Profile: Arioc
Send PM  Forum Posts  Forum Topics 

Recent Forum Posts [more...]

• • Diablo 3 Forum???

  • Massive = More then a handful of people can be in the same location at the same time and interact. Not just chat, or wait in a lobby to join an instance limited to 4 people.

    HellGate, Guildwars, Diablo, Counterstrike are not in that category. Guildwars allows for a great many people to sit in town and interact, trade, form parties, so it walks that line, but the instances themselves are very limited. Diablo doesn't offer even that, you sit in a chat room, make a game with a handful of friends and join it, fight to the end of the level and end it. The world is not persistent, you're basically replaying the same level from start to finish with some randomization of layout, loot and creatures.

    And yes you can distill that down to say that similar concepts appear in many recent MMO's but those are large persistent worlds where a good many players can gather and interact in the 3d environment.

  • Posted: 6/30/08 3:54 PM
    General Discussion
• • The worst about AoC is: it is BORING

  • Originally posted by Blomi
    

    Just another still-born MMO made by westerners.  I don't understand how Asia can so out-do American/Euro designers in this genra...

    
     

    Huh? Every Asian MMO I've played has been just as shallow if not more-so. They focus on graphics and repedative play far more then immursion, atmosphere or story. Eastern players simply grew up with differant games and have differant expectations and things they look for. They don't care as much about involved quests, affecting the world, or sandbox type play over time. THey don't want slow play-pace, they want lots of sparkaly rewards, pretty graphics and will grind to get them. It's not about right or wrong, it's about what you and your friends grew up with and want from a game now.

    Also remember that alot of players in asia do so in cyber-cafes. Mmo's are not a solitary experience, they're a communal gathering where friends hang out... like a ton of lan-parties. In some respects it's more healthy, but it also means they want simpler rewards for simpler tasks and want to enjoy the comradery of playing with friends less then the escapism of immursive solo play.

     

  • Posted: 6/25/08 7:43 PM
    Age of Conan
• • The worst about AoC is: it is BORING

  • Elikal I completly agree. Firstly it's the heavy instancing, I'm level 45 now over halfway into the game and only now am grouping with people as of level 39 (Sanctum). This partially due to the lack of group quests. So far I've gotten 99% solo quests I can hammer out myself easy and then 1 group quest for a named boss out in the field will drop in my lap. There's no drive to push people to dungeons, nor establish community centers.
    
    WoW did an excellent job of pushing players to community hubs like dungeons. Scripted experiences they would be sure to do because they recieved a slew of quests with enticing rewards to accomplish them. THe rewards for most of my quests in instances have been sub-par to the loot from the bosses themselves. If I looked at the rewards for those quests I might have skipped them all together had I not found a group. Warcraft did a good job of providing 70% of the zones quests for the overland and 30% for the local or adjacent instance of that level range.
    
    Also the way the world is chopped up dosn't help. There's no purpose to hang out in town, all items purchased from town are available elsewhere and drop armor often is better then anything from the stores.
    
    Zones themselves are so heavily instanced that I rarly see 1 or 2 people run by me. I know there's alot of people online but the zones always feel barren.

    Some of the flaw is in the zone layout and design, quest breakcrumbs and rewards don't push you twards the more memmorable locations and experiences. And the more interesting stuff dosn't begin till yer 1/2 way through the game. It's not like WoW were at level 20 you're in deadmines or blackfathom and already experiiencing a memmorable adventure.
    
    Likewise these instances are few and spread apart level range wise as well. Some zones span 14 levels of play while some dungeons span.. 2? Sanctum is listed as 37-39.. sure you can go in after 40 but at that point you've already begun to item-farm the boss's for blue armor drops.

    I also don't get a sense of an over-arching storyline or plot developing. Individual people are suffering individual problems I help with but I am not slowly uncovering a plot or drawing closer to some archeevils master plan. I just don't feel like I'm progressing in a story.

  • Posted: 6/25/08 7:39 PM
    Age of Conan
• • Need help with design document software.hunting!

  • I've got a large ammount of information, which became too unweildy to search and sort in a single word document (as well as taking a while to open) so I moved it all over to a small web-site, wiki-esqe but simple enough to sort all the pages in a branching tree view on the left for easy catagorization. As the data flowed in I found I spent too much time trying to format the stuff in HTML to avoid the useless ammounts of code generated by WYSIWYG editors and their CSS tags.
    
    Now I have a bunch of info, with tables and alot of custom artwork and concept art I've done I need to port to something that's less technical but just as robust for page layout. I guess I ultimatly need something that lets me keep the individual pages in RTF or DOC's so I can use advanced page layout, tables, and such to keep the pages looking pretty as well as readable.
    
    I've done some extensive searching online and found some TreeNote and zNote programs which offer the ability to create collapsable trees of nodes and built in Rich Text editors to allow you to organize info, but the software felt very home-brew and the formatting was rather primitive (can't even wrap text around images).
    
    Does anyone know of any software, or some sort of small wiki package that is quick to launch, allows for easy WYSIWYG sort of formatting and allows me to keep the info/pages organized in tree view on the left?

    I don't know what software you guys use for your personal design documents, but mine has gone beyond the scope of easy handling in a single word DOC but I need the cross-reference ability to refer to other pages so I can't cut it up into completely isolated documents.

  • Posted: 6/15/08 10:00 PM
    General Discussion
• • do you need a free trial before your willing to buy aoc after what you ve heard about or experianced in the beta ???

  • There's still time before release, so I'm waiting for more performance patches. I like the game, but the performance is the biggest reason I am hesitant to pick it up. The last patch really improved stability, and I was very impressed, however in some locations like the area you're sent to right after the level 1-19 island, I simply cannot play without horrid framerate, which makes the game unplayable and eventually locks up and crashes. I don't know if it's an issue of batch count due to an over-use of unique objects in an area, or what but on a less then 1 year old system with a nivida 8800 and 2gigs of ram I don't expect this sort of hitching. Again, it's beta so I'm not making any final descisions yet, hopeing for an optomization patch.

  • Posted: 5/12/08 12:27 PM
    Age of Conan