f13.net

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=15745 (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=15745)
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Former WoW, Fallout Designers Form Carbine

Former WoW, Fallout Designers Form Carbine NCsoft Corporation (Lineage, Guild Wars), has announced the formation of Carbine Studios, a new Aliso Viejo, CA-based studio in its online game development family, and adds that Carbine is currently working on an unannounced MMO project.

The studio is comprised of 17 former Blizzard employees including lead and senior developers from the World of Warcraft team. Carbine’s vice president of design, Kevin Beardslee, was a lead developer on WoW, while Tim Cain, Carbine’s programming director, was the producer, lead programmer and designer on Fallout, in addition to co-founding the now-defunct Troika Games (Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines).

Carbine executive producer Jeremy Gaffney previously worked as executive producer on NCsoft’s City of Heroes, and established the product development group at NCsoft’s Austin headquarters as VP of development. He was also a co-founder of Turbine, where he spearheaded development on Asheron’s Call.

“This is a dev team made in heaven,” said Robert Garriott, CEO for NCsoft’s North American business. “This group is as experienced as they come in the area of computer role playing and multiplayer game design. Making successful games is second nature to them. They are a very welcome addition to the NCsoft family. The gaming community should be excited to see what great things come out of Carbine Studios in the coming years.”
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Official site:

http://www.carbinestudios.com/ (http://www.carbinestudios.com/)

At least, nice collection of names, same goes with Spacetime Studios.

(http://img235.imageshack.us/img235/5694/mjpopcornsm1.gif)

if it wasn't an MMO...

(http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y277/Mathx/Boner_Time_.gif)

Yep.

Way to make me not care. Michael Jackson is eagerly awaiting failure.

That's what... 17 studios composed of leading / senior WoW designers?  Those guys are getting spread thin!

I wonder how these guys will adjust to not having a bottomless pit of cash to draw from.

At some point every MMOG company will have their owner former WoW development team at the current churn rate.

That's what venture capitalists are for!

It's funny to me how game development funding seems to follow some of the same trends that I see in scientific funding.  Who you worked for in the past seems to be as important/more important than the quality of your current ideas.

I would be nice to see a dev studio run by a 30 year veteran of a real software company.  Creatives should not be running the asylum.

Get back to me in 2010 when they actually have something playable.

Hey thats where I live.

*edit*

That place is like a 2 minute drive from my house.

Could you go and beat some sense into them?

Why bother?

But Garriott says they are awesome.  Why would you beat them?

I met Garriot once at E3. He was in full lord brittish getup. Pimpin Tabula Rasa. I felt weird.

Did he touch you with his sputnik?

Did he smell like mothballs and brandy?

I dont remember. All I remember was him constantly saying "Let me show you something" and I wanted to run.

Well, they do have NCSoft backing for what it's worth. Of course, from the list of job postings, it may well be 2015 before they have anything to market.

Depends on how much Garriott can siphon out of Korea.

I don't like it when people eat with their mouths open.

Ye olde typical medieval music track posted on the "Downloads" page:

http://www.carbinestudios.com/downloads/ (http://www.carbinestudios.com/downloads/)

It's good they are not making another generic fantasy MMO.

Preliminary Results: ^H^H^H Fail.

Edit: They don't deserve an Epic fail.

If you look at the wallpaper right below it, there is a guy with a gun, so I think generic fantasy is wrong. Now, if they actually release anything remains to be seen.

So it sounds like some former Wow devs making a sci-fi mmo? I'd be willing to give it a chance.

Missed that.

Doubt it's Sci-Fi Mopps. Hit the link and check the first pic.

Also I'll remind you Morfiend that WoW has guns. And no one would argue it's not (mostly) generic fantasy.

Nice art anyway. Would be sweet if the game actually looked like that.

Damn I edit a lot.

Has kind of a Ryzom-esque quality to it. Would love it if that art spoke of the final style. Too bad...

...And how could ya live without ye olde "introductory" interview with some high-profile member of the studio? (btw, apparently they've just wrapped up pre-production)

Gamespot interview with Kevin Beardsley (VP), Jeremy Gaffney (Executive Producer) and Eric DeMilt (Producer) (http://www.gamespot.com/news/6180469.html?om_act=convert&om_clk=newstop&tag=newstop;title;2)

Ahem, can anyone translate the following answer in proper, non corporate english, please ? :P

GS: In the announcement this morning, it said Carbine would be "breaking new ground" in the MMO market. What exactly does that signify for you guys?

JG: I absolutely think there's a lot of area to evolve games, in terms of what [is] the next likely stage of things to work on." There's some things these games do really well, and there's some not so much. And so obviously, we want to chase down that path. And there are places where there are brand-new systems where you can fundamentally do stuff in a different way and really try to improve it and make it better. One of the holdovers that we have is that there's really a belief in iterating on things. You put stuff in, and then the company speaks because people are playing the games and people's friends are playing the games so there's kind of no BS. Stuff either works or it doesn't. And we're going to try to both evolve and revolt--is the unfortunate word choice [nervous laugh]--in a bunch of different ways. Evolve and revolve. And Darwinian fitness is going to say which of those survive and which of those don't.
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Regarding the game "Art" :

GS: Carbine's site has some interesting artwork that's got a fantasy/sci-fi look, with a sword-and-sorcery theme but characters are wearing bandoliers and pistols. Is that indicative of your first project?

JG: The art is indicative, but we're not talking a ton about the game yet because, in part, we're still in development. And we're also sort of planning our reveals on that. We're definitely letting the art speak for itself right now. We're also a fan of inventing our genres and/or crossing genres, as WOW does to an extent and some of our other games have done to an extent. But we're also into opening up some new areas where we can have some freedom to create, as opposed to working with established clichés. We're giving the creative team more interesting avenues to explore than just your traditional high fantasy or whatever...it's not, "Hey, we want to be different because we need a new genre for a business tactic." The types of choices we're making are more to do with what the creative team wants to do--where they want to take the setting and the stories and the creatures and the characters. And that's kind of how you derive some of those elements that you see in that artwork.

http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2007/277/Dagun397_screen.jpg (http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2007/277/Dagun397_screen.jpg) -"We're gonna break yer plate mail ass, dude"

(http://z.about.com/d/crime/1/0/A/8/vanillaIce.jpg)

Sad.  It's not 2000 anymore.  There's no place for such type of talk that early in the process.  No one cares.  Maybe it's for recruitment purpose?  They hope to get some good resumes out of this?

It reminds me of Green Monster Game.   Where's your game?

Yeah, beside Carbine's, looks like there are a lot of prematurely announced MMOGs out there we don't know the slightest thing about (nothing strange :P) :

- Bioware ultra-uber-sekreet project
- 38 studios (GMG) MMOG
- Stargate Worlds
- STO
- Spacetime Studios space MMOG (even tho they recently started posting small blogs on the main page. New one might come out today)

Well, not to mention others, like the DC and Marvel comic-based ones, but for now we just know about them because of press-releases (yeah, ok, same for Bioware).

Nvm, i'm dumb.  :-D

Well, since that's what I'm working on:  http://stargateworldswiki.com (http://stargateworldswiki.com) - There's some info out there.  Yes, it is early though.

Back to the story:  This is an interesting change.  This studio was previously a direct branch of NCsoft.  What prompted the change from being part of NCsoft to being an independent studio published by NCsoft? 

Maybe NCSoft pulled an early Microsoft, a la Vanguard.

There are only so many losses a company can have before the shareholders get all  :mob: on your CEO.

NCSoft stockholders being weary of crappy titles impacting the main business?

I'll take a shot at translating the corporate-speak: We don't know what we want to make so we are going to use the iterative process until we add or trim enough features to make something that lots of people will buy into.  We are going to let the creatives run the show for a while and release a technically-deficient product, if we are lucky.  All we can guarnatee is that we will be able to make our rent for the next two years.  Please subscribe to our newsletter.

I'm going to take a devil's advocate position here (not really DA, since I mostly feel it's good, not bad)--what's wrong with what you just said (other than "technically-deficient", which isn't a logical conclusion of what you described, just a historical one) as a development process?

Most of the failures we see in games today is because no matter what development style they use (many actually are using SCRUM/Agile of some sort), the design is still very much waterfall--"we're making an MMO with X Y Z A B C D E F G, no matter what anyone tells us".

Assuming that they start with fun, and keep making sure it's fun along the way, what you just (derisively as far as I can tell) described is actually an outstanding way to do things.

Remember when NCsoft was the great hope of the MMO-medium?  They had CoH and there was no way cars+guns wasn't going to be cool meanwhile SOE was butchering their games and nobody was reallying talking about EvE around here yet.

@Steven: It's a great theory, iteration.  I do it all the time, in fact, since I hate making plans or sticking to them.  My derision was directed at the feeling that they don't have anything solid right now, which means they are going to be iterating until someone kicks their door open, flips up a bullhorn and shouts "YOU SHIP GAME NOW!"  Which, of course, will be before it's ready.  In my opinion.  Hell, maybe they have a solid core idea, but I'm just going off the garbage in those quotes.  It has the quota of buzzwords, you have to admit.

Yes, it does, I agree :) And yes, it can "fail", in that it can give you an early out decision: "hey, you know what? this isn't fun, and no matter what we do, we're not making it any more fun."--but, that's a big advantage because many game ideas really aren't fun, and you know the old adage--you can polish a turd as much as you want, but it's still a turd when you get done.

Where does it say Carbine is now an independent studio?

Hrm.. Call me in 3 years.  We might know what they're working on by then and I can make a decision on weather or not to care at that point.  Hell, we still don't know what Lum's working on and it's BEEN 3 years, hasn't it?

I do find the art amusingly reminiscent of Samwise's, however.

Year and a half.

Aw fuck.  I've inherited my mother's sense of time.

Hmm, looking at the site, this is NCsoft NA's special ex-WoW dev division that has now been turned into a separate entity. Perhaps this is because NCsoft isn't seeing TR as a saviour that is going to see the money just roll in and want to divest some of the risk of internal development. Perhaps because the WoW employees have been employed since 2005 and are yet to have even come close to releasing anything (especially given that interview, where many words were used to say not much).

Perhaps this is what NCsoft has learned is the safer path - to support external studios rather than to pour money into internal development in NA.

Carbine studios: "Now with more dancing!" :P

(Interview with Jeremy Gaffney and Tim Cain: nothing new is revealed, of course, beside a certain fetish love for dancing, or something like that)

http://troikachronicles.wordpress.com/2007/10/23/carbine-studios-interview/ (http://troikachronicles.wordpress.com/2007/10/23/carbine-studios-interview/)

Seconded.

I have to ask. How do you Start with fun?

It's easy, just say it.  If, at first, you find it a bit difficult to get it out, start with some of the easier lines of bullshit er hype game development.

"next generation", "sandbox", "never before seen...", "programmed to play on a wide range of machines", "masterpiece", "brought to you by the makers of....", "we listened", "imaginative", "casual", "built for the casual and the hardcore player". 

Soon you'll find yourself convincingly using words like "truly" and "exciting" everyday!  Once you start it just gets easier and easier!  Go ahead try some of your own!

No, i would really like to know. How do you start with fun?

Design a small alpha that contains all of the core mechanics.
Have people test it.
Ask them: "Is this fun Y/N?"
Then ask them: "Why/Why not?"
Use answers to refine game.
Repeat.

Then expand the boundaries of the game.

Ask right up front, "What kind of experience, at the end of the day and stripped of all secondary in-game systems, are we trying to give our players?". Then tell that story to an 8-year old (or a nearby gaming journalist, if that's easier to find without scaring mothers in the local playground). Ask them if it sounds fun. If "No", start again from scratch.

Prototype early and often. "Fun" is, to most, an amalgamation of past experiences. So draw up your references, coble something together, tune the hell out of it, vertical slice, go. But that's mostly only going to see you through things, like some combat and puzzlers, maybe some UI things.

Where things generally fall about is when people start asking things like "what do we do at the end of the game", "how long does it take to achieve X", "how can we have 200 different completely different and nigh-unbalanceable classes because of the continuing niave belief that more is better".

I thirst for the game that announces itself with open beta applications, launches into playable beta within a month, and then releases six months after announcement.

I don't care if they launch 12 or 24 months after beta starts, but I don't think MMOs can launch official community sites 12 months before they even have the concept art finished anymore. Pre-launch community has precious little value if it disintergrates when you announce what the game is actually going to be like. It's only the community that launches the game that counts.

Now this is some serious, professional....

RISEEEE!!!!  :drill: :drill:  :ye_gods:
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Actually, no, no news on the horizon, but today I was checking their (lots of) job opportunities (http://www.carbinestudios.com/jobs/) and this caught my eye:

SPAWNER

Carbine Studios, a software development company focused on making high-quality, cutting-edge, and conceptually innovative Massively Multiplayer Games, is seeking a talented Spawner to work on an upcoming PC MMO in their Orange County, CA development studio.
 
Responsibilities
·         Is responsible for the spawning of creatures within the MMO game environment
·         Collaborates with system and AI designers on monster and group mob creation.
·         Works closely with the level design team and the quest design team to make sure spawn groups support the needs of the game levels.
·         Attends and participates in design meetings
·         Intimate knowledge of game levels; day-to-day adjustment of spawn groups based on changes in design
·         Provides feedback and suggestions to design team
 
Qualifications
·         Minimum of 2 years professional experience working in a design role
·         Must have shipped at least one AAA quality product working in a design capacity
·         Must have experience in RPG and/or Action Adventure genres
·         MMO experience highly desired: MMO knowledge essential
·         Strong passion for games and excellent knowledge of video games, particularly RPGs
·         Strong decision-making and organizational skills
·         Ability to learn and use proprietary editor and tools for spawning
 
Pluses
·         Love of pen and paper RPGs, board games and comic books
·         Avid MMO player
 
A casual work environment, comprehensive benefits and competitive salary are all part of the package.
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"So, Bob, what do you do for a living?"

"I work on computer games. I'm a EVIL SPAWNER".  :awesome_for_real: :awesome_for_real:

It's nice to see a MMO studio where job titles and player classes could be used interchangeably.

Can anybody explain to a not-so-skilled in "business english" guy what exactly "competitive salary" means?

It sounds like ehm, something I wouldn't want to work for?

Competitive seems to mean "about the same as you would make at other game development studios of equal size/status in the same position."

Tree-Fitty.

(http://www.faniq.com/images/blog/303_chef_folks.gif)

Since this thread has been necro'd...how many studios is this now with "Ex-Blizzard" staff? Anyone have a running tally on how many playable, fun games any of these studios have produced?

Looks to me Blizzard is firing all the right people.

Not only have there been studios that haven't produced a playable fun game yet... (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=13751.0)

...there is at least one studio formed of now-second-generation-former-Blizzard developers. (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=14051.0)

Mmmm. The worm turns, devouring as it goes. Where will Carbine's developers wind up? Check back in a year, when we second-generation necro this thread!

Okay so basically none.

I'm in the wrong field. You think I could get a ton of venture capital to piss away if I first got some scrubby marketing, management, or bean counting job at Blizzard and triumphantly quit about a half year later so I can have this pedigree of being "ex-Blizzard"?

Aren't the Guild Wars guys ex-Blizzard?

It always annoys me when a plus for a job is that you like that genre of game. I think that sometimes it makes sense to hire people who don't like that genre of game because they can see through the genre-convention BS. Hire a bunch of dudes who love WOW and they'll make a WOW clone. Hire a bunch of people who aren't fans of MMORPGs and you'll get something interesting.

Obviously you don't want a bunch of people who hate their jobs and the game they are working on, but looking for drooling fans doesn't strile me as a good idea unless you are trying to create a knockoff.

Yes they are.

A level 99 Lead Quest Designer sits before you, wearing nerdy glasses. The wall behind him looks like he's going to be shot down right after his last words.

Do you:

A) Compassionately watch and listen to what he has to say (http://vault.ign.com/View.php?view=movies.detail&id=8) ;

B) Cowardly run away, and watch something else (http://www.youporn.com/) (NSFW!!!) ;

C) Honourably tell the original poster of this thread to STFU about a game that will be released in approx. 7 years or more.


Choose wisely, O' Seeker.  :ye_gods:

Whoa.....RISEEEEEE AGAIN!!!!!  :drill:

Carbine Studios might finally unveil their MMOG at Gamescom, in mid-august (yeah, yeah, of this year, meaning 2011 :P):

http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/07/28/ncsofts-carbine-studios-to-reveal-new-mmo-at-gamescom/

New website is online:

http://www.carbinestudios.com/en

At the time I'm writing this, if you don't put the "/en" it will direct you to the old website. There is a new blog post by Jeremy Gaffney, executive producer (fhttp://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,41034/).


- They worked in  "stealth" mode for a very long time, considering when they opened the software house website (october 2007). Since then, only vague interviews. The only thing we know, beside the project having Fallout's (and Troika's) Tim Cain at the helm (well, designers' helm, at least), is that it should combine sci-fi and fantasy elements. Also, probably a strong focus on narrative and story, akin to Bioware. That's it.

EDIT

An interesting link I found among Massively's comments to the above mentioned article:

http://verticasino.net/2011/06/ncsoft-has-not-really-known-to-be-gentle/#more-39


Oh, and....ahem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Cain

Cain left Carbine Studios in July 2011 for unknown reasons.

(http://i.imgur.com/6wVpq.jpg)

I hope to god that is a translated post, or the author doesn't have English as a first language.

As for the MMO: let's see it. A title that started in 2007 is going to have design decisions fueled by what happened in MMOs up to that point; the market in 2011 has changed a lot since then.

Would be true if current MMo devs weren't still designing games for 2002. WAR, AoC and Aion thought they were competing with EQ1 and DaoC. Rift thinks its 2004 again.

This yet another fantasy MMO?!

Fantasy, sci-fi AND quirky, if I'm reading things correctly.

Seen a rumour this may be the WildStar game that NCsoft bought trademarks et al a while ago for.

Too bad it has fantasy themes or they could channel Firefly and cut their marketing budget in half.

WildStar...as in....Star Blazers?  Or the comic?

Not the Image comic. Extremely unlikely to be related to Star Blazers.

As I said, that was the rumour I saw in a few places, but it may not turn out to be true.

Hnngh.  :uhrr:

Those two were the two top things the almighty google showed me.

No idea what WildStar is/could be.  Enlighten me, UnSub?

Just a possible name. Like Lum's cancelled title was Blighted Empires. NCsoft goes out and buys the various names needed for their games long before they are announced and apparently have been sitting on WildStar for a while.

It could also point to the lore of the title, that a 'Wild Star' is somehow important to the game.

But then they could also announce that Carbine's new game is "Flippy McMuffin's Great Landscape Wander Online" and we'd still be ahead on what we know about a title that has been in development for 4 - 5 years.

Blast. And all this time I thought that was Whamadoodles Online.

I hate those Nazi furries.

APPLY NOW!!! :D

http://www.carbinestudios.com/en/jobs-listing/seasoned_explorer.php

I'm almost tempted.

The following position might appeal to you even more:

Battle-Hardened Soldier:


Hmm, have to check about my intergalactic clearance, offices are quite slow granting that :(
----

In other news, the Arkship is reaching its long-awaited destination (1920x1200 game artwork):

What are these guys up to....

Forgotten left-overs count, right?

And here is Wildstar !

Trailer is...well, WILD!!! (and I found it pretty well done and funny)

http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/

Fun trailer, although the purple bunny girl was stereotypically useless. Being both the girl and the peaceful, reasonable one. The trigger happy vet and the reckless guy both got to blow away enemies with big attacks while her sparkle attack did nothing.

Gameplay footage from Gamescom:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zooOjqhUH0Q

From the description:

"Developed by NCsoft's Southern California-based Carbine Studios, WildStar offers epic high adventure, where players make their mark as Explorers, Soldiers, Scientists or Settlers and lay claim to a mysterious planet on the edge of known space. WildStar's iconic visual style and "Momentum Mechanics" immerse players in a deep world stacked with content, challenges and rewards that respond to the play style choices of individual players. "

Nice, I love the art style and the character animations.

Look decent, but doesn't really inspire me either.

Detailed overview of the game:

http://www.vg247.com/2011/08/17/carbine-announces-wildstar-aims-at-mmo-reinvention/

Also:

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/17/wildstar-preview-hands-on-with-the-stylish-new-mmo/
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/08/17/wildstar-preview/
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-08-17-wildstar-preview
http://www.g4tv.com/games/pc/65701/wildstar/articles/75286/wildstar-hands-on-preview-far-from-your-typical-fantasy-mmo-staring-magical-bunny-women/

Yeah, I don't quite get this one.  It doesn't help that it didn't offer gameplay.  Looks to be a simple ranged/lmelee/powers setup.  Also, Viera.  Why bunny-eared lady?  Cute and quirky space cartoon doesn't seem like it would be a big seller.

It appears to be a modern DIKU MMO with DIKU MMO combat but no autoattack, like it appears to be in SWTOR.

We won't know if the holy trinity will be prevalent yet.

Remember to sign up for beta on the homepage!

I like it.  A lot (so far).  But it's almost like the game was developed purely for my ridiculous tastes.
This does not bode well for the rest of you.

You seem to know a lot about this game from the little information released.

I like that it doesn't take itself too seriously, I like the style, and I get a very big ratchet and clank vibe from it.

The combat looks like standard fare, and for me, boring. This should have been an action game.

I agree, fantastic presentation and style throughout.

Steampunk Wow from the looks of the art direction. Shoulderpads a must.

I signed up and also added F13 as an interested gaming group.

Ahem...same  :drill:

The new take on the class system is cool.  Instead of a class just defining the way you kill things, the tasks are actually different.  Obviously, this put a lot of pressure on content design but it should give significant replayability.

Your character class is separate from Paths - you pick a class for combat, but then that explorer/soldier/etc thing you pick as well.

This is on my radar... though a mac client is doubtful based on the beta sign up process.

It's scary how this is almost exactly like my first thoughts on hearing the name.  Feels very inspired by Outlaw Star, Trigun and similar anime.  The ingame screens give me a very Titan AE feel for the art style curiously.  Feels like they're really shooting for a blending of anime and more traditional western stuff.  For me personally at least that stuff hit all my buttons.

Edit: I also signed up for beta and listed F13.

Visually it reminds me more of Free Realms or LEGO than anything else.

Like I said, I was especially surprised by the animations...Maybe I was skeptic considering how..."doubtful" they are by looking at the TOR ones (even though they are getting better). But yes, it might be something also related to the different engine they use, I don't know anything about computer animation.

Not surprisingly, among other developers, they have Kevin Beardslee (Lead Animator of 2004 WoW and later, founder of Carbine itself) and Matt Mocarski, credited among "Dungeon/City Artist" of the original WoW. Not implying anything about the quality of the gameplay itself, just sayin'....

Maybe I'm just not jaded enough, but this sounds like it could be really fun and interesting provided it's done right.

The animation style reminded me of the ground unit clips from the original Blackstar video that came out a while back.

I was thinking the same, actually:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jc8dXW61bv4

That's a "Blackstar" presentation back in 2008 (I was really looking forward to it, sigh). As you might know, the game (developed by Spacetime Studios, at the time another division of NCsoft, I think) was eventually cancelled, Spacetime Studios went on its own and now it's primarily a mobile phone game developer (and I think they're trying to revive their original attempt, albeit in a smaller scale). But yeah, probably just a vague similarity :)

I signed up for beta, but first appearances don't thrill me either.

Also: you don't need my home address for a beta sign-up. You aren't going to be mailing me anything, or calling me on the phone to ask why I haven't been playing, so don't ask for unnecessary information.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MnM_LByfw4&feature=player_embedded


Gameplay video.

Looks like a wow killer :oh_i_see:

Style/settings are pretty.  Everything else looks 2005.  Slow running, slow combat animations.  It literally looks like a WoW starter zone, but more confined.  I thought we were moving past WoW design now?

Ho hum.

More like 2002 but continue  :grin:

That's the one. Not to veer off too much, but I could go for a fast paced space fighter game right about now.

You know what else, this is a fantastic way to reveal and announce your project.

A great trailer, followed up with tons of actual screenshots (with actual diversity), and videos of it completely playable and live. No countdowns to an announcement about a name and a barren website, followed weeks later by a teaser trailer, then a real trailer, then maybe a single screenshot, blahblahblah.

Yea, I'll give them credit for that.  Too bad the game doesn't look that interesting.

I actually give them credit for showing there level 1 gameplay instead of there level 80 gameplay.

I liked the "double-tap W, or S, to dodge the big bad attack" mechanic, though I'd rather the tell were somewhat more subtle than a cast bar.  Hopefully, there's more of that sort of thing in the game, because the rest of what they showed in that video was pretty uninspiring.

Gameplay livestream starting in a few, here (http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ncsoftteam#utm_campaign=synclickback&source=http://us.ncsoft.com/en/events/gamescom_2011.html#17868&medium=9093164)

http://us.ncsoft.com/en/events/gamescom_2011.html#17868


EDIT: just finished watching the gameplay live session.

- Yes, at first sight it surely looked a bit generic, as in "go grab quests and kill generic stuff", but then it quickly became more dynamic, especially considering that they shown starting stuff. Let's say it was more like the new WoW starting zone approach than, for example, the old, tedious Tauren starting zone one (especially all those kill quests in Bloodhoof village).

Beside the very good animations and the cool-looking environments, it looked like that quests are updated on the fly, with new objectives and things to do while you are actually out on a mission. It seemed to me that you deal with enemies quite quickly, with a more "actiony" approach so that you get to the "meat" of the quest without the tedium of killing a lot of stuff (again, speaking of what I saw from the gameplay video). That "beacon tower" quest looked nice, and also you got reward for you chosen path, which I think was the explorer one, by doing stuff related to your "path".

There will be another Q&A session in about two hours, but I think it will be in german only.

Complete, good-quality walkthrough in english (of a Human Spellslinger, Explorer Path):

Part I:
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/gc-11-wildstar/719395

Part II:
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/gc-11-wildstar/719396

Part III:
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/gc-11-wildstar/719397

Part IV:
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/gc-11-wildstar/719398

Haha, what made you think that? The second-most-successful Western pay-to-play MMO at the moment is a WoW-clone and the Next Big Thing is a WoW-clone.

Sometimes you really have to make the tells big and flashy to drive it into someone's head, though.

The tells for those starter yeti is that there is an animation of them leaning back and inhaling, with a sound, a cast bar, and a giant red cone on the ground indicating where it's going to hit with the attack. And that's just for a starter creature. Even with all that, there is still plenty of footage of people playing the demo just autoattacking the creature, blissfully unaware.

I'm way past done with wow and wow clones. In fact I'm writing off games the instant that I see hovering "QUEST'S HERE" (say that in Paulie D's voice from Jersey Shore) icons above stationary NPCs heads. They can be yellow exclamation points or other cute icons but no more CAB'S HERE/QUEST'S HERE trash in my trailer.

This is a really big point to me - I think there's obviously better ways of showing quests than Everquest had, where you had to hunt and peck at the game world, then dialog to get anywhere.  But the yellow exclamation points are simply overboard.  It is one of the huge turnoffs I have when examining a new game.  The yellow exclamation point just screams "treadmill". 

Then again, I want more immersive online worlds and less game. 

Reading around the net as usual the comments on the style I've seen are sort of overwhelmingly positive.   Gamers are older but I'm getting the feeling that this one is going to be a generational gap thing.   I haven't even seen the usual realism trolls.   I guess it's so far from realism that they don't even feel it's worth arguing.

So, here is a great video walkthrough of the entire starting zone, called "Northern Wilds", complete with a short istanced area at the end. It runs for 37 minutes, good quality, and it's narrated by Lead Creative Writer Chad Moore (worked on games like Arcanum, Fallout 2, Vampire: Bloodlines).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiOseZt_dDo

It's a change from other gameplay videos floating around 'cause you are following an Aurin Esper (bunny!!!  :drill:), instead of the Human Spellslinger. Path is the same: Explorer. The main mechanics (at least those unveiled so far) are explained: challenges, "momentum", special UI features, combat actions and more.

What I like the most is how "layered" the experience seem to be: yes, there is your average "kill stuff throughout the zone and grab quests" one, but there is also a lot more. Very dynamic and, *gosh*, quite fun to follow as a simple video spectator, considering is a MMO.
----

Another interesting video: "Paths" presentation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcU3qqsWjbc

It's basically a summary of the "paths" the player can undertake. Settler sounds quite different! (starts at about 2m 33s)

If they improve the intro, I would actually play this based on the path system (combat obviously). Look there is nothing wrong with wading into mobs and slaughter them 3-4 at a time. As long as its not boring, not staring at an xp bar, generally not getting "old" with your content. One of my first mmo's had me fight zombies out in the desert area, for 1 week that was the most fun i had ever... unfortunately that was about it for the game for at least 15 level and after 1 week of killing zombies I'd had advanced 2 levels  :awesome_for_real: Diku's are boring because they are generic grindy pieces of shit. Not because the gameplay isn't can't be fun otherwise why are we frothy at the mouth for diablo 3? 

I disagree, I think it is absolutely because the gameplay isn't fun.  Make a Borderlands MMO and I bet a lot of us sick of the current crop of MMORPGs would play the hell out of it.   Grinding is a meaningless term - it vaguely describes "The game is convincing me to keep playing to attain an in game goal even though its not fun for me to play"  People never trot out the word "grind" when they are having fun actually playing.

Yeah, I'd play the hell out of that.

You take any game and bury it under a mountain of "play x hours to unlock y" and you made a pretty effective filter. WAR, AoC, Aion, Chronicles of Spellborn, Rift etc

Lets take Chronicles, it wasn't a bad game play wise. Actually it was great. You had a skill deck system that effectively rotates so you can do combos. You can select different skills or multiple copies of the same skills on your skill deck (each style had its advantages), and every skill had to be aimed. You can also effectively dodge skills by basic movement (juking), applying speed buffs, and using line of sight (no shooting through stuff). Sounds fun right? It was and probably still will be if the game didn't insist on boring you to death  with what you actually used that neat system to do.

I question the split of the Scientist/Explorer roles. They've conflated lore-delving with - by their own definition - achievement whoring. It seems to me there'd be a lot more overlap between people who like lore and people who like to explore the landscape and find unusual sites. Achievement whores are more about ticking items off on a list.

But maybe I'm biased because that's how it shakes out with me.

I thought Chronicles was a badass game.  But the grinding was fucking awful, so I quit.  I really had fun actually playing it though.

What do you really mean though?  It sounds like you are just saying "It was fun until I had to repeat stuff too much and then it got boring."  If it kept being fun to play that entire time, you wouldn't have minded, at some point it stopped.  It sounds to me like issue is that the gameplay didn't hold up to a lot of repetition.  There are plenty of games in which I've happily played the same thing literally 1000s of times without seeing it as grinding - so it seems to me that grinding itself can't be the issue unless the gameplay doesn't hold up.  What makes playing dustbowl for the 25,000th time more fun than killing the 25,000th boar in an MMORPG - the gameplay. 

I meant exactly what I said. 

I really enjoyed my time playing.  But when it got to a point where character progression just stopped because the exp curve went through the roof, I stopped playing.

Also, solo play kinda ended as well I think, but it's been a few years.

To me "Grind" usually means "repetition to the point of not being fun". I agree with whomever posted above that Grind really doesnt mean much these days. Back in the old days it meant sitting at a camp and killing the same mob over and over again. These days people just use it to mean "not fun". I think we need to get an internet ruling on the term myself.

I'm the same.  I'm split on which I would want to choose, because I enjoy exploring lore as much as finding out of the way places.

Ok, we can stop confusing people with a common term used for 10 years, lets call it "what I AM doing is not what I WANT to be doing"

AoC for another example, Its combat was praised on every gaming site known to man. Finally every sword and board kiddy can finally aim there sword, hit someone, and even hit the person next to him. It was the jebus of game design, you had combos which had starters and finishers and you could actively block and evade attacks. The days of stand and trade blows combat is over funcom declared, and they were right, and people loved them and pve'ers sang there praise for 20 levels and the magic ride ended there. The fourms ran red with the blood of subscriptions being canceled as the fanboys hugged themselves jeering and weeping as they told there fellow gamers to go back to WoW, that the grind wasn't that bad, that there need not be an endgame! They wondered why one of the first action oriented mmo's, the first brake from staple diku combat, could fail so miserably.  

What I'm saying is that a game that is fun is fun regardless of how often the game sucks your dick with a new level.   If you stop getting shiny from the game and you feel like quitting, thats probably a good sign you should've quit a while ago.

First Action MMO? No.

AOC has the typical MMO issues for many, combat wasn't really one.

Wait are you arguing that diku combat shouldn't exist or that you're just tired of it?   I want to play some action MMO's as well of but not all the time.   I'd rather not pit my reflexes against 16 year olds in an MMO I'm actually serious about.

Gameplay in the video looked ok. Small addition to the target and hotkey combat (which is just fine with me) with the moving out of the circle. I liked the quest updates by video phone in the corner. Environmental hazards look a bit tedious and static. Had to dodge the same ones going down the mountain as he did coming up.

Do not like the design of the bunny girl. The purple furry ears and tail look like costume bits added on. More like a cosplayer than a different species. Also the tail is just too big for her body. Are there bunny boys and rock girls or are the races gender locked?

Got a chuckle about the theme of the zone being saving everyone from freezing to death while the character was running around in a short sleeved shirt/hot pants outfit.

I find TF2 Fun. I played it for hours, like 5-7 hour sessions straight till the computer over heats, never got bored.
I find Chronicles of Spellborn fun. I played it for hours, 2-4 hour sessions, got bored.

All I'm saying is that there is a big divide between finding what you CAN do fun and finding what your DOING fun, a divide most mmo's don't acknowledge exist so they bull ahead with game design decisions that make the game uninteresting and wonder why no ones interested.

And no AoC was probably not the first action mmo, but it was hyped as such. My post never stated anything wrong with AoC combat.

Interview with Executive Producer Jeremy Gaffney (some new info here and there):

http://www.tentonhammer.com/wildstar/interviews/cons-2011

- Two Factions: Dominion and Exiles; humans in both factions, the other races are unique to each faction (regarding the Exiles, apparently there are more besides Granoks and Aurins) ;
- Fully "mod-able" UI;

- Possibility of playing in space? (no free-flight space travel, though):


About the "Settler" path (still nebulous...it shows that they're still heavily tackling it):


- Regarding the starting areas:


Some more stuff at the above mentioned link.

Sooo, what's been happening in the last 10 months

Err, not much really, at least public-wise: lots of blogging and some hints here and there about their take on some gameplay features (and design in general), but that's it. Looks like they'll save most of the new stuff (especially a more detailed look at the "settler" path) for this year's Gamescom.

Some highlights:

- Just posted: a quick look to the ongoing "Friends and Family" testing (I really dig the art style; looks like they're also going for a "tera-like" targeting system?)
http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/blog/wildstar_wednesday_an_inside_look_at_wildstars_friends_family.php

- the job of the "narrative designer":
http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/blog/wildstar_wednesday_the_story_of_an_epic_world.php

- "Quest text in 140 characters" part 1:
http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/blog/wildstar_wednesday_quest_text_in_140_characters_more_or_less.php

- "Quest text in 140 characters" part 2:
http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/blog/wildstar_wednesday_quest_text_in_140_characters_more_or_less_part2.php

- Northern Wilds (first zone of the game, I think, at least for one of the factions) bestiary:
http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/blog/wildstar_wednesday_northern_wilds_bestiary.php

- Northern Wilds minibosses:
http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/blog/wildstar_wednesday_northern_wilds_minibosses.php

- Musical score:
http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/blog/wildstar_wednesday_wildstar_music.php

- "Algoroc" zone (immediately after Northern Wilds, I think):
http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/blog/wildstar_wednesday_introduction_to_algoroc.php

- Algoroc rogues:
http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/blog/wildstar_wednesday_algoroc_rogues_gallery.php

- Wildstar will feature UI add-ons !
http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/blog/wildstar_wednesday_yes_well_have_ui_addons.php

- "Quality of life" features:
http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/blog/wildstar_wednesday_jeremy_gaffney_on_quality_of_life_features.php

- Insights into Eldan technologies:
http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/blog/wildstar_wednesday_insights_into_eldan_technology.php

- A scientific analysis of "Loftite":
http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/blog/wildstar_wednesday_-_a_scientific_analysis_of_loftite.php

- "Gallow" a settlement located inside the Algoroc zone:
http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/blog/wildstar_wednesday_welcome_to_gallow.php

I was watching a video of this over at RPS (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/06/14/the-paths-to-glory-wildstar/) and I do like how it looks. The gameplay, not the neon fox-tails, that is. Very action game vibe to the combat, which I'm really digging as a new trend for MMOs.  After clicking on one of Lucas's videos, that is not the face/neckbeard I expected to see with that voice.

They put up another short video showing some group combat:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/06/28/wildstars-group-combat-looks-sort-of-familiar/

I have to say despite not liking the holy trinity the whole free form targeting in combat looks really fun.  It reminds me a lot of LoL combat almost.

"PROTOSTAR CORPORATION ANNOUNCES NEXUS HOUSING INITIATIVE" :
http://www.wildstar-online.com/uk/blog/protostar_corporation_announces_nexus_housing_initiative.php

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bNjhJxdb0E

(housing and player-owned lands with possibility to enhance it).

As a standalone feature, it looks simply fabulous: we'll see how it integrates with the rest of the gameplay.

P.S. YOU CAN PLACE YOUR LAND/HOUSE IN THE SKY!!!  :drill: :drill: :drill:

Housing makes this at least worth keeping an eye on!

That's fairly interesting.  If they aren't going to instance the housing then they must have a fairly big area to put it all in.   Even with that housing in the sky thing they'd run out of room.

I'd put dollars to donuts that they crib from Anarchy Online

Do you mean the instancing?  I thought AO was 100% instanced on the apartments.

I think he was referencing the guild cities in AO out in the wilderness.

My only question here is what good comes from building turrets around one's flying house.  Is there any actual possibility of invasion?  House vs House combat?

I desperately hope to one day see a game with airship housing specifically for that.

Yeah that's what I meant.

There's a four-part developer walkthrough up on Gametrailers.

Part 1 (http://www.gametrailers.com/gamescom/videos/gg1pr1/gc-2012--developer-walkthrough-part-1---game-overview--cam-) - Part 2 (http://www.gametrailers.com/gamescom/videos/4qf8vb/gc-2012--developer-walkthrough-part-2---the-world--cam-) - Part 3 (http://www.gametrailers.com/gamescom/videos/ww0ts7/gc-2012--developer-walkthrough-part-3---combat-highlights--cam-) - Part 4 (http://www.gametrailers.com/gamescom/videos/otgpf6/gc-2012--developer-walkthrough-part-4---looking-ahead--cam-)

That actually looks pretty decent.

Ya with this and gw2 it doesn't look like their stock price will stay down for long.
Though it will take some flak for the questing which looks pretty vanilla, if the npc he ran by with a ! over it's head is any indicator.

Go play Allods.

Good find on those walkthroughs.  Seems like they are further along than I thought now.



I would if it wasn't horrendous P2W. 

Game is coming out this year.

http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/blog/wildstar_wednesday_february_state_of_the_game.php

Here's a video introducing one of the player factions, the Exiles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn8648VGMKM

This game looks pretty quirky and fun to me (though I have NO idea why they think their system of moving "get out of fire" circles on the ground is revolutionary combat), and I'll take cartoony scifi over boring fantasy mmo #639085 any day!

Yeah, same, I always liked their approach and enthusiasm for the project: something that aims to be, first of all, fun and with diversified activities (paths and other features like housing, which I love); not attempting to be the  "next greatest thing", a sandbox simulation or trying to promise lots of far-fetched stuff. Regarding combat, yeah, with the release of TERA and GW2, "actiony" combat is nothing new: we'll see if they can add another layer to it, or make it fun, anyway.

The central part of the "state of the game" is quite interesting:

I played a bit of this game in 2011 at PAX Prime and the get out of fire stuff is on almost every skill.  Sleaves, swipes, attacks, whatever.  So it's not really just for special attacks.  At least it was so on the bigger mobs.

They weren' showing much and it looked like any other quest driven DIKU.  Their state of the game sounds interesting when they got to the end game stuff.  Building keeps and housing seems neet if they actually don't instance the shit out of it.

I had forgotten this was even supposed to exist. Is there a TLDR for what this about anywhere?

Read the state of the game article, then if you want to watch videos watch the different path videos.

It's just all the usual MMO dev hurf blurf.

Looks pretty though.

There's some more info in Massively's fairly detailed write-up (3 articles) linked from this post - http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/02/06/wildstar-reveals-2013-launch-window-ambitious-plans-to-make-mmo/

The tldr seems to be that it's sort of like GW2 combat, with TSW-esque aoe indicators that are Serious Business (and also used by players to signal what moves they'll be doing for combos?), player housing and COH-style 'housing pvp', and some quirky shit with the settler and explorer archetypes that goes beyond kill stuff - level up.

Looks like next week we'll finally learn more about the Dominion faction: I think we can get a glimpse of one of the races during the presentation video linked above (the horned character). Also, there is still one, unrevealed Exile race. One of the articles on Massively does a good jub in summarizing some aspects of the game:

http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/02/06/the-biggest-game-on-the-planet-wildstars-boundless-ambition/

Here's a video on the dynamic combat from last september:

http://youtu.be/PgFo28scfYM

The last Exile race is clearly space zombies.

The naive part of me is starting to get somewhat excited about this title.  The press blitz they did this week looks nice.

Hope someone told them that while they're trying to reinvent the wheel (again) that subscription-based games are old hat...

More stuff.

http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/02/13/everyones-a-potential-traitor-even-you-wildstars-dominion/

tl;dr
- Humans for both factions
- Two other races ("undead" Robots and lizard-like race)
- Stalker (read: Rogue) class is in

Aaaaand, I just became a Dominion gal.  Dragons, Robots, and spiffy uniforms.

It's a cute little style they have going.

Did I mention playable robots?  Like, what SWTOR would never let you do?  Actual.  Playable.  Customizable.  Robots?

 :drill:

And new official website:

http://www.wildstar-online.com/uk/#page1

Kind of weird to have an obviously evil moustache-twirling faction (dominion) and a sorta-neutral one (exiles). Maybe the last race will change things, but otherwise the game may suffer from the usual "kool doods go for the evil side" problem.

The web site doesn't really seem to provide much more than fluff.  Is there any place where I can get some depth?

The massively articles (from last page) are decent-ish since the writer had some hands-on experience with the game, especially this one:
http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/02/06/the-biggest-game-on-the-planet-wildstars-boundless-ambition/

Thanks Z!

The Exiles have the cat/bunny people race. It'll even out  :why_so_serious:

I'm dubious about this game (for :nda: reasons), but if they're doing these faction trailers in-house, they have God's own team of character animators.

The trailers remind me of Ratchet and Clank. Cartoony style, broad iconic characters.  We had country girl and now aristocratic bad guy.

Ratchet and Clank, with a dash of Don Bluth   :drill: :heart:

This is NCsoft West's next important project to launch, so they probably aren't short of resources in that area right now.

I played the pink rabbit psychic character back at PAX Prime 2011.  It felt really smooth and extremely well animated back then.  It looked like a simple game though, and they weren't sharing much.  It was just a WOW clone at that point.  Looks like they added a bunch of stuff.

Looks really well done. Shame it's a wow clone though. Tried GW2, SWTOR, TSW, and MoP a while ago. Turns out the Diku is dead to me. I have just played too many incarnations.

Regardless of it being a WoW clone, it'll be the first AAA pulp sci-fi MMO made.  Which pretty much means, to me, it has to be played.

I'm watching this one closely. I have mixed feelings about the anime style graphics but the ideas are great. And housing this in-depth is something I love in my gaming. I'm a bit 'bleh' that raids are such a major part of their endgame but whatever. I think that's a mistake, especially if they go for BIG raids because the industry is moving away from that for a reason.

I've just started looking at this.
I'm a sucker for MMOs, as a lot of you would probably have noticed by now.

I like the housing idea and being able to move to join your friends.
My friends have a problem in LotRO at the moment where our kinship house is in one instance and our personal houses are in others.
Would be great to be able to merge and have our own little neighborhood going.
Lets hope they don't screw it up by going with servers that mean your friends are all over the place and can't meet up.

Other fun thing that I've just seen is that unlike LotRO, the interior of houses have no slot restrictions.
Add stuff as you will.

I also like the sound of the paths.
I've got 2 friends looking at playing explorers and I'm going scientist.
I'm hoping that these things will cross over so that they can find ruins (when not jumping all over mountains) and I can research the things in there so that we can have cool things to play with.

Anyone know if this is going to be a Sub based game, or more likely to use something similar to the Freemium model of paying to unlock perks / extras that they had in COH before they shut it down?

I don't think they've said, but I'm really hoping it's not a sub since I'll give it a pass then.

+1.  I've resolved myself to living in co-existence with cash shops.  If they can pull off AAA stuff for free, more power to them.  Otherwise, they're not bumping squat off the current MMO market.

I've become the complete opposite.  I can't stomach the free-to-play audience any more.  Granted, the wow crowd wasn't much better... but there's something about spending $15 a month that seems to filter a lot of idiocy. 

If I were them I'd blaze a new trail and start as a boxed-sale with microtrans, then once the playerbase was fairly set move to subscription.

Maybe immaturity.  Idiots can scrounge up $15, too.  For example, several of my friends still play WoW.

I think it's more shitty free games filter out reasonable people because they realize they aren't having fun and have better things to do with their time.

Nothing but elitist bullshit, Nebu.  It's a simple function of us getting older and less tolerant vs the market getting bigger more LCD.

I disagree.  It's easy to watch a community change in real time when games convert from subscription to F2P.  There's a certain level of community built into games when you're paying a flat fee to belong.  It's self-selecting among those willing to invest rather than those willing to show up, shit on the floor, and leave.

Nebu, do you stick with any game long enough to get past the first few days of "Oooh New Game" rush to see how the communities shakes out?  Especially a free to play one where you're already biased against most of the population getting to try it out?

We can agree to disagree you know.

Or we can stand around screaming "GET OFF MY LAWN" at the yunguns.

Honest I would love it if the age of niche MMOs dawned and we could all choose the MMO with the theme, rule sets and business model that best suits us. But the economics of just don't allow it.

I think the economics allow it just fine.  The problem is that there are too many companies chasing after the mythical "next WoW" instead of building a simpler & less expensive game that caters to a niche.  I'm hopeful that kickstarter may bring back more niche games and then we all get to be happier.  Variety benefits us all, right?

It's not so much disagreement as me trying to understand what's irking you about the people in these games.  I turn off global chats almost immediately, so I've had very few negative interactions.

But I've seen you chew through games with your hyper-efficient leveling, and I'm just wondering if maybe you're seeing a whole different segment of the populace than I do.  Ultra-achiever-world-first dickbags versus enh-whatever-I'm-easy stoners or something?  Kids versus people who take these things far more seriously?  I dunno.

My biggest beef with F2P is that it encourages developers to focus as much, if not more on revenue streams than player retention.  While the two aren't mutually exclusive, there is a lot less emphasis on community building and more on extracting cash during periods of high churn.  I see the trade-offs and the cost benefits of being F2P, but they don't fit with the style of game that I prefer to play.  Remember that I prefer PvP games which already contain the more volatile members of the gaming community.  With F2P this already bile-filled bunch seems to get even more ridiculous in their behavior.  There's no reason for accountability since you can simply generate a new email account and start from scratch.  If F2P games were to be more rigorous about limiting the number of accounts per IP address, then I'm sure I'd find them more palatable. 

Please remember that the game I primarily play is a F2P game (World of Tanks).  I would much prefer that it were a subscription-based game for exactly the reasons above, but lacking a viable alternative, I'm stuck with it as it is.

The "communities are shit" phenomenon is one I've only really noticed with MMOs that start out as box+sub and then later go F2P. With the few games I've tried that were built as F2P from the ground up (and aren't MOBAs), it feels like people are at least a little more civilized, beyond the newbie areas which will always be shittowns.

I imagine in the F2P conversion scenario it's a combination of a bunch of clueless new people, a bunch of bad apples in those new people, and a bunch of already-playing vets who are bitter at such a stark reminder that "their" game failed on some level just feeds into this big boiling pot of suck.

I actually think that there's a lot of truth in this.  To be fair games like LoL fail to hold my attention precisely due to the community being a bunch of assholes.  Perhaps my age does color my opinion.  I'm more irritated by the cowardice of hiding behind internet anonymity than I probably should be.   

Even LoL I hear's improving in that regard, since Riot's giving actual reward incentive to be, if not nice, at least tolerant  of other players.

I'm not sure where you heard that, but you heard wrong. LOL's community is still full of people I'd like to infect with smallpox.

Thinking back on communities I've been a part of, I don't recollect any specific attitude based on sub. AoC was chock full of douchebags while GW2 has had some of the friendliest players I've met and I've played on about 5 different servers over the past few months before settling down. WoT? Plenty of asshats thankfully limited by the chat functionality, or lack thereof at least when I played. I could probably keep going, but that would get tiresome. I'll just say I haven't seen the same delineation between sub or no sub when it comes to player attitude.



LoL is its own beast forged in the depths of community hell and shouldn't be a part of any comparison to other online communities. Also I spit a little coffee when I read the second sentence.

Nebu is an old man yelling at a cloud.  :why_so_serious:



If anything, the internet is less anonymous then it's ever been, with all the facebooks and etc. People are still enormous retarded assholes though!



All communities are shit if you aren't part of them. One mans gibbering retardation is another mans hilarious in-joke and good times.

TO THE CLOUD!!!!! :geezer:

Kill some shit
Turn in quests
Level up

wheeee

Great post. I don't get how you are being forced to even notice the overall community of a game these days. Get some friends and play with them or play solo. MOBA's are a cesspool because you can't avoid having your fun be dependent on others. There is no reason for MMO's to be like that. I've been playing Tera and literally give zero fucks what anyone else is doing in that game because its free and I play with the people I want to play with. Fuck the rest if I see them and I can I just kill them. If I can't kill them I just change channels.

If community isn't really designed into the game to begin with than complaining about community is slightly mad methinks.

Nice video showing some gameplay in the Deradune zone:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPaCzrOWpBo

Official blog about it:

http://www.wildstar-online.com/uk/news/wildstar_wednesday_a_look_into_deradune.php

Great art.
Great animations.
Great sound and writing.

I just hope it's more than a quest driven, level/gear grind WOW clone.

I really hate "gameplay" videos without visible UI.

I agree.  But their UI, last time I saw it, was pretty normal.  Nothing too exciting and what you'd expect from any other MMORPG with hotbar combat.

3 parts Barrens
1 part Zangarmarsh
dash of spaceships
sprinkle of troll screaming about the blood feast. 

And a hint of Iksar

For the horde Dominion!

Mods plz move thread to WOW subforum, kthxbye

I'd be fine with an improved/prettier WoW. I don't hate hot bars. Yet.

The over the top narration and seemingly intentional hyperbole make this latest video great:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OlC-Oq_Plsk


I expect TESO to take itself very seriously, which is great. I expect this game to be the opposite, which is also great.

The more I see, the more interested I get.

http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/news/what_is_wildstar_raids.php

Talkin' 'bout raids.

Where's the goddamned pre-order button?

Seriously.  NCSoft must have finally captured the WoW genie.  The question is if it'll be enough to topple the current 800lbs gorilla.

I've been interested.  My question is if they're going with the GW2 pay model or subs.

If I had to guess, I'd say Sub.

Uhm, am I missing something? This is just WoW. Not that there's anything wrong with that, if that's your thing, but I don't get the excitement.

But it's a new WOW!!!!

"WoW in Space" is something people (including myself) have been whining for... over a decade.  Blizz didnt do World of Starcraft, so former Blizz devs make Wildstar.   Niche filled.

But its so transparently NOT WoW in space. Its WoW, with guns that are just magic missile, cannons that are just catapults, player housing yoinked from SWG and the requisite giant shoulder pads. Seriously, wtf people, you're meant to be smarter than this.

Since I love the housing in SWG, that's not a bad thing...

My playing this depends on two things:  Not having dozens of buttons and being no-sub.

Not, it's not exactly what I want, but I'm finally starting to get those games, so there's room for a distraction in there.

It's not WoW in space YET.  So they start on one planet...expansions and patches could very well add space travel and other planets.

I'm with Engels, any hype for this is pretty strange. The best things they are doing so far seem to be the things they aren't doing which is another fantasy game or another old IP cash grab game.

The only thing I'm interested in for this game is the combat.  It seems like they may be taking the GW2 approach which I really liked. Other than that, the "settlement building" with one of the paths looks really fun.

But as far as a I know it's a quest driven progression game with raids and pvp battlegrounds.  Not earth shattering, but it will be interesting to see if they iterate it well enough. I thought I heard there is a LFD at launch.  Amazing if true!

Well they're saying that raiding isn't going to be the end-all/be-all of the "elder game", though how they'll get away with solo/small group stuff beyond daily quests will be quite the challenge, me thinks.

Best thing that probably comes out of this is WoW patches in player housing right after they launch =p

What do you think all of our visions of WoW in space where......

http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/03/22/pax-east-2013-a-first-look-at-wildstars-high-low-and-housing

dat new video about housing is  :hulk_rock: :Love_Letters: :Love_Letters: :Love_Letters: :Love_Letters: :Love_Letters:

 :heart:  Just....    :heart:
Housing Video (http://www.viddler.com/v/958cac?secret=72281351)

If you're on the fence about this game, after watching that video you likely won't be.  Has to be the baddest ass housing implementation on a viable AAA MMO I've ever seen.  errr, maybe tied with SWG.

God damn it.

http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/03/22/pax-east-2013-a-first-look-at-wildstars-high-low-and-housing/#continued


SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!

Also, the Massively article details a leveling zone IN SPACE!  So there you go.   :grin:

Played this for a bit at PAX East. Felt like a WoW clone. That's not necessarily a bad thing of course. WoW may have run it's course for me, but the fundamentals are still sound.

Played about 10 minutes, not nearly enough to get the gist. MMOs don't really shine well at limited-attention-span conventions :-) So none of the longterm stuff that's interesting about Wildstar really has a chance to come up at a show. They had a pretty sizable booth for it. Kinda like they really want to invest to make it successful or something  :headscratch:

Voice overs and acting throughout?

Not that I could see. Some here and there, but it was in all that forgettable variety, like stock phrases on click but the stories told in text. I could be remembering it wrong. It was the first booth I hit simply because of where it was.

I think I'm over the whole "fully-voice acted quest dramatics" thing.  SWTOR showed that in the end, it really doesn't matter, and you'll just end up ESC through the cutscenes anyways.  TSW did some fine stuff with quest intros to get you at least interested in doing the quest and maybe seeing it to it's conclusion, plus the scripted lore from characters was neat.  But if I could trade that for a better DX11 client + some better fleshed out gameplay, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

What I don't understand is why nobody has combined this with the WAR style Tome of Knowledge. Instead of having actual dialogue, have the quest text be narrator based and let the player turn on, pause, rewind, whatever through the TOK. It'd be a lot cheaper to just bring in a few narrators rather than dozens of VA's.

Isn't think pretty much what Diablo 3 did with the tomes you could find? Some also played when you killed something new.

No idea.

Dungeons & Dragons Online has the "dungeon master" do some narration whenever you enter an instance. Some were actually pretty decent (though not the Gygax one)

I finished caring about fully voiced over in MMOs during EQ2. It's because of the game play. VOs are great for RPGs because there's a fair chance it actually does add to the immersion, drawing you into listening. For MMOs, you know it's just window dressing on a "go to X and do Y" thing. Until the core moves beyond tasks, I'd rather they spend the money elsewhere and not incur the residuals to SAG or whatever.

The narative idea for a TOK works though. And yea, that's about how it was in D3 iirc.

My problem vo's is it can totally turn me off from playing a character.

The VO's in Defiance are pretty much all I need.  There is just a voice in my comm (with an avatar in the corner) paraphrasing what I read in the mission text or embellishing a sudden scripted event, and that's it.  Perfect.  Wing Commander style.

Its not my player having VO I care about.

I don't want anything in my MMOs that will be hard and/or expensive to continually produce. Voice-over being one such thing. I want patches and expansions to feel as equal in quality to the original content as possible.

I'd like/settle for one or two good voice actors doing narration whenever appropriate (the actor really makes a difference which you can hear in audio books). Going for a full cast vo is far too costly and cumbersome for most MMOs.

The problem with no VO in this instance is that they're playing themselves up to be all Ratchet and Clank-ish, and maintaining the sort of humor they're trying to associate themselves with in the trailer ads requires voice acting.  You can't have a wacky moment with dead silence in place of witty banter, it's just plain not gonna work.  They need voice actors, and good ones at that, we're talking some of the bigger names from the cartoon market, not George from accounting's brother who does a funny voice at the holiday party.

Yep. Great VO and "character" game is going to suffer if its just text. Never seen an engaging Pixar film that was soundless and subtitled. If you want to see how much may be lost, watch any video put out yet and turn the sound off and captions on.

WALL-E had a complete lack of any vocal dialogue for the first 22 minutes.  Just sayin'  :grin:

No it didn't. He had audible noises through ought. That was part of his character, that IS his voice. This game has already presented very strong characters and voices to match as part of the package. It will be jarring if that just stops and you are reading Wow like text everywhere.

I dunno, Morrowind was fairly immersive and its NPCs would throw WALLS of text at you.

Have all the VOs you want, just let me click a check box in settings to disable all of it.

Holy fat faced monkey fuck.  :ye_gods:

There were some pretty awesome, evocative, and immersive COH MA missions, and the authors only had text to work with.

Also, as a MUD builder, this is the point where I tell all the voiceover people to get off my lawn.  :why_so_serious:

EQ2 was also my clue that voiceovers were better in practice than they worked in theory. For an MMO, they are just crazy talk. Until such times as the worlds ARE evocatively real, are something we can experience rather than quest hubs, loot bags and drones, there's no need for scripted voiceovers because it's just expensive and not worthwhile.

Anyone remember SWTOR?  How many millions were wasted on voice acting? 

Love the housing stuff.  LOVE IT!

Someone shot the 40ish minute press demo from PAX East.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vtl_tBRPWDU

stuff about housing and some of the higher level zones

I wouldn't say it was wasted, the voice acting was great.  It's the rest of the game that they fucked up.

I do hope they use this as a box pull-quote.

SWTOR's whole voice acting idea was great and was a worthwhile investment for a triple-A take at trying to be a new major MMO

too bad about the rest of it, innit

I should have put in TM.  :why_so_serious:

This actually looks really freaking fun.  Have been loosely following it for a while, but starting to get kinda giddy for it.  I get combat is pretty typical MMO, but it is 4 toolbars full of abilities MMO or more like 8-10 abilities that really shine with positioning and being smart about what you use when/where?

http://wildstar-central.com/index.php?threads/how-do-you-feel-about-limited-action-sets.1225/

Looks like limited action sets have been mentioned. I also saw footage of a guy camming the PAX demo on two different characters - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veB3Qf6dvgE&sns=em

That dude looked terribad at playing.

That OP made an interesting point about in-combat meditation.  Normally you cant switch skills during combat but a (very) few games have meditation or pop-out-of-combat ability, wherein if undisturbed you can swap abilities.  I'm all for limited sets but only if they have such a meditation ability; which for me is a damned awesome feature - reminds me of a typical Mage in a tabletop game.

Post-PAX break is over.  Resume the content feed again!

http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/news/what_is_wildstar_arenas.php

tl;dr - We're copy-pasta'ing WoW Arenas, but no more single-elimination.  Each team gets X number of respawns to burn before final defeat.  Also, Web 2.0 still lives!

Wow why is everyone going nuts about 3d farmville? "And let your friend take care of your garden while your away" - yuck.  the whole thing is just another variant of grind for a toy doll house. in an instance. RIFT has apparently same thing already. why there is no millions of happy customers throwing money at it?

Although the video is impressive, I'm always curious about the in-game costs to set up housing. After all, CoH/V had a fantastic base system, but you needed a large and / or active guild in order to afford to buy anything past the basic block.

1. I like non-combat stuff in MMOs
2. I like having some investment in the game world beyond just my character.  I liked housing a lot in Lord of the Rings Online, and is one of the things that got me to resub several times.  Part of the actual game world is better than instanced, but oh well.
3. I like having a place to "hang out" in MMOs.  In the MMOs I played long term, I spent a lot of time just logged in talking/being social.  Social spaces encourage that and are largely absent from recent MMOs (WoW included I would say).

The bottom line is, your moment to moment gameplay (read: combat) has to be good in an MMO for me to care about it in the first place, but it is stuff like housing which keeps me really invested in one long term. 

That being said, if you are right that there is a lot of grind attached to the housing thing, then I'm not interested.  I don't mind the "grind" as much when it is something part of the persistent world (i.e I didn't mind the mundane work of helping to refuel my coporation's POSes in EVE, because it was part of something bigger). But in something like this, hopefully it is something which can come a bit more organically.

Housing? Furries? Some vague sci fi shit we will tell you about later? TAKE MY MONEY!!!

No, please, go on.  Tell us how you really feel.   :oh_i_see:

I don't play games to crush, I play them to bake bread.

I played Rift for nine months, then got tired of the basic gameplay. The housing came close to luring me back. Since I got Storm Legion free with Defiance, it's all but certain that I will eventually go back. I'd also like to point to all the people who happily threw money at UO and SWG for many, many years on the strength of Elder Game features like this.

I know more than a few people in swg that all they did was decorate houses and play around in the city building features.  Non-combat activities are VERY attractive to a significant number of people, esp. women.

You could say that Richard Garriott invented Farmville back in the UO days, and it proved to be a good idea at the time since everyone went crazy over decorating their houses and lookng for rare furniture. What Farmville needs is to be put (back) into a bigger game and become nothing but one of the many things you can do in a sandbox. This could be it and I see nothing wrong with it. In fact, let me try to get your point: do you dislike sandbox elements? Because lots of people love them and have been asking for it for a long time. I think it's good that one way or another, and even in what is probably going to be a traditional dikuish game, someone listened and is putting some effort into building more sandbox fluff into their MMORPG.

I could play house and kick-ass, all in the same play session.  SWG is still at the top of my list of MMOs I loved.

Lantyssa gets it!

I seem to recall them mentioning in a video that you get it in a questline for free/cheap early on in your character's life.

If Skyrim is any indication, I'll play house even if there's no chance someone else will see it.   And like Skyrim, this seems to add some convenience and functionality.    Before this video, I had zero interest in this game.

Every damn time I play skyrim I build a house...I have no idea why but I do, because.

My Hearthfire house got bugged.  When I was close to "finishing" it, all of the sudden it would CTD me upon entering.  Children and priceless artifacts lost to me forever.  Well, at least the children would go outside to say hi and ask for stuff every once in a while.

Wow I am really somewhat surprised so many people are really into the housing stuff. I mean I personally always considered its "neat" feature but something I wouldnt personally want to do because of grind/time involved for basically cosmetics. 

But then  its strange that there is relatively little attention/hype to the newly upcoming Korean mmo's such as an Archeage or Black Desert. They really have the housing/farming features on the next level

Me too. I was one of those work-for-hire home decorators. I also was in a band for a brief time.

There's nothing wrong with Farmville. In fact, the sequel has a better crafting UI than any MMO I've played. Which isn't saying much because they're all one-dimensional copy/pastes of eachother. What makes it better is simply that you can start with the end combine and work backwards through all the sub-component combines, and it remembers as you backtrack back up through the final combine.

From the mouth of babes.

Farming and planting and harvesting is cathartic. It's also not time-sucky. In fact, Carbine should launch that system as a Facebook game so people could do that shit during the times they usually do it: at work. Throw some ads and MySuperRewards at it and they can drop even needing MTX :awesome_for_real:

I still want an mmo with untamed wilds where I can tame the fuck out of those wilds and build a road, and set up a tavern, and, and, display my pretties!  Sure some fuck will build Penishouse next door but oh well.  I'll just have to level up my arsonist skill.

Yeah, this would be nice.  Ultimately I don't know how it can be done with public servers though.  If you could imagine a really large game world with a much smaller player base per server where by there would enough space for their to be "wilds" you could really get something going.

Pathfinder Online?

I thought ArcheAge was offering that.

One day there will be an MMO where the world is generated kinda like Minecraft is, including monsters with their own pseudo society and growth.  All the players start at one spot and then spread out. 

I haven't read anything on the Pathfinder game, didn't even know one was int he works.

See, to me it's the other way around. Wordly MMORPGs need side activities badly, and that's why Farmville inside an MMO is a great idea. While I find the experience without a world around it quite dull (I know I am the minority). I've been pushing to have a tiny Football Manager-like game embedded in a MMORPG for a while now and thought SWTOR was the perfect environment with the Huttaball stuff fitting the lore. And I definitely think that's the way to go. Sandboxes can and should host as many activities as possible, and honestly, really, who ever dislilked housing in any game? At worst, you ignore it. At best, you love it and becomes one of your favourite aspects of the game. Yes, I spent hours and hours decorating my SWG house too.

Also, about Korean games, people are suspicious here about them due to a 'grindy' label that will take a while to go away, and they don't get much press space or flashy youtube videos like the Wildstar one, but should they launch in a playable state you can be assured that the amazing sandbox elements of Archeage and Black Desert (seriously, how many have even heard about Black Desert?) won't be ignored.

We got crafting, yes we do.  We use Circuit Board Crafting, how about you? (http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/news/econ_devblog_circuit_board_crafting.php)   :awesome_for_real:

"By Loic "Atreid" Claveau... My name is Primus (Gortok on the forums)"

 :uhrr:

Seems like a streamlined graphical version of Tabula Rasa's original crafting system, with "power" (amount) separated from actual ability.  I like it.  You can essentially make anything (and everything will have a schematic), but certain components will randomize to prevent minmax copycatting.

This pushes my buttons.

It turns out Wildstar's entire Dev team is one guy with Dissociative Personality Disorder.

Very interesting post from the devs at Carbine about item design and how they are looking for help to create a new item slot.  Really worth the read if you are interested in the game.

http://wildstar-central.com/index.php?threads/wsc-exclusive-design-an-item-slot.2287/

Also, here's something about the details of their server architecture.

http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/news/lets_talk_about_servers.php

Funny, I thought MS SQL was frowned upon these days?

Yes, everyone tends to frown on it.


Then they go and use oracle.  :grin:

Oooh ooh, can we talk about SWG and Oracle issues again???  :grin:

No.  Bad Darniaq.

Watching this develop has been the polar opposite experience to watching TESO develop. Wildstar genuinely feels like it could be a real breath of fresh air despite the fact that mechanically it really isn't anything new. It just seems to be being made by a dev team with their heads screwed on and possessing a wicked, irreverent sense of humour that is otherwise totally absent in the MMO market - and one that isn't wholly reliant on pop-culture references like WoW, which has become the Shrek of MMOs - massively popular and badly dated. Carbine, on the other hand, just seem to keep adding in everything I could ask for.

I've honestly yet to see or read anything about Wildstar that annoys me or sets off alarm bells. The only issue I really have with it is the publisher. I don't feel like I can ever trust NCSoft, certainly not post-CoH demise. They'll likely shit-can Wildstar in two years if it doesn't get a decent Korean playerbase, and fuck everyone else.

I imagine the answer is a resounding yes, but has a non-Asian developed MMO ever actually intentionally shit their game up with increased grind/etc for an Asian release? For some reason the idea makes me laugh.

The whole thing reads like a pretty standard rundown of an MMO server stack. You'll see similar things on Patrick Wyatt's blog (http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/) if you follow it. Given how heavily instanced Wildstar seems to be, their setup seems like the most logical implementation.

I'll give you a 99% chance that their unmentioned "chat daemon" is either an off-the-shelf chat technology or an implementation of an open standard - they're probably setting up some reveal like "and you can chat with your buddies from your phone!" That kind of multidevice interoperability has been trendy to plan and talk about for the past couple of years, and there's a few successful implementations out there.

MSSQL is more or less industry standard as well. You won't get amazing performance like you would with a hand-optimized version of Postgres or MySQL, but you also won't have to hire an entire team to build and maintain said custom version. Instead you can hire in some local contractors whenever needed, and you can have a support contract with Microsoft to quickly resolve smaller issues.

Closed non-family/friends beta is underway, and they even took the extra step of binding the invite to a person's email addy, so no giving away codes.

That said, the smell of fresh cake is in the air again  :awesome_for_real:

In response to leaked patch notes showing up on beta leaking sites, the M30 patch notes were posted (the build that is on the beta server).

http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/news/m30_patch_notes.php

Yea, the vibe I'm getting is like GW2: I wasn't impressed when I first saw it (for reasons largely similar to my Pax East demo of Wildstar), but once I got into the beta, I was hooked. Wildstar may have that right combination of quick action, minimized suck, fun quirkiness that doesn't take itself too seriously, and launching at a time when nothing else is going on.

Somehow a team aiming for "fun" makes a world of difference.  I think we've gone too long without anyone understanding that it's the opposite of sucking.

First, official beta report:

http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/news/black_ops_missive_from_the_field.php

I need a beta invite like Gollum needs his damn ring.

x2

I'm honestly kindof warming up to this project. That, I believe, would make it the first MMO project I've warmed up to in years. It isn't even the fact that this looks to be 'WOW done better'. I don't even care about 'WOW done better'. I'm not even actually interested in playing this game. It's just that most mmo's are either blatant also-ran cash grabs or some neckbeardy vision quest. This is the first time in years we've had an MMO coming out that was developed by a team who's primary goal seemed to just be 'make the game fun'.

They've said basically nothing about the payment model, right?

Correct. I would bet sub. Put a side bet of not 15/mo.

I very much doubt subs. Nothing about Wildstars implies the kind of faith needed to make subs a viable business, especially when so many have switched to f2p, including the swan song of big budget AAA subs games.

Err, ok, rant aside, my guess is box and MTX :-)

fuck why did I watch the housing video fuuuuuuuuuck

Because we knew your Sims playing soul would be ours if you did...

(http://www.1800pocketpc.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/evil-laugh.png)

I think everything that they have shown says they have faith in subscriptions. Conversely they have shown nothing that supports a cash shop.

I would prefer B2P though with a cash shop. I don't mind spending cash to level faster.

I'm not sure I've ever seen a game promise as much in their trailer as this one did. Seems awfully ambitious.

Sooo, what do they mean by action combat?

Looks like it has dodging from the video.

It's like combat, but full of action!  :why_so_serious:

I think it means there is an active portion to combat rather than tab target - attack - next target. Probably dodging and position stuff. Now I am going to have to look harder at this game. Damn it.

There's videos out there that explain it a bit.  They're essentially doing what GW2 does in that you can just fire off your skills and your shots will hit everything in the ability's cone/blast/radial/etc.  The big thing is that they're attaching training wheels to the mechanic by having said cones/blast/radial fields CLEARLY FUCKING VISIBLE, for both friend and foe.

 :oh_i_see:

I'm open to suggestions on an alternative phrasing  :grin:

Common sense?

TSW does this for area-based monster-abilities as well - though not for player ones.

Yeah, but even those can get diluted and somewhat unrecognizable at times, esp. in the elder game.  Wildstar so far seems to be deliberately trying to make all actions recognizable, and thus giving everyone a pretty fair chance and opportunity to respond/react.

That's sounds fantastic.  Better than the boss in TSW that's nearly impossible for me due to red/green colorblindness.  Bunch of red circles in hell: not something I can see.

Bastards!  :heartbreak:

Wildstar is fully moddable so I would imagine there will be a mod out there to make the telegraph system based not on color but pattern overlays or something.

Certain colors work.  Bright blues and yellows are great, and I love it when companies use those.   I think that's the default switch (or purple/yellow) in games that have a colorblind switch.  I think if you have red/green and blue/yellow colorblindness, then you're pretty boned in games in regards to standing in fire.   The pattern thing world work then.  Maybe a bunch of pink skulls on the ground.  :awesome_for_real:

I think patterns require a bit more time to fully grasp if it's good or bad. GW2 has some wonky border thing that takes entirely too long to process mentally compared to "red or white circle" version.

Yes because they definately fucked over everyone with guild wars 2.

I can't tell if sarcasm or not.

Isn't NCSoft just the publisher?

It depends on how deep the oversight is.  Certainly there's a difference between how Bliz manages WoW, even though Activision has the reigns, and how Bioware manages SWTOR, even though EA is, well, EA.   :why_so_serious:

Carbine is attributed as NCSoft's southern California studios.  They have no other titles under their name, but the titles that the devs have worked on before are a smorgasbord of everything from the past decade.  And that work is being clearly mirrored in the gameplay seen so far.  How big of a dick NCSoft is in it's oversight of Carbine though has yet to been seen.

...Which is doing well in Korea and the influence on the art and character models in the game is a blatantly obvious attempt to maximise that appeal.

Those blue/yellow people are rare freaks though.  :grin: Red/green should be taken into account in every game.

Just learn to see red and green, you newb.

(http://cdn3.standard.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/max_800/2010/05/20/story-go-red-green-29310.jpg)

Why is there a silhouette of a fly fisher posted?

ZAM interview on Wildstar's graphic engine, "Engine"

http://www.zam.com/story.html?story=32245



Lots of other bits of dev-speak in the article too.

It's from an old Canadian TV show called The Red Green Show. 

Red Green clips. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL8xOXYAE0w)

To my knowledge Carbine is 100% owned by NCsoft, as was Paragon Studios and ArenaNet is. So NCsoft gets to allocate resources as it sees fit.

That hat he's wearing is the one we got issued to wear in the field up until around 2000.  I'm glad the army went with the tilley hat version we have now.  That old one looked stupid as hell and I hated wearing it. :uhrr:

And remember, if women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy. :awesome_for_real:

I really like the way these guys present themselves. Seems like the charm of the game really does derive from the people building it, rather than some faux affectation.

Or their media training group is just that freakin' good  :grin:

Why do I continually click these links?!? Jeezus Christ now this is on my radar.  :oh_i_see:

That was a red-green colorblind joke.  'Cause they wouldn't be able to see Red Green...

PvP Article

http://www.zam.com/story.html?story=32258

Tidbits:
- Jen Gordy, who started at the bottom at Mythic with DAoC, worked her way up, crossed over to LotRO, helped wrangle Monster Play and various systems, is heading up PvP for Wildstar
- PvP is taking a back seat to PvE, with the exception of Arenas and Warplots/Battlegrounds.  Arenas will be a focus in order to analyze class X vs. class Y stuff on the small scale in order to better implement stuff/changes on the larger.
- Web 2.0 is still a thing
- Two unique PvP stats.  One for amplifying damage, and the other to mitigate.

Fucking PvP stats. I think that is a concept I would really prefer die forever.

Or gear-based PVP in DIKUs, period. Then again, Rift tried removing that and the players cried bloody murder (progression! shineys! getting beaten up for weeks so that I can get epix and start beating up on scrubs myself!). Oh well.

Oh yeah, don't get me wrong, I prefer an even(ish) playing field for sure, but I have mostly made peace with the concept that most players are derps and want a gear progression in PvP (mostly so they can stomp newbs). But PvP-specific stats get right up my nose still, even though the reasoning behind it is nearly the same ("I don't want some scrub taking some different progression path gear-wise to escape their righteous stomping!").

Wot? PvP stats allow exactly that. You can make gear that is mediocre in pve be the best or close to it pvp gear in the game and you can award it for pvp'ing or make it free for everyone to access.

PvP stats could be a simple tool to remove gear-based PvP but no game ever seems to implement things that way.

I loathe all manner of gear progression (PvP and PvE).  I don't want to whack a mole to get a pair of pants that will help me whack a bigger mole.  Give me a robust crafting system, access to vanity items, and more skill choices please.  

more power to whoever will PvP in battleground/arenas. For me, the only remotely interesting PvP in any MMO is the world one, with random organized expeditions to the other faction territories or random PvP encounters while you travel in a contested area.

No one's saying they're not going to have the world one.  They're just not going to go out of their way pre-launch to make it the next best thing since sliced bread. 

That is never how PvP stats work though. It's just a way to artificially sort people through gear. God forbid someone gear up running dungeons, get bored with that, and switch to PvP and not have to build a second suit! Or someone PvP a bunch and be able to use that gear they've earned in PvE! And the world would fucking end if the geared people can't smear the new people across the battlefield and tell themselves they're simply more "skilled."

And they never, ever, ever hand out PvP-stated gear for free. If they do (like in SWTOR), it's behind the "real" PvP gear and only makes you a slightly bigger speed bump.

I'm okay with a rough baseline that everyone should be at to have a fighting chance, but I am sick of gear progression and pointless, false gear divides fucking up PvP.

Ya it's too bad swtor doesn't have the balls to bolster everyone up past the best gear you can get and leave it like that. Too even a playing field for the hard core though I suppose.

It's really odd to me to be honest, the hardcore PvPers in any other genre loathe imbalances in stuff like this.  Is it just that the (hardcore) RPG PvP crowd basically consists of the people who couldn't hack it in the other competitive PvP games and use their ability to sink more time to dominate in a gear focused game?  That sounds really condescending, but it really seems that way sometimes.

It could be that most of the hardcore PVPers in MMOG's are complete and utter cunts.

I think part of the driver for PvP gear is that a lot of people, based purely on skill, are forever doomed to be fodder.  When i look at most any pub FPS, the top ~20% of the scoreboard usually has like 50% of the kills.  The next 15% usually has about a 1:1 KD ratio, and then it's quickly down hill from there.  That's in a game where roughly equal "gear" is assumed.

So, I think PvP gear can counteract that somewhat, though VERY unintuitively.  Joe Scrublord might never understand what all of his buttons do, but if he puts in the time and gets enough PvP gear, he can brute force his way through an ungeared opponent.  Jill U. Raidqueen is always gunna shit on the scrubs, and PvP gear is only gunna change how long she has to heal afterward.  At least, i think that's the goal.  

Essentially, PvP gear stratifies players skill more.  It does so by allowing players to leverage time invested vs player skill.  Hopefully, it does so in the middle to bottom end of the spectrum, without pushing the top end too far out.  Though, that may be wishful thinking.  Personally, i dislike the idea of any sort of gear progression in PvP games in general, and I think it ends up with generally unhealthy stratification.  That earlier 15% with the 1:1 KD ratio, they get to go apeshit.


Just for kicks, I think if you had some class design to support the above idea, PvP gear with built in tradeoffs might actually be healthy for a game.  Say some of your abilities are more useful in the hands of a higher skilled player, and generally useless for scrubs, then PvP gear could lessen the power of the high skill ability in return for buffing other stuff.  Great players might end up using a couple pieces of PvP gear mixed in with the rest, while poor players might pile on the PvP gear.

No, it's not meant for any of that. It's just a grindy carrot to theoretically keep people along.


Any idea of pvp gear somehow balancing out the skill levels falls apart once you realize the top players in terms of actual player skill will also end up with the top end gear and it only widens the gap in the end.

Pvpers in diku themparks and not "hardcore". I would even venture to say they not pvpers at all - they are pve'rs grinding another kind of gear progression. The only legit pvp in any MMO is WoW arena, and the main reason for it is the sheer amount of people in competitive rank based ladder.  The ladder is why people are there not the "ubermathafuck11thseason gladiator" gear

And a lot of people migrated away to f2p games with ladders. Like  LoL. The warfare based pvp guilds are playing GW2 www and/or waiting for archeage etc. No pvpers plays themepark diku MMOs as "pvp game"

Someone never played Puzzle Pirates!

I'm no dedicated MMO PvPer. I find it fun, but feel true PvP is just a byproduct of an open world where PvP can happen because people are around, not the reason the people are there.

Grinds are accepted by certain (many) MMO players has an acceptable way to efficiently level/gear up. WoW Arena and BGs (like many PvP themeparks) just provide a structure in which you're grinding in competitive matches instead of PvE ones.

So what's the difference between WoW Arena and WoW BG with regards to grinding progression?

Cept now "world pvp" means "here is your world pvp specific zone, have at it".

If you mean what makes Arena pvp and BG grinds? - arena has rating and publicly visible ladders . This is the  main reason people keep playing it once they get trough novelty stage. WoW being most  popular MMO on the market makes for tons of epeen  if your rank is relatively high.  In arenas people play to win against similarly minded competition -the quintessential thing for pvp, not for purple gear or tokens.  GW2 was supposed to take over this market (or at least take a large share of it) but arena.net royally screwed the pooh there

DIKU themeparks keep throwing instanced BGs in their kitchen sink just for check mark ,  no one interested in them either. Wildstar will be no exception even if they do have ladders and arenas. Unless somehow it becomes magically more popular than wow (yeahhhh righhhht)

Sensible.  So you prefer whack-a-mole, to ding a mat, to sew some pants?

You're hilarious.   :thumbs_up:
 

FTFY

Check out the free weekend Steam offering Forge btw. Looks like an interesting blend between MMO pvp and a shooter.
I especially like the wall jumping.

Ah ok that makes sense. And yea, very different than BG grind.

Someone can message me on Steam for a free copy of this game.

First beta stress test is coming up. 

http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/news/wildstar_wednesday_beta_stress_test.php

*crosses fingers*

*crosses toes*

*uncrosses toes*

So how do you unknot a penis?

Ask a prostitute.

One very important point about this stress test:

Next 'DevSpeak' video is out, focusing on Movement.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qo5nrkYYI0

Wait, ...if the mob knocks the weapon out of your hand? And you have to go pick it up?  :drill:

Scissors or a knife.

I absolutely love the sense of fun these guys have with their videos. That bodes very well for the game.

I'm enjoying SWTOR again and GW2 isn't going anywhere soon, but of all the MMOs currently running or coming soon, this is pretty much the only one I give a shit about. The humour, both in-game and in-house has a massive part to play in that. They have a slightly self-depricating wit I really get on with, like they know that what they're doing is frivolous and unimportant but they just hope you're going to have some fun with it, even down to the bog-standard nuts and bolts.

Word.

This is the only upcoming mmo that's still on my radar, basically... even if it doesn't turn the mmo scene upside down, at least it'll be decent fun for a while.

I wish it had wall running and air dashing also, playing age of wushu has spoiled me with their movement powers.

Yeah right another wow clone gonna "turn mmo scene upside down" . 3 monther tops.

See this is the difference between someone whose played a lot of mmo's and someone who hasn't. Yes at face value it's more of a wow clone than anything else out there but that's not a bad thing, almost all recent mmo's copy bits and pieces of wow like exclamation points or quest based leveling but the one thing this game seems to have copied that most don't? wait for it....


wait for it....

Fun! Not fun as in fun to play but genuinely looks like a work the devs are having fun making and will be proud of, its got real motivation to it.

Also, why is "3 monther" a pejorative? So what if it is? I have a game I play longer than three months already: it's called real life. Well, and Football Manager 2012. And Blood Bowl.

But who cares? It's okay to play a game for three months and have enough. It's probably HEALTHY for it to be like that.

Hey, you need to shut it if your going to be spewing common sense all over the place.

Perhaps if people didn't poop-sock their way to max-level as soon as possible from launch day and actually tried to get a feel for the world instead of complaining about a lack of end-game content 2 weeks after release, those 3 months could be doubled!

Hahahahaha! HAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh god, seriously. I slay me.

The people who poopsock to the end typically don't enjoy the leveling process and enjoy the race/end game more.

I really like Mario Kart.  So I'll play Monopoly.

This is starting to look pretty damn good.  Its easily my most anticipated MMO.

Yah, they just threw that comment in there like it was nothing... knowing full well we'd squee over it.
Also, anyone else notice the mining node turned into a mob and fought back?   :drill: :drill: :drill:  Love it.  Reminds me of the mobs that used to hide in the asteroids from E&B; good mechanic.

You're pretty bad at analogies. Feel free to try again.

I'll walk you through it.  Just because there is an element which you might find enjoyable or familiar (traveling in a circuitous route) does not mean that the game is designed for your style of play.  You hate leveling, don't play a level based game.  So you like going around the track really fast; doesn't mean you can roll 12d6.

I think it's first time ever I see anyone wet themselves with excitement over the prospect of getting subjected to the Disarm in a MMO.

I want a beta invite so bad. My evolved policy on MMO purchasing is never ever a day one purchase unless I was in the beta. If not beta access then, I wait to see who hates it and who loves it here. For instance if Ingmar hates it I will probably like it. If Ironwood likes it, then that means that the game actively dick punches...ect. If a Bat Country guild forms then I definitely purchase, but not to be in Bat Country because everyone knows BC lasts a month.

Don't be retarded because Wildstar is advertising a robust, hardcore, raiding game full of min/max theorycrafting for the "1%" of gamers (did you see that gear modification system?). For players that want to compete in that sphere the leveling aspect is a bump in the road to get done with as soon as possible.

So where you fail is calling Wildstar just a "level based game". It's like you're purposefully ignoring every aspect of an MMORPG on purpose.

Yes but this type of disarm isn't just about your weapon disappearing or you hand glowing and a message saying you do not have a weapon equipped... you have to go physically get your shit. At least I hope that is how it works...Little things like that make me all tingly.

Sounds really fucking annoying to me, on the other hand.  :why_so_serious:

Ya picking up someone's dropped weapon will be the new form of griefing. Note to developers. People hated this back in Everquest. It didnt last 6 months before it got nerfed/fixed.

I'll explain the disarm mechanic having no knowledge of it but using my super-power of COMMON SENSE...!

Your weapon will never actually leave your hand/paperdoll, mechanically it will work the exact same as a wow disarm but the duration is entirely based on when you walk over the weapon ICON on the ground.

What you can do with this is make better disarms drop the weapon further away and also have a maximum duration just in case pathing issues drops the weapon icon in a bad spot.

How it improves on wow is it makes things more interactive and immersive, how it could backfire is trying to find your goddamn weapon in a mass melee of pve or pvp.

Yeah, i'm kinda expecting the novelty factor to wear off and be replaced with "goddammit at least regular disarm didn't make me waste extra time walking just to be able to do something effective again" ... around third mob which does it. Maybe fourth :why_so_serious:

Sorry for the shill, but here's a summary of the Circuit Board stuff that the devs talked about on the forums over the weekend:
http://wildstar.junkiesnation.com/2013/05/13/circuit-board-crafting-random-chips-and-you/

They also talked about elder game (end game) stuff as well, which is in another post.

Seems interesting, but if they make this too complicated for the masses, I'd expect this to be a big turn off. Sadly, the masses that play this will be the ones to determine what is best in slot and if that is theoretically impossible to get, then a lot of the min/maxers will be a bit pissy. It does seem a little forgiving in terms of running a dungeon and say only getting drops for the one class you DIDN'T bring, but I get this feeling there is going to be a lot of griping about the best shit never dropping, or the stats you are getting on stuff is meh - ah la D3. Add in a lot of dependent components and the stick just gets too long for the carrot. This is all site unseen so I might be way off the mark, but it does make me pause some...for now at least.

At least it gives you better reasons for running dungeons over and over. While you may run dungeons for that last drop, you now always have a chance at getting the same piece of gear with a better roll of stats on it. It also allows you to take apart gear for the modules to sell/save.

So, to me, you get more stuff out of repeated drops which is a bonus. It really depends on how frustrating gear rolls are.

Very true. But with so many configurations, I ma just hoping this doesn't end up being a situation where there are really only 5 penultimate gear stat configurations out of 3000. I recall back in WoW, running UBRS - first couple times was learning, then the next couple were streamlined gear runs, then the next were targeted gear runs, then the next was just fuck right off when all druid gear dropped every time. Sure, shit you got from DEing stuff was useful and you could sell it, but it still was not what you were after. So yeah, I wholeheartedly agree on the last sentence... such is gambling, erm playing an MMO end game, I guess.

Seriously? it is obviously just a freaking animation, you are not going to actually drop your weapon on the ground.  And i say that with absolutely zero knowledge of the game.

Watched this :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_4_riSI7Ydg#!

They apparently do have some interesting features: "warplots" (aka instanced guild castles", "custom content" (CoH like ?).  I mean if the games has all the features solid ,core gameplay fun  and lots of content - than heck why not.

If you go look up that Dev on Wildstar Central (why the fuck do these games not have their own message boards?) he talked about the system and it's goals back when they released this CBC info originally.

Ultimately they want to avoid, or make it difficult for people to go to an Elitist Jerks to find the best shit. They want to make a myriad of combos work or "be enough" and allow the crazy people to after the perfect set if they want.

Fine and dandy, but on the flip side, don't over complicate and open-end shit so much that players can't make heads-or-tails with it, or end gimping themselves due to a total lack of direction/focus.  Secret World comes to mind.

Yup. Comes down to how good the design the system.

I kinda liked secret world system , but seems lot of no so theorycraft inclined people were really lost with it  and at the end of the day there is always best and most optimal builds no matter the system (unless all builds are identical)

Yeah, this is what I was trying to say, but failing miserably. Unless that system is dynamic, people will ultimately come to an agreement on the best shit and where it comes from, how long it takes is sort of a moot point. It happens in every game. The perfect set pieces don't matter only if there is no perfect set... which is a whole other matter. But yeah... I have a little faith. Tempered of course.

Do they have a way to combat data mining?  I would imagine that would be the first step to stymieing the 'best in slot' lists.

Yeah, sounds a little obnoxious to me, honestly.

How do you sign up for this stress test that guarantees a beta invite at some point?

They are pulling stress test invites from the pool of beta applications. So if you applied already, you don't need to do anything.

Epic Paths video is epic. (http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/the-game/paths/)

 :drill:  I don't know which I want more...this or Hex.

Why is EVERY GOD DAMN THING on Facebook these days?

No don't answer that... I don't want to know the answer.

Hehe, in that latest video, I loved when the Mechari Settler swept off some (presumably oily) sweat  :grin:

wtb beta invite pst

So I guess I'll be the only explorer in our guild, surrounded by settlers and scientists.  :why_so_serious:

I've been checking my email like every 10 minutes.  :(

Depends.  How much exploration can you have with a static world? 

Assuming the combat doesn't make Ingmar knock over the game board and stomp away completely, I wouldn't be totally surprised if he picked explorer. Scientist seems more likely if the lore isn't completely derp though, I guess.  :awesome_for_real:

But yeah, I will be building ALL THE THINGS.

Fuck you Wildstar! I have two years left on my degree! You can't open beta NOW?!

Explorer seems to be JUMPING PUZZLES AHOY so unlikely I'll do that. Scientist looks most appealing to me at first glance.

I highly doubt I can build a whore house, so that's out.

What? You want a world where the mountains grow overnight and seas flood the land every week? GW2 was a static world too and no one really complained about exploring it. Hand crafted goes a long way where procedurally generated worlds tend to be boring.

We also don't know how much of this path stuff is going to be instanced, no?

Nah.  I understand the limitations of these games.  You can only see something for the first time once.  But that's inherently the problem.  An explorer is always after the new shiny, but in these games the new shiny lasts a month, then it's 6mo to 2yr before more new shiny comes along.  Of course I am buying the game (because fucking housing yo!) but I'm leery at these path choices.  Of course information is limited atm so don't take shit I'm saying to be serious gloom and doom naysaying, just a casual worry.

I'd really like to see progress in procedural generation though.  We're eventually going to have to go that way, imo.

None of it is specifically instanced for paths (or at least the vast majority of it takes place in the open world as far as I know). But you might be able to do things in existing instances.

AS GW2 has shown  -quite a lot. I played  for 6 month total and still dont have 100% map completion. I still see completely new zones (granted  exploration was not what I invested a lot of time into)

Does this f*cking game have PvP?

Standard MMO stuff.
PVE or PVP servers
Battlegrounds
Arenas

The new addition is Warplots which are essentially 40v40 Guild Housing fights.

Thanks m8, didnt have any games on my radar, now I do :)

It's getting to where they should announce a release date if they want to get it in 2013.

I wouldn't be surprised if they go open beta or drop the NDA after pax prime.

I thought this was interesting. http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/news/wildstars_economic_game.php

Also, he gave Raph a nice shout-out in the post:

I'm glad they pushed TESO til spring.  I now have a chance of getting more of my friends to try this. 

From my watching of this game, and talking with the people who've gotten their hands on the game at conventions, this game will be tuned and play like WOW vanilla. So if your friends want a modern WOW 1.0, then this is the game for you.

That's not a bad strategy to be fair. Wow has gotten too loaded with its own BS, a "down to basics" WOW might be enough to capture some of the people who are cheesed off with WOW but have nowhere else to go for the gameplay they like.

I just want a damned beta invite. I feel like I am missing out on something big.

They did a stress test recently. I don't think they actually give out beta invites. It's just a scam to get you on an email list.

CONSPIRACY!

This is hardly "down to basics". I don't think I've ever seen an MMO trailer that promised quite as much at release as this one.

Yeah, that was badly phrased I guess.

They already have a function cross realm dungeon finder according to some quotes from developers. That's like 90% of the way there! They also have a functioning addon system in place.

What we don't know is the quality of their class/character development and whether or not their dungeons and raids are horribly tuned or not.

http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/06/12/e3-2013-not-so-wild-about-wildstar/

Meh, just seemed like he was pissed he couldn't change the default controls and then harped on it for the entire article.  I think it would be fair to assume that the live game will allow players to change the controls to how they want...like every other game does. :oh_i_see:

What I got from that article was more of a "been there, done that" vibe.  Seems he felt Wildstar was just a rehash of what we've all been through already.  If that's the case, then I can understand the 'meh' reaction.

We are all on the same page that the vast vast majority of the progression gameplay is going to be Vanilla WoW in space right? I mean it sounds like he thought Vanilla WoW in Space was going to be a little more fun and different feeling than it actually is.

Double jump is pretty cash though, so hearing this game has double jump is the most exciting thing not called warplots. They are still a long way from me even thinking about a day one purchase but I used to be convinced this was going to be utter shite. Baby steps.

I don't know what he was expecting.  We've known for awhile now (if you've been following the game like the author of the article should have been) that this is a theme park MMO that has a lot of qualities of early WoW.

Just to be clear, I wasn't judging the game.  I was just stating what I got from the author/article. 

He sounds like a complete douche, tbh. He admits he went off path of the demo, bitches about controls, acts like he's totally above trying this wow-clone, and even manages to insult women as idiot gamers in the same article.

I would play an mmo that was a reskin of vanilla WoW. Not for as long as I played WoW, but I would buy it and play it. (As long as Ghostcrawler was not involved in it, that is).

I would also play a reskin of the first Zelda. Heck, just a repeat of the game with the same everything but everything moved on the map (like the second game you get to play after the first one).

Have game developers completely given up on non-monster-killing professions in mmos? (Like trader or fisherman or farmer).

Yes. They see a game that a lot of people play, and they make more of that and less of the other stuff until that is all they are making. That other stuff is then forgotten about while companies continue to chase the hordes of gamers that are playing the only thing available. And the vicious cycle continues.

I wouldn't play a reskin of WOW 1.0. However I would play a reskin of WoW 1.0 with GW2's combat system with a limited hotbar space. Wildstar's combat system will supposedly by close to that. Movement, soft targeting (telegraphs) and dodging. I don't think I could go back to a tab-target system with standard rotations and hotbars full of cooldowns and rotational abilities.

But you can't rebind keys guyz!!!  :ye_gods:

Not even joking but if that's live it's a total deal breaker for me and I'm DOWN for wow in space big time.

I can say with a 99% certainty that it's not going live. My guess is they didn't want to let people waste time in a demo remapping keys.

I would agree but I want to throw it out there because there are a lot of people like me who, if they can't remap keys get very, very pissy.

Might as well bitch about debug messages hitting the chat output.

What's the last game you can remember that didn't let you remap keys?

Witcher 2 had a couple keys you could not change(mind you this is at release, may have been patched later)  There have been a few others that I can't recall off the top of my head but really I would say nearly all have re-mapping but many have "this button is holy" crap that for some reason you cannot re-bind certain functions.

Guild Wars 2 won't let me move them around on my taskbar.

SWTOR won't let me remap Next Target to T.  It made me pissy enough to give WoW another shot.

 

You're a known dumbo though.

Fucking Hobbit.

Oblivion could only let you binb powers to keys 1 to 8 because consoles.

I don't use WASD, instead favouring the cursor keys and the keys around (right ctrl, shift, delete, pg up & down, numpad etc) so I tend to jump using my little finger on the right ctrl... WoW and SWtOR won't let me bind Ctrl to Jump because it's a 'holy' key, which is irritating as fuck and means I've had to get used to jumping using the click wheel of my mouse. Which, given the jumping puzzles and terrible action lag of the Hero Engine in SWtOR is a major handicap.

NO fucking key should EVER be sacrosanct in a PC game. The Keyboard exists as the ultimate expression of control freedom ffs.

You can't bind Ctrl because it would mean it would have to fire on key UP rather than key DOWN. Otherwise it wouldn't be able to distinguish between Ctrl alone and Ctrl as a modifier key. (You depress Ctrl - should it jump or should it wait for another key?)

WoW prior to some patch (2.x or so) fired on key up, which gave abilities delay. I remember having odd binds on Shift (like /sit) so I think it was possible at some point. It was changed for the sake of reponsitivity though, which I can only agree with.

Hey guys, the game has fully bindable controls, that's 100% guaranteed. I'm willing to bet you will have a full blown bartender mod before the game even launches.

Yes.  It was because it was at E3.

No.  The solution is to be able to separately define your modifier keys.

What planet do you come from?  :uhrr:

Madness!

He comes from Planet Alb.

I wasn't suggesting a solution.

A hands-on video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovWB71RTVXc), if you are starving for news.

"Video is private"

What?! That's really strange. I can watch it just fine from two different computers and Youtube accounts.

I can watch it just fine as well.



Edit: and by "watch fine" I mean, "strangle the living shit out of the narrator with every breath he takes"

I'm not logged in.

It annoyed the shit out of me how he dodged backwards every time, sometimes twice, when a step sideways would've completely avoided the enemy attack.

This. 

That video was painful.

Beta houses competition:

http://www.wildstar-online.com/uk/news/living_in_style_wildstar_beta_houses.php

Oh, last week update was nice too, talking a bit about UI modding:

http://www.wildstar-online.com/uk/news/bitwise_and_packetdancer_talk_wildstar_ui_add-ons.php

I created this thread back in 2007; submitted my beta application, like, three minutes after the 2011 website went live and still no invite...."SO WHY DID YOU DO THIS..TO ME!!!" : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N7KOGnATgM

*fetal position*

Did somebody say sorta-twitch? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjQLsE02OPg)

Don't understand. What part of tab targeting is still around? From they were showing it was like the worst of both worlds, no tab targeting and no crosshair (?) to help you aim (instead you have to hold down skill buttons, yuck).

I can not imagine playing a healer and needing people to stay still so that my spell zone area hits them.  Especially since the rest of the game emphasizes those people moving to deal/avoid damage.  That system could be fun for dps/tanks but nothing more than an exercise in futility for a healer.

As someone that enjoys playing a healer, I think that having to anticipate movement could add some fun.  It's like dropping a ground AE spell.  You have to anticipate where it will do the most good.  I rather enjoyed that.

It's manageable if they design things properly. Tera has such a system for most of its healing spells. Wildstar is basically copying what Tera does with some twists.

Adds a new twist to "FFs healer", namely "FFS DPS, stand in the fkin green heals and not in the fire!".

SWTOR has a bunch of heals that work with ground targeting, it works just fine.

You can tab target, but your target has nothing to do with how your abilities land. Essentially it lets you pick targets out of the crowd and gives you something to aim towards.
The rest of the skills work like normal skills in any other MMORPG but you need to fire them off in the right direction.

Think GW2 but your area of effect is shown on the ground in red.

Looking forward to it. I heart my GW2 elementalist, and basically all of my skills [except for the 'autoattack'] are ground targeted. Hasn't been a problem in my experience, even for the two heals.

It also has a bunch of heals that don't. And those are really helpful when you land your GTAE heal and your DPSers flee from it because they forgot you can do that.

So ... I think I prefer a mix.

Now that I've watched the video, I'm about 80% sure I will hate the combat in this game. Oh well.

At least you gave it a fair shake.

This MMO seems to have developers with a clue and a sense of humor... good things can come from that.

I'll still try it for the housing/paths stuff, but all that rolling around and aiming rules out things like collector's editions and such for me.

I'm an MMO junkie and I've never bought a collector's edition of anything.  NEVAH!

You guys are truly hardcore.

Judging by the final comment, seems like they'll be using a few RL incap effects for abilities like 'blind.'  That is, you got blinded?  Your screen goes dark.  Which plays pretty well with their choice of aiming system.  I cant stand in RPGs when I get blinded and yet for some dumb reason I cant spam my berserker-ish aoe ability - makes no sense.   There are SOME things in life wherein you dont need a target.

That combat system actually looks pretty awesome to me.

Yeah, my guildies mostly share this view. I know that one of our healer-types hated healing rain in WOW due to the ground-targeting aspect. I love them, though, as they allow me to subtly influence my group members' positioning (and get them to stay at the right spot). Ditto with geyser/healing rain in GW2 dungeons. Dance, my puppets!

That said, I don't think there are many gtae heals in SWTOR at all, unless they added some recently. There's salvation from sage and the healing grenade from commando, and that's about it?

It's just those two, yeah, scoundrels don't have one.

I don't hate GTAE stuff, it's just sometimes if it's a frantic fight you just don't have time to get your ground target JUST SO, and as a healer I am a control freak who doesn't like when she can't get things JUST SO in order to keep everyone alive.

I haven't raided seriously since WotLK, you see, so my hardened carapace of "fuck them, if they died it was their fault" has softened again.

Sjofn makes an interesting point, mainly because Wildstar plans on going back to hardcore raiding style... which indeed requires precise healing (not conducive to an aiming system).   This is not a hardcore Trinity game though, so I anticipate it being more along the lines of something like GW2 classwise - which may make up the difference.

Last 2 race reveals - Chua and Mordesh.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6t0mgu0_i3c

Told yea, Space Zombies.

The psychotic racoons are a surprise though.  :why_so_serious:

Psychotic Space Racoons. I'm not entirely sure Carbine need to work this hard to make me want to play Wildstar, but I sure do appreciate their dedication to flicking my switches. Even the Mordesh have a great aesthetic - Neon Goth - going for them, and it's refreshing to have them work for the 'rebel' side.

I am totally playing a Chua.   :awesome_for_real:

(https://fbcdn-sphotos-h-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn2/1069898_521764601230652_1187322938_n.jpg)

Carbine is going to clean house when it comes time to divvy awards to community manager, art director, and marketing director.

 :nda:

There was word of some kind of 10k invite stress test blitz they're doing.  Lucky stiff!   :angryfist:

 :mob: :mob: :mob: :mob: :mob: :mob: :cry2:

 :heartbreak:

I got... no it was spam.

I saw a message in my inbox today from Carbine Studios and got excited until I noticed it was just an update featuring the new races.  So, yeah... :heartbreak: :heartbreak:.

There are only two conditions that will make me buy this game. One is that i get to beta test it and discover that it is not shit. The other, if i don't get to beta it, is that an f13 guild makes it longer than a month. If neither of those conditions get met I wont be spending my money on it. Unless its free, then I will not play it at all. I am really fucking tired of the free to play evolution.

If I have to group with more than 3 or 4 other people to get the top end gear, I'm not playing.  I'm sick of raiding as gated content. 

If it makes me feel like a  :pedobear: because of the graphics... also not playing.

Ditto

I haven't seen any "not child porn because they have elf ears" content, but I haven't done an exhaustive search.

I'm more restrictive.  I want to be able to solo when no one else is on/around, and I want it to magically scale itself as more people login to play.  I don't want any dungeon to be more than a half an hour because folks can't stay focused for more than a half an hour.  I want a difficulty slider.

...

:) yeah, I'm probably not playing this game

This is all I've ever wanted in a MMO.  I'm never going to get it.  That's OK with me, MMOs don't need to be my alpha and omega of gaming anymore. 

We had that game.  It was called City of Heroes, but not enough people played it so now we can't have nice things.

I couldn't get past level 11 in CoH. I just found it incredibly boring.  Boring enough that I didn't make it 10 minutes into CoV before turning it off.   Game just didn't work for me at all.

Loved that game and played it for years.  I'd be quite happy to have a fantasy version of CoH with better crafting, housing, and decent loot generator. 

I love CoH a lot as well, so much done right.  That said, the speed of leveling, waiting for powers to come off cool down and the jarring change in difficulty with that patch whose name I can't remember made it hard to stick with.  Heartbreaking really, given how simple those items should have been to fix.

So much done right.  Mentoring +/-, housing, interesting villains / villain groups / back stories.  Missions that scaled to those playing.  So much done right.   :cry:

Something else I always wanted in their missions - secondary objectives that accepted partial completion.  Example, "arrest all villains" was a frequent goal of the missions, but you could get stuck on that mission if the villain got stuck in the geometry.  They should have implemented secondary objects with fuzzy logic.  If you were playing a stealth hero, then you actually want to arrest as few as possible, ideally triggering a different next map (story arcing).  Playing the bad ass you want to arrest as many as possible.  Ramp up the difficulty by having some of the runners actually try to make it to the doorways instead of just hanging back a bit.  Higher score/better reward the more guys you arrest.  A villain (or gigaw I'm supposed to pickup) getting stuck in the geometry doesn't stop me from progressing.

While I want to shake the fuck outta these ADHD people, I can't argue with the fact that you are about right. I like longer dungeons, but it seems the rest of the playerbase just can't handle it... thta makes me sad.

Well there were a couple of radical global nerfs to the game but you are probably thinking of "Enhancement Diversification" aka ED.

Scaling content is almost universally boring.

Bethsoft's attempts at scaling would work OK for me.  Then again, they're not making you do the Heigan Safety Dance in Skyrim. 

Compelling and difficult solo content has been done well by TSW and GW2, they just haven't gone all the way yet.  Same with SWTOR really.  There's no reason why that game couldn't be 100% soloable, especially the leveling content.

If you make a game F2P with achievements and cosmetics? The outdated idea that you have to gate things through large group content as a point of retention is no longer necessary. It could be 100% solo content with an economy, housing, social aspects, and exploring.

Bethsoft's never done scaling for group size, so I don't think it's really an applicable example. The core problem with group scaling is you either have to remove complexity from the encounter as it gets smaller, or just have very little complexity in the fight to start with. You lose design space in other words; Blizzard managed to scale the 4 Horsemen in Naxxramas from a 40 person fight down to 25 and 10, but you really can't go beyond that; all that potential room for encounter design is just gone in a world where you'd scale all the way down to 1 person.

While I loved CoX very much, the scaling wasn't exactly exciting or interesting. I'm by myself! There are groups of 3 bad guys all down the hall. I'm with Ingmar! There are groups of four or five baddies down the hall. I'm with a full group! I can't even SEE the hall for all the baddies.

But those baddies were the same exact baddies with the same exact powers. I prefer my group content to feel a little different. And they had that more interesting group content in the Task Forces (whose main flaw was that some of them took a billion years to actually complete), which were ... group only.

The only way to have solo content be as or near as complex as group content is to have npc's available to be your group. At that point why even play an mmo?

On the other hand, much of why I loved GW1 was because I could have customizable npc's available to be my group.

And we officially reached the "what constitutes an MMO" part of the thread.

Because you like people some of the time? Your gaming group of friends can't get together every day but would rather play with together given the chance? MMOs also come with a semi-persistent world/community and live development teams.   Those are nice.

No, Rasix, you either want to play with other people ALL of the time or NONE of the time, there is never any in-between.

Damn, and here I was sure there was a number between 1 and ALL. Those fucking musketeers ruined everything.

Play a massively multi-player game.

Complain about not being able to solo.

f13 :rock_hard:

Not yet, but I feel it coming on pretty rapidly.

We've been through this too many times to recall.

Yep, but the audience is changing. The dedication required to PUG is fading as online gaming becomes more mainstream and gamers more fickle.

I accepted that EQ was group required for XP giving content because getting kicked in the balls was part of the novelty. I got over it...

Should there be rewards that encourage group play? for sure. It worked fine in CoH where the action became more fun and more rewarding so people would form groups because it was fun. It works fine in GW2 events where they scale up dynamically and you don't need to do a pre-PUG interview and item-check. Having a large amount of content behind a "5 man or piss off" barrier, especially if that content is challenging enough to make PUG's have a high failure rate, not so bright.

Or you could you know, close the mmo and play a single player game for a while. MMO players just want everything all the time.

All genres are moving towards the "games as services" model.  MMOs included.  If your game is a service, you want to offer something to as many people as possible as often as possible, particularly when your income comes from people being invested enough to buy a new hat.  They are a lot less likely to buy that new shiny if they feel compelled to load up a different game when their friends aren't online.

Sometimes I want to climb out of my cave and stop being an anti-social hermit for awhile.  Sometimes.

All grouping, all the time is dumb.  All solo, all the time is dumb, too.

I think people think other people playing a game is fun in theory. The issue arises when players just want other MMO players to not be useless asshats. The problem is that they themselves are likely useless asshats. And that's because the genre attracted this kind of asshat over the years with it's time=success model of game.

Now it's just asshats all the way down.

I don't think MMO's should be devoid of solo content but too many people want the solo content to be the same as the group content. "I want to one man raids" and that line of thinking is when you get homogenized dungeons so they can be scaled down.

Ideally an MMO should have enough fun solo content to keep people entertained but when they try to be all things to all people they tend to suffer.

Ask yourself the following question though. Do people really enjoy large scale raiding?

I'd contend that the vast majority of the players do not enjoy anything over 4-5 people, and see it as more of a hassle getting in their way.

People enjoy the spoils of raiding and often don't separate that from the exercise of raiding itself.  If they could get those same spoils using a group of 5, I'd bet that the majority would go that route instead.

I think the 10 and 25 man split of WoW follows that logic. 25 man raiding for the most part fell off the face of the earth when they introduced the same rewards across the tiers.

I'm probably in the minority, but I do enjoy the large scale raiding. The move to continually downsize the numbers involved are one of the reasons I'm not as into MMOs as I used to be. 20 is the bare minimum for me; I'm also not a huge fan of the smaller group content. I either want to solo, or work with as many as two others.. or at least 19 others. Anything in between just isn't for me.

That said, I have a love/hate relationship with any kind of grouping in MMOs. Love working with a lot of others to bring down content (including the organization/cat-herding aspect). Hate the fact I have to rely on x number of people to not be absolutely moronic.

As for what people will do or prefer? The majority will always go for the path of least resistance (which is always going to be fewer people due to making it easier and easier to organize) regardless of what they actually enjoy most.

I love playing in a group of competent people.  My problems arise when all of the good players I know quit the game I'm playing.  You have to wade through so many terrible players in pve MMO's that rebuilding a group can seem like a monumental undertaking.  I don't even want to think about having to constantly fill a 10 or 25 man roster.  That's a nightmare in my mind and that doesn't even consider the rage I feel when one person consistently screws it up for the other 24, wasting their time in the process.

I often enjoy organized raiding in the 8-10 people zone. I don't mind it when it's 20+ type stuff as long as it is spontaneous everyone-in-the-zone-there's-a-monster-look-out sort of stuff. It's when you get the numbers up higher AND need to organize it all that I think it's not worth the bother.

Yeah, raiding needs to be done in the GW2 model.  Big dragon spawns, everyone on the server that wants to rushes over and kills it. 

The giant monster spawns in CoH and the recent giant monster event in TSW where both like that and they were a lot of fun.  Only problem with them is when /too many/ people show up and the lag monster rears its ugly head.

There is a lot of culling in GW2, in pve it doesn't bother me in the least but it seems to annoy some people.

They already do. My guild chat is full of people watching timers for the next world spawn.

I don't think GW2 should bother trying to do raid content. They don't have the revenue stream, they more or less promised a flat power structure, their mechanics are poorly suited to it and the hard core raiders are still wedded to WoW. Their more casual gamer orientation is a comfortable and fitting market niche for them.

Now wildstar is promising raids so that will be interesting, and probably the reason they are talking about a "hybrid" subscription model and have a more cartoony and easy to extend art-style.

The giant monsters in CoH were quite a lot more fun than the equvalents in GW2, IMO, I think because the more defined character roles and abilities in CoH made you feel much more like you were contributing in a specific way. At least for me.

There is also a segment of the population that actually wants to see the end-game content for the lorelol reasons.  They could care less about loot or how complex they make the fight; they want to play it as a single-player game would be played: for completion's sake and the story end.

Soloing the lich king is an incredibly stupid concept, just saying.

Indeed. When in the entirety of the many fiction genres has an individual hero, or a group of five or less accomplished anything of note? I double-dog dare anyone to come up with an example. Personally, I look back fondly on many afternoons reading about Conan farming yeti pelts and plant seeds to turn in for reputation points. Have we forgotten the gripping tale of Frodo and Sam waiting for Borimir to finish his corpse run and all those other guys to get their shit together, find another thirty or so guys, and then have someone pull mobs from the Black Gate until Mordor runs out of orcs and they can all move on to next stage?

Mechanically, maybe, but it makes sense in the context of WoW lore.  To the extent that WoW lore makes any sense at all.  The Lich King was just an orc shaman once upon a time, Arthas was just a regular guy until he found a magic sword, etc.  There's no reason another guy with an even more biggerer magicker sword +2 couldn't kill him.  Whatever god like powers he was given are only there by author fiat, there's no reason you can't give the players the same.

IIRC your raid doesn't even beat him in WoW, you just fight him until he gets bored and instakills everyone, and then he gets NPCed to death.  There's no reason you couldn't do that with one guy instead of ten.

The problem being that you are not the single greatest hero in the history of Azeroth. You are some schlub mercenary just like a thousand others walking around doing the same bullshit poop grabbing quests as you.  If the game in any way set you up to be an epic hero the likes of Conan it would make sense but it doesn't and you aren't.  Therefore fighting anything on scale of a dragon or demigod solo is ridiculous.

I believe the key is to change the paradigm.  If you were to introduce skill to a point that some small percentage were capable of becoming epic heroes, perhaps that would provide incentive for players to either get better or stay in the game longer in an attempt to be better.  I think most of us are very sick of the time = power focus and would like some modification to time + skill = power.  The new metagame in WoT, for example, seems to be one of becoming elite in terms of statistics.  It's possible that many people are staying in game (i.e. decreased churn) for this reason alone.  It's not a bad idea given that most players can burn through content at a rate far greater than it can ever be generated.

Then there's the issue of NPC henchmen.  All heroes (and mercenaries) have access to henchmen if they have the money.  If I feel like I can do group content better by myself with 4 henchmen, why not let me?  It's really not much different from 2 good players dragging 3 scrubs through an encounter, is it?

*edit, directed at Lakov, not Nebu*
Says you. If you want to pay to be a faceless, generic cog in these games go for it. As far as I'm concerned I am the center of the universe, the person who the entirety of the game revolves around. All those other people playing, some of whom are a lot more powerful? They're the center of their own stories. They can be in the same story as me, but fuck them if they try to make their part more important than mine in my portion.

One MMO I can think of where skill plays a huge factor in how you are seen in game is Puzzle Pirates. There are rankings to the puzzles, along with titles that actually distinguish people as good at a particular job.

I agree with Bob.  I don't want to play Lakov's game, it sounds lame.  Bob do I need to force one of my friends to play a healer in your game?  Can we do without?  Or do you provide an AI healer?  If yes, shut up and take my money!

Fantasy MMO's need more of this.  Titles that show a player to be in the top xx% in some ability (healing, support, dps) would do wonders.

Ironically, the most 'heroic' I've ever felt in gaming is within large raids/squads (when I know we all die if I fuckup, the mission will fail if I dont show at the rally point, or perhaps I didnt work hard enough grinding/crafting gear [I was the guy in my guild who did Cenarion Circle to keep pace with the rest of my guild that was already on Rags as I was just getting back into WoW]).  Solo gaming to me is NOT heroic; you're just playing out an on-rails storyline just like every other mundane who bought the game.  Any heroics in this sense is strictly locked up inside subjective experience due to storyline.  Similar can be said for small autogrouped & balanced instances wherein the magic wears off the moment the last boss goes down.  

So the more people you add to this equation, and the more difficult a task, the more important one becomes.  This is why in all my gaming history (tis lengthy), nothing comes close to vanilla WoW raids and early WW2O gameplay as for providing a sense of true heroics, importance, and tension.

Shit... heroics!?   :awesome_for_real:   I've got a ton of stories for that.  None of them involve shit like solo-grinding scholomance.

That's because the MMO solo game is poorly designed and targeted at the ability of the below average gamer.  If some of the solo content required a significant skill component (like most single player games), then you would feel pretty damn spiffy about defeating a tough encounter.  Particularly if only a few people were similarly able to defeat it.

[MAJOR SPOILER] from the end of the Jedi Knight storyline in SWTOR puts the lie to this notion, as it applies to MMOs as a whole. There's no reason WoW couldn't be structured in a way to make you the center of the story instead of Thrall or whoever.

Some games just can't be made to please everyone.

Yes, it would be very helpful, but it would probably piss off the bads and make them quit. So likely no dice.

UO did this for crafting.

Don't confuse my statement for my own desires when it comes to narrative.
There is nothing in online games that makes you feel epic or heroic beyond the norm of the world(every other person is a hero)

If you want to believe you are, great, awesome but it's also completely in your head because the game itself does not tell you that. 
Then I'm forced to wonder, if you have to go through THAT much effort to try and be the hero in a game, why not just play a game where you are the hero?

I've done some awesome things in mmo's that made me feel heroic as part of a group, I've also done some awesomely badass things in solo games. In neither case did I have to go out of my way to set up a scenario where I had to augment the game narrative to enjoy myself.

There's plenty in the game that tells you so, for quite a few MMOs I have played.  WoW, for one.  There are numerous quests that reference how incredibly awesome you are and how thank god you are there because there is some serious shit going down and they need someone like you.

Yes, it doesn't make sense that there are thousands of epic, incredible heroes in the world, but that's because the worlds don't make sense.  You may choose to believe you are just a "pretty good" mercenary or whatever in MMOs these days, and I can see why that would be appealing, but there is no more validity to that belief than believing you are one of the greatest heroes of your age in WoW.  Plenty in the narrative supports that.

This reminds me of the hilarious anger when people were like "OMG HOW COULD 25 PEOPLE KILL ILLIDAN THAT'S RIDICULOUS."  There aren't, like, "power levels" in real life, or even in most fiction.  Games have them because they are games, but even the goddamn narratives of games don't have them in anywhere near as rigid a sense.  There aren't "levels" of heroism.  If you go out and constantly solve hideous problems and vanquish horrible, evil foes on a daily basis, well fuck, you are a miraculous goddamn hero.  Yes, there are a thousand heroes in WoW because it makes no sense.  You can't make it make sense as a whole.  You just have to choose what to consider real and what to consider a game abstraction.

My point in all this rambling is that MMOs are even more impossibly weird than most games where you kill 1000 people, and it's silly to act like there's some "correct" way to interpret exactly how much of a hero you are and who it would be ridiculous for you to be able to kill.

As long as you can't see the entire chart and it's just a reward/prestige thing for the people who make the list, I don't see why it would cause a problem. A bigger (potential) issue is coming up with a measurement system that doesn't cause behaviors that are actually detrimental in an actual encounter but get you farther up a list.

Oh, the heady days when I was ULTIMATE rank in four puzzles.

I was ultimate in sailing. For some reason I can't bilge. Like at all.

It's because you're bad.  LFM Blackjack raid, need someone that can actually bilge.

Well obviously.

Bilging is the only one I really liked (and I had some kind of super multi-ocean high ranking with it at one point) so we'd make a decent team.

Sailing though, fuck sailing.

I never felt like I had a bigger epeen than when someone would admire my sexy, sexy rankings. Of course, it also means I get sent to the carpentry mines, because everyone seems to hate it except me. Unfortunately, when I played last, they usually would pull me off carpentry to load guns (carpentry is the most expendable during sea battle, I guess?), and I am fucking terrible at the gunnery game.

I was also pretty butt at the navigation game.

WoW is very strongly progression based, so raids and "I kill elder-gods for breakfast" make sense in that narrative. For small values of "make sense" anyway. Some of the more narrative based content could just as easily be built around the potential of a single agent.

It's really just a question of design. If you want to make your content group only, challenging and tiered you'll gain the people who love raids and lose the people who want a more casual experience. Maybe that's a good deal.

But the more serious problem is there's probably going to be a dominant raid game. Because people want to compare their e-peen in the game were getting that e-peen is the most varied, challenging and recognised. Or to put it another way if you want to play the raid game you probably need to be the successor to WoW.

I 100% think it is a good deal. There are so many games out now, they need to start specializing to specific audiences.  They need to start looking at EVEs success in a niche.  I don't begrudge the folks that like to have 10/20/40 other folks along for the ride and love the 'team' feeling in their games.  I think that those games should absolutely require grouping at every step of the way and have content hand-tuned for groups.

I'd like a game that scales from 1 to 5ish auto-magically and also has a difficulty slider - cause some nights we're either shit faced or just suck. And whether I'm solo or in a group I have a similar chance of getting the best gear in the game.

I don't think he meant raids specifically. When I played WoW there were quest lines that lead to whole villages cheering your character for whatever, killing a local bad guy that was soloable from what I recall. Mostly introduced in the first expansion iirc.

Yeah, that's exactly what I was referring to.

Basically, my point was:

- These games, taken at face value, are so impossibly ridiculous that in order for any narrative to make sense, you have to abstract away huge, huge portions of actual gameplay and just pretend none of that stuff is really happening.  In the game you and your friends hit the bad guy 100,000 times, but that's just an abstraction for, like, a bunch of you rushing him and one of you manages to stab him with a sword once or twice.  Beyond that, there are thousands of heroes around, all of them constantly solving the same huge world problems.  You just have to pretend maybe only your friends actually exist and maybe the others are just villagers?  And your friends are actually solving different issues, you just kinda choose to ignore that you're being told the same story?  Who knows.
- Given that, it's hilarious to make any argument for how many people it should take to kill a given thing based on what makes the most narrative sense, since you have to continually ignore the gameplay in order for the narrative to make sense.  Even these games own, in-game narratives ignore the game mechanics.  There's no lines like, "Fortunately, I'm too powerful to be assassinated.  It would take an assassin with the finest weapons available at least five minutes to kill me even if I was completely immobilized, and my guards would reach me by then."  Similarly, and what I was referring to before, they do, in fact, tell you that you are the greatest hero ever, despite the game mechanics flying in the face of that, just like they fly in the face of everything else related to the narrative.  And that's ok.  It's the only reasonable way of dealing with an extremely gamey game.
- So basically it's dumb to argue for or against soloable content on narrative grounds.  It is and should be purely a game design decision.  It does make sense for the toughest dudes in the narrative to be the ones that require tons of dudes to kill, typically, because if you're going to make it so that you have to do a bunch of real world work to kill some of the dudes in the game, it might as well be the toughest dudes in the story.  But it's NOT because it wouldn't make sense for one dude to kill Arthas or Illidan or whatever.  NOTHING of what you see on screen makes sense.

Just thought I would ask:  Any idea how big the download to install the beta client is?

The place I am currently living at is somewhat bandwidth challenged, and I am shareing the connection with the landlord.  They are on a 50gig a month cap, and I have agreed to try to stay under around 20gig a month.  Is grabbing the beta going to totally blow my bandwidth allowance?

There is about a 75% chance of that.   :awesome_for_real:

Just finished an end of zone quest in Rift Storm Legion that had the whole camp turn out to cheer my character so it's becoming more common, at least in those games that slavishly copy WoW.

Maybe I'm remembering wrong, but I thought I did some pretty epic shit going through WoLK leveling content. 

Even the end of the Draenei starting arc had the village cheering you on.

Beh, WoW sort of stole it from City of Heros anyhow.   One of the many things I missed about that game.   They knew EVERY mission you ran, and so had loads of hooks tied into the people on the street.  You would be roaming about town and random people would comment about how "hey, isnt that the Hero that took down so-and-so", or "Look, there goes X, the hero that solved such'n'such mystery".  Was pretty cool since the more "famous" you became, the more people seemed to know of your great deeds.

Looking forward to the day when CoH is mentioned about as often as Auto Assault still is.

It's getting to the point where anytime someone even mentions it, you feel as though they should also include violins in the background or some 9/11 type tribute attached to it.

Seriously, it was just a game. They'll make more.

You shut your whore mouth, it was a travesty the way CoH was treated. It is an insult to mention Auto Assault in a reference to CoH.

Kidding aside. CoH was pretty good. It is a shame it got treated the way it did from start to finish.

Back then, there were a lot of great games that got mistreated.  It's ultimately our fault though; too much game-hopping. 

CoH was the most repetitive MMO I ever played.  I had fun for the year or so I was subbed but after I left it never even became a game I went back to for a nostalgic look.

It was a decent enough game, I just never saw the shining, mystical life-altering aura surrounding it a lot of the ex-CoH players seem to talk about now that it's dead. There most certainly were, and still are, a plethora of games that should have been shut down before CoH though.

The best thing about CoH was the character generator. It was grindy as balls otherwise. I never got past the early teens in that game. Warehouse simulator wasn't terribly compelling for me.

The best part about CoH was the Mission Architect (no, not the farming missions  :awesome_for_real:).

That, and Total Focus. Dat animation.

CoH being grindy was all about the way in which it was mis-treated as I understand it. A good foundation they milked while they worked on something else (which became Champions Online eventually).

Yea that's really what killed it. iirc CoH was the first MMO to peak early and then see a cliff of subscriptions shortly after. And yet they stupidly kept to their Vision of grind. This was completely at odds with their premise of crazy levels of customization coupled with action-y comant.

Eventually all their cool concepts did appear in other games, but it tooks years. And all the while I lament on what CoH/V coulda been.

Such a waste.

Essentially this.  The reason most of the ex CoH people on this board gush about it is not because of the gameplay (which was repedative grindy ass mostly), but because of all the neat mechanics the guys incorporated into the game, many of which still seem well ahead of their time.  Things like Exemplar / Sidekicking allowing people of vastly different levels to group almost seamlessly without resulting in one party feeling underpowered / overpowered, or the Giant Monster system that let players of pretty much any level take on massive threats without being useless (imagine level 10s trying to fight a level 60 world boss in WoW.  They would be useless speedbumps, and probably die whenever the thing even looked at them).   Dynamic dungeon scaling was also another cool one.   There were SO many great mechanics at the heart of the game that got washed away under the overall focus on grindy, repedative leveling.

The reason I gush about CoH is because you could jump a mile then punch a street thug down a city block and it was AWESOME.  That's really all it takes.

Yep. Very kinetic experience (is that the right word) I don't remember seeing again until DCUO, which had only some of it.

I just wish they coulda gotten their mind out of the grind.

They didn't want grind... they just didn't put enough money in to cover the slow levelling curve. Though this was the age where farming monsters was sort of considered content.

On the other hand DCUO was every bit as boring and had less of an excuse.

Agree on the second point, but Cryptic not wanting a grind? I don't see it. The leveling curve was EQ-like arduous for a game that otherwise had very console-y like sensibilities. I still feel they were sitting on a goldmine if they could have just gotten out of the whole "this is a MMO and therefore we must have a guaranteed 15 months of subs" convention. Man, they coulda just put in tradeable costume recustomization players woulda RMT'd the shit out of years before inter-player "RMT" became corporate-sponsored "F2P". We'd all be talking about how CoH started it all instead of EQ1.

My only solace is that in another of the infinite timestreams in the multiverse, this did happen  :grin:

I'd more consider that a symptom. They didn't want the grind, they just didn't want to invest money in content and what was left was a grind.

I mean any game that has one end-boss raid for several years is a good indication of a development team that just really doesn't give a damn.

CoH had more or less stable subscription numbers for YEARS, I am pretty sure they never fell off a cliff the way something like WAR did.

This narrative here about how CoH was some kind of giant failure is really just off. It was a successful niche game, that was all it was ever *going* to be, and it really only died due to age and lack of interest on NCSoft's part. I am getting the sense that most of you never went back to it after the Paragon/Cryptic split, they were doing good stuff with that game.

Yeah, the CoH grind was pretty much gone, they put in a no-xp toggle so people didn't outlevel contacts. What they really needed, from day one to the end, was a steady stream of new and randomized mission maps. My goodness, I could navigate some of those maps with my eyes closed.

It's subscription revenue had been in decline since 2007 up to the day it closed (rare peak aside). CoH/V had three very good years from 2004 to 2007 but arguably took some development body blows when CoV wasn't hugely successful in drawing new players and NCsoft put all of its spare money and resources into Tabula Rasa.

Also, CoH/V being niche depends on how you define 'niche'. For a while there it had nearly 200k active players, which generally put it top 5 in player subscription numbers within the Western market.

As for NCsoft not showing interest, they greenlighted both the Going Rogue expansion and the F2P change, but neither was successful in brining the players back for long.

CoH/V's place among MMOs has been hugely benefited by a group of cheerleaders who loved everything that Paragon Studios did, despite the fact that the changes they made to the game were never able to increase their subscriber numbers.

As for the grind... it was a bit smoother, but let's just say that if you wanted to start buying things in the Auction House the grind was still in full effect or you needed to be really lucky and get some rare item drops. No, you didn't NEED full IO sets, but they certainly made things a lot easier (and quirky, like when a random effect activated within some sets).

I played COH a bunch of times, I never made it past level 5 or whatever because the game itself was boring and shitty. but I play the crap out of the character creator.

The tragic thing about COH isn't that the game died, as all MMOs do, but that so many of the brilliant innovations it brought to the genre still haven't been picked up by later titles. A number of them would be even more appropriate in the current f2p environment. Now that the game is dead, a lot of these techniques will basically need to be rediscovered by other studios as the game slips out of the collective mind of the industry.

Like what exactly?

COH ( And all the old titles ) also had the luxury of being in a smaller market of games. Now, there are least 10 MMO's launching each month.

I don't keep track of every feature in every MMO, so some of these may have been used elsewhere, but just of the top of my head:

The mission difficulty slider had around half a dozen levels. Every mmo I've seen typically just does some 2/3 split like normal/legendary or easy/medium/hard. Not that six is perfect, I'd like to see more games generalize it to an actual slider that dynamically adjusts monster toughness and spawns. And the mission architect could entirely sustain a character( with the exception of AO slot token things, iirc). Maybe Neverwinter can do this, too? Usually mmo's that even allow character missions tend to gimp them in some way so players won't exploit them. Yes, it's understandable why. Honestly, at this point, I'm past caring what other people do in MMOs.

A lot of games have a sidekick feature now, but how many have exemplaring? Maybe a few, but I can't think of any offhand.

The aforementioned player specific citizen banter. Unlike WoW's scripted phasing system, this was dynamic and used all over the the gameworld. Did ChampsO implement this? I didn't bother with that game for very long, so I can't remember.

Palette and color customizability for the entire character model. Most games that offer any customization only allow for dying of things like articles of clothing. If I recall correctly, even ChampsO was missing some of the cosmetic customizability options of COH. The outfit swap buttons actually let you swap everything about your character, not just outfit. Body size, gender, skin color and texture, etc. And no, Second Life doesn't count. Because it's not a game.

You could arguably claim that COV was an expansion, but it was sold as a standalone sequel. I can't recall any other MMO having crossover compatability with a sequel, even so far as simply 'import your GameX character name to GameX 2!". You could even switch characters over with a quest chain.

Not only did CoH have great character customization, but you could also change the visual effects of your powers. For weapon builds this wasn't a huge deal, but being able to change the colors of your blasts and such was awesome.

So about that Wildstar...   :grin:

Champions Online basically did all of that stuff.  Although their direction has been to add more costume parts on the store (not giving players a way to design/sell costumes), and comic book style content releases which have been too few and far between.  Kind of surprising given STO and NW having the content creation tools that they haven't applied it to CO yet, you think that might be the most obvious place of all to have it.


But since this is a Wildstar thread, I guess I'll just try to bend it back to that topic by saying at least they seem to have an interesting housing system.

It's all under NDA still right? We can only say we like/dislike the artstyle so many times.  :why_so_serious:

It was one of the first MMOs to launch big and fall off considerably iirc. Yea it's common now for games to launch and then shed players and resources, and nobody's ever launching a subs-based game again. And MMOs are a dime a dozen, all over mobile devices, launching with multiple revenue models, peaking early and then getting dustbinned within months.

But back then, MMO subs started low and incrementally grew and core MMO gamers were still thinking the next MMO was going to be the last one they'd ever need. We're talking a decade ago, less than a year since SWG had launched and then half a decade of subs games all hail mary'ing into f2p or closing outright. I mean back then the idea of an MMO closing? Very different world :-)

Games that are still around all eventually stabilized. But success after shedding resources for the players you ended up with is different than successfully delivering to the market you thought you'd have in the first place. It's only "failure" if your game/company are no longer around. But it's "success" that has features which get emulated.

Oh and on topic: Wildstar graphics r gud

Yeah, I want that sort of customization to be done more often.

I know why they DON'T usually do it, but I still want them to.

Most complete feature-list/explanation I've seen thus far. (http://wildstar.junkiesnation.com/2013/08/05/wildstar-a-guide-to-what-we-know/)

"The best gear in the game will come from 40-man raids. It will be entirely unique."

I'm out.

Look... 2005 is back!

There has to be some incentive to do 40 mans as the devs have said that it's supposed to be super "kick you in the nuts" hard.

As if cat herding wasn't hard enough.

Do people really enjoy spending hours trying to defeat an encounter because 2-3 mouth-breathers don't know to get out of the fire and waste the time of 30 others? 

Slot machines.  Meh.

I've seen people all over the world physically organize into large groups to attack, claim, defend, and link imaginary portals opened by errant higgs bosons.    So, clicking "I will attend" on a Wildstar raid scheduler doesn't seem so ludicrous.

2005 indeed.

e: also, notResilience and notPVPPower on pvp gear, along with a gear progression system that's pretty much like WOW was at its worst (have to play arenas to get the best gear, and you bet it'll be heavily gear-based). Oh well, they still have time to change their minds, I guess.

Organizing 40 people interested in a niche != organizing 40 people in a mass market game.  You did play WoW and EQ, right?  Many among WoW's playerbase needed a freaking MOD to get through encounters in less than an evening.

Even with the mods a great many people still cannot do the content.

Ahahahah, I can't believe the devs are stupid enough to think the 40-man raid thing will last very long.