any of the skills anytime you like. This is golden!
Forget the alts, you can play the same character for anything. Forget the thinking of some new names. Forget the grinding the same shit over and over again just to try a new build. You can even build up some of these skills at the same time by popping a spell then whacking something. The xp would be shared out between the skills  but the options for how you play are all yours.

The skills building out of blocks that you can edit anytime you like is a bit confusing to the new player, but it also means that all the players with higher skills won't actually all be the same. It's not rocket science hard but it does give you something to do with all that xp and a chance to try something different.


This game doesn't suit everyone.

If you love the Gear > Skill type of thing, move along. If you need to be completely guided along and don't want to think for yourself, you're in the wrong game. If you hate being sociable and just want to solo the whole game without ever bothering with other players ever, buy a console. If you loved SWG pre CU and you haven't enjoyed that kind of feeling since, you should check out this game.

Rather accurate review.

I loved SWG pre CU (except all the broken and unfinished bits) and dislike Rysom.  Either I'm broken or the game is.  I'll continue to blame the game.