f13.net

Last Night,

Anyone have any issues?  Everything worked like butter for me.  Did Cryptic just raise the bar on game release?

Damn, color me crazy but so far the only bloody complaint I have (since I have not taken a Task Mission) is that I sometimes have to reset the bloody team mission (not because it is deselected, but because I lose the selection) as the only thing I find currently annoying.

Anyone else have any hate to toss at this shiney?

Not really as of yet, save the Task Force mission problem. Really, the only hitch to the launch was the 30-45 minutes of slamming that the login server took on the first day of the pre-release going live. The actual release itself was, as you said, smooth. I think this is due in part to the fact that most of the people who were planning on playing the game were already playing. In my local EB yesterday, they said they had received 40 boxes of the game and didn't think they would sell all of them. I just gave them a knowing smile and said, "I think you might." I'm gonna stop by there today after work to see what happened.

Well, here's some hate for ya: the boards have been full with bitter complaints over the name reservation system, the 3-day head start not being a full 72 hours (13 hours short), not letting people know they would be able to buy cd keys online before they pre-ordered, and not planning to ship the monthly comic outside North America my god Cyptic is the worst dev studio EVAR!

..or not.  Since those are just whines from typical idiot gamers.

Personally, game plays smooth with no bugs or complaints to speak of so far...which is just weird.

Can't tell you how much my short play session ass in loving being able to complete a mission or two before work and at lunch.  In fact, i've got a date in a mission come high noon :)

It is definately a different feel playing a 7am when population is low; you can actually find single and duo "groups" of soapbox speaking Nazi's in Steel Canyon as opposed to the groups of 5-7 you see at prime night time.

Xilren

I am brand new to CoH as of last night; I did not play the OB at all but merely lurked here and then broke down and bought the box at Fry's yesterday after being overwhelmed by the love.  <twitch> I had been playing Lineage2 OB fwiw. </twitch>

Sooo, anyways.  At Fry's first of all (If you don't have em... think CompUSA/Best Buy/Circuit City only hugerer) they are running a sale on both NCsoft products; Lin2 and CoH... $38 thru today.  There were boxes-o-plenty of the Lin2 still on the shelves but the shelf space for CoH was bare.  Luckily for me they had an over-stock section down below and there were still a few boxes to be had down there.  But by all indications, CoH was pwning Lin2 head-to-head.

The install (2 CDs) went very quickly and smoothly... as did registration.  But I ran afoul of the old video drivers tripwire and the game wouldn't actually launch; I saw where this was a 'known issue' on launch day so I didn't bother reporting it.  No biggie, as promised the game started up smartly after I upgraded my Nvidia driver set.

Once really "in" CoH I was dazzled.  Character creation for one.  But then inside the game... looks great and I have a barely passable gaming system (@1 GHz).  Didn't even really lag that much in Atlas Park after completing my n00b mission.  

In short... bravo.

When I went into EB to pick up my preorder during lunch (approx 11:30) yesterday, there was a line of about 4 people in front of me and another 5 or so wandered in behind me, all of them picking up CoH.

When I told the guy I preordered he looked down and there were two lists in front of him of preorder people to call, he said one was for Lineage and one was for CoH.  He handed me the CoH list and asked me to scratch my name off so they wouldn't call me.  Just glancing at the list, it was about 15-20 names per page, and it was 4 pages long.  I was blown away at how many preorders they had.  

When I mentioned it to the guy, he said that because they had such a large amount of preorders at this store the "main office" shipped them twice as many boxes, but he didn't think they were going to last long.. *shrug*..

So, can we call it?  Best MMOG launch ever?

I would say so.

I don't count the North American launches of FFXI and Lineage 2 to be launches.  If anyone has any comparitive information on the japanese or korean launches of those games then we can consider that.

If we limit it to true US launches then I would easily say it was the best.  Closest other launch I had been in would have been DAOC, but it was far from perfect.  Half the creatures in the game beign spraggans with a new name over their head was my major beef at the time.

I'd say it is the best launch I've been part of. One hour of server hammering then nothing but normal gameplay.


This is probably my biggest complaint, but it's a general known issue that playing mmogs during prime time blows, and is probably the reasons I dislike them now that I can only play in prime hours with all the other jackanapes.

The experience flow slowed down a lot when I had to shift gears from hunting small groups of yellow/orange to large groups of blues/whites because I can only find groups of 7 or more around. A LOT more running around wasting time looking for mobs, because I'm mission-bound right now (All my available missions are too tough for my level). Small gripe, but it's there. Should go away once I start grouping more :P

The first Asheron's Call launched extremely smoothly, with content in place and only got better as time went on. As for COH. I got a Map Server Disconnect once last night, but it was my first since PreOrder started, so I'm pleasantly surprised. Frankly, after Beta I expected frequent map server disconnects for the next month or so.

Yeah, but that's not a terribly fair comparison:



I hate talking up any game, because it always comes back to bite me, but CoH had no such limitation to their launch..

I'd say this is the best launch I've been a part of.  I'm including Dark Age and AC1 in this.  

Although I have run into at least a couple map server and game disconnects, it still beats what I had to deal with in DAoC or AC1 which seem to be the industry gold standard for launches.  DAoC had lot of of broken quests, horrible lag in town, and I got stuck once and it took a CSR 3 hours to unstuck me.  AC1 had some of the most soul crushing lag EVER.  Getting remotely near a town usually meant a 5 minute slide show and a portal storm out of the area.  AC1 town lag at launch was probably the worst lag outside some of the stuff AO produced that I have ever experienced.

Comparitively I've just had a couple of crashes in COH.  I haven't got stuck, died to a bug, or lagged beyond comprehension yet.  All my missions have worked (even when I couldn't find a door in one due to my own lack of observation).  It's been nice, wish I had more time to play.

It's early yet, so I will reserve 10% of my judgement, but this has been the most smooth launch that I have witnessed -- bar none. I had a *bit* of lag once last night, I had to hammer the login server on day one of pre-order, but aside from those itty-bitty annoyances, this has been silky smooth. Let's see how it goes over time, but I don't see COH having the same stability issues (can you say server downtime and outages each time EQ patched for the first few years), or glitches that other games have had.

COH has set the bar, and set it high.

However, given that this is better than the crap we have had to deal with in the past, is this where we want the bar set? Is there more we want? If we could set the bar where we want it, where would it be?

Zipper

<edit> spelling

The AC1 launch sucked monkey balls for me.  Not so much the launch, but the week after launch when more started playing.  The portal storming was a fucking menace and I could not get anywhere near a town without getting ported out.  Try to buy reagents and practice up new spells when you are new to the game while being randomly and intentionally teleported by the game.

Well, imho, it's a good start.  Sure, as consumers we want a holodeck game with a $5 monthly fee and excellent gameplay, like, yesterday already...   But CoH raises the bar for 'what is acceptable at launch' to a level that 'normal' gamers can accept, I think, which is more than you can say for previous MMOGs.

Basically, if other devs reach this bar, we might start to see growth in the genre, as people who are used to PS2/XBox/GC-game reliability won't feel like an idiot for purchasing a game that doesn't work.  IMHO, THAT is what has nearly killed this genre.  Not the 'EverCrack' comments, or the emotionally unstable retarded 22 yr old who killed himself after logging out of the game, or any of that...  It's that the games haven't worked, or worked very poorly.  Consoles have flourished due to software reliability.  You put the disc in, and It Just Works.  If we can get to that point with MMOGs, or even somewhere close, it'll be great for the genre.

--
Alkiera

I've had a few map disconnects, some soul-crushing lag (on dialup temporarily) but it's by far the smoothest launch.

No sticking in walls, no unkillable mobs, and fun from the start. The complete opposite of AO.

The few times I have lost connection, there haven't been any negative effects.

This has been the first MMOG that I've been able to just take out of the box, sit down, and play like any other game.  I think the bar has been raised, not just because the game is stable and relatively bug free, but also because the learning curve isn't insanely difficult compared to most other single player games out there.

This, more than anything else, makes me want to bitchslap my fellow editors into letting me review this. Dang. WT peeps talking about a smooth launch. Wonders never cease. :)

DAOC was the first, and only, MMORPG to really have an incredibly smooth launch in my recollection.    

Asheron's Call I don't call "smooth launched" at all.   It was rubberbanding for me for months.   The teleport storms were a PITA as well.   Course', at the time I was playing it on a 56k modem, and it may have more been a matter of bad net code than a launch screw up.

CoH's launch was pretty good, but there was some initial login server failures for a couple hours on the first day of the three-day head start.    Contrary to some folks belief, I count this as day one of the launch since it involves paying customers on official time.    All things considered, it could have been much worse.   There's still a little latency, but it's nothing unmanagable.

No, the customers were not paying anything at the point of the pre-order headstart. At the end of those 3 days, unless a player purchased a CD-Key (or boxed game), and subscribed to a payment plan, they could not continue playing. They were the last days of beta.

As to DAoC's launch, they launched with a lot of content missing from the game. Smooth or not, I can't say that that is a better way of launching than CoH did. CoH is feature complete and content complete. At this point, anything else added is just icing.

I don't know if I'd call the pre-order folks "paying customers."

Once they required the retail CD Key to play, I think that was really when the people playing became paying customers.

Yeah, if you want to call the 25th the 'real' release then you would have to call the 7th the 'real' release.  And buying a preorder does not give a penny to Cryptic or NCSoft.  It is just money toward a possible future sale.  If you cancel, the distributor keeps your money.

I do think CoH launched batter than DAoC in terms of working quests and lag/login issues, but I have to disagree about the content.  DAoC had all their dungeons in, but most were un-itemized, while CoH is missing almost all content over 40.  And pulling the cap down ten levels so they have content at release for all the available levels is a smart move that I'm glad they made, but won't earn them clemency in my book on this one point.

Really? Well, I can remember hitting unitemized dungeons at about level 22 in DAoC, so how does that make Cryptic's decision to keep the level cap at 40 (it was never "raised" to 50 during beta AFAIK) a failing? At the risk of sounding like a smitten fanboi, 40 levels of complete content looks a hell of a lot better than 50 levels with missing content starting at level 20. But maybe it's just my perception that is skewed. I would rather have a developer say here is all the complete content that we have instead of having them say, we're going to make you catass longer, but there'll be some stuff missing along the way to enhance your boredom. ;)

Do I need to bring up DAoC's assassin class for each realm? Put in one week before final.  One of the dumbest beta/launch decisions I've ever witnessed in any game.  

Ask anyone about playing in Hibernia at launch.  Ask anyone who leveled over 30 in the first month in Midgard and had to cram together in one crappy dungeon (lets not forget about 1 in 3 30+ quest was broken in some fashion).

DAoC's content smoked pole on release. It maybe passable now, but don't underestimate the joke that it was upon release.

Ya know i was doin some poking and I think I figured it out. Many of the devs on CoH worked most of the time on console games so it only goes to figure it would .. you know.. work out of the box. I have to say I am impressed and think im gonna stay a while.

Fun
Stable
playable out of the box
NO RATS!!!!!

SOE and EA better start some polishing and I mean fast. The reaction to this game shows that a working game is accomplisable and anything that is buggy and incomplete out of the box will now even smell like shit once the box is opened. Thank you for making it smell like a rose Cryptic.

I had to make myself a map of Tir na Nog where I marked all the places I would fall through the ground and get stuck.

I am going to go on a limb and say the enhancment slots and enhancement placement is the complex mini-game of character building.  Of course, the ability to change and restructure this area (aside from choosing the sockets) is a big benefit.

Your right though, it is not difficult.  The game is very easy to learn.  Kind of like Blizzard's ability to make easy to learn RTS games.

The release launch seemed smoother than the pre-release one, and even that one wasn't too bad.  I think the key to the smoothness of the release launch was in the way that the boxes were shipped.  We didn't have 100K+ players with the game already loaded up and ready to go hammering the login servers.

The Name Reservation system could definitely have been done better, and we've learned a lot from that experience.

Overall, I think the Cryptic team deserves major kudos for such a stable game and the Ops folks here at NCsoft also have done a great job.  

Since this is the first time I have been involved with a game release, I'm really happy to have had such a good experience.

Since I have had the displeasure of participating in several releases, I am really, REALLY happy to have had such a good experience.

My big concern was how the billing stuff would hold up with both lineage 2 and COH going off at the same time but I have not heard or seen any complaints on that at all. Lag in the head start was fine and I played about 12 hours total and never map discoed once nor had any other issue.

That is probably about the best you can hope for a mmrpg launch. The ability to pull it out of the box plug it in and just start playing. A little lag or map disco now and then is also something I would expect but COH has managed to make this even less of an issue than normal.

Ac1 had a good launch but my god I was rubber banding like a mad dog with it and the portal storming was a beast.

Daoc had a very acceptable launch but was a bit content sparse.

The only real known "issue" that is somewhat of a content problem is the task force issues in COH. I am confident that the devs can take care of that and when they do there is plenty of content up to their current level cap.

All in all a very good launch and I wish to god more mmrpg launched as well it would save me grey hairs and busted keyboards.

Kaid

I should clarify.  :)   This is the first time I have been involved in a launch from the company's perspective.  I was on the player side of a launch for UO, EQ, AC, AO, AC2 and EVE.

My condolences, I still have nightmares about UO and AO's launch.  UO's was just happier because everything had a nice new shiney glow about it.

I played in Hibernia.  The missing content was in your face from level 1 on.  Oh look, another badger. Noo, it says 'wolf' over it's head.  Oooookay.  Oh, look an elf, noooo, they are 'pixies' and 'orchard nippers'.  Oh look a spraggan, could be a fucking dragon for all I knew.  Spraggans were 70% of every game model I killed for the first fucking 20 levels.  I compiled a list of things I saw with the spraggan model and it was hilarious and huge at the time, but I have wiped that bad time from my mind.

Hmm...

I remember like five or seven hours of waiting to get my billing info setup for DAOC on launch and the fact I could not enter the capital city in Albion because I kept crashing and falling through holes.  The game play was smooth and the shiney looked great, but the polish on the billing, terrain, and items left me feeling very unwelcome.  Still, it was better than EQ...

And anything would be better than the AO launch. I still remember standing on that damn hill trying to help form LumCorp, disco'ing, and being stuck in a wall everytime I logged in from that point forward.

Other than CoH seeming to flood my modem occasionally, it's going fine.

I can still hear that crappy sound the spraggans made ringing in my ears. God I hate that game.

Heh, I had forgotten that one! What a mess that game was on launch, and I tried so hard to like it.

And after being told ofor every bug report 'that bug is fixed in the sooper-seekrit Gold Client' I'm still amazed that people stayed around after the free month.

CoH has amused me enough already to justify the $29.99 I paid for it. Any expansions/additional content will just be gravy.

Btw, did you use that handle back in the day? I don't seem to recall it, but that's not surprising, given the age and abuse of my poor brain.

Yeah, I haven't been around much for the last few years, my job takes me on the road too much, with too little inet access.

I'm back though, I missed the hate.

We can officially call this release the BEST RELEASE EVAR!!!1!!@!

I waited a little bit after noon on pre-launch day to login, and never had a problem getting in. Very little lag. I think I've had all of 2 map server disconnects in release. Not one client crash, not even in beta. The only bugs I can find are things like missions reseting after zoning, or chat channels switching windows after zoning. None of them are gamestoppers, or even bothersome.

Billing was a dream. It worked, from the get go, with absolutely no problems. And I did my billing information at about 6:30 CST on Wednesday (the official launch day), prime time.

DAoC had set the bar high before, but its lack of content for all levels and realms put it a good notch below CoH. Sure, they only have 40 levels instead of 50? And? Those levels all have content, working quests, etc. The task force mission bug is the worst thing I've heard.

Yeah, CoH is the standard by which all future MMOG releases should be judged.