All Posts by morkai2004

Originally posted by nirvanarocks

he was trying to say that in real life. things dont just decay. It takes a long time and shit. But yeah its different weapons cuz ur consistanly hacking shit apart. But yeah back when swords were a common thing. u never had the same sword for ever. it needed to be sharpened after every battle. But its a rare ocassion it would break. I think they should add some kind of decay system but over a long period of time. something to encourage you to upgrade ur armour or watever. Anyways i don't get how people can say the games shit without playing it :S. Like wtf?

Anyways i don't get how people can say the games shit without playing it :S. Like wtf?

you mean like your recent rating "1" of WAR.. (couldnt resist)

to bad AoC gotten postponed. had hoped to get hands on this year. will just have to wait that little longer.

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Originally posted by The-Raven

The overall graphics look pretty dated however, but we all know that GRAPHICS DO NOT MAKE A FUN GAME so we will have to just wait and see. 

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but it dosnt hurt. if your one of the few that ever played horizons you willl know what a small playerbase can hurt a game to the point of collaps. and a small player base, long development time could in the worst senario end up with a game with little to no supoort / updates along the way.

thank andryl

didnt read the thread to the end as it was just a lot of wauw nice screenshots, ohhh that looks great. I started getting worried as noone saw anything 'wrong'.

glad im not the only one. started to believe i was seeing things :)

im stil hoping it will turn out alright, but the latest set of vids and now these screenshots just left me feeling cheated.

gone is the stunning work, and amazing character art, and we are left with a eq2 style plastic world and characters where characters the most of the time looks out of place or even misplaced (feet sticking into grund, collision with rocks or other players).

im having a hard time swallowing this plastic graphics when you compare to other games around the corner. i know its all vaporware til we get it in our hands but comparing the current results i fear VSH will end up like eq2 with a small, very small, player base and as a result limited funding.

images by brad himself.

he gotta be kidding right?. 1920x1200, high graphics settings and it looks like something my 7year old kid could have made with mspaint. looks as bad or worse than my screenshots from horizon / eq1 to be honest.

http://www.bradmcquaid.com/Mid/MidLevelBattle017.jpg

check his post for the 17 other shots
http://www.vanguardsoh.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1563375#post1563375

at the official site, take a look if you havent already. also pauls video blogs are up along with the new newsletter for september. mmorpg.com is slacking a bit on the updates :)

http://www.warhammeronline.com/english/media/screenshots/

actually vangaard smells more of WoW that WAR. Vangaard is a native type PVE game like WOW, and maybe they will put together a PVP server with a special ruleset but its not in the core of their design focus.

Vangaard simplified, is a next gen mmo, taking the best from WOW, EQ and EQ2. (inteface WoW, EQ pve progressing and EQ2 grapphics).

WAR is more like DAOC. realm vs realm pvp in constant conflict with the ultimate goal of sacking each others capital. also noted that WAR will have less of a gear focus and more of a skill focus to prevent the yberweaps to dominate the pvp efforts.

if im wrong, stand me corrected :)

oh im not complaining, rules are rules and should be enforced.

i honestly just forgot about the drawing, spend the holiday weekend doing a bit of seeing the world and then DOH when i checked my inbox sunday night.

the post was more of a suggestion for future draws to make it a 48h or something period. heck: hurricane joe-smoe, local power outage or a family party out of town and you might miss the window, or as myself working with computers every day of the week i tend to spend one day off the computer if possible to just get a breath of fresh air.

least i made someone happy..... the one that gets my spot :)

hope ill catch ya around in open beta.

just how much influence does the producers have?

From EA perspective. they realize they suck at making MMOs and decide to go shopping for a upcomming title to get them a chunk of the market.

From Mythic perspective, they need a serious backing to compete with WoW, even if there is a lot of ppl getting disgruntled with WoW

From Gw perspective, they know mythic got the backing finansial to make the game a success.

the future will however tell how much the will inpact on how mythics does it business and how the game will evolve.

for most parts i think it will be a win win situation. EA wins since they cannot do this themselves, Mythic wins since they get the finansial backing.

its all comes down to playstyle and what aim the game has.

taking WoW as example, it starts out very balanced for lvl 1-59 for equipment. the green drops actually meam something as your leveling and quest rewards were useful thruout the leveling period. Crafted items had their use, specially in the 50s where the craftable blues becomes superior to what you could hope to get as a random drop and equally powered to dungeon drops for that level.

for 1-59 i found the game very balanced for regular drops, craftable items, quest items and boss drops.

60+ it takes a different path. either grind for faction to get the rare recipes made crafting a painful experience, or even a closed book since some of the recipes requires drops from places like MC that in effect pushed a lot of players out of the crafting market.

drops also started pushing towards the raiding, taking the path of requiring 40 players to get anything useful.

if your not into that type of playing suddenly a game like wow turns ugly on you especially if you didnt expect this kind of game change towards end level.

PVP equipment is comparable for most parts in WoW to the first set of raid drops from MC, but after that you will start see the gab between casual/pvp gamer and the raid gamers widen drastic. suddnely PVE becomes nessasary to be viable in PVP and for a casual your just out of luck.

Even if you do stick with the PVP grinding for honor to get the 13+ ranks you will not be able to compete with the new raid stuff comming out, and with the horrible ranking system that in effect ruins the pvp system past rank 10 most PVP players wont get the pvp weapons. they are stuck with that they can grind out for faction or quests.

so whats the solution.

definite avoid a PVE/PVP gap, make items equal in power for both crafting, questing, pvping and raiding.  avoid the lure to make bosses the only viable source of items in the end game, to avoid forcing ppl into the raiding environment.

make craftable items widely available and the tradematerials tradable so everyone can sell the item even if they cannot use them, makes for a stronger economy. this is one of the things WoW does excellent.

but most important, move towards a skill game rather than a gear centric game. if the newest and best trinket will win the game for you (pve or pvp) skill will take second seat and build a lot of frustrations. not so much in raiding where ppl work together to nail the boss, but in PVP where overpowered gear might just ruin the effort.

there is a reason the pvp test server in WoW (where you get a premade lvl 60 char with tier1/2 mixed gear by default) is highly popular since the gear factor is eliminated by everone being more or less equal in power. suddenly skill plays a huge factor in the pvp.

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Originally posted by Aldreth

Soloing 10/10

I got to level 10 in 5 hours, if that helps you understand how much better this is than EQ1. You also get bonuses for killing grouped mobs which you will just have to play and see what they are.

Lag 9/10

VERY MINIMAL, even in beta, it has actually been better than WOW's beta, and I would have to rate it the best for a beta that I have ever experienced, I have btw beta'd over 20 rpg's. The only lag I have noticed was when I turned up the graphical settings to way above what my pc could handle, then I got GRAPHIC lag, but thats the user's fault not the servers :P

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just picked two of the major things to comment upon...

soloplay. try soloing past lvl 12 - 13. you will find maybe 2 mobs in an area of 20 mobs solo. with 5 players trying to solo you get to kill one mob every 5 minuts or so if your lucky for 0.02% xp.

lag. did you leave the newbie islands?. antonica lag was and IS (as of today) running high. peak lag was around 10 minuts to cast a spell, trigger an ability. and no this isnt client lag. its server lag running wild.

before i get flamed.

im playing the beta, currently lvl 36 with my main, and lvl 26, 22 with two new characters to test their viability.

game 1 - 10 is a tutorial. game 10 - x is a horrible grind with broken dynamics, and extremly liniar gameplay

xp is as intended atm.

else it would be very hard to rate quest rewards compared to critter killing. having to adjust all xp rewards to bring them into line with the 'new' xp pr monster wouldnt be easy .

Blizzard also stated a few times that they were quite happy about the speed of progression.

What you have the see is that this game is not just about building one character over 4 - 5 years.

you actually get 8 (9 or more to be decided) character slots to goof around with and that you can actually play and have fun with.

as for CB-Retail. yes characters will be whiped. this was one of the major mistake Lineage2 did (those that didn play the beta was already way way behind the adena / farming curve), and especially in a pvp oriented game this hurts double.

the best we testers can do is play, enjoy it , and submit bugs, suggestions and balance issues as we find them, and not worry about keeping the toons in retail. hell we already got a huge headstart due to knowing most of the lvl 1 - 30 quests by heart by having had to play it 5 - 6 times during the beta (locked chars)

http://members.cox.net/x21/wipe.jpg

no, we wont get to keep them from CB-OB

my feedback and yes ive been voicing this on the beta forums / feedback for a long time.

my characters

lvl 35,lvl 29,lvl 22,and  a few lvl 15ish chars for testing

Classes:

Very cookiecutter approach. everyone is the same, everyone can do the same, and desprite you already know you want to be a ranger you have to thru the subsclass system for ages until you realize getting to your class its still the same.

there is no individuality of the different players. all rangers are the same, all crusaders are the same and get the same skills.

Combat:

Boring, and fast. how did they end up with such a mix?. combat is boring because its the same very few select skills you use each time, to kill a mob very fast. low hitpoints, hard hitting critters so it takes 15~35 secs to kill any mob. if it takes longer your dead most likely solo or your group is doing something very very wrong.

You cannot talk while fighting since your waiting for that hero opportunity to present itself and dont want to be in the middle of a chat line while attaching and missing it. you look more to your hotbar than to the actual screen to spot when that next skill is ready for punching.

Locked Encounters.

You know before you pull a mob if its doable or not. there is no longer pulling tactics or splitting of encounters. you will have to be able to defeat them all if they are locked into a group before pulling, and they will all come regardless of they are 1000 feet apart visually. if they are 'grouped' they will all come.

Graphics

looks nice, nice effects and nice environments. character animations and especially monster animations is horrible in my opinion. nothing looks worse than a monster turbo sprinting 100 feet to get to you, with an animation that looks like its played back at 20 times the speed. same goes for the characters running / sprinting / staffing.

Sounds

voice overs and music nicely done. however you get fed up with the voice overs. you stop listening to them on the quest npcs, clicking thru the dialog faster. you can read the text x 2 the time it takes the npc to talk his or her way thru the dialogs and if you are like most, you click the response you want without waiting. also generic voice overs gets anoying 'what a wonderful day it is today', .... grrrr hear that 30 times a day in qeynos and your about ready to turn of the sound.

Gameplay

Slow, grinding and impossible to solo. wait thats not true. you can solo but it makes progress feel like Lineage2 is extremly fast. 0.02% xp pr kill at lvl 15. , 0.005% xp pr kill at lvl 30. group play is the only way to get anywhere. sadly groups are still requires 2 heals and minimum 1 tank to do anything. one healer cannot keep up with grouped encounters with they few group heals on slow recycle.

Environment

mobs stand around with no purpose. they dont roam, they dont interact they dont do anything. they just stand there waiting to be killed. they dont have any scripted AI to patrol an area for intruders, run for help or sound an alarm when attacked. they just stand there and when pulled come for you. however most of their fellow kind just watch a few feet away if they are not in the linked encounter.

Quests

fedex, fedex, fedex, killx and return with gizmo x, fedex. there are no real interesting quests besides the hallmark quest( class quest ). everything is jsut to blend.

Performance.

3ghz, radeon x800pro, 2 gig mem and i can run it at 'balanced settings' with 30 fps most of the time outdoors or in dungeons. in cities i get 10 fps-15 fps. if more than 20 people is in my visual field its 5 fps. At fastest performance settings game looks very emtpy but i can handle a 20 ppl raid size. however graphics is then not much prettier than eqlive.

if game is released as it looks today it will be SWG once more. halffinished game that will take a year to get into shape.

great idea, new way of making people interact with each other fighting against the server and the blight.

bad execution. world isnt dynamic as it was intended, since every event is GM controlled. as an individual player you cannot make much progress or any difference.

it would had been great if a group of players by consistently cleaning out a blighted area could temporary force the blight back, se the grass start to sprout and sky clear up... and when they left the blight would reclaim the area again.

let the blight grow constantly if noone fights it back.. let it take over towns and area, change the mobs from normal wolves and doggies to undead version, foul creatures and baddies in the blighted areas...

and if noone stops it ... lets the starting towns become infested, let the server 'die'.

that could have been truely awesome to play.

:)

i dont dislike the game, its just has some very flawed mechanics that tend to protect the ones that deserve the most to be killed (griefers, noob killers).

grahical the game is very nice, great design and lotsa places to go se and hunt near. also the game dosnt lack mobs, you wont run out of things to kill even if there is a lot of people hunting an area with the 15 - 90 secs respawn on all things (random location for respawn near the original).

i would redesign the karma / pvp system thou. and there has been a lot of great threads on the official boards suggesting this and how to implement it.

just dont se it happen which is sad.

goes like this.

unless you in your past have killed someone (taken a karma hit) you will be 'white' flagged.

if you initiate combat (say hit someone once) with another player you will turn purple for 30 secs before going back to white again.

should you happen to kill someone as white (or actually purple since you become purple at the first hit) and the player you killed was white, then you turn red (and take a big karma hit).

if the other player decides to hit you back after your initial hit then you are both purple and has both agreed to PVP... and neither of you will turn red if you kill each other.

should you encounter a red player (someone that in the past killed someone and took a karma hit) , you can attack attack without fear. attacking will still keep you white, and if you kill the red you dont get a karma hit nor turn red.

when the red player dies he will get rid of some of the karma and work his or her way closer to becomming 'white' again.

should you happen to hit someone (turn purple) and the other player dont fight back but is killed by monsters in the mean time you wont turn red for participating in the kill.

if you heal a purple player you turn purple.. ( i think, never tried this as im not a healer)

basically. unless you want to take the karma hit there is no all out pvp going on. people play it safe as you loose 8 % xp and possible items on death and that xp is around 1 hour constant xping.

item loss is the big pvp killer thou. drop your 10 million weapon and your character is basically screwed. you cannot kill anything to gain money, since easy mobs wont drop for you, and you cannot buy anything unless you gota big cash reserve. so your only option is to delevel 20 levels back to around lvl 20 and farm mobs for weeks to get a few miliions back.

(or get your guild to sponsor something for you but dont count on it heheh)

all in all, the system sucks.

Reds cannot defend themselves against attackers without further taking a karma hit (a red hitting back at a white player attaching him, will take a karma hit from killing the white player. the white player will never turn purple as to agreeing to the pvp fight with the red)

Reds drop items way to much... expect a drop every other death if your red.

Purple drop items to much. once every 5 deaths.

Whites drop items to much, once ever 15 deaths...

:)

and the first post is exactly why this game fails...

flawed PVP mechanics and a childish mentality illustrates why most mature players are leaving the game or just waiting for a better alternative comming out.