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Post by steevodeevo on Jun 17, 2008 19:57:42 GMT
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Post by Turwhitt on Jun 17, 2008 21:06:50 GMT
Wow, that looks excellent. I'm well into Greek legends so it's right up my street.
I couldn't see anything about a release date - are they being cagey?
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Post by steevodeevo on Jun 17, 2008 21:37:38 GMT
was checking that out meeself. Says Autumn on the Codies pre-buy site.
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Post by trencher on Jun 18, 2008 5:36:28 GMT
That looks nice - and it is coming out for three systems.
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Post by CaptainHeff on Jun 18, 2008 17:08:11 GMT
Looks very good but I havent a prayer of that running on my system Trench where ye been matey are you ever going to join us on the open seas or are ye a britisher in disguise aarrrr
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Post by trencher on Jun 18, 2008 20:21:23 GMT
I’ve been. . .elsewhere. Ultimately the game didn’t take with me. Some aspects of Pirates I didn’t like right away. Without pulling any punches - the avatar combat was as awful as the sea combat was great. One thing I found myself missing as well was a more persistent world where I wasn’t having to run into an instance for every mission, encounter, or town. Also to say that the missions lacked variety is a stunning understatement. At first I had a humorous outlook towards it but then I thought - am I really running down the same stretch of beach here fighting the same guys for every single mission?
I didn’t feel like they included enough missions for all the leveling forcing one to grind it out - and as much as the sea combat was well done - doing it over and over for grinding purposes was not something I was enjoying. Ultimately the game started to feel like a chore early on which made me sad but also made my mouse cursor float over something else WoW, Team Fortress 2, Sins of the Solar Empire, Bioshock - anything rather than boot up Pirates. Also Steevo and I have been playing Battles of Normandy by email wherein Steve is busy rewriting history in favor of the Germans.
Now my wife and I game together quite a lot (understatement again) and she walked from POTBS around level 20 and went back to WoW which she had been missing. All this got me thinking about the MMOs I had tried this past year; Lord of the Rings Online, Tabula Rasa, and Pirates of the Burning Seas - they all had one thing in common which was (brief pause while I climb into my flame retardant suit) they made me realize all the things WoW did quite well. LOTRO was the most polished of the three but I found it’s character classes fairly dull. Tabula Rasa got me going for a while but I didn’t like feeling lost as to where to go next. I don’t think of hiding the next leveling area from a player in order to make a game more of a challenge as good game design. And POTBS I have already been over. Warcraft is a big game in the marketplace and inspires many detractors - but it does get a good many thing right.
So I went back. It had a lot to do with what I was missing. A big persistent world for instance. If I chose I could walk from end to end on a continent. Unless a quest takes place in a dungeon you don’t run into an instance to complete it - you travel through the game world by walking, riding, or flying. That helps to make Azeroth much more of a tangible place in your mind’s eye than just the suggestion of a place. Also Azeroth is a Blizzard created world so they don’t have to play it safe. LOTRO has to adhere to the Tolkien universe and POTBS is even more constricted in space and time (not necessarily a death knell for an MMO but requiring much more inventive game play than I think Flying Labs was able to muster). In Warcraft the regions are very diverse, and in particular I found the Expansion set to be particularly pleasing in this regard.
Whereas questing in WoW could suffer from the same problems as any MMO (Kill X amount of Y and then return to quest giver) they have been striving to provide a variety (lure lady involved in a love triangle out of town with a bottle of wine and turn her into a mouse so the local cat will chase her away). While leveling you never run out of quests in WoW and the progression will eventually lead you to the next area you need to be in. Since the third expansion is now looming they have increased the amount of XP you get for quest turn ins making them even more worthwhile and causing long time players to level yet another character.
Before this post gets too long I should cut to the chase - the endgame. This is where MMOs falter. You’ve reached the level cap - now what? Again I feel that Blizzard has strived to find solutions for this. The level cap in WoW is where I really started to hang out with people and joins guilds. Instance raiding is social event wherein there is an actual objective and strategy. In the Lich king expansion all big instances will be raidable by a group of 10 which is a good number (I found 40 man raids to be interesting in theory but that was way to many people). They keep adding new areas to the game - most recently an entire Island off the coast of the Eastern Kingdoms. They also have daily quest all over the place where you can make a bunch of gold and can gain reputation with certain factions not to mention little things like new crafting recipes, holiday celebrations, monthly events, PVP battlegrounds, world PVP objectives, arena battles and so on. WoW endgame might be far from perfect and no game may ever get that aspect right , but it makes other MMO endgames seem positively barren (if indeed they even exist). Lack of a palpable effort to improve the endgame in an MMO and a billing cycle do not mix.
Also the social windows and chat functions in the game are a joy to use and there are plenty of downloadable add-ons that can customize the UI exactly to your liking. As someone in a from the site The Cesspit said:
“WoW is a game that fits in a well-defined genre. It is strongly influenced by other mmorpgs, replicates most of their features. But what is relevant is that WoW HUGELY IMPROVED what it borrowed. From the UI, to strict mechanics, accessibility, polish and flow. Every tiniest aspect in WoW was analyzed throughly, improved and refined. WoW took a model and improved it like no one else, set a new standard of quality and opened up a genre that was a market niche mostly inaccessible to the larger public because of consolidated bad habits that plagued it.”
So that is where I’ve been Heff - in Azeroth, because I missed it.
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Post by steevodeevo on Jun 18, 2008 22:00:00 GMT
Great post Trench. I cant leave PoBS as I'm a Pirate at heart, but I do agree with a lot of your comments at the moment. PoTBS is a low budget game, like Eve and I am hoping that the passionate developers can keep evolving it. I am really enjoying the Warhammer Online beta but of course I cant say anything because of the NDA, but it takes a lot from WoW and features strongly on Realm v Realm, signs are good. I recently canceled my Tabula Rasa subscription (sadly) as its a good game, but I was running with three subscriptions. I have kept LoTRO as I love Tolkien, and the game is so polished. I play it for time to time and get into it again. Plus there is a big expansion on the way and a level cap increase and lots of new big features. My main issue with LotRO is I feel that the ingame community mechanics are weak. You really don't have to be social to get on in LoTRO and I like teamwork in my MMO. It occurs to me that we have build a little community here at TLC central, so its great that even when someone moves on from a game from time to time that we keep talking. It wasn't what we intended for TLC but the idea of a TLC W.A.R. Society is quite appealing I will never play WoW, not because it isn't a great game I'm sure, but I hate joining MMO's late to the party. I know it doesn't really matter, but its just a 'thing' I have, I like to be in at the grass roots.
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