All Posts by Zorndorf

Originally posted by Ascension08

1) Only between Tiers, NOT the zones WITHIN the tiers. Also in the scenarios and probably some PvE stuff. That's it, no Age of Warhammer here.

2) Animations are one of the last things polished, I'm sure you've only looked at videos of Chaos Chosen with their giant 2h axes, lol. If you didn't notice, in your precious WoW, go play a warrior with a 2h wep and see how slow the animation is. Oh yeah, unless you spam Mortal Strike...that really takes skill.

..... well, /....

They already included the light effects and spell effects.

If you would change the animations now, they would have to redo the lightning effects and spell effects also. So I think this is it.

The pace of the movement and combat is far too slow. Just look at the thousands of Arena fights on the web. Smooth and fast fighting scenes is what WAR needs.

Actually I really think that one of the biggest selling points for Wow is the control and animation in combat on this micro scale.

You have to FEEL your avatar in REAL time. In most other MMORPG's it is the system that controls your avatar more than you do.

The moment that feeling gets across, you have a winner.

The moment that feeling isn't there you have the usual drift away of players after the initial "new" lauch period. And for PvP games this is even more important. But even for PVE games this is a deciding factor: in LOTRO the very beautiful and excellent views were marred by the somwhat cripled animations.

In the beginning it is all new and wow, but after the initial phase the character control has to be perfect to identify the avatar the player uses.

Conan is an extreme example I think: by having framedrops and a very clunky control system of button smashing you actually lost control of your character in the fighting and people seem to get "bored" with the Simon says mechanism very quicky.

WAR uses the correct MMORPG visuals btw. Higher than this is NOT possible in decent MMORPG's !!! Those who don't understand this should stick to preloaded off line shooters and race games.

Wow insider came with hot news today.

Apparently Blizzard will have a big press conference next week.

Signs are they will announce a new Diablo game.

see www.wowinsider.com

Just look at : today:

http://www.amazon.de/Computerspiele-Games/s/ref=sr_nr_n_1?ie=UTF8&rs=300992&bbn=301129&rnid=541708&rh=n%3A300992%2Cn%3A301129

"Conan bugs balloon" is bursting already in Germany.

I bet they didn't even sell the mentioned 700 K.

"They would produce in the "upcoming weeks" 300 K more copies to satisfy demands. they said 15 days ago....

So tell me why are the racks in Belgian shops still full of Conan boxes ???

Originally posted by AckbarNL

Originally posted by Zorndorf

AoC now falling off the top 40 in games sales on Amazon.com

Position 42 now... on 43 there is the pre-order of Warhammer...

Next....

After Vanguard, LOTRO, Conan, now WAR is the next on line in supposed Wow killers.

Just to let you know I like to play Pirates these days. A very nice little game with no hype and a good boat show and about a zillion less bugs than AoC. So sad this game has so few players.

 

You know wow wasnt number 1 in 1 day. and was not nummer 1 best seller in the first weeks

On the main continent Europe, the Germans already made their decision:

Wow outsells on Amamazon.de Conan on a wide margin  (add up the Wow 4 products btw...and it should be even with a margin of about 2 to 1.

http://www.amazon.de/Computerspiele-Games/s/ref=sr_nr_n_1?ie=UTF8&rs=300992&bbn=301129&rnid=541708&rh=n%3A300992%2Cn%3A301129

Always a BIG indication this very big German speaking market in EU.

LOL

EVERY year it is the same....

Watch out for Everquest 2 it will be so much more than Wow beta (2004)

Watch out for Dungeons and Dragons on line: it will kill Wow (2006)

Watch out for Vanguard:it will take half of ths subs away from Wow.

Watch out for LOTRO: the only REAL fantasy game that will kill Wow.

Watch out for Tabula rasa: the MAKER of UO is developping it himself !

Watch out for Age of Conan: a REAL Wow killer: at least a mult millions subscriptions game.

Watch out for WAR: it will kill Wow, after the left upper cut of AoC it will be the right uppercut of WAR.

Result??? WotLK will launch in Nov with --- team manned mounted Tank combat, air combat, underwater worlds, constuctable keeps, siege systems from Warcrat 3 and sieges both in BG's and in open world PvP.

 WotLK will do for open world PvP what TBC did for Arena: the best PvP fighting on a competitive level.

Ohh btw: WARHAMMER will have ..... loading screens between ... each zone ... and each tier ....

Happy gaming.

My advice is roll a paladin or druid.

End game: choose your playing styles: healer or tank.

With the new epics system in BG's and arena you can have good gear for all specs.

Together with the highly rewarded daily quests (12 gold each quest) you can respec easely. Justbthe cost of doing 4 daily quests !

Be a full tank (protection) a full healer or a full DPS kind of warrior with JUST ONE character and if you like doing PvP in BG's : it is a breeze to gather the gear.

Every group needs healers or tanks, and you can fulfill them both plus being a DPS guy if you wish.

Druids have the advantage of being TOP in arena's also, while Paladins are the number ones in Karazahn as tanks, healer AND dps(patch 2.3)  these days.

It is NO surprise to me that those who played GW  love Conan.

The fact is that they have no idea what an open seamless world is in real MMORPG's.

Again:

In TBC I can take my personal flying mount and FLY ALL over Outland (2x times bigger than the whole Conan lore without EVER meeting a "loading screen".

I can fly over mountains, lakes, rivers, ALL foot and horse bounderies, cities, you name it .

AND I CAN LAND ANYWHERE without EVER finding a loading screen.

This is called MMORPG in a seamless open world.

The world YOU live in.

The fact that you can go to a theater show or opera late at night to do a dungeon or an arena match doesn't destract from this open free world.

The fact is: GW and Conan games are NOT MMORPG's because they DO not have seamless open worlds.

Originally posted by CreDiBles

Yeah it gets 90% from me all round great game and got me back into the PC and of the console.

Was getting bored of Wow anyway.

 

Good to see you back in 10 days  :)))

Stopped playing 10 days ago.

I was the last one of my guild to still come on line BTW :))

Uninstalled the 25 Gigabyte and decompressed the HD.

Installed Pirates. Surprise ! I managed to have a lttile fun again. No hype, no players, but a zillion bugs less.

I want to ask the guys who STILL want to defend this AoC game one simple question....

Suppose IF all features worked perfectly with NO loading zones and NO instances and NO 436883 BUGS.

What's the end game in Conan after grinding the resources for hundreds of hours?

One siege battle of 48 vs 48 with a "Simon says" key hitting feature"???

.../ duh?

Life is just toooo short and beautiful to play such a broken game.

Try all the other MMORPG's please but just get out of this mess.

Just one example: say EVERYTHING worked PERFECTLY.

What do we have  in its end game after grinding for hundreds and hundreds of hours ???

? An "epic" battle system of 48 against 48  with static  Simon says keys.

I can have that one about every minute a day in my game (and it's about 1% of that end game's content)....

AoC now falling off the top 40 in games sales on Amazon.com

Position 42 now... on 43 there is the pre-order of Warhammer...

Next....

After Vanguard, LOTRO, Conan, now WAR is the next on line in supposed Wow killers.

Just to let you know I like to play Pirates these days. A very nice little game with no hype and a good boat show and about a zillion less bugs than AoC. So sad this game has so few players.

2 things bother me.

- Loading screens betweens zones and tiers... Age of Warhammer? It kills things, like it or not. To LEAVE your world everytime you enter a long loading screen (say 20 seconds something). It's lazy programming, it should be avoided. Even if the zones are far from each other: include a boat trip or mount for 30 seconds but NOT DEAD loading screens for 20 seconds. The reactions to Age of Loading were very clear on this one. If you want to create a MMORPG world you do it like Wow or LOTRO (with even better DX10 graphics).

- Already mentioned this a YEAR ago on the WH forums: the PvP fighting/animation is much too slow. It's like some 70 year olds are playing the game.

And NO the slower the better is NOT good: if I want to see a GOOD football match I like to see the pros not the slow moving handicapped sports of a local competition.

This is VERY important for a game based on PvP BTW.

It killed the excellent RvR in DAoC when compared to basic Wow movement/fights. And over the last year it didn't improve an inch. The only things they added are the effects in the fights. So the animation is FAR from the "latest" polishments. It is the prime thing in PvP.

Well, staying on topic.

2 remarks.

Conan just decapitated itself. It was going to be a Wow killer... wasn't it ?

Besides WAR isn't up to old Wow, it is up to WotLK.

Launch date of WotLK will be around the end of Oct/ beginning Nov.

Why?

- Wotlk began already alpfa testing at the beginning of April (TBC began in July and was published in Jan)

- Season 4 starts now on June 24th . BUT. BUT the new season 5 will only start after the leveling to level 80 in WotLK. Meaning about 8 to 10 weeks post WotLK launch. That would be the end of January for the season 5 start, which gives this arena season the usual 6 to 7 months of competition.

- BIG parts of WotLK full Beta will be played on the WW Invitational in Paris next week. These  gameparts  are already being polished to death.

- Vivendi (mother company of Blizzard) very recently "slipped" info in their communications to the shareholders that WotLK was scheduled for a 2008 release.

- Exact dates will NOT be given until a few weeks before launch. Beause they want to react strategically.

- The big surprise in the WotLK will NOT be the new class or the 10 men dungeons raids though. So I doubt they will show much in Paris except for some quests in one or two zones.

Running Wow in 1680 x 1050 resolution with "only" a NVivdea 7600.

All options maximum 24 bits depth.

Always 60 FPS or above.

Curious fight from fans of ...

A game with hardly over 50 K subscribers and the worst MMORPG launch in history...

with fans of

a bugged game with a rather succesful launch but with a very bleak future in number of subscribers.

----

or ... the current situation in the field of MMORPG's...

Originally posted by axe_hero

I have found there is next to no immersion in this game. I don't feel like I am a cimmerian bear shaman running through Hyboria, I feel like I am a guy trying to hit 80 as fast as possible. Im not quite sure why this is but, I think some of the factors are loading screens and poor performance and questing. Questing at higher levels is non existent, forcing you to grind all the way to 80 from a bout 55 or so, which is incredibly tedious and boring. Also, say you start getting in to the game, but then all of a sudden you must sit through a loading screen to cross through some zones. These loading screens really make you not want to explore, and exploring is  a large component of MMOs.

Apart from the bugs  and technical problems....

1. Perhaps the loading screens and fixed entry points etc ... are a bad experiment in on line games.

In Oblivion you were in those cities, you defended that town, YOU helped to find that murderer in a cave in the middle of nowhere and you were living into that world. Oblivion was a great RPG adventure game, perhaps even the best Off line game I played.

On the other hand everyone used fast travel in Oblivion because horse riding was certalnly boring. But for some reason or another excessive use of non functional loading screens in MMORPG's is a kind of degenaration of the open worlds you are supposed to live in.

And of course instances(copies) of  zones are completely breaking the lore feeling.

2. The fighting technique itself is a core. You watch the keybord combos more than "controlling" your avatar. In fact it is like  the system that plays with the players instead of the player controlling his avatar. It is far worse than FPS mechanics and worse than classic solutions. Because of the timers and automatic attacks you can concentrate on the positioning and figthning or spell trics in the more classic MMO's.

3. Conan is further proof that for many it is NOT the higher number of pixels or shades that "sucks you into an MMO. world".

Well as of today (June 21)

at Amazon.com, Conan has fallen out of the top 30 of video games (actually it's in 37 th position now)

in the much smaller dedicated PC games market it is now down to 3, and just before a "pre-order" of Warhammer and behind Spore.

Meaning it is now - hardly one month after launch - on its way back.

This is important, because soon the point of "break even" will arrive: having equal losses of subscribers as new buyers of the game will enter.

This is a  match that FunCom just can't win, because the newer purchases will  no longer be bought by the "hardcore" and the more casual players  will be very surprised of the technical demands of the game.

So those so called extra 300K that would be produced "in the next few weeks" are far from sold out at the moment. Meaning FunCOM pushed between 500K and 700K boxes out of the window in its first 4 weeks.

Still very impressive for a game with so many bugs, but shifting boxes of an MMO is not important. Keeping the clients to PAY for PLAY is.

250 K worldwide subs through the summer period would be a tremendous succes, because that would mean about 35% would further play to play the game in the next 2/3 coming months.

After that it will be struggling time. All the latest launched MMORPG's (last 3 years) were halved in subscriptions 6 to 9 months after launch (see LOTRO or TR) but it could be worse if the polishment doesn't show up.

Don't forget to level to 70.

The new Wow (since Nov 2007) only begins at level 70 really.

Tell us when you enter the first Karazahn fights. :))

Players who didn't play Wow in its end game since Nov 2007do NOT know what they are missing.

Blizzard constantly fine tunes the game into a very open ended number of playing styles and choices.

At level 70:

• Battleground AB, WSG, EoS waits are 15 to 30 seconds now. Log in Wow: hop into a BG and you play within seconds AND gain honor and loot to buy th best epic stuff for your (beginning) l70's.
• Daily qyests in dungeons (heroics) have very short queing times because of the loot in badges and everyone uses the LFG tool to do the heroic daily dungeon (18 different dungeons alternate every day). So if you do 3 dungeons a week, it takes almost 1 to 2 months before you redo the dungeon.
• Raiding is for everyone these days (again the badge loot system is terrific). Reducing the drop chances. No attunement anymore. Meaning people who never raided are now actually learning how to do it in groups of 10.
• Arena is for the hardcore PvP hi competition level guys.  You get your head offered to you in no time. But .... I LOVE those short bursts of energy. Can be played in competition in a hardcore arena rating or just skirmish to have fun. Waiting times were reduced just a few weeks ago to one or two minutes.
• Open world Daily quests in professions like mining, herbalism, fishing make for a full acitivty on the auction house where crafters buy and sell all the stuff everyone needs.
• Daily quests in OPEN WORLD PVP with gold and honor makes  now for HEAVY stuff fighting on PvP servers (Halaa and a littlle less in Terokor Forest). Very BIG battles are reported on PvP servers like Al'Akir on EU. 60 against 60 are no exception and NO lag.
• Respeccing from a HEALING character to a FULL tank or a pure DPS fighter (paladin) costs  just 4 (daily) quests  (50 Gold). Talking of "open choices". I laugh when I hear the opnions of those who never played Wow recently. I have Battleground and bought raiding epics in the 3 branches with my paladin and so change completely in my roles with just ONE character.

So those who didn't play Wow's end game today ... are STILL talking of a "lineair game system from 4 years ago". Nothing could be further from the truth these days.

Wow anoo 2008 at level 70 has completely changed from the dull PvP less "raiding PVE" hardcore game it once was back in 2006.

Just one example: NO other MMORPG has a PvP  e-sports branche in its end game. Only Wow has it.

And WotLK will be a further evolution: choice between 10 persons raids or 25 raids for EVERY raid up until the end bosses and PvP open world - even on PVE serverswith PVP automatic ON - with Air combat and mounted tank combat.

So I pity those who never even tried it at its end game.

Best of all stays the animation of course. In Wow YOU control your character. Not the other way around.