"Goodbye, Mr. Anderson"

[Samprimary]

I just took a look back through the lens of GAMES JOURNALISM from the perspective of knowing that this is now about the most fail of mmo's that ever had a fighting chance.

A lot of the reviews I looked at said stuff like "Um if you like the matrix, and MMO's, and are somewhat patient, you'll like this! Score: 7.9"

[Dtrain]

I just took a look back through the lens of GAMES JOURNALISM from the perspective of knowing that this is now about the most fail of mmo's that ever had a fighting chance.

A lot of the reviews I looked at said stuff like "Um if you like the matrix, and MMO's, and are somewhat patient, you'll like this! Score: 7.9"

This just in: video game reviews suck. More on that later.

[chargerrich]

Did this game even have raid style instances or events? What were boss fights like? Who did you fight, Sarth from Tron? 

Tron > Matrix

Make a Tron based MMO, I would check it out!

[diivox]

There wasn't any high end raiding content or anything of that nature. There were "dungeons" so to speak that were just long hallways and soloable (with only one available at the level cap, which was easy at that point). The game was a giant sandbox dependent upon player driven content most of the time. The events were really fun when they were happening often. Towards the end, they conscripted players to run them. LESIG it was called. Live Events Special Interest Group. While it was still under Monoliths control, the LESIG was what it sounded like: a forum for input and ideas on how to make things better. It turned into the only way the events got ran.

You basically hit 50 and it turned into a social experience. Alot of the playerbase dabbled in second life on the side, and at some point you can only do the same Matrixy stories so much. The only thing to do at the level cap was go into the "archive" which was a reproduction of 01. In there the 3 factions were open pvp flagged. You could also type /pvp to flag in the game. I remember the night they first allowed players to do this. I had been grinding like crazy and I was much higher level than alot of the other players. The swarms of people I was fighting and the standoff we had on the roof on Mara central was one of the coolest things I've ever done in a MMORPG.

There wasn't any need to re-roll ever, since you could go to a phone booth (which were always close by) and load a template of a completely different class. All it cost was money to raise the skills and after a while money was meaningless anyway so everyone had everything leveled. Abilities cost a certain amount of memory slots, so you could tweak your toon pretty well. In beta it was cooler, everything cost one memory slot, so you'd never really know what someone was running. They changed it for live, so you could only really be one "thing" at a time.

They never really did take advantage of the world. I spent alot of time jumping around downtown, which was really well done, except there was no reason for me to do that besides cool screenshots. Mission mobs scaled to your level so you didn't need to go to the high level areas to do them, and there were several "sweet spots" where if you launched a mission you would never travel very far from start to finish. Eventually they added more lower level content, which was nice except everyone was maxed. There were key items to be gained too, either from collectors or from dungeons (the most prized being ones that only dropped if you were in a certain level range) but they never let you customize stuff. So you'd have all this good looking clothing, but in pvp, everyone wore the exact same stuff.

I could ramble all day about the game, it dripped potential, and they did eventually redesign the combat to be better, but it was too little too late. The ship already set sail and Sony never really did anything to try to breathe life into the game. I played the hell out of that game because I loved the IP and made some good friends, but in the end, since it didn't get the extra 6 months to a year of polish it really needed, it ended up being a drama filled community wearing matrix clothes going to dance parties and having fashion shows and listening to internet radio stations ran by players.

Edited to avoid death...

[schild]

If you don't learn how to use capital letters, someone here will KILL you.

Shape up or ship out.

[Surlyboi]

Fuck raids.

[stray]

If you don't learn how to use capital letters, someone here will KILL you.

Shape up or ship out.

it's ok though if i do it and don't smack you with a wall of text at the same time, right? 


I had a beta, I think, but I remember getting pissed about the silliest thing.. That the user names were tied into AIM (it was originally a Warner Bros game). I don't remember the details now.. but names could be taken across all servers that way. That was frustrating. Fortunately, I did end up getting "Neopheus" . I don't remember actually playing though.

[Azazel]

didn't they kill Morpheus in this game?

Yes. and its canon too.

Not sure how important the "canon of Matrix" is really though. It's what? 3 movies, 1 of which was really good, and 2 that were ...less good. And some amimations and such. And probably nothing else to come. Especially after the last 2 films. 

I mean we're not talking about Star Wars/Trek/LotR where you have all the additional stuff like the EU and lots of interest in it. Not that I care about the extra crap in SW, either.

[5150]

Exactly.  Isn't this their first title they're killing off?  Like, ever? 

They killed off Everquest Online Adventures (Everquest for PS2) in Europe a while back, which was on Station Access

[Endie]

I was pretty upset by this thread.  But only because of the horrible mixture of abuse and neglect that the humble but vital functional apostrophe is receiving in so many peoples' posts, whether supposedly denoting abbreviation or possession.

As regards The Matrix, the IP seemed promising, but ultimately I suppose it was always going to be stripped of the interesting Baudrillardian stuff from the first movie and made into a lengthy series of badly choreographed foyer scenes.  The shame is that it had a little potential to be the Shadowrun MMO we're never going to get.

[DLRiley]

Oh, hell yes. Now this is good fucking news, proceeding to dance on this game grave.

[Hoax]

This game could have been good & interesting.  It was a buggy pile of shit.  I literally couldn't run it due to a bug that I never heard back about after submitting during beta.