f13.net

...that I forgot until I peeked in the WoW forum: being able to tame pets. I played a hunter to 58, and taming new pets was a cool part of the game, having to give up an old favorite to tame that kickass pet with killer stats. That was cool. Sometimes it's the subtle things.

Pickles the spider was my bestest friend.

My hunter (left him on my old server) had a boar named Adama.  I tended not to play pokemon.  I find the first pig I can and he's my friend for life.

On my Draenei I have done that with a Deviate Dreadfang and the purple Death Ravager on Bloodmyst Isle.

If only I had the stable size from SWG for all the pets I really want to keep...

Cool but not something WoW invented. Was taming pets in UO years earlier.

It might be gimmicky but I like to go to the opposite side and get a cool pet.  My dwarf tamed a barrens oasis turtle (Nestor), and he was an awesome tank.

My favorite Wow nifty thingy is being able to ask a Guard for directions and haveing the spot appear on my mini-map.  It's a very nice touch.

I re-subbed last week after never getting past the forties and only just found the awesomeness that are all the Nintendo references in Un'goro crater.  Helping out Linken, Larion and Muigin fighting, Dadango disliking smoke, looting empty barrels off of gorillas - I had a grin on my face the whole time unless I was being chased down by those big elite T-Rexes.

Fraggle rock.

Easier to use than DAoC method of knowing the special slash command to use and having the guard just point in the direction.

fo'shizzle

When I had leveled a few times, I went back and started killing those damn things. Second most annoying wandering Elite in the game. (The worst, at least Alliance side, is that fucker who hangs out at Raven Hill. At least 5 levels above the other mobs, gold-elite, big aggro radius, and wanders all over half the graveyard. I spent more time running from that guy....at least he's got a fairly short leash).

But WoW has named mobs with better stats that you can find. I never claimed WoW invented it. I had just forgotten that particular aspect of WoW I had enjoyed.

Wow easter eggs including the Legend of Zelda references http://www.gamershell.com/faqs/253.txt

No longer.  Pets were normalised (aka all the unique pets lost their uniqueness - now every cat has the same stats etc) a few patches back.  Poor old Brokentooth had to be taken out and shot after that patch - since without his 1.0 attack speed he is just another boring old newb cat.

It is really cool in WoW that when I am fighting a MOB I can actaully see my sword being swung too. I guess my point is how many other games have to do something before we stop talking about it as something cool WoW does? Off the top of my head UO, DAoC, and SWG all had taming of world MOBs before WoW.

WoWs taming in several ways has become less cool over time. Many of the stats on pets have become normalized. Run speed and hit speed used to very a lot more even between animals of the same type. Now only the skin is different from two animals of the same type.

Dark Age has taming?

It's technically called "charming", but many classes may charm mobs to use as pets.  Minstrels at higher RR can charm pets well above them in level. 

But is it permanent between play sessions?  (Not trying to validate WoW's taming, just curious as to DAoC mechanics.)

Permanent, that's a tricky comment.  It has to be maintained and can be broken depending on the level of the mob.  Once broken, it's really easy to recharm a mob.  Also, charmed mobs can't cross zone boundaries.  So there are conditions on the permanence of a charm.

Remember though, DAoC is like 5+ years old. 

This really does make me sad.  I wish they had kept the combat specialization.  It sure seems to me like all they had to do was to keep the abilites seperate, and it could have led to some specialization in hunters - one interrupts casters, one has a fast chase speed, another hits hard, another tanks well.

I guess there is still some of the last two - cats are still high dps, low armor and bears/boars/turtles are still high armor/hp, right?

Pet customization is done through pet talents (trainable) and Hunter talents now. Normalization was done because certain pets -- 1.0 speed, to cite the extreme example-- became god-awful monsters of death in PvP. They were 1.0 -- but if the Hunter had Serpent's Swiftness (IE: All Beastmaster specced hunters) they hit at .8. Every time they critted, they'd proc 8 seconds of frenzy (30% speed increase) -- 1.0 pets perma-frenzied and more or less raped casters. They couldn't get anything but instants off.

Which led to pet balance problems -- first, only 1.0 pets were desireable. Second -- and more critically -- they were having a really hard time doing pet scaling (based on Hunter abilities) and pet talents because what was "good" for a 1.0 speed pet was shitty for a 3.0 -- or vice versa.

Even things like my current favorite talent (Ferocious Inspiration -- 3% damage buff to all members of the party for 9 seconds. Spells too -- mages love) was a problem. On a 1.0 speed pet, it was constantly up. On a 2.0 speed pet it barely proceed before trash mobs died. They were having real problems there.

Now, if Blizzard doesn't come through with some serious pet love in the form of new pet abilities and talents, now that they have a balanced slate to allow customization -- problem.

In Outland you can find He-Man and Orco along with Battlecat, also Harris Pilton.

That sounds like the Enchanter AA ability they added in Luclin -- a charm that lasts until you zone.

and in SWG

Down with WoW

meta games rules

why to people persist with "x did this first" it's a slippery slope.

humans were the frist to domesticate animals. many many years ago.

So what did WoW invent?

I really liked the mailboxes and the ability to mail things to my alts.
I liked big giant visible ?s and !s over quest NPCs heads.
I second the comment about getting useful directions from guards.

FF XI.

WC III.

DAoC with the /where command would point you to any NPC.  It's not exactly the same, but WoW polished it and updated the functionality.

Releasing a polished MMO.

I had an archer class with a summonable pet in Midgard DAoC.

The class was called Hunter oddly enough.

I don't give a shit who 'invented' what, as Shakespear said (paraphrased) - "there are no new stories under the sun."

But as someone who played a 50 RR7 Sorceror in DAoC for 1.5 years, I can assure you DAoC Charm mechanic was/is VASTLY different from the current WoW hunter tame & train model. SWG? Um lol. So whatever, it's better in WoW this way for WoW and it is cool.

That's not reallly taming though.  It's just like an enchanter summoning their pet (can't remember name) or a druid summoning their lynx.  You have no choice in what you get.  WoW's is somewhat of a hybrid of SWG/UO taming and standard pet summoning due to the fact that you're not going to have wild descrepencies in pet strength but you have a selection that draws from the game's bestiary.

I've never been particularly drawn to WoW's hunter or pet taming.  Never gotten a hunter past mid twenties.  That's probably more due to my complete ineptness and lack of desire to play ranged classes. 

Actually, Hunters could charm animals in addition to the summonable wolf. It wasn't permanent and you couldn't teach them skills though.

What did WoW invent? Nothing, really. That's been the point since beta though. The whole thing is derived from other concepts, but then, so is every MMO in some form. There are actually very few brand-new ideas in this or any genre that can't be traced by through to early games from different genres, or to MUDs or to whatever. Even stuff like interactive world elements go back to Ultima III, or just to UO if you want to stick with persistent-world environments.

The better question in my mind is what did WoW popularize. That's a wider net. There I'd say things like mailboxes, instantiated sport-based PvP, quest-based advancement (as opposed to pure mob grinding), interactive world objects. Probably others I'm missing.

Hunting obscure corners of the universe for pets was one of my favorite things about early SWG.  I remember crawling around looking for some sort of uber-armor spider babies.  Once people saw you could kill anything in the game with them, they nerfed the bejesus out of tamed pets.  So I went back to killing Kimogillas with pistol-whip instead of tank spiders.  Man was that game a wreck.  Someone should start a thread about it.

Feel free not to post in my thread, then. I wasn't talking about invention of ideas, or how it stacks up to other games. I just thought that was a cool bit. I'm trying hard not to call you names.
Well, that blows. That's the part that was cool about it. So never mind this stupid thread that some expletives have made stupider.

The Chinese game I have been playing offers this feature. You can charm/capture almost any mob in the game. Each one has it's own stats and abilities.

Here is my current pet with his information window open: Link (http://www.exploiter.org/l-c/screenshots/Perfect_World/pet.jpg)

The next pet I plan to get: Link (http://www.exploiter.org/l-c/screenshots/Perfect_World/bigpet.jpg)

Man, I miss that. I was a BE/CH at one time. I used to make and train squalls that could eat rancors. Poison and bleed special attacks, the works. Called 'em "hellbunnies" Best part was watching the reactions of people as I let them go apeshit on their unsuspecting pets.

And yeah, somebody should make a thread about what a trainwreck that game has become. Maybe they could mention twitch or something too.

I miss all my babies. :cry:

Re: subtle things.

My comment here may be personally incriminating to me - at least if you spoke to my ex-girlfriends.

So... I like annoying the NPCs in the game.  I really get a hoot - finding the different dialogue sequences they go through when you click on them repeatedly.

In a way this is therapeutic, since it spares those around me in my real life  :-D

STOP POKING ME!!!!

(http://forums.somethingawful.com/attachment.php?s=&postid=323347511)

Repost from SA - the Blood Elf who would teleport you to Silvermoon before they added the teleporters in beta.

All that stuff was already appearing just about every MMOG of the same period (CoH, EQ2, GW, SWG, even ATitD)


WoW might have popularised MMOGs as a whole (jury still out), but it's hard to say it has had any impact at all within the genre. Shorter time played between levels maybe? But that was also a process that was happening anyway (look at daoc for the most extreme example of grind shortening).

The one thing WoW did do was launch a stable and polished product. So far there is little sign that the polish bar has been raised for other MMOGs.

(btw, GW also has permanent pet taming)

:roffle:

As far as I can tell, people might be talking about WoW lots - but I don't see any changes in design or any sudden move to release games when they are not either buggy pieces of crap or bland patch-the-fun-in-later wastelands?

Or is Vanguard really that much more polished than I thought?

Vanguard said they were going to try and stay as far away from becoming WoW as possible.

Who knew they'd succeed so wildly and in so many facets.

Also: Brad McQuaid has an ego the size of Jupiter.

But my point is that WoW brought it all together with a stable and content complete experience out of the box. No other game prior did. Nobody else had the money, time and confidence of a multi-national publisher.

WoW didn't raise the bar. It raised a bunch of them. A few of those are in features. Unless an MMO is targeting a niche on purpose, it too will have mailboxes, sport-based PvP, quest-based advancement, less time between levels (therefore an achieveable endgame) and interactive world objects all in the same title, not appearing as unique line-item features spread across multiple titles.

It did not innovate any of these individual features. It innovated by bringing them together. And yea, so did EQ2. But which game is everyone talking about?

That's why I emphasize popularize. WoW made quest-based advancement popular in this genre by bringing in more people to this genre than existed here already (except in the Far East)

Point I'm making is that future-MMOGs-not-tatgeting-niches would have had these anyway - as they had already become de riguer regardless of WoW.

Occasional games will miss out occasional features, just like WoW skipped one or two now-standard features.


Absolutely agree. This is the new thing that WoW did. Noone else seems to be following this, either because they can't or because won't. This is why I'm not sure WoW has had nearly the impact on the design of new MMOGs that some people seem to think.

WoW has had a massive impact on the way the wider gaming industry looks at online games. It may or may not bring more people to the genre, but I don't see anything that WoW has done to the genre that would not have happened if WoW had not been made.

This is not even intended as a criticism of WoW - they set out to do what had already been done, but to execute it with much higher production values and quality levels. That's cool.

I hate to SirBruce this post, but please.


You do realize that everything prior to WoW was niche by todays' definition?  500k subs was incredible back then.


I think it's way too early to tell.  To the extent that it is possible, we have seen almost all new games get more WoW-like (which, for the record, I think is a bad thing).  Vanguard and LotRO come to mind.


May not bring anyone new to the genre?  Are you high?

Bobo the Bear was born in UO, died several hundred times, and was reborn each time. Well, at least each new one looked like the original, so close enough.

He was then reborn in WoW. Being the fan of self-gimpdom that I am, I kept Bobo through my hunter's entire career, 1.0's be damned.

Not everything was targeting niches though. Which is what I said.

EDIT: And BTW, 500k subs is still incredible NOW if you are not Blizzard. Thinking of 500k western subs as niche would be nonsense.


How?
Shorter grind? Was already happening with every diku release since ever.
More quest-based? Did you not play CoH, EQ2, DDO, or GW? If anything, WoW is less quest based than its contemporaries.


We've had the new-people-to-the-genre discussion many times before. But plenty of people have argued that the extra couple of million western players are only here for Blizzard, and will walk back out the door before they play a non-Blizzard MMOG. This is not a new or controversial opinion (though ofc it may or may not turn out to be true).

And contrary to many people's belief there are only a couple of million new-to-dikumud players in WoW, the rest are Asians who were already playing crazy Asian Dikumuds and will most likely go back to playing crazy Asian Dikumuds once they are done with WoW.

WoW was certainly the first crossover eastern/western success. This is a way WoW could effect the business side of running mmogs. Maybe WoW will herald a whole range products successful in both the eastern and western markets, but there isn't any evidence of that so far.

I just don't see how mmog game design has changed as a result of WoW. Yes it has been the most successful implementation. But people have been making EQ/Dikumud clones with slightly less grind, slightly more quests, and slightly more consensual pvp since forever. They were doing it before WoW, they will do it after WoW, they would have done it without WoW.

WoW showed that you don't need social ties that arise from forced grouping and downtime to have retention. If you consider EQ2 at launch vs. EQ2 now you can see what kind of an effect that change has had.

Some of the best things about WoW are impossible to implement for others (i.e. they don't have $50 million to offer something on that level of scale and polish). So in a sense, I agree with eldaec.

[EDIT]

Most of things they can implement is no brainer bullshit others have been doing here and there in other games.

Didn't Vanguard have like a $50 million budget?  I'd like to know what they spent it all on... it certainly wasn't polish.

The engine, and art pipeline took up a very hefty chunk. And it appears to me at least that they left the core engine pretty much alone, and then tried to push the performance without optimization for their game, which is always a bad idea.

/mole
Part of the reason Torque (even the commercial license) is so cheap compared to other engines is that we approach the concept of an engine from a completely different perspective--an engine is reponsible for low level functionality--simulation management, render/scene management, networking, object referencing, cross platform capability, etc.

Many engines however go the next level, and force specific methods and techniques for higher order functionality, and expect you to use them stock and "bow down to the designers"--and they do of course give you pretty strong tools to do so. The up side is that IF your game fits the engine designer's plan, it can be made reasonably well without modification, and low amounts of actual programming (relatively speaking). The down side is that when you are going past the boundaries of what the engine "expects", it's pretty hard core (and expensive) to do anything about it.

When I first heard about Sigil, Vanguard, and their engine selection (and this was well before I was a GG employee), the first thing I noticed:

--management
--artists
--"vision"
--no c++ designers/developers

And I said to myself--this is going to be an art/"vision" driven game, and they aren't even realizing just how important the architectural design/development is during the early process. They spent a year plus doing production quality art for screenshot purposes, and I still hadn't heard about any major programming staff additions, and I said to myself "this just isn't gonna work like they think it will..."

As a C++ developer the lack of programming talent was very evident to me during the Vanguard beta. The lack of multi processor support was an obvious example of the client problems and all the issue with zoning lines showed me the server programming failure. I also questioned what they had been doing for the last year plus of beta when they were patching so much stuff during the last month.

I wonder however how many well known C++ developers there are. Only ones I know about are better known for their non coding game design than actual coding ability. Like Sigil did during formation isn’t Green Monster doing the same thing now? Press releases for managers and artists. Only MMOG company that I can think of right now who formed and somewhat announced technical talent and then were actually successful with a product is AreaNet with Guild Wars.

You can't blame that on Sigil...that would be hugely fundamental underlying engine changes that they have no control over. The zoning stuff, sure.


Amen to that. Like I said originally, I am hugely doubtful that they planned on having any -real- development/design from the get go.


And look at how terrible most of the launches and products have been, hehehe.

Actually I feel I can blame that on Sigil. They picked the engine to use. 3 years ago the Intel and AMD road maps all were public that multi core processors were the future. Even before the public road maps multi core was being discussed. Before that multi processor mother boards were getting more popular. So if they are happered by the engine they have no control over then it is because of a lack of foresight a good C++ designer would have thought about and made a better choice.

Next point is they don’t have much control of the graphic engine but does that limit their multi threading completely? What all is being handled by the third party graphic engine? Do they have their own UI on top of the graphics for the scene being displayed? Can UI updating be done in a separate thread? Can sound be done in a different thread (supposedly this is one area done with different thread in Vanguard)? Can network communication be done in another thread? Can they do prefetching of artwork in another thread? In this post Brad says they have more multiple core support planned http://www.fohguild.org/forums/mmorpg-general-discussion/27195-vg-your-system-specs-required-4.html#post667847 My issue with this is adding multiple thread support to an existing application is usually very difficult. Much easier and plan and implement it from the start than to add in later.

The multi processor support was just an easy thing to point out as a lack of underlying technology. I saw other things less easy to explain and point out the lack of C++ designers. Brad’s words just scream it out to me when he says they will just patch in the threading later.

OTOH their art director - the late Keith Parkinson, whose art was also partly inspiration for the game - was terminally ill. He needed to get the art done back then.

Nothing exists in a vacuum.

I'm suddenly just really sad that someone spent their last days racing against death in order to complete something related to Vanguard.  I can't help but think that if there were a heaven, this guy would be sitting up there looking down at the game and going "Aw fuck, what a shitpile.  I could have spent that extra time with my family.  Thanks Brad, you dick."