f13.net

I tired of WoW finally. I learned some things from that game:

PvP can be fun, if done in the right way, however, PvP rankings that reward time played are not fun. Open PvP is still a retardfest however.
Quest-based gameplay rocks
Melee doesn't have to suck compared to magic
Raiding is NOT what I want in my endgame

At this point I'm watching the development of the Warhammer MMO and hoping for the best.

I've come to the same conclusion as well.  Unfortunately, that just leaves Guild Wars.
I hear that, I won't grind without context anymore.
If the developers of a particular game aren't balancing for magic surpremacy.
Raiding's great if you're an achievement whore.  It seems you're sane, congrats.
At this point I'm watching the development of <insert name of random MMO in development> and hoping it doesn't turn out that the developers are total clueless bastards like the last 20 times.

I'm just bitter because I burned out from WoW 3 months after it was released.

God help me but part of me is seriously considering giving COH/COV a try again. At least in that game for the most part I can do small/solo missions pretty much the whole game.

I still fear the grind however..

That's where I went for awhile.  It was fun until the fun ran out and the grind reasserted itself.  Perhaps worth a monthly subscription, but it may or may not hold you past that.

Jump around games. There's always someone giving a free Trial or something. CoX is a great kick if you want to have as-twitch-as-RPG-gets combat, but you'll run into the same issues you had with WoW. EQ2 is a better WoW in some respects, with more customization and a more involving crafting and economic system, but you gotta like youse your PvE a lot. GW is, as ever, free beyond the box purchase, so you could have that account running the background all the time. And even though it likely won't keep you very long, now's a good time to check with Space Cowboy, another freebie. They'll want you to buy crap to use in the game with realworld cash, but if you don't care about the game, it's free.

If you want to diverge from diku though, consider Eve, Auto Assault (gotta be a free trial somewhere around here), Vendetta Online (lite-Eve with lite-space-simy flight) or DDO (which has some diku feel but is very different from WoW).

And if you want really far afield from diku, Puzzle Pirates or Second Life. If you have game concepts you've ever wanted to try out, learn the latter. You've got an installed base of beta testers that love new experiences there, given they like, built the whole world themselves...

Some other options to consider (http://www.darniaq.com/wordpress/my-links/). Nowhere near a complete list of course, but links to those are in the "Gaming Lists" section near the bottom.

From your list this one looked interesting when I perused their website:



Though it's hard to tell at this stage just how good it will be.

I have also considered going back to Anarchy Online. The thing I like about it and COH both is the self contained mission system. I can do missions by myself or in a small group if I choose to.

Eve intriques me but I have the feeling I would only get frustrated in the long run by it.

Yea. I'd always recommend checking out a free live game over following one not yet out. Anything can change between not-live and live.

Eve can be pretty frustrating at times, but I like it because it contains a number of very different activities in it rather than something like WoW in which all activities are shades of the same one. But I have active accounts in both because they're so different. For Eve you can find a niche operate exclusively in that or do a bunch of things. This is what SWG always got wrong. If someone wanted to be a Crafter and Entertainer and Combatant, let them. They can't possibly do all three at the same time though, so let where they spend all their time be the determinate, not some arbitrary limitation on what skills could be learned. Obviously you can't let people learn everything, but Crafting and Entertaining should always have been separate XP lines like Pilot became.

Why does it even need to be an MMO?

Personally, when I get sick of my current MMO I pick-up a single player game and play it to death. (Not necessarily PC)  If nothing's out on the market that I want to play, I'll cycle through a few of my perennial favorites (BG, MoM, CivsXX, SoulCaliber, Smash Bros.) or things I haven't revisited in a while. (SMAC, Planescape, GalCiv, etc.)  If I still don't have the MMO itch after that I'll pick up another one and do the same with it.  The cycle continues until I get caught-up in an MMO again.

Personally I'm waiting for Warhammer and have switched to console games on Gamecube(and Wii eventually) until it comes out.

I play Counter Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source, Natural Selection or any of the other Steam games out there when I get tired of MMOs. CS and DoD are a nice change of pace from EVE, but then I get annoyed at all the cheaters and go back to EVE.

HAY I HERE SWG IS NEAT!!

(http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y14/Daevina01/pinkvader.jpg)

I loled.

When I get organized I'm going to play me some NWN Infinite Dungeons.  Ding-gratz without the dick-heads.

Yea yea, I say it a lot.

But get the hell away from MMOGs. From August to January (possibly through March for reasons I can't divulge), the console and portable gaming arena is looking AMAZING.

I still have fiun with my BG twink.

http://www.battlegroundforums.com/forum/index.php (http://www.battlegroundforums.com/forum/index.php)

Hey!  Come play... err... it appears I'm not subscribed to anything, either.   :oops:  Someone tell me what to do. 

I know... let's meet back here at the end of November when the expansion MIGHT come out for WoW and we can be bad elves.   :-)

Well I have been playing alot of Single Player Console RPGs and it looks like this month the 360 got like 3 good releases. (Well, 2 good ones and Enchant Arms from what Schild says). I guess I can stick with that for awhile.

The only interesting games out right now other then the stuff in my sig under development are:
-Neocron2 (10day free trial, you have to cancel or they bill)
-EvE (you'll love it or hate it, or both)

That's really it I can think of, everything else is just more of the same, calling AA/CoX/DDO different is laughable at best.

I think the Steam option is one of the best unless you are anti-fps, another option is WCIII DoTa and other mods.  If you dont want to go those routes there are tons of free games you can experiment with, all of them have huge flaws, but the joy of messing with innovative core gameplay usually lasts me about a month before I get tired of the lag/bugs/missing basic features.

Hurry up Pirates of the Burning Sea  :-(

I should give this a try.  I liked Neocron, although its server population maxxed out at about 400, and I found it a bit crappy that a PvP centric game would have game mechanics where a player with 10 hours of game time logged would do a piddly 1 pt of damage per hit to a player with 100 hours of game time logged.  Neocron2, although I know it's just Neocron 1 expanded, might be interesting.  (A brief investigation on the boards show the servers peak at about 150-200 players right now.)

But first, a hiasta from the farse that is massively multiplayer.  Final Fantasy X and perhaps Dead Rising shall fall beneath my feet before I shoot my credit card number to the grind machine makers again.

Asheron's Call.  You want quest-centric gameplay where you don't feel compelled to grind?  AC is perfect for that.  PvP is very balanced, and the PvP server is the highest-population one right now.  Melee doesn't suck compared to magic.  The closest thing in AC to what could be called "raiding" is completely marginal to the game itself.  Come to the dark side, Riggs...

Here's the problem. No one here could make an MMOG more enticing than the quadruple fall threat of Devil Summoner, Final Fantasy XII, Contact and Rogue Galaxy.

Oh, and if you like sandbox-y games like Morrowind or Oblivion, play the original RPG sandbox: Betrayal at Krondor.  It's really good.

Single player RPGs offer story and fulfillment. I seek grinding and false sense of achievement. Well... I guess theres some really shitty single player RPGs that do that.

But they rarely have a feature that "gratz"s me when I ding.

Do not bother with Neocron 2.   The expansion just added shitty gameplay mechanics wrapped in lag with a side of poor billing support.

Roger that, I guess I'll just wait for Tabula Rosa to get my MMORPGFPS jones addressed.

Conan Online.

*crosses fingers*

Sadly, no MMO jumps out at me as something I have to play. My girlfriend has been wanting me to show her COH so I might do that. A good friend of mine is playing Eve and enjoying it so I might do that.

Or I might just wait for the next major releases. EQ2 holds zero interest for me from the craptacular grindfest rumors I've heard (and remember from Beta). I'm WoWed out. DDO looks interesting but I'm leary that they discarded one of the big things from 3rd Ed D&D (easy and fast leveling) to stretch things out. That and Eberron? That game should have been Grayhawk or Forgotten Realms all the way. (though a part of me would love to see a Birthright setting, an MMO where the players run Kingdoms and have to do diplomacy and wars? Give me that!)

So, right now I'm kind of pinning my hopes on W.A.R. or Conan or Tabula Rasa. As well as considering for a short time trying out COH (again with maybe COV added on) or Eve. I've considered AC but remember my last trip back there and it didn't have the rosy glow I remembered from initially playing it.

Actually, you can level up to the maximum (10) in the space of a week or less.  Leveling is quick to DDO, my trouble is just exercising the patience to stick with one character that long.  Fun game, but not deep enough to keep me.
Agreed.

I wouldn't recommend buying DDO off the bat.  I did, and want my $50 back.  However, Turbine's offering a 7 day free trial (http://trial.ddo.com/?utm_source=www.ddo.com&utm_medium=Frontpage&utm_campaign=Trial) that won't cost you anything other than getting that time of your life back.

ONE OF US

ONE OF US

Good game. Lots of commitments.

I'm looking forward to TR, AoC and PoTBS. And WoW BC but I know what that's going to be already. The other three could be awesome or flops :)

aye, and WTH is PoTBS?  /ancy

Pirates of the Burning Sea

IIRC it's Eve with Sailing Ships and the ability to submit your own Flag/ Sail for use. Arrr.

Edit: how the hell did the E dissapear. I dunno, it was there and now it's back.

One thing to consider about EVE is that F13 actually has a regular playerbase, consisting of a mix of forum irregulars and lurkers.  This could change when PotBS comes out, since it will be taking parts of EVE and coating it with PIRATES, but for the time being you might as well try it.  You should know pretty quickly whether or not you will like it.

In other words, gaming Nirvana. Unfortunately it has no chance to live up to my incredibly high expectations. If it hits 80% I will be ecstatic.

Yea, the guys behind PoTBS take a lot of inspiration from Eve, in fact are part of an Alliance there (though wouldn't tell me which one ;), though honestly, I didn't pry). 

It will be interesting to see if they can lower the barrier for casual players seeking game-directed experiences though. Eve doesn't do that very well. Based on the talk, Flying Lab Software is down the right path for appealing to a broader playerbase. But there's Talk and there's what I can install on my hard drive.

It'll also be very interesting to see if generic-pirates can stand up to generic-fantasy at a time when licensed pirates (http://www.dignews.com/game.php?platform=pc&gid=1653) is coming too.

But that's why I also like AoC and TR. The former felt a bit more like SWG in Conan lore than anything else, but with a better combat system :) The latter (Tabula Rasa) is also a better combat system, for different reasons, trying to combine hybrid-twitch game play with the trappings of an RPG.

Three games, all equally compelling to me, for very different reasons. Should be an interesting '07.

Consider me quite skeptical of the Disney version of Pirates. I think there will be way too much interference and 'help' from the IP holder to get a decently gritty pirate game.

From what I've heard PoBS won't be a terribly gritty pirate game either. The focus is supposedly more on the national wars between Spain, Britain, and France, with a heavy focus on the actual ship-to-ship battles and economy... oh, and there's pirates around also.

It seems like the game will be borrowing heavily from the playerbases of EVE (game-design wise) and WWIIOL (historical people love history). I come from WWIIOL, and Lineage 2, so... It seems like it should be entertaining for a while to me. IMO, it's the quintessential indie MMO. It doesn't seem to be overstepping it's bounds, and they're taking their time to make sure that the goals are met. Could be really cool.

Certainly isn't going to be for everyone though.

Heh. The only 2 games I have ever subscribed to for more than 6 months at a time. No wonder I am a drooling fanboi.

Wow, totally forgot about that game. One of the greatest open ended rpgs of all time for sure. After seeing this, I did a quick Google and came up with a link where you can DL the game (apparently Sierra made it freeware).

http://www.alt-tab.net/games/betrayal-at-krondor/download/

Tempting.

I haven't been a part of an MMO since maybe May (?) when I joined ATitD3. That didn't last any longer than it took for me to see they didn't add anything interesting. I'm waiting around till someone puts in a game that meets or exceeds the "potential" SWG never achived. Anyone know whats up with the Star Trek game?

It's a damn shame the sequel was horrible.

yup know the what of PotBS that was a "WHEN??".  I think any new MMO that doesn't look seriously at what Eve has done with a few things is bound to be lumped in that room with the rest of the cheap 6 month NCSoft knockoffs. 

Which sequel was horrible - Return to Krondor, or Betrayal at Antara?  I didn't get too far into Antara, but I remember it being really devious and filled with interesting puzzles and sidequests.

I must have missed the charm of Betrayal at Krondor. I loved Feist's books and world, but I really hated the game. Given, I only played it for a couple of hours, but it just wasn't my bag, baby. I wish I could remember what I found so annoying, but it has been far too long. Was it one of the first to go for real time combat v turn-based? That may have been it if so.

It sucked. I've played worse games in my time, but it was pretty terrible.

Both, Antara was a replica that lacked the charm of Krondor, and Return to Krondor featured horible mechanics and from what I remember a very short and incomplete story.

The story in BoK couldn't have been that short, because I remembered sinking days to go through multiple chapters and not quite completing it.   Maybe it's because I was completing sidequests and whatnot.

From what I recall, the best thing the game managed to do was the storytelling.  The interface was awkward, but one can get used to it.  These days, I'm not sure I'd bother playing it unless I feel like giving DosBox a good test.

Interesting bit of trivia, apparently Tanarus and the original EverQuest client used the same graphic engine (http://www.grimwell.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=2690&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=14).

I loved BoK -- mainly it was the design. 8 or 9 "chapters" -- but all these subquests available whenever the hell you wanted to do them. I think I spent forever on the first chapter, because I wandered all the hell over instead of going to Krondor or whatnot like I was supposed to. Spoiled me for a lot of later RPGs, and was probably once of the best franchised games I've ever played. It really was a good game for the time.

Return to Krondor sucked. Never tried the other Betrayal game.

Antara is perhaps a bit 'dry', but IMHO it does have some of the ol' Krondor magic.  Worth trying for a little bit, at least.

Also, yes to wandering around Chapter 1 forever just doing all the shit there was to do.