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Post by Sosa on Jun 3, 2010 14:19:57 GMT -5
I don't really have a problem with Free to Play games as long as they're actually free to play. If the game forces people to buy items in order to advance and models its entire economy based on this fact, or if it charges fees for basic necessities of gameplay like player storage, it's not a Free to Play game - it's a Hidden Cost game.
This becomes a problem when you have a company that makes questionable decisions regarding their pricing model (like Cryptic) such as charging players to purchase the game, charging them for a subscription cost, and then also charging them with gameplay enhancing microtransactions on top of everything else.
I understand that as a business, they are not producing a game out of charity. The point is to make money off it. The trick will be coming to a reasonable balance between providing a game that people will actually want to play and then giving them incentive to want to purchase additional bells and whistles without making them feel like they're being nickled and dimed for everything.
My interest in this game (and most other people's, I assume) depends mostly on which direction they decide to go with their free to play model.
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Post by Sosa on May 28, 2010 22:29:08 GMT -5
And therein lies the basic problem. Creating your character is about 50% of the fun to be had in the game. Give another 20-30% over to being able to freely experiment with powers as you progress, before you find out that half of them are useless for your character because you don't follow a specific build or gimmick. The last 20-30% is basically the "honeymoon period" where you're genuinely having fun running around, doing missions and very, very very occasionally teaming up to do a lair or two. Once the honeymoon phase wears off, you realize that there's barely enough content to even get to the level cap, you can plow through it very quickly, and there's no real endgame content to speak of (and PVP is completely unplayable unless you are willing to submit to one of a scant few gimmicky flavor of the now builds.)
All that leaves is creating new characters for the fun of it (you'll have to run through all the exact same content on this character by the way, since there isn't enough for you to pick and choose what to do or where to go.) And hey, you can get your fill of that in the demo.
This is essentially the reason I am hesitant to ever hand my hard-earned money over to Cryptic again. Their business model is very simple. Charge you for the game, charge you to play it per month, and then charge you for as many "bells and whistles" as they can possibly get away with at the cost of regular content updates. People were already complaining about the lack of content and game areas and felt it had a large number of bugs that had been lingering since release when Cryptic announced: the Vibora Bay mini-expansion for ~$15.00. Three levels of content (37-40) for $15. Needless to say, the community backlash was frightening. Cryptic ended up releasing the Vibora Bay pack as a "free service" to the community.
Off the top of my head, I remember there being: Rocket Boots, "normal" Flight, Fire Flight, Elemental Flight (ie: you float around on rocks/clouds,) and Ice Sliding (which is more or less flight, think Iceman.) The diversity of powers is definately one of the game's strongest points, though, in the case of travel powers, half of them are just analogues for the same generic flight ability. Swinging and Teleport are actually fairly different, but allow for the same degree of vertical movement. Super Jump / Rocket Boots also affords a lot of vertical freedom.
The promise of what endgame could be is what keeps me interested in the game. There are some really great[/b] ideas, like the Nemesis system, which is actually a pretty good analogue of the game as a whole. It allows you to create your own evil adversary with which to do Nemesis missions. Unfortunately, it's in a very incomplete state, with very few creative options and fewer practical in game reasons to actually use the system.
Anyway, wall of text response, sorry. I hadn't really gone over the negative aspects of the game prior to gushing about it in its pre-release state (which was looking pretty good at the time.) Just wanted to get them out there so people would know what they were getting into.
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Post by Sosa on May 27, 2010 20:56:42 GMT -5
I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the game took a massive overnight dive in quality on what was literally the day before retail release, in an infamous patch that radically unbalanced the game for months afterwords.
Friends that are still playing the game have said that most of the initial launch issues have been fixed at this point, but that the game is still pretty far from where it needs to be to be a competitive MMO.
Definitely a try-before-you buy game, just be aware that the game has barely enough content in it currently to get your character to the level cap, and has basically no endgame content to speak of. It had... and still has a lot of potential. At some point before XIV comes out, I may revisit it.
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Post by Sosa on May 19, 2010 12:57:02 GMT -5
4 Disk long game, It suffers from compression issues already, SE cut out enough data to make a whole other game. What doesn't sound like a limitation of the DVD9 here? But its not a which system is better then the other. No doubt any game made to utilize a single platform will use the strengths of that platform without having to worry about the weakness of another. Nomura promised that this game would exceed FFXIII due to the freeness of the blu-ray drive in which he would use to create a vast and open world, something he could not do on a multiplatform game. He simply stated he wanted to use the strengths of the PS3. But...before we get too ahead of ourselves....Wada issued a statement that we shouldn't read into what he said. It was an example used to illustrate that nothing is in stone until the game is officially announced. True, but this makes a lot of assumptions about what "Open world" means. If they go with a classic Final Fantasy world map, for example, it would necessarily need to be made in scale. This being the case, it is unlikely that it would be significantly larger than any of the other large areas of the game. If, instead, they mean completely open-ended exploration: ie, game areas transition seamlessly to other game areas (similar to what we saw in FFXII, but with larger areas,) then yes, it could potentially lead to a limitation in the size of individual game areas. Really, at the end of the day though, these technical concerns are a lot less important than making good decisions regarding the gameplay of the game. If nothing else, I feel that FFXIII is a shining example of that. To be well-received by the fans that they disenfranchised with their most recent installment, it needs to be fun to play and have all of its central gameplay elements established first, and then be a technical marvel second.
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Post by Sosa on May 19, 2010 12:46:57 GMT -5
Oh god. Now that I see it, I can't un-see it.
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Post by Sosa on May 19, 2010 12:44:00 GMT -5
Gameplay will always trump graphics in my book. Ideally a great game will have both, but I'd much rather see them make cuts in the latter category than risk losing what makes the game fun to play (or failing to establish any fun to begin with.)
Shadow Complex was a great, fairly recent example of this. It was an XBLA release that was very obviously inspired by classic "Metroidvania" games, and although it was technically above average for an XBLA title, it still had quite a few graphical rough spots (clipping, low resolution textures, animation hiccups, etc.) that made it look dated by 3D gaming standards. It's probably one of my favorite games to come out of this console generation simply because I couldn't put it down from start to finish.
Alpha Protocol looks like it has some of the same potential, but it may be too early to tell how well it's doing in development.
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Post by Sosa on May 19, 2010 12:31:10 GMT -5
looks like this may now be multiplatform. So looks like it might suffer from the same problems FFXIII did...linear and meh.... I don't know. Without turning this into a "bash FFXIII" thread, I didn't really attribute the linearity or other gameplay-related problems in FFXIII to it being a multi-console release so much as having flawed game design. Also, we're not talking about them making it cross platform for the Wii here. The two systems are close enough in major technical specs that there shouldn't be any need to cut or modify major elements of gameplay in any way.
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Toast.
May 19, 2010 12:20:02 GMT -5
Post by Sosa on May 19, 2010 12:20:02 GMT -5
What? Where's the option for grilled cheese, or peanut-butter toast?
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LOL!
May 2, 2010 16:29:06 GMT -5
Post by Sosa on May 2, 2010 16:29:06 GMT -5
This reminds me of that video from launch week, where like dozens of people were clipping through the floors of Dalaran and falling to their deaths into the zone below.
At least this one was just players being dicks and not a show-stopping bug. lol
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Weeeee
Apr 26, 2010 12:39:23 GMT -5
Post by Sosa on Apr 26, 2010 12:39:23 GMT -5
Ravenholdt is full of pedofiles and really shitty players. so like Tempus x 1000? even worse? You haven't seen Temp in Dynamis: Xarcabard while the mages are resting for mana. /creepy
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WTF
Apr 22, 2010 11:54:28 GMT -5
Post by Sosa on Apr 22, 2010 11:54:28 GMT -5
EO has a long-standing tradition of forum signatures made in MS Paint. I'm glad to see someone from the WoW side has decided to carry the torch.
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Post by Sosa on Apr 20, 2010 10:48:30 GMT -5
I for one enjoy our little verbal sparring sessions.
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Post by Sosa on Apr 16, 2010 12:15:57 GMT -5
hope u got wasted and ended up sexing on someone you dont know, that or making lewd propositions to Zentro and Lunar involving eiffel towers What, I never told you guys the story about my trip to the Eiffel Tower when I was like 14? I didn't mention the bunch of creepy looking dudes in trench coats who tried selling a bunch of counterfeit "souvenir" sex toys to our group, and how they ran the fuck off when the cops showed up? True story.
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WTF
Apr 14, 2010 21:30:56 GMT -5
Post by Sosa on Apr 14, 2010 21:30:56 GMT -5
Admittedly, I did read the change previews today and say "WTF" out loud.
It's a cool idea on paper, but really?[/b] I mean... really?[/b]
Also, randomly linked from an old friend:
...Pretty sure this qualifies.
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FOOD
Apr 14, 2010 19:15:17 GMT -5
Post by Sosa on Apr 14, 2010 19:15:17 GMT -5
Spaghetti Carbonara. Courtesy of Wikipedia: Us fat, lazy Americans tend to make it with Cream and Bacon, but god[/b] it's delicious.
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