My 20 most favourite games ever

- M.U.L.E. - Ozark Softscape - C64 - 1983

- Utopia - Don Daglow - Intellivision - 1982

- NHL 94 - EA Sports - GEN - 1993

- Ultima Online - Origin Systems - PC - 1997

- Bard's Tale III - Interplay - C64 - 1988

- Mars Saga - Westwood Associates - C64 - 1988

- John Madden Football 93 - EA Sports - GEN - 1992

- Wasteland - Interplay - C64 - 1988

- AD&D Treasures of Tarmin - Tom Loughry - Intellivision - 1983

- Championship Manager - Collyer Bros - Amiga - 1992

- Portal - Valve - PC - 2007

- Laser Squad - Julian Gollop - C64 - 1988

- Disgaea - Nippon Ichi Software - PS2 - 2003

- Pirates! - Sid Meier/Microprose - C64/Amiga - 1987

- Half Life - Valve - PC - 1998

- Archon - Free Fall Associates - C64 - 1983

- Phantasy Star 2 - Rieko Kodama/SEGA - GEN - 1989

- Demon's Souls - From Software - PS3 - 2009

- Kick Off - Dino Dini - Amiga - 1989

Star Wars: The Old Republic

I know you don't want to hear people unhappy with SWTOR, but let me vent my frustration here just one more final time. If possible I'm liking it even less than the beta. Republic Trooper story is horrible so far compared to Empire Bounty Hunter, and having played Mass Effect a lot in the last 2 weeks only made things worse. All my other qualms stay, clunky interface, bland combat, horrible encounters, poor dungeons, pathetic itemization, sad ugly empty and cardboardy world, utterly subpar questing, lack of customization, poor visuals, terrible pvp, ...but at least the storytelling was great. While now, I feel that once again we set our bar so very low just because "it's an MMO", cause what we have here, storytelling-wise, is a cheap version of stuff that this same software house was doing about 5 years ago.

Also, this is certainly me, but the whole design of the game makes it hard for me to play it with people considering that I want to follow the story and listen to the dialogues but everyone chattering in TeamSpeak/Ventrilo inevitably take away from the cinematic (?) mood of it. As a result, either we quest together and everyone pressures you into clicking as fast as possible (or they just talk over stuff, see above), or I turn voice chat off and play it as a single player which doesn't hold a candle to much much older titles.

This game could have been awesome, epic, great. They had the tools, the people and the money to make it. It's depressing to see how generally disappointing the final product is.

I was wrong about Vanguard (march 23, 2007)

Reply #77 on: March 23, 2007, 05:47:37 am

I wanted to do this since a couple of weeks. I stopped playing Vanguard. And I have to admit that I was wrong about lots of things.

So yes, I was wrong, you all (not you Geldon) were right and yeah I'll stay grounded for the rest of the week.

I think it would be too long to list them all and explain why Vanguard ended up boring me to death, especially because many of the reasons already came up on these boards million of times turned out to be true.

I just want to point out what really killed me: the world.

Again, I was wrong: this game is NOT the explorer heaven I thought and preached it was. Because yes, as many of you said back in the days, it looks too much of the same wherever you go. It's huge, and there are for sure Points of Interests, but what really lacks is a "change of pace". I mean, you know in other games when you are bored of a certain zone/theme and you decide to go elsewhere just to have a completely different colour palette, theme, mobs, atmosphere? This basically can't happen in Vanguard. If you are in Thestra, that is the largest continent and it is VERY large, you will be in Thestra for the rest of your life! It doesn't matter if you'll go to the elven city or the dwarf/human/whatever city... it'll be more of the same! Don't get me wrong, New Targonor has beautiful buildings and architecture and I still thinks it's a beautiful world after all, but it completely lacks variations.

The game has slow progression so you are forced to stay in a single place for a long time anyway, but as soon as you learn that in 10 or 20 levels it will be basically more of the same, than your will to live starts crumbling to pieces.

Hiding and going into dungeons is the only way to save yourself from the attack of the too-real world but of course you can't go in there unless you have a good group (crappy group means endless Corpse Runs and usually some delevelling is involved too), so you are stuck to live in the usual green/brown hills killing the same old mobs for days hoping that maybe one day they'll patch in I don't know what maybe an alien world with some different colour or theme.

But I already wrote too much, and I'll sum it up:

- The seamless world idea turned out to be bad to me. I enjoyed gazing to the horizon but in the end it's best to have more foggy shortsighted old kind of worlds and more different places to visit. And I mean really different. The EQ2, EQ1, WoW.. well.. every other game's way.

- The graphics are bad in a not-fascinating way. So after 6 weeks of playing you are not so curious anymore about what will come, because apparently nothing will come. Not in a human sized time-frame. Mobs are just awful, seriously awful. Some of them are uglier than EQ1 ones. It's just uncanny.

- The dungeons that should give that "different theme" feeling are just, in most cases, pretty ugly. I tried all the dungeon I could try hoping that the next one could refresh my will to play and expectations of good things to come, but it basically never happened. Dungeons are ugly. To understand what I am saying just consider Befallen in EQ1 and you'll have a dungeon that is 10 times better of any of the dungeons I visited in Vanguard in 6 weeks. Not to mention places like Unrest or Mistmoore, and I am talking about the original EQ, not EQ2 (that has incredibly good dungeons too, especially compared to VG ones). *sigh*

- It completely fails to recreate the EQ1 kind of magic in all aspects. I remember a Freeport where you could be slain by a NPC in an inn just because of some nasty ill faction stuff or just being the follower of the "wrong" god, or amazing "secret" places like the sewers with high level sunken corpses. Nothing like that is here apparently. I know it wasn't fun to be killed at level 5 in your city by a crazy NPC, but it made for a creepy gaming experience. So far, Vanguard couldn't surprise me save for a couple of starter quests (showing that they gave their best for the first introductory quests, and the rests is plain dull, and duller as you progress).

- The supposedly neat stuff like Diplomacy and Crafting is actually there, houses, boats.. it's all good, but it's not even remotely close to the "worldly" feeling of Ultima Online (an example that I guess will be fixed is the lack of a function to recall to your house. I am sure they'll add it later, but it's not in now) so part of their appeal is missing and the funnever really kicks in. Plus, if the world is boring you are not compelled to "live" in it.

My final note:

The game is good for a diku, and I am sure it will be even better in a couple of years thanks to improvements in all areas and especially addition of features on an already pretty solid base. But unless they put in some new ZONES with COMPLETELY DIFFERENT themes I doubt it'll be ever able to lure me back. I don't care how good are the special moves or combat animations in a MMO if it is unable to give me the illusion of visiting many different places or have me interested in exploring its dungeons.

I want to conclude with something I scavenged from my memory and my hard disk and I feel this is very important given that I am now convinced that it's the "seamless" world that killed it for me, especially thinking about all the goodness you can still have in zone-based games, even better when zones borders are of the soft kind like in WoW. It's a 2002 interview to Brad McQuaid mostly about EverQuest 1 where he said something that makes me want to kill him with a 9-iron. It's 2002 so I guess the design documents for VG were already inked on paper and preproduction was supposedly already started:

Quote from: Brad McQuaid

Another very important aspect of the game and a goal from day one is how immersive and vast the world is. EQ has been criticized for being zone-based (as opposed to seamless), but look at what it allowed us to do. Whereas seamless worlds, at least with today's technology, require less detail, texture variation, and variety of objects and other points of interest, having a zone based engine allowed EQ's world builders to create well over a hundred unique and interesting places to explore. And then it's not just the detail in the world, but also the content in terms of NPC models, quests, items, etc. I think EQ really set the high bar there and also proved just how important depth and detail really is.

WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU BRAD? ARE YOU DISCONNECTED FROM YOURSELF?! YOU TWO GO SEE A FUCKING DOCTOR, NOW!

But it's too late I guess. I am stuck with my mistakes and the time I wasted saying stupid good things about Vanguard, a game that, as for now, is about 5 times less interesting than its predecessor.

Once again I was wrong, you were right and I am sorry. Just thought it was fair to let you know about it.

Age of Conan - What went wrong?

What went wrong?

1. Performance issues, especially at launch. Things are way better now but many have left already. Stuttering, crashes, game not starting at all wear people's patience down.

2. Too much soloing. Too much power to the loners, as in the chance to play all the way solo to 80. That, in the post WoW era (when a solo-viable MMORPG was very much needed), isn't such a good idea cause everyone is a little more burnout on the genre than they were pre-wow and need solo-viability coupled with gentle and easy group-content. ie: dungeons (see below). Otherwise they'll rejoice for the solo play capabilities only to feel utterly lonely and bored after forty levels or something. As someone else said, there are better single player games around, so they shouldn't abuse of solo-friendliness in multplayer games. That backfires.

3. Lack of rewarding group-casual dungeons. Dungeons aren't fulfilling enough and they fail to provide both a social-enhancing and a gamistic-rewarding experience. They are too hard hence need full commitment, a good group with a much coveted guardian and 6 players. They force you in there after spoiling you to play alone at a relaxed pace for 40 levels. No one wants that, unless it rains rare stuff and the effort is minimal. Which is the opposite of what is required (unless you do them at a higher level). And itemization (see below) for many dungeons came too late.

4. Itemization. Itemization was so stupid in the first 3 weeks that I think the game retained more player than expected. Everything was SO brown that, realism or not, you felt nauseous about it. Now things are slightly better, but a level 30-ish player is stuck in brown mode and he has no way to think things will get any better. Nausea, disappointment, quit. Also, stats and bonus are so moronic they don't make items cool at all, not even in the numbers dept. People like big numbers, +50 Defense Bonus, so there's nothing more depressing than getting a +0.1% defense bonus jacket at level 1 and a +0.2% defense bonus shirt at level 30. Even numbers are brown in AoC, and the UI (see below) doesn't help.

5. User Interface. Totally uninspired. Icons are great honestly, but the inventory/character sheet are WAY uglier than 7 years old Anarchy Online ones just to mention something Funcom. Fonts are ugly, "rolling 3d item thumbs" are SWG ugly, inventory pages is just IDIOT and numbers are once again too sparse, too small and too brown/white. This game needed a little more coloring for item descriptions, better fonts, better icons for items (skills/spells/combo ones are fine). When you get a blue/purple item you don't want a smallish dull list of 0.6 bonus, you want some noticeable figures that stands out when mousing over it.
Non existant Guild management tools, ugly and buggy friend lists and all around plain or lacking menus stink bad in 2008. Big mistake here (yes, better one is in the works. Who cares about tomorrow? Things went wrong here YESTERDAY).


6. Lacking features. For a PvP oriented game, the total lack of incentives is depressing both for hardcore killers and casual battlegrounders. No reasons to play leads to empty battlegrounds, or empty wins in the open areas. As much as it can be fun, too many couldn't start a single minigame due to the lack of players, and the few they participated in felt useless, confusing and not-rewarding (especially because they very much likely died in a matter of seconds). The lack of features could have been less blatant if it wasn't all about the most new/interesting/publicized aspects of AoC: player cities (not working or useless) and PvP (useless, or as we like to say "not-meaningful"). Hell, they even stopped mentioning border kingdom's Towers for smaller guilds. That's backstabbing all the smaller guilds who will never be able to fight for a BK or even just gather the shittons of required resources to go T3.

7. Bugs, so many. Playerbase will forgive you if you feed them with solutions and other things to keep them busy. It doesn't matter how fast they patch, there's a strong perception that something is lacking from the game and it wasn't patched in soon enough. Not to mention the perception that bugs weren't all squashed soon enough. Many are being forgiving with Funcom because they are neglecting the 6 afore-mentioned reasons anyway. But whoever sooner or later got hit by one of those, simply had no reason nor will to cut Funcom some slack, especially since they were paying for it.

8. Finally, Players' burnout. In 2008 no one is fresh enough to accept troubled gaming experiences, and that coupled with that old feeling of "been there, done that already, thousand times" doesn't help a game that, despite being very well crafted on some aspects, lacks some of the features that could make it [i]different enough[/i]. In the end Age of Conan felt "old" too soon to experienced MMORPG players, especially because of one or all the 7 aforementioned reasons, and while I don't really know how new MMORPG (read Warhammer) will do in the future, I am now even more sure than I was that you really need: 1. A cool interface, 2. great itemization, 3. smoother performances and 4. a couple of SERIOUSLY new features. Conan, while being the game I am loving much more than I expected, lacks so far 3 and a half of these elements.


It all sounds like a fiasco. I think it is definitely not. Something went wrong if everyone was SO hyped up despite all the bugs in the first 2 weeks and simply let it fall after 14 days. But all the points I made up there are fixable in a few months and I am confident they will. I wonder if it will ever be enough to gain back all the escaped players. First impression rules everything, the buzz, the hype, and the cool smart kids are pretty much done with it. The game needs ironing out point 1 to 7 so bad. It can be fixed, now they just need to stand out with what they promised and that is not just blood 'n boobs.



( Posted on f13, and on the stupid AoC official boards too: )

A (brief) ode to EVE

I remember back in 2002 when me and some friends were waiting for EVE drooling on our keyboards and worshipping every single bits of news we could get about it, one day while looking for info on combat (because we and many other didn't have a clue about how it was supposed to work) I stumbled on a comment which was like this:

"EVE's combat will be much more like Magic the Gathering than Tie Fighter or Wing Commander. It will be all about strategy, customization and countering"

That shocked me, as I was definitely waiting for twitch massive combat, but what's not to like in Strategy, Customization and Countering if done the right way?

Well, you may not be into M:tG but in so many ways EVE is a miracle of a game, if nothing else because you can play the most stylish card game ever, without having to pay for booster packs, and you got to do it online with friends while smelling adrenaline and sipping bile. Glorious.

More on Lineage 2 - The secret

Originally posted as a random post on f13.net - This is 16 months after the previous post.

--

I finally completed the Class Change (a joke, a joke! that should be illegal! It's dehumanizing to do three stupid LONG quests like those to just get your final class... at level 40.. after DAYS of /played!!!) and I am now a level 42 Gladiator, so while still lightyears away from the coregame, I know a few things more about this monstruosity called Lineage 2.

I could talk, again, about what works and what not, what's peculiar and should be cloned (Olympiad, Manor system) and what has just been cloned in (Instances, Keeps) from other games. Anyone cares? Everyone knows that. And everyone knows that Lineage 2, no matter what, isn't by no means a great MMORPG.

But I think that beyond its merits and demerits there's some kind of bizarre originality in L2 that makes it quite unique and hypnotic.
The ridicolous speed at which you mow through mobs, the flashing lights of clashing swords and soulshots, the incredible (still unsurpassed 4 years later) characters graphics and the amazing weapons and clothing arts, the robotic, metallic, essential interface, the unearthly background and animal sounds, the enigmatically smiling and beautifully painted NPCs, the looping bits of music...

I'd say L2 is the coldest and more subtly original online world I've ever touched, it can make you feel lonely like nothing else while you mechanically whack for hours in the dangerous (xp loss) deeps of a dungeon, and there's something unsettling and addictive in it that keeps vibrating in your bowels like a subsonic bassline on a frequency too low to be clearly perceived.

Don't get me wrong. It's not healthy and most people are luckily and totally immune to it, but I can't stop to find L2 totally fascinating in a morbid way.
Everyone in Asia cloned it thousands of times, but no one cloned its extraterrestrial nature.

Lineage 2, one year ago

Posted on f13 September 29th 2006, I copypaste it here cause I was looking for it and couldn't find it. Next time it'll be easier.

--

Out of masochism I recently started playing Lineage 2 with some of my rl friends.
We were looking for some evil PvP action and checked Shadowbane. Uh.. no.. my eyes... (did they downgraded the engine and the UI since 2002?)

So we derailed on L2 with the "excuse" of the new server.

Falconeer's short-range perspective on Lineage 2 in September 2006 - Chronicle 5 era:

The CONS:

- The grind is as bad as you think
- The grind is actually way badder than you think
- The grind is insane
- Quests are a joke
- The colour palette, except for player characters, is a little too medieval (green, brown, gray. That's it)
- The world could use some more points of interest. Or just some without the more.
- You move so slowly. Oh soooo slowly. And there are no mounts for players with a life. Although you could get one if you are a cultist of the Lineage 2 church and live your life along. To meet your friends or go to dungeons and so on you have to walk for hours or pay some VERY expensive (at least at lower levels) teleports. You are "invited" to explore the world in a first generation of mmorpg fashion. Actually I like that, but I am pretty sure no one else does.
- Point and click could be bearable, while targeting is an electronic nightmare, especially during raids or when mobs chase your healer.
- The interface is close to useless. Another joke.
- TO get your "final" class you have to level to 40 (forty). That will take you between 15 and 60 days. Before that you are a close to a generic dummy. Sword, dagger or cast. Not much more than that, no matter the 16 subclasses. That hurt replayabilty. Who in hell would reroll a char when you have to play for more than a month just to get to the first level of your true class? (and that's where the grind gets REALLY evil...)
- There's close to no loot. Mobs drop money and some crafting materials. Anything else is as rare as Magnolia-like frograin.
- Money are EVERYTHING. THey are actually more important than level to a certain degree. And that means BOTS and lots of ubertwinked players that you know bought money on eBay.
- Bots
- Farmers
- Bots
- Farmers
- Bots
- Bots
- Farmers
- FarmerBots
- more Bots
- more Bots
- ok stop Bots...

The PROS:

- It's PvP oriented, definitely. When you die you lose XP and CAN LOSE one of your item. Equipped too, uber super fabled epic too. There's no insurance here. And you can loot that stuff too, of course.
- The character visuals are still unbeaten in my opinion. Gorgeous. Little stiff, a bit robotic, but you'll get great screenshots :)
- The world, although bland and empty for the most part, sports some nice vistas and the whole thing really looks medieval, not fantasy. Cities, shops, buildings and everything it's not bland empty forest looks great. Score for me.
- Sieges look fun (too soon for me tho)
- 31 classes are the higher number in any mmorpg for all I know, and they fill their roles very well. Plus all the classes got some rebalancing after Chronicle 5 so now they "are supposed" to beat each other according to a Rock-Paper-Scissor mechanic. Has to be verified. Oh, you can't walk through players and mobs. They are all, mmh, very solid. Griefers love to corner you.
- Servers are always full, in a positive way. The world, actally all of them, feels alive. And I especially love the no-auction house policy. That's not user friendly but it's fun. You have to browse the market stalls and looks for the best deals. Again, UO nostalgia. VENDOR BUY!
- Clan structure has just been revamped. The Clan management is fascinating and the whole "politics" part of the game is apparently well served by the clan system, clan wars mechanics and new alliance rules.
- Fighting other guilds over a (unique) Guild Hall can't be boring.
- The interface is useless, as stated before, but elegant.
- The mechanic surrounding the "enchantment" of weapons and armours is EVIL to the core (everytime you try an enchantment your weapon could get stronger and gain a glow, or get broken and trashed), but addictive. It's like Russian Roulette in a videogame. Too bad people who buy eBay money screw this.
- That "old mean feeling" from preTrammel UO. You go out, you watch your shoulders, you get chased, you get ganked, you gank back.. you lose your uber Armor, you loot back a Super Staff of looting. All that eclosed in a "political setting" where you can wage war on opposing guilds, threaten them to give your mercenary support to their enemies on the next siege, exact tributes from nearby villages and things like that. Some of us love that.
- Franz, a new server, just started. We are there, and we get into this just for that. a "new world" with castles still to be taken and economy still to be screwed.

Bottom line:

This game requires friends. RL friends are even better.
If you manage to play with Teamspeak, chatting and joking while doing the grind part, then you can survive L2 to the point where things *can get* interesting. Another good tip is to use the phone. I recently discovered that I love to grind while I am on the phone. It's just like drawing mindlessly or simply dangling my slippers... it's so automatic and catatonic that it's a perfect subconscious activity. So whenever you pick up the phone, start L2 and grind. It works, really.

It helps the fact that about 6 "expansions" are out for this game. Every chronicle added lots of things and they are definitely there. Lots of "minigames" and other special mechanics introduced with every update (the Manor syste, although often exploited, is a very interesting and unique one) definitely add to the content side of Lineage 2. So maybe they are not so honest when they say "6 expansions", but those 6 chronicles could count easily as 3 EQ2 retail ones.

But that said, Lineage 2 is too grindy and too money driven (meaning too bot infested and eBay friendly) for being seriously considered as fun. It has "aspects" that are unique and very fun. I am just not sure that there's actually room to see those if you are not really into it with a bunch of friends to ease the pain.