All Posts by jakin

"Next-gen" is perfectly appropriate.  WAR takes elements from WoW, elements from DAoC, and probably several other games and rolls them into one package with a handful of their own innovations.  That is exactly what next-gen is now and always will be.

WoW was the next generation of the EQ model.  Did they do anything different fundamentally?  No.  They polished, improved and did some minor innovations.

People in general don't play games that are wildly different from what they know.  Commercial success depends on a game being familliar enough to the player base while fixing or improving on some of the problems from the last generation.

Also - I can't believe that no one mentioned this yet, but this is Warhammer AT LAUNCH.  It is a full and complete game with all it's parts and features that were expected AT LAUNCH.  WoW didn't have half these things when they launched.  In four years WAR is going to have gone that much further and WoW will be as dated as EQ is now.

Hehe - well, the fact that it has taken this long to get a response on Pirates of the Burning Sea should tell you something already but...

PotBS has a fairly large number of quests.  The game mechanics are all instanced - so every "quest" (could also read mission here) you take you will load into from the dock NPC. 

There are ship-based missions which are basically either escort, destroy, or escape missions (sometimes timed, sometimes not).  Unfortunately most missions have been generated from templates - which means you will see the same exact mission over and over and over just with different boats in the various spawn points.  They're starting to put in some handcrafted ones as well - but it's mostly the template ones.

There are also avatar combat missions, again either escort or destroy and all instanced.  Whether you like the avatar combat system in general will determine whether these missions are kinda cool or as painful as a root canal.

By and large the quest text is well-written, but the actual missions leave a lot to be desired IMO.

General wisdom was always that the missions are the best source of cash while hunting down pirates on the Open Sea was the best source of XP.  It may have changed since I played though.  I know that they've introduced a few repeatable missions that people farm for cash though.

There is a quest-line that continues through the entire game that was well-written and more involving for the parts that I did - but that is really only a minority of the missions you can take.

One final point that should probably be mentioned - PotBS is a PvP game.  It is very possible for the ports you need to get to to continue your missions to be blocked by PvP zones.  If you're strictly PvE this may be a problem for you.

Voted LOTRO for your situation - but with an amplification (all IMO of course).

If you haven't tried PvMP yet give it a go.  If the experience there is something you find you really like, then I'd recommend trying Warhammer (they're similar enough to get some idea if it's what you might like).  If it's an alright experience but nothing great - stick with Lord of the Rings.

You've really only got a few choices there if you go by the "having fun" metric.  No matter what the votes are, playing Guild Wars or Vanguard isn't likely to ever be for you because they're just not grabbing you. 

I feel very similarily to you with Ryzom - ultimate freedom to do whatever you want (as long as what you want is to do one of four basic activities for a very long time), so that's probably out too.

UO sounds like first love syndrome, but it's never as good as your memories. (SWG is mine)

So it's really just between WoW, LOTRO (new WoW), AoC (six months to a year away from being ready for primetime), and WAR (WoW - LOTRO + PvMP + some innovations).

Good luck with it.  Faced with a similar choice to yourself, I personally liked the PvMP aspect of Lord of the Rings far more than the rest of the game so I'm going to give WAR a try.

Originally posted by Antaran

Originally posted by rikilii

There is.  Eve Online.  Play it and quit whining.

 

EVE online is NOT an MMORPG....  it's a MMOSG (Massively Multiplayer Online Space Game) it's basically Freelancer online..  and yes i have played the FULL trial from start to finish, 6 hours a day till it ended.

WTF?

How is the genre (space) related to being an RPG (role-playing game)?

Originally posted by Wickersham

Originally posted by Enigma

Imagine the ENTIRE country.  It would be tens of trillions of dollars. Japan would invest about 100 billion and they're done. Unfortunately, for the US a hundred billion will cover 2 to 5 states or just New York alone.

Canada...

Canada, while geographically larger than the States, has far fewer people spread over a much smaller area.  Canada has an order of magnitude (10x) fewer people than the US and about 3/4 of them live within 150 KM of the border.  A very large proportion of those people live in the Golden Horseshoe in Southern Ontario.

Same principles apply - smaller geographic area to cover means that the costs are relatively cheaper to get upgraded connectivity to a large proportion of the population. 

Animations can be changed, graphics can be updated, gear can be made more impressive / better looking.

Gameplay is pretty much set.  As long as the game plays well and is fun it's worth playing to me.

Strangely enough - I see Warhammer as taking the only part of LotRO that was at all interesting and building a game around it.

/shrug

To each their own.  I'm just glad I decided not to go for the lifetime membership.

Frankly I'd be shocked if any game were "balanced" all the way through - much less this one in particular.

There are going to be rough patches to any game where the sides are not carbon copies of one-another.  I'm sure there'll be some point in the leveling curve where the Destruction side is getting hammered over and over.

I honestly wouldn't worry a great deal about your stats.  They genuinely don't make a huge deal of difference in the grand scheme unless you wildly imbalance them - and since you're just starting out, that has the potential to cause you some headaches down the road if you gib one stat completely.

I'd personally recommend that you try to even out the stats as much as possible from your starting point.  You'll eventually train as many as 9 (or maybe 10) points of learning skills in whichever stats you think you'll use most - plus get +3 or +4 (eventually maybe +5) to various (or all) stats from implants.  So the couple of points you're allocating now aren't a huge deal.

Be sure that Caldari is the race you want to play (from the standpoint of the ships / weapon types you'll get initial training in) and set a goal ship build you want to work towards.

Some players will suggest training the learning skills immediately.  I'd disagree.  I'd suggest you train skills that give you some combat utility (if you're looking to be a combat type) first - spaceship command, racial frigate, racial weapons, etc.  (If you're smart about initial skill choice you can start out with a lot of these trained quite high off the bat)

Once you've got some good combat utility I'd alternate in some learning skills (up to about level 3) with your other utility skills (Electronics and Engineering) before really settling down to train the learning level 4, 5 and advanced learning skills.

If you're going to be an EVE player on the long term you'll eventually want to have the advanced learning to level 3 or 4 in all fields - but it's not crucial right off the bat.  Make sure you're also training skills that let you actually fly missions or whatever you're going to do to make money.

Small companies also make pretty bad games:

RedBedlam (Roma Victor), Farlan (D&L), Flying Labs (PotBS), Virtrium (Horizons).

Pretty much the only thing that can be said is that (Blizzard aside) pretty much all the successful companies now in the genre started from humble beginnings and saw many other companies / games fall along the way.

/shrug

If it launches and is stable / reasonably complete / fun enough to give it a try I'll probably play both.

Why would it be one or the other?

The whole problem people have with EVE's real-time skill system confuses me.  Could someone that hates it explain their view to me?

I mean - for sake of thought experimentation let's say EVE changed overnight to an XP-per-use system as in most other sandbox skill-based games (Ryzom for instance).

So now when you log in you've bought your missile skills and they're at level 0, allowing you to use missiles with some effectiveness.  You undock and blow up some ships with missiles and gain both XP and money (rather than just money as is now).  After about ten minutes of combat with enemies you can defeat with your low-leveled skills you get to level 1 and get increased damage (as well as the pre-req for other skills that increase other missile attributes).

The next level would require an average of an hour or two in combat, the one after that would take 20-30 hours on average, and the one after that would take 50-60 hours (ish), and the final one would take a monumental amount of time - weeks of straight combat (remember there are only 5 levels to each skill).

How is bashing widgets over and over and over again to get to Level 5 missile user any better than having it train in real time?

Does the problem come with the amount of time that it takes?  Does it take too long to train the skills?

That's the thing I don't get really.  It's going to take a certain amount of time to get the skills regardless - this is the same for any game with a deep skill system.  Sure the play-for-20-hours set are going to be able to cut that time down, but the vast majority of the population is going to take the same amount of time to get to "max level".  Whether that time is a non-negotiable period (X days) or a flexible one (Y number of widgets at Z amount of XP, giving you an XP per hour figure) doesn't really change the fundamentals does it?

The only difference between skills in EVE and Ryzom (for instance - I play both) is that if I don't have time to play EVE for a while I can continue advancing skills whereas in Ryzom I'm going to be in the same place as when I last stopped playing.

That and the fact that Ryzom does eventually top out in skills that you can advance - whereas EVE only tops out on a per-ship or a per-career basis (but you are then allowed to go start training for a new role or a new career).

Isn't wikipedia the first place people look?

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

Seems to be working well enough (though I really have no basis for comparison).

I played for a few hours Monday without a hitch (still on Silan on Arispotle (sp?)).  Got dropped twice (rolled-back) on Tuesday as there is apparently a bug where guild invites can cause the server to burp.

There was a CSR there immediately in universe chat though - helping whoever it was to add to the guild without killing the server.

Being a long time MMO player I wanted to like this game.  Unfortunately there just isn't much there to like.

Don't worry too much though, I don't think PotBS is in danger of shutting down - feel free to like it as much as you want.  It will always have some appeal to a certain population.