f13.net

What a surprise.

Can't say I feel sorry for them.  Make a mediocre game that's only features were being pretty and a storyline only AC1 players would probably care about and watch your game fail.

Because sequels that play nothing like their predeccesor (sp?) are going to do so well.  AC1 was one of the least grindy and more satisfying MMORPGs out there.  And it kept getting better as time passed.  AC2 wasn't even AC for Dummies. 

Impressive that the official thread for it is only 4 pages and doesn't seem to be growing.  That's REALLY unpopular.  Hell, there was a thread on the CoV beta boards waiting for servers to come up that was adding a page every few seconds.

EDIT

Wow, reading some info on the game.  To store items, players go to a secluded place, drop them, log back in as a mule character, then go get them.  Shit, no wonder this game failed.  Couldn't even put in a vault?  Christ.

Agreed. Though I have to ask: Is it me or does WoW's combat feel very AC2-ish to anyone here?

Asherons Call 1 players pretty much rejected AC2 en masse.  I honestly cannot think of a single person I knew in AC1 (I was in the largest guild at the time) who even contemplated playing it.  In my opinion the game is like EQ2, but with about 50% more grind.  God, gathering alone was like having your penis sanded with the grittiest sand paper out there.  Seriously it was THAT bad.  Combat and stuff was meh, but I always felt slooow in that game.  I still have fond memories of AC1 and am tempted to resub; problem is the people make it a Soap Opera, but I guess that is part of the appeal. 

De nihilo nihil

Well, it is (kinda).  Problem is AC2's was littered with retarded ideas (wait till the mobs flashes and then hit button x for UBER DAMAGE YAY) and it wasn't balanced worth a shit. 95% of all characters couldn't kill most even level mobs.  Most mobs would chew through your HP in no time at all and your attacks were mere pittances.  The only characters that could solo without exploiting were melee tanks with a series of drains (Ferals) or unlimited healing (Defenders).

The combat, however, worked out very well with PVP. It was very fast paced, you could dodge projectiles (most), and for the most part decently balanced with several viable pvp templates.  The problem was the rest of the game, which was such a pile of shit, with it's broken chat, horrible rubber band lag, pve that was only interesting if you were exploiting, and a loot system that was very bland, dragged it all down.  I can't imagine how PVE only players managed to struggle through that piece of crap.

Plus the billing system was a goddamned joke also.  I accidentally got billed twice trying to give a friend my account without him inheritting, well... ALL OF MY FUCKING CREDIT CARD INFORMATION.

Not sorry to see this one die, although it did give me a chuckle or two while playing.

That would make a fantastic gag Christmas present to someone you dislike.  I also doubt the stores that have this sitting in some bargain bin are going to know to remove it.

Probably showing my noobishness here, but this is the first time I remember that I've heard of a major (well, relatively) MMORPG actually completely shutting down.  I don't have the game, but I'm kind of curious what the "standard" way of handling this is; anyone know?  

I mean, you've got a lot (well, again, relatively) of people out there with copies of this game.  Presumably, Joe went to the store and bought a copy of AC2 for $50.00.  Takes it home, but can't play it without paying a subscription fee.  Pays a subscription fee.  They cancel the service anyway.  What's Joe left with?  He's got a game, but he can't play it?  Are they going to release the server code so that you can at least still play it?  Or is that considered bad form, and the consumer should feel lucky he was allowed to pay their bills for so long?  Regardless of the quality of the game, the fact that a company can just say "thanks for the money, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out" whenever they feel like it would be kind of disturbing.

This is where they make the client, server, and devkit available to the public. Seriously. Seriously. SERIOUSLY.

The combat for WoW and AC2 are both pretty similar, you are right. You attack pretty fast, enemies attack pretty fast, and the animation typically has little to do with what is happening. In addition, your character and the enemy don't seem to interact at all. They just face each other and dance around.

That's opposed to say FFXI, where your character and the enemy attack much slower. When the enemy hits you you can be knocked back and vice-versa. The sounds effects match the animation as does the actual damage.

I personally can't stand it when combat is just people thrashing around. It really takes me out of the game. WoW was very much like that.

Edit: The fact that AC2 lasted as long as it did is actually pretty amazing. E&B was far better.

Well, EA canceled Motor City Online and Earth & Beyond. Two games that had some potential too...

As for how they handled it?

Umm....

"You're screwed".

But that could just be how EA does things.

Meh. Rancid apples and rotting oranges.

Potayto, Potahto.

Who would have figured AC1 would still be plugging away as it's sequel tottered off into the grave?  Oh yeah, I remember: Everyone.  Speaking of which, how's AC1 doing for subscribers?

You almost sound like you've never played WoW. Playing both rather extensively, I can officially say you're full of shit.  Ohh wait, you got an Orc to level 6. My bad.

Really, yah, FFXI and it's superiorly interesting combat.  :roffle:

I can't say that I've leveled too far in WoW either, but I'm just speaking in general terms. Some classes moreso than others.

As for FFXI, the required grouping/skill chaining thing kind of turned me off, so I didn't experience much in that game to begin with.

They should have pulled the plug before it even went live. But that's not news to anyone. Must say I'm amazed they are pulling the plug. It's the only MMO that was ever on my radar (as in, I cared enough to check out how it was going once or twice during developement) to be pulled after going live.

Um...did you even read what I wrote? I didn't say anything about combat being deep or interesting. All I said was that in FFXI it feels like you are fighting, while in AC2 and WoW it feels like you and the enemy are having a dance-off.

Again, it FFXI the timing of the sound effects with the animation is better, the timing of losing HP with the animation is better, the animations themselves are much more distinct and vibrant, you can knock back enemies or be knocked back, etc.

I don't see how you can even compare. Watch someone use a 2-handed weapon in FFXI vs WoW.

Okkie dokey.  FFXI combat didn't really feel like fighting, just felt like real time FF combat AKA every other MMORPG on the planet.  What you listed registers a hearty "meh" as far as what I'm looking for in combat, especially if it has to occur at a sub EQ pace.  WoW sounds/damage match up pretty well player side. Not always the case monster side, but I again /meh.

Really, I'll take the old UO hally hit any day as long as I'm not trimming my nails during the fight.   

My female human warrior in WoW swung a 2-hander believebly enough.

FFXI has the worst combat I've ever seen in a retail game. My buddy is in one of the top guilds on his server, and they do dragon raids....

for like, 5 hours.....

on ONE dragon.


Just die, FFXI.

What. The. Fuck.  Tell me this is a gross exaggeration.  If this is not would you please ask your friend as to why they do this?  I mean is it loot driven, e-peen driven, or what?  I for some reason have blacked out Final Fantasy XI from my internet, guess I will have to read about it.

I shit you not. When i was in Florida, me and my friends all played NES, MtG, ate...did other things.


He raided a dragon.

All day.

And like, 3 items drop.

FF11 was the most horrific grind I have ever experienced, and I played Ragnarok Online from beta to release.

This is about where they announce they are goin to patch the AC2 graphics engine into AC1 and make AC1 one of the single most popular MMOGS of all time.

I mean christ, they should have just done that from the beginning.  AC1 with AC2 graphics could EASILY give EQ / EQ2 / WoW a run for their money.

Shouldn't that be in green?  Really, even looking beyond the oragami quality art of AC1, I didn't find it that compelling of a game.  I don't think the style or setting translates into mass market.  With AC2 graphics and a flawless launch (AKA no patented Turbine rubberband lag or horrible mismanagment of exploitation), I think AC1 would maybe top out at 100-150k subs in today's market.  I know AC1 has probably the most die hard fanatics of any game, but I guess I just didn't "get it".

Of course, maybe with a great looking graphics engine it would be a lot easier to get drawn into the non-standard fantasy world with its goofy bestiary. 

Huh. I would have guessed you to be an AC fan.

But I thought you were male all this time as well, so what the hell do I know?

I'm with Margalis on this one, auto attack combat will never be interesting but FFXI has far superior standard melee then WoW.

Oh and just for credentials sake which suddenly we need to express an opinion around here.

FFXI:  Thf 3x/ Nin 2x/ and lower lvl's on several other jobs
WoW: Priest 60

Sorry but this type of comment really rubs me the wrong way:

"You almost sound like you've never played WoW. Playing both rather extensively, I can officially say you're full of shit.  Ohh wait, you got an Orc to level 6. My bad."

omg lol nubz

In any case, I have to say that FFXI is a pretty fun game if, if you have a set group with some friends. It can get pretty awful if you're forced to depend on the general population to advance.

It wasn't bad. Played it for like 2 months, got a xbow guy up to the point where I was fighting some decently hard stuff, but then it just got kind of boring.  I probably should have played on Darktide. My desire to ruin people's online lives though pretty much died with UO.


Should I take sensitivity training or something?  :roll:  (the old board warrior is still strong in me) Perhaps it should have been reworded as, "Well, that's a valid opinion but allow me to show some skepticism as you seemed immediately dismissive of WoW after playing what was an admittedly short period of time.  You might have also played when rogue animations were somewhat broken."   

Don't you need an EXACT number of friends? I forget the group sizes in FFXI, but from what I remember it was pretty fucking easy to get left behind.

If your friends plus one random dude filling in for you grind on those sand worms for 4 or 5 hours, it's not like you can just jump right back in with them and be merry and gay. You'll have to find some people to grind fucking sand worms for 4 or 5 hours before you can even regroup with those people.

Just thinking about FFXI makes me mad. ><

And Rasix, here's the good thing(s) about AC.

You can dodge projectiles.
You can loot items from people you kill.

Going back to basics that's all that a game really needs in order for me to have fun. Some player skill and some risk, both of which have been absent from every game SINCE AC.

Shocked, I am, SHOCKED, I tell you that such a thing has come to pass.  

Seriously, though, why would Turbine keep it up? Shift the resources to D&D Online and LotR (or Middle-Earth or whatever it is) and call it a day. The game has never worked right. It's the only big-name (relatively) MMOG I've ever known that had a non-functional chat server for months. It was an awful boring game in beta, and had nothing but a shiny engine to ever appeal to anyone. I was surprised they released it.

As for releasing the server code to the public, why would the public want shitty, buggy server code? They could just go open-source for that.  

It feels as though that press release belongs here. Don't shoot the messenger.

So all those music vids that have been made with the FRAPS program are being shown on MTV instead of the acual videos for the songs in those videos.



That's got to be killing some music video director somewhere.

Edit: Oh MTV2.  Do they still show videos there, or has it become as disfunctional and irrelevant as its parent?

It's just as bad, reality TV overload.  They made MTV Hits and MTV Jams in order to have someplace to actually show videos outside of TRL, but they're slowly infilftrating those with "Making The Video", "Cribs", and other crap.

--Dave

They don't have to pay the artists to show cribs, they do if they want to show videos.

You're so hip!

So you never got knocked down, stunned, backstabbed, shield bashed or hit with any other of the kind of cool pve mob attacks in WoW? You have played it right? I didn't play AC2, but what you described was DAoC PvE, not WoW.

I never experienced the fear that even a mid range mob in FFXI (like pugils with screwdriver or the bats with their aoe silence) in WoW.  Now I did not do very much raiding at all and I have heard what a solid challenge raiding can be but basic mobs never did anything immpressive.  You couple that with needing to setup a group makeup (class, weapons, spells) renkei and leveling in FFXI was really fun and interesting except for the fact that the grind was awful and getting items was damn near immpossible.  Oh yeah and having to level up 2+ times through the newbie shit was weak.

Ok, you guys have some sort of reading comprehension problem.

I'm saying FFXI LOOKS AND FEELS better. Whether it is better is another story. In FFXI when you swing your sword and hit something it looks like you swung your sword and hit something. In WoW the fighting looks like you waving your arms around and the opponent waving it's mouth or claws or whatever, accompanied by some totally innapropriate "donk" sound effect.

In AC2 when you fight is basically looks like you opponent is spasming wildly and you are taking damage for some reason. WoW definitely feels that way to a lesser extent. WoW looks like stage-fighting at best.

That isn't to say WoW is a bad game. The fighting just feels bad, like it does in most games.

The fact that I quit WoW at level 18 means what? That you have to grind to level 40 to have combat not look retarded? Combat in FFXI looks good at level 1. Just look at say a Mithra Monk. She has 3 or 4 different attack animations that are all very well done, different looking, and have some oomph. You can actually watch and see jab, jab, uppercut, reverse. WoW looks like flailing, sword-fighting for ten-year-olds.

Does your basic attack animation magically improve at level 60? I doubt it. I don't think it is a stretch at all to say that FFXI has FAR better attack animations for both characters and enemies.

Too bad it takes 5 minutes to kill a single mob.

Once again, learn to read. Apples and oranges.

This is where all the WoW fans come out and say "omg, FF has Tarus! That's gay!" Great. That's not what I'm talking about.

I have almost no knowledge of FF

With that in mind, I can say that the combat animations in WoW have ALWAYS irritated me.  When I started the open beta, the look of the combat completely turned me off the game.  It looked kinda like Warcraft combat has always looked- two things stand next to each other and swing their weapons, one eventually dies.  Of course, it was better than that, but not by that much.

Later on when I picked it up to join some friends and made my way to 41, I still felt it was crappy looking combat.  I also felt that my character was ugly as hell and the game gave me no options to achieve the look I was going for, though that's unrelated.

The combat itself was actually fairly fun, but watching it wasn't.  I never felt the urge to take a screenshot of combat.  I never saw myself or anyone else do something and think "Woah, that was awesome."  Hell, even some of the combat animations in DAoC did that for me.  It's unfortunate that in such a stylized world with so much personality that the fighting lacks any distinctive style or personality of its own.  Other than flailing.

Tarus are pretty gay.  I like Elves and I think Tarus are gay.

I really don't understand your argument.

My character in WoW swings a weapon, or casts a spell, and I do damage to the mob, or some other effect.

My character in FFXI swings a weapon, or casts a spell, and I do damage to the mob, or some other effect.

I don't see how one is "Oh that's gay, it doesn't look like anything is happening" and the other is "That looks so cool."

Whenever I watch FFXI high-end combat, all I ever see is people standing around, and an occasional weapon swing.

So why bring it up? People here will debate the merits of peeling an orange before eating it and how that peeling adds to the overall experience of eating the orange. Some people won't like oranges at all and find it silly that you even brought it up in a thread about apples.  Some people will argue that even though you were just pointing out the benefits of orange peeling, by bringing it up, you bring oranges themselves into the conversation.

Anyhow, shampoo is better.

(http://amberbloom.faithweb.com/images/billy-madison.jpg)

I wish I knew enough about mmo combat mechanics to articulate more here, but I don't. I will say however that I'm not talking about the flailing animations so much as I am the general pace of WoW and AC2. Mainly with WoW Rogues. Mages and Warriors feel nothing like AC2 combat though. Paladins do, to a certain, slower extent, but that's about it. I could be wrong, but it seemed like AC2 was going for a Diablo-ish/Dungeon Siege type feel (at least it seemed so to me), where autoattack is like the bread and butter that binds everything -- Which, in turn, may be why I may see some similarities with WoW, a Blizzard game (though, admittedly, WoW combat slowly becomes more interesting than that past the early levels).

On a sidenote: I get a chuckle when I hear people call the WoW rogue a "micromanager's dream class". Obviously, they've never played CoH or Shadowbane (not that I don't like how Rogues play out, but geez..).

People call it that?

Try playing a Death Nova/Animate Bone Minions Necromancer on Guild Wars.  THAT'S micromanagement.

As for the argument-

I'm not sure how to articulate it.  It was something that bothered me from the very beginning of the game, though.  I think it was largely Sinister Stab that did it.  It looked more like my arm was spasming than me actually hitting the enemy.  A lot of the animations in WoW have that "not quite right" look to them.  In the long run it doesn't really matter (hell, I played to 41 didn't I?) but it turned me off at the beginning.  I couldn't follow the combat by looking at it.  Lots of stuff happening, but it was hard to sort out what was actually an attack.  Also, wtf was with the slow motion animation when you miss?  I just didn't like how the combat LOOKED.

What defines that difference?  <shrug> Stylish maneuvers, for one.  Most stylish thing my rogue ever did was spin around once and thrust his dagger in a downward motion.  And he did that for just about every special attack, except Sinister Stab (I can't remember anymore, is it Sinister Stab or Sinister Strike?) for which he would use a sort of "I'm swatting a fly, ignore the dagger in my hand" motion.

Pretty much, yeah. The thing is, if you've got a set group, you don't play unless everyone is there. If anyone is missing, you find something else to do (play a different job, for example). FFXI is pretty fucking brutal about level differences in groups, which is probably one of the worst things about it. Anyone even a level behind the highest leveled person in the group takes a decent exp hit. Two levels behind is absolutely ridiculous, on the level of 35-40% exp lost.

Group size is 6 people, by the way. My current set at the moment is me and three friends. We just pick up a couple of mooks to fill it out, and it works out pretty well.


Hah! I played a rogue to 60 in WoW. That's one of the most absurd statements I've read... today.

CoH had combat animations I liked. Especially jump kick -- I took it only for the animation just so my ice/energy blaster could look cool as she kicked the shit out of some punk then froze his ass.

Buit after a while, I find all eye candy goes stale. I then start asking if what I'm *doing* is enjoyable. No matter how much I liked jump kick, it couldn't keep me from feeling that CoH got "grindy".

Compare a well-animated 2d game like Street Fighter 3 to Time Killers, or a well animated 3D game like Wind-Waker to some budget 3D game. You could make the same argument - "I do a kick/swing my sword, opponent takes damage!"

In FFXI if you are a smallish character like a Mithra using a 2 handed axe it looks like you are a small character with a big axe. All the swiings are very large and loopy, and the axe looks liike it has real momentum. If you are a martial artist, your moves look crisp and they correspond to actual martial arts moves - a punch, a reverse, a Thai-style leg kick, a side kick, etc. Most of the attacks are animated in a faily realistic (but stylized) manner. Similarly, if an enemy like a liizard uses an attack like his lunging headbutt you'll see his whole body coil up and compact and then quickly unwind. It's just well done overall.

You know how bad CGI/computer animation looks like all the weights and momentums are wrong? That's what I see in WoW. Everything just looks off. It looks like people's limbs and weapons weigh nothing, their bodies have no momentum or inertia, etc. It just looks very fake and make-believe.

And I'm not talking about high-level combat here. I'm talking about any combat. In FFXI just start a level 1 character, equip a two handed axe, and go fight some bats or something and you'll see what I mean.

---

A lot of MMORPGs suffer from this problem. AC2 has it in spades. Anarchy Online was pretty bad that way as well, as the damage you took and gave didn't seem to synch up with the animation at all.

From a design perspective, it's sort of the difference between:

"Ok, this enemy has a claw attack, a bite, and a body check - let's animate those all and figure out how much it uses each one."

vs.

"Ok, this eenemy attacks once every 2 seconds for an average of 26 damage - ok, um, we need to animate that or something"

Maybe it was a problem with the other WoW races, but whenever my two toons were swinging weapons, it looked fine to me. My warrior almost looked like she had trouble with big two-handers.

Though it may have to do with the fact that most of my toons in WoW were female. The male animations may have been a lot more over-wrought.

And perhaps you have some sort of problem distinguishing your opinion from fact. You say FFXI LOOKS AND FEELS better. I say it doesn't. You haven't presented any objective argument other than 'i say so, in WoW characters flail around.' Ok. Whatever.

My first complaint minutes into the beta was that the WoW combat system was boring as shit to watch. I still stand by that. It looked like crap. Still did at retail, imho. Hell, EQ2 looks and feels better.

I think we're forgetting that FFXI was a really bad game.

Well, even though the animation stuff isn't part of my point, I'm going to side with Margalis a bit. He already spoke about melee, so I'll just mention Hunters here.

Roll up a Tauren or Dwarf hunter, log in, and start shooting things. Look at the proof yourself...We don't need to have a freaking message board debate about it. Unless your mind is warped by only having mmog's, nobody should have to "prove" anything to you. Shooting looks as lame as it did in AO -- And by that I mean that your toon won't even be pointing at the mob when it fires off a rifle! Compare it with, say, a 3rd person single player shooting game like Socom, and try to tell me it looks like I'm actually shooting something. Even SWG, at the very least, did better in this area.

Anyways, whether FFXI's animations are superior, I don't know. I don't remember enough about it. But as far as measuring it up against action games in general, hell yeah it's sloppy.

Really bad is giving it too much credit.

Its McQuaid era Everquest for the anime kids. 

Oh I think it is much worse than that.

I actually played EQ way back then, somewhere between the Velious and Luclin expansions, and it was possible to actually have fun in it.

Granted, it was my first MMG, but still....

I'd have been tickled if WoW had realized that when a blow strikes home, it's momentum ought to terminate.  My paladin was constantly swinging his hammer through things, not against them, and the only way to tell a hit from a miss was to see if numbers sprang up.

Who gives a shit about auto attack animations? No animation will make autoattack fun. It's the first thing I forget and definately not the first thing I notice.

Now, AC2 had great DEATH animations. The lugian animation where they slump forward onto their knees and fall over is outstanding, and probably the most satisfactory kill-shot death anim from a mmorpg yet.

It could only be better if it was coupled with the UO death .wav.

We're not just talking about autoattack.  I'm talking about all the attack animations in WoW.  My Rogue had, I think, two animations different from autoattack.  A spin/downward thrust and a flyswatter-smack.  That's it.  Pretty lame.  Not fun to watch.

Also, there's something to be said for being able to watch a fight and know what's going on as opposed to watching the stats flying by in the chat box.

The only fun I ever had in FFXI was growing plants in my apartment and harvesting them.  And that was not much fun.

I quit when it dawned on me that every level you gain adds a couple thousand more xp you need to get for the next level, but the amount of xp you gain always stays the same, an even con solo always gave 100 points.  I did a little math and figured out how many foozles I would have to whack at higher levels and promptly unsubscribed.  Oh, and I could never find that ghoul in the desert to enable my subclass.

And what was with that terrible interface you had to go through just to play the damn game?  I don't want to check email and friends from your buggy, slow, and just terrible little app.  I think the install required three different keys for three different programs to finally play.

Having half of the people running around being Japanese was kind of interesting though.

Seeing 5 animations 20000 times v. 10 animations 20000 (lowball estimate) times doesn't really mean a hell of a lot.  Anyhow, it's funny, on my priest I just notices there's like 3 different swings for my staff on autoattack.  Never noticed after 160+ levels in the game.


I can watch a duel in WoW and tell what spells they're using based on animations, effects and spell/ability colors.  I think in every game (mmorpg) I've played there's enough visual cues that you can tell the flow of a fight without looking at a combat log.  Rogues had a lot of aural cues.  One of the most ingrained sounds in my brain is the sound of a rogue's Cheap Shot.  I can pick that out in the middle of a heated battle without fail.

Anyhow, really, is this what you're looking for in a game?  Some little anime pug-human hybrid swinging a large axe and it feeling just like you hoped it would?   We're doomed.

For the record, the cheap shot sound is one of the most satisfying sounds in a mmorpg yet.

la la, leveling on birds in azshara, no cares in the worl... *CRUNCH* Holy shit what was that? oh I'm dead.

I'm not defending FF.  As I said in my initial post on this subject, I've seen it played once and wasn't particularly impressed.  By all accounts it's an awful game and I'm thankful to have never played it.

But given the choice between watching a fight in WoW or watching a fight in CoH, I'd pick CoH.  I can recognize what's happening easily, just looking at it.  Hell, at least in DAoC I can watch a fight and tell what styles are being used, if not how much damage is being inflicted.

WoW's combat lacks impact.  It's something that bothered me from the very instant I started fighting in that game, and clearly my opinion isn't unfounded because I've got two other people here agreeing with me.  I'm willing to bet there are at least two or three more people out there who agree with us.

Of course you'd be able to tell what's going on in a CoH fight. A shaman in WoW has more totems than CoH players have offensive skills.

It says something that the farewell to AC2 turned into a gripefest about combat systems in general in less than a page.  This is how a world ends, not with a bang, or even a whimper, but with a collective "Meh" and a shrug.

--Dave

Found a list of totems, and Shaman spells online.  13 totems + 9 spells, compares pretty closely to the 24 power picks of a CoH defender.  3 damage spells, a root, a dispell, and one damaging totem, vs. the 9 possible attacks in the defender secondary, and then power pools.  Outside of totems, they have 2 party buffs, 1 self buff, and a heal/regen spell.  Again, compare to the 9 powers in the buff/debuff pool, + power pools like Leadership.

My scrapper has 5 attacks with his broadsword, as I didn't take all of the powers from that set.  They all have different animations.  My buffs all have animations that can be seen, so someone with some experience, just looking at me, can tell that I am /invuln, and which of the invuln powers I have up.  When I attack, they can tell which attacks I'm using, just by watching the animations.

In WoW, there is a lot of random whackety-whackety, and many of the special attacks don't appear terribly different from those random auto-attack animations... or at least, didn't when I played in beta.  And they are an ideal case, where they are typically constantly using different special attacks to build up points for finishing moves.  Other classes with less offensive specialty, like paladins, spend most of any given fight just doing auto-attack, with the odd heal or seal activation.

In short, autoattack sux.  That is all.

Alkiera

I don't really care about the animations, but for actual play, one of AC2s worst features was that the "special attacks" were pretty much worthless--at least when it was at its highest number of players in beta. You autoattacked and it didn't do much. Then you got your flash, pressed the button and it died. It didn't matter what class you were, that was pretty much it. Unless you never got the flash, then it killed you. Whether you mashed your specials and in what order didn't matter at all, the only thing was hitting one after that flash.

FFXI has renkei. It has the EQ-esque class synergy thing (aka forced grouping). WOW has all the different specials. Some classes dot, others have instants, fighters, mages, and thieves generate energy differently. But no matter what, you feel like you're actually doing something. AC2 seemed to be the ultimate bot game to me. Just create something that sees the "i'm vulnerable" flash and triggers the special attack and that's it. Maybe it got better, but they lost people before that.

The only major game I know of where the devs have said "we give up, here, do something with it plz" is Microsoft's Allegiance (http://research.microsoft.com/research/allegiance/) multiplayer space combat game. It's doubtful Turbine will be releasing any of their IP, they still make games probably using much of the same tech, while Allegiance was the start and end of one product line.

I've given plenty of examples, but in the end it's a subjective point. If you love the look and feel of WoW that's fine, some people like to eat shit. (Literally)

As far as FFXI being a bad game - yeah, it is. I think it's interesting but in the end basically unplayable. WoW, on the other hand, is playable but totally uninteresting. AC2 was much the same - it was playable, but why would you want to? AC2 is basically WoW with less of everything, no towns and no quests. It does kind of feel like it could be WoW version 0.5.

As fa as people not caring about the end of AC2...it was a train wreck from day 1. How many years did it take them to fix chatting? (Did it ever work?) It is odd though to see a MMORPG sequel die while the original is still going.

-Weeps silently for Allegiance for a moment-

Yeah, but that's also one of the few major games where the dev basically has (er, had) to be present in order for the game to work.  If I want to install and play Unreal Tournament, I can do that whether Epic is still in the green or not.  With Asheron's Call, or (to an extent) Allegiance, the disappearance of the dev would mean that your game will not run.  At all.  It does nothing.  Coaster time.  I'm honestly surprised companies are allowed to do this at all; let you buy a product and then deliberately stop you from using it to do what they said it would do.  And even if it's not explicitly forbidden, it still seems like a bad business choice.  Knowing how badly AC2 players got the shaft would reeeeeeally make me think twice about buying AC3 (or whatever).  However bad the game was, presumably some people liked it, and in a business where your income is based on long term subscriptions, you'd think that pissing off those customers so that you can keep whatever magic secrets are in your three-year-old netcode would be a bad trade-off.  I didn't even buy the game, and it's got me upset.

Well, I don't see how they'd ever let AC2 come into the players' hands (as much as I'd love to see that)....So complaining about it is pointless. Or maybe there is a way, I don't know.

I just think that for players to get full control of it, they'd need to have access to the source (or at least part of it) -- and that isn't going to happen. DDO still uses the Turbine engine, for one (albeit enhanced), so some bits of AC2 are still a part of Turbine's (viable) product line.

I have yet to meet an active player of AC2 who did NOT think it was going to close.  I fired up an account about 2 months before the expansion was due to arrive, and no one believed it would stay open.  And also, as has been pointed out numerous times, the source code is part of the "Turbine Engine."  This would be bad mojo to release to the public.  If you played this game and expected it to have a future you may of had bigger problems then losing access to your chosen esape from reality.  Not saying this is/was/will be your case, just sayin' in general.

I'm sure that for the last while, yeah, the writing has been on the wall.  I'm sure that people saw it coming.  I'm sure some of them might not be upset about it.  That's not what worries me.  What worries me is that a company can take a game, charge you money to buy it, and then deliberately block your use of it on a whim.  When you pick up a box at the store, it says "this is a multiplayer role-playing game," not "this is a flat, metallic disk of no real value," and the fact that someone out there can arbitrarily decide which of those statements is true irritates the hell out of me.

The server code being part of the Turbine Engine is an issue that I as a player should frankly not have to know or care about when I'm making a purchasing decision.  Turbine wrote the game.  They programmed it (intentionally) so that it wouldn't run without a server.  They didn't have to do this, but they chose to anyway, and because of that, it's their responsibility to come up with a fix.  If they don't want to release the source, fine, they can distribute a compiled server program, or release some new version where it's only optimized for about a hundred players.  Whatever.  They chose to make the game that required a server to run, and they chose to shut down the server, so they can provide the alternative.  Choosing not to do so would be... well, it would really, really piss me off.

And again, I'm not saying they are likely to release the code.  I can see why they wouldn't.  It would just really bug me if that turned out to be the case.

I was thinking this exact same thing..

But I didn't care enough about AC2 to post it.

-Edit: Hell this was my 1k post.  What a way to blow that wad.

When you purchase an MMORPG you are NOT purchasing a game.  You are purchasing access to a subscription based services.  I agree, ethically you should be able to play forever, even if the company dies a painful death.  But it is their IP, and as such it is their right to do what they may with it.

I don't deny that it's their IP, and that legally, they can do what they want with it.  But if you're not purchasing a game, they sure as hell put a lot of effort into convincing you otherwise.  It's in the game store, on the shelf marked "games," sitting in between two other games, in a box with the same dimensions and design as a game and selling for the same price as all the other games on that wall.  The only difference is that AC2 has a tiny box that says something to the effect of "requires a subscription to play."  It doesn't really follow, in my opinion, that you can interpret this as meaning "you are not purchasing a game."  It would seem more likely to mean that you are purchasing a game, you just can't play it without a subscription.  And while there's nothing on the box saying "you will be able to get a subscription," (I assume, having not seen it) it seems at least implied that such a service is available.  Yeah, I'm sure it's legal, but many things which are legal are still damned annoying.

But, I get the sense that we're both trying to convert each other to the same religion, here, anyway ("It's legal, but mean!"  "It's mean, but legal!").

It's just the nature of purchasing Service. If laws were changed, it'd have more ramifications outside of video games probably (and not all would be good).

This is the most preposterous argument I can remember popping up here in recent memory.

Does anyone honestly think, or even expect, that an MMO is going to, or even has an obligation to, run forever?

I seem to hear it a lot actually. Mainly from Diablo junkies for some reason.

The problem with companies dying anymore is that their stuff doesn't become abandonware or get GPL'd. Mostly because everyone licenses this or that technology to other living companies, or in the case of many, the massive entity that bought them out (EA, etc.) decides to stubbornly hang onto both the creative and technical property just because they may possibly be able to wring a little more cash out of it later...even if they never ever do anything with it.

The reason it doesn't work is this:

Let's say you have cable.  You pay a certain amount a month.  But before you can even do all that, you have to pay an installation and activation fee.  That fee is something you pay to obtain the right to pay monthly for access.  Silly sounding, but that's how it works and that's how this will work.

Actually the engine is quite good and solid. A lot of the issues in the past were Microsoft problems.

Anyhow, I think I'm the only person on here who enjoyed AC2 so I wish they would release the source, but it's highly doubtful that they will since MEO and DDO game engines are both newer versions of the AC2 engine. You could make one hell of a neat game using that engine. Ah, well. Life goes on.

I have to say that AC2 had an amazingly fun music system.  I had a lot of fun finding instruments and playing in pickup 'bands' during beta.  The rest of the game had potential, but the horrible problems with chat and rubberbanding coupled with a severe lack of content turned me off to the game.

I remember there was an actual animation for when you dove off us a high place into water.

That was cool for about 20 minutes.

It's a shame; The game had potential, but someone decided to fuck it in the ass and ruin it for everyone.

Some PC games say "requires subscription".  All of them say "requires a PC".  I'm not aware of any that say it, but most assume that electricity is required too.  If you don't have all the required things, you can't play.  Exactly what about this is mystifying and/or confusing?

For, me, it would be the fact that if Compaq goes bankrupt, they won't come to my house and take my PC.  If my power company stops providing service, it won't stop my stuff from working if I move to another city and plug it in there.  But if Turbine decides to pull the plug, that's all she wrote, game over, man.  Turbine wrote a game that deliberately will not work if they do not provide a service, and now they've decided that they're not going to provide that service.  They could have written the game so that it wouldn't require their input, and it would have taken almost exactly the same amount of work, but they didn't, because they wanted to be the only option for their customers.  Now they're cutting off that option.  That's not very nice.

Again, I'm not saying it's shocking, I'm not amazed that this is happening, I'm not shaking my fist in the air and saying "There oughtta be a law," I'm not implying that these are the End Times, or anything like that.  I'm saying it would be nice if they'd show some consideration for the people who supported them. 

I don't deny that it's legal for them to do it; I'm sure that somewhere someone has covered that angle fairly well.  It's just depressing to see a game vanish so utterly, when presumably at least a few people enjoyed it.

I...

...

Yeah.

So don't buy an MMO.  Ta Da, no angst.  The service you're recieving requires things to work in this manner, it's part of the business model.  No, they couldn't have just coded it ' so that it wouldn't require their input.' and still produced the same game.  They also didn't do it because 'they wanted to be the only option for their customers.'

   To say that shutting-down the server is 'not very nice' is naive.  That the game WILL be shut-down so nobody can play it someday is inevitable.  If you don't accept that as valid, it's as easy to not purchase the game as it is to puchase it.. easier in fact.  This 'omg thing of the consumer, how much they supported you!' anguish is silly. Obviously not very many people supported them, or they'd have been able to continue to move forward and pay bills.

Purchasing a computer is NOT purchasing support.  That is seperate.  The electricity company has nothing to do with the electrical stuff you own.  Apples and oranges.  How is this a hard concept?

Also, if you have a Compaq, having taken away would be more of a blessing than a burden.

Well, guys, you know, he's right.  It would be nice if, as a last gesture, they gave up some information on how people might maintain their own UO-style fan servers, or maybe sell the game to someone who can run it more cheaply and possibly stay in the black.  He isn't calling for them to be hanged in the town square.  Nor is he saying they're obligated to help people keep playing after the game's death.  But it would be nice.

Yeah, a little "here's what we ran on our servers, throw that onto a dedicated box and you and a few friends can still play" would be nice. Even if they charged a few bob for it.

We have no idea what their server architecture looked like. For all we know, it's impossible to run on a small scale like the aforementioned example.

Not to mention that whole, "Hey the netcode for the next 2 turbine games is in there. I wonder if the Hackers would do anything with that," angle.

Or the, "Hey, lets this engine to run our own little MMO...and get 'donations' from people" angle.

I played AC2 from its beta/release until november 2004.

What I liked:
- Just like for AC1, the guy who made lugian toons animation is truly an artist. I congratulated them for it once and some of the devs responded that they indeed hired some guy to do that work specifically for AC1 and were so happy that they brought him back for AC2 and that he did lugians.

- Combat: Some of you are referring to the old AC2 combat system, a totally imbalanced one and pretty boring as well. They attempted to make it more interesting. They nerfed at lot of classes on the way and brought up the difficulty of group monsters. Some of the classes were made more interesting to play, some were basically left behind and that felt. It was looking in 2003 but in 2004, it all fell apart, I guess due to lack of dev resources to really reimplement some classes instead of just changing a few numbers. AC2 combat was fast-paced and intense. That was very good.

- Community: AC2 community is one of the best and one of the most educated. Look at www.ac2hq.com offtopic forums. One of the most interesting MMORPG-players opinion forum. Some are regular posters on CorpNews as well.

What I didn't like:
- Eternal grind: They introduced a "hero" system and basically extended the level grind. We went from a cap at lvl 50 to a lvl 150 cap with an XP curve that grew exponentially. I played for over a year after they introduced that system and my highest toon was still 55. They are closing down the game 2 years after they introduced that system and the most hardcore players haven't even reached lvl 90. Add to that significant advantage due to level in PvP, fellowship requirements of +-5 levels, and you had a recipe for disaster as players in guilds could not play together if some of them were playing more than others.

- Small world: AC1 has the largest 3D landmass than any MMORPG out there. AC2 felt very very small in comparison.

- Lag: Can't even have 20 people on screen without having some severe visual / network lag.

- Too little too late: They focused on class rebalance and didn't add significant content. Got old after months of nerfs and nothing new to see.

In every game I have played since ac2 beta though I jump of a cliff at least once into water and miss the diving ac2 had.

I said it would be nice, I didn't say anything about it being feasible.

Oh yeah that diving thing was damn cool.  I forgot about that.

I've got somewhat of a horror story about the diving, but it's probably best that I not get into it.

Sweet fancy Moses.


How is it that this is not a bestseller in Korea?

It seems they've already decided not to:


 http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm?gameId=1&setView=features&loadFeature=208&fp=1280,1024,1314517968,20050830115235

No school girls in skirts.  Or elves.  ^_^

You cannot penatrate the korean market without bondage elves, or is that you can not be penatrated by...  anyways, there was a severe lack of boobies.

Not to pick nits, but the chat system was only fucked up for about 4 or 5 months after release (which is still rediculous mind you).  By late spring, Turbine released a rewritten (non microsoft) version that worked perfectly. 

Three things killed AC2:

1)  Bad word of mouth after the first 4 hellish months after release.

2)  Lack of fleshed out content.

3)  Shitty post 50 hero system that resulted in an endless grind with little to no rewards.

I have fond memories of AC2 despite it's problems.  The main reason I quit playing was that too many good friends left the game.  There was a great deal of potential there, but like Horizons, lack of resources and bad planning destroyed what could have been an amazing game.

I always thought that what killed AC2 was the blanket assumption that any online fantasy RPG would earn at least a couple hundred thousand subscribers for several years.  And as a sequel, they thought the money should have come just pouring in.  Lets not forget, they launched with ten servers.  A basic mis-reading of the market.

Initially those 10 servers were relatively full and stayed that way until about April 2004.  It was that month, during the peak of the chat fiasco, that a patch was released that doubled the power of most monsters in the game while at the same time nerfing multiple classes.  That was the final straw that drove off the masses.  It also didn't help that SWG came out the following month.

April? You're giving them more credit than they deserve. Everyone quit after the first month. The content stopped at level 34.

What was that big dragon that was patched in, at the bottom of some dungeon? When the server came up after the patch was applied, me and 3 other guys ran down there and killed it. Pathing bugs on the stuff right next to where he spawns. Writing on the wall.

Cancelled later that day.

Ocellot is right. They made group monsters... "group" monsters. That killed a lot of people habits of soloing group monsters and thus getting group mob XP without sharing and group mob loot without sharing. While that isn't that bad said like that... In-game that meant that people turned around and looked at things they could do.

- Group with others to have pitiful XP shares and 1 out of 8 times the right to loot IF people in the group where respecting loot order (everyone had access to the dead mob loot, first to click-first served!)... So you had melee toons taking all the loot on a regular basis.They introduced a few months later a round-robin system...

- Group mobs were made insanely hard and dangerous. Able to two-shot anything. Yeah for painful travelling in most zones! Yeah for sucky groups without the holy trinity (tank/dd/healer).

- Lack of quests showed!!

Then they made Deimos (the big dragon). It was first exploited by using a bugged mezz (acting like a stun in fact). So the huge dragon of doom was basically harmless. They fixed that... one (probably more) month later when everyone high-level enough was running in their shinny now-impossible to get armor.

When you go through the list of things that went wrong in AC2 design wise, through the list of things they managed to fix too late or never, you are left wondering how it can be originated from the same company that made AC1. Sometimes I think of it and I think that AC1 was the result of extremely pure luck from Turbine in implementing a system taken/inspired from table games and that worked very well. Not because they knew what they were doing but because the table games have such solid fundations that even if broken a little, it was still amazing. When AC2 was designed, they did full-Turbine way and it broke apart.

AC2 inherited from AC1 only two good things:
- An original lore and world. Totally unexploited by Turbine in AC2 but the bases from AC1 were there.
- A great community. A lot of AC1 players in it. It probably counted a lot for AC2 because they thought that Turbine could fix the problems and make it shiny-shiny like AC1. They failed on both sides. They have lost for good a good chunk of their community.

d