f13.net

and other serious plastic surgery.
From an email I just got:


I guess they want more people in the open beta.

Its not quite ready for general consumption yet.  But it is getting there.

If anyone would be interested (read: not just flame me for fanboism) in a review I'd be happy to share my thoughts on the experience.  I've been playing for the past three weeks and while there is allot one can complain about, unlike Haemish I still belive in innovation and am willing put up with some defects to escape the clutches of the clone parade that continues to spew from major developers like so much soft serve ice cream. That is brown.. and smelly.

Are the changes good enough so that you can generally see other people nearby?  You couldn't when I played.  You'd occasionally get a lil target tooltip thing, indicating someone was there, but there was no avatar drawn.  Or they'd be blinking in and out of existance.

That, to me, is pretty game-breaking.

Alkiera

Translation: Game R Broke, We Fixee, Plz Test Again? Maybe Pay us money?

I think if I can make myself break away from ESPN MLB 2k5 and Freedom Force, I may give this a try for a writeup. I always love skewering incompetence.

Having now played it for an hour over two play sessions, I can safely say that until this game's facelift is done, it has got to be quite possibly one of the shittiest experiences I've ever had. EVER.

Lineage 2 was better, because at least it did what it was supposed to do, and it made sense from the get go. I didn't like what it did, but I knew what it was doing and it worked at what it was supposed to be doing.

This game... holy god, you cannot imagine. I spent 30 minutes wandering around aimlessly because I couldn't figure out where on my interface it said that I had money. No, they don't give you a starting weapon, not even a goddamn pea shooter. Nor armor. You are dropped in the world with a few emails, an apartment with pretty much nothing in it, and apparently you get some money. When I finally discovered I had money, I decided to try to make more of it, by following one of their economy guides. It said to go to a colony and mine. So I tried.

I walked into an area to try to mine and was immediately gang-raped by that colony's version of West Side Story. I get gangfucked by 3 guys who laugh at not only my inability to fight back, because I hadn't bought a weapon, but also laughed at my inability to get away from them. PVP in this game apparently involves trapping a person in a spot they can't jump away from and shooting them repeatedly. Did I mention that this game has permadeath, after you lose 3 bodies/clones? Did I mention when you re-emerge from being dead into one of your clones, you have to stand in the cloning tank for like 3 or 4 minutes just to get your health back up to 20%?

Yes, I said TWENTY PERCENT. You have to pay to get the other 80% restored at a hospital. And wait a good 5 more minutes while that heals up. You can heal up for cheaper, but it takes longer.

The name of this game should "Face of the Clock." Because you will be staring at it a lot. And wondering what the fuck you are doing here. You see, when I finally was able to mine something, I was told that mining even a small amount would take TWO HOURS. TWO FUCKING HOURS. Now, at least you can do other stuff while you mine. Like shop.

You have never seen a shopping interface so bad as you will see in this game. First, you go to a "Marketing Terminal" and do a search for what you are looking for. You want a gun? Good fucking luck. See, the list of items in the terminal, it doesn't list what type of item it is. Nor is there any method in the terminal for getting ANY INFORMATION WHATSOEVER about the item, except for quantity and price. And you are buying these items only off of other players, who either crafted the item or got it from some other player I guess. The NPC's don't do much of anything but wander around, so I'm not sure there is anything like drops in the game. So, yes, you will either need to telepathically need to know what item you are looking for, or you will need to buy items you THINK might be what you want, then hope for the best. I lucked out after two or three failed attempts to buy a gun (when what I really bought was a grenade I couldn't use) because someone was selling an assault rifle. The fact that rifle was in the title was the only thing that let me know it might be a gun.

When you buy something, it doesn't appear in your inventory. No, that would be too easy. No, it appears at a "Storage Terminal." Now, logic would dictate that a storage terminal would be next to the "Marketing Terminal" if that's where all your purchases (and crafting goods) appear. But that is not the case. It's a good minute or two walk from the Marketing Terminal to the Storage Terminal to pick up your goods. The same goes for Crafted Goods, which are produced at Production Terminals, and Mining Goods, produced at Mining Terminals. So for whatever you are doing, you need to go to Storage to pick it up. So there's LOTS of walking. Oh, and since the gun you buy doesn't tell you what type of ammo it uses, I had to buy various kinds of ammo and try to reload by trial and fucking error. Luckily, I only bought 3 or 4 wrong items before finding the right one. Oh and forget the default control scheme. The fucking BACKSPACE key is the default reload weapon key.

Well, when I finally managed to get some PVP in, it was against one lone guy who ran away from me the minute I fired at him. It was mostly a running something down nondescript hallways before he gave me the slip. The lapse between me "pulling the trigger" and the gun actually firing was... well, it wasn't instantaneous, which is what it fucking well should be.

You will spend most of your time walking around aimlessly wondering what the fuck they were thinking in making this game. Sure, the buildings look good. The models look like ass, and the player-generated mission system? It doesn't work if the players don't generate missions. Which means you pretty much just have to go around and look for people to kill.

FUN.

No. This game shouldn't be out of fucking alpha yet. There is no excuse for releasing an "Open Beta" game where you can't even get information on something that you are buying from the buying terminal. It's fucking amateur hour.

Good ol' Haemish- taking a bullet for all us sinners.

Too good not to frontpage (http://www.f13.net/index2.php?subaction=showfull&id=1110927804&archive=&start_from=&ucat=1&).

Rather than beat up on a helpless cripple (that I've never played), I suggest that somebody who sees a fun core mechanic in this game state that fun core mechanic in one clear sentence.  Then the devs need to cut out everything else.  I suspect that when they do that, they will find that they don't have an MMO anymore.  And that is probably the point they should get.

It's sort of fun to ride up and down the elevator thingies for a minute or two.  I was also amused to find that someone had been sticking a knife or something into my avatar for a few minutes before I noticed it was happening.

My impression was "Neocron wannabe, done badly". Frankly, I cannot understand what FoM tries to compete with if it wants to actually succeed. All current sci-fi MMORPGs have better interfaces and better... well, everything really. OK, it might have better graphics than AO, but AO has personality.

No, if you are talking about player models, AO has FOM beat hands down. Terrain would probably go to FOM, as well as sound design (though the footfalls are WAY TOO LOUD). But everything else... wooga. Bad bad wooga.

I've got a review written in fact its been written for some time on this game...

But the fact of the matter is, one has to ask people to see past too many faults to get to the good stuff.  Untill they add a tooltip, some more newbie orientation and a bit more protection in major markets on earth, all of which have been announced by the dev's as in the works.  No matter how much I espouse the possible virtues of player-content, fps combat (which is not even done well, although not a day goes by that I dont advocate for the current reticle bloom to be redone) no level system and open pvp somebody like Haemish can just throw the stumbling blocks to even figuring out the game back at me.

Not to say there aren't plenty of people who will not enjoy the game even if they actually do know how to play.  Too many player E types I suppose.  I would definately agree with the statement "I can safely say that until this game's facelift is done [its not a good idea for anyone who doesn't already know that open pvp fps combat mmog is what he wants to stay away]".

After all judging from the success of EQ clones 85% of mmog gamers like to have their dick held while they piss.

Great review Haemish.  I hope they change it enough to warrant another review :)

I wouldn't mind an open PVP FPS MMOG with no level system. But I want one that doesn't suck ass. This one has a long way to go to remove its mouth from the anal sphincter. I'm not dogging the concept. I liked the concept when Neocron did it, and I still do.

I just want the execution to be on the level of say, a normal FPS mod. Neocron had too many treadmills, and FOM was just plain badly done. And both games made the mistake of not giving you at least a decent weapon from the get go.

I mean, is it so hard to give newbies a baseline weapon?

Agreed.

I've been advocating for newbie starter kits to be more equipment and less cash based.  Not only will people feel less like helpless lambs when they start off but it reduces the impact of multi account cheating.

There are several systems atm that are in the way of this at the moment but all are under some form of review:

-Mission review system, currently 10 players need to review a mission for rewards to be given out, this system is just plain not working well and open to unbelievable amounts of abuse.

-Mining system, because the only cost effective mine type requires you to mine 50+ units newbies with less cash would be unable to even get involved with selling raw/production materials.

There are several suggestions up on these matters and time will tell what they do with them.  This is not your typical mmog open beta, they aren't just going for free word of mouth and website advertising.  Because its player based content/story/driven they NEED players to test anything about the game.  Hopefully both of us can write a review of the game after they release some of their major overhauls.  I will keep people appraised of the situation every patch in the meantime.

On the plus side the game's lag issues and disconnects seem fixed, there are still some crashes that people are reporting but DPS has immpressed me with their ability to release patches often and that actually fix things.  I've gotten so used to big budget MMOG beta's that when I see patch notes that give bugtracker ID #'s and say that bug is fixed I get confused.  Anyone who played in the WoW beta knows what I'm talking about..

*new patch on wednesday, fixed a bunch of misc simple bugs nothing major, game still seems to be running fine for everybody.  Devs are definately adding a tooltip into the new interface.  Also they have acknowledged the two major flaws to combat and say its comming on the list.*