All Posts by boinged

By March...

• I'll have had a decent length of time playing Pirates of the Burning Sea
• My gaming rig might actually work with Vista
• I will have saved up for even more upgrades
• Those won't work with Vista
• Tabula Rasa will be long dead
• If I went to the gym (and drank a few 'potions') I'd actually look like Conan!
• This movie might be out http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0816462/
• Funcom will be considering more delays 

Your link to http://mmorpg.com/newsroom.cfm is screwed up. It takes me to the news editor now.

What's the system in Planetside? There's also Roma Victor for a melee approach that worked when there weren't too many people lagging the battle out. AoC is the obvious one although even that seems like a gesture activated skill system, correct me if I'm wrong. Tabula Rasa is an interesting case - it is reaction based in that you have to (ideally) continually shift your position and manage heat although the actual targetting is still automatic.

I don't know if I'd play a fully twitch MMO though - where's the character development? I like the Battlefield series of FPSs but they're so throw-away I'd never invest any effort in creating and playing a character. Even the latest one has equipment you can unlock by playing thousands of matches but it would have to go a long way to approach an MMO. By that point it would be as much about gear and strategy as reaction time.

Cool, so NCsoft can now re-release Auto Assault for PS3  Tabula Rasa looks like it could easily run on console with it's limited hotkeys/target tagging and arcade style of play. This announcement just confirms that, like it or not, MMOs are set to move to consoles in a big way. Time for a sweepstake on when Blizzard will make a similar press release...

You can interpret Trial Island one of two ways:

1) They're trialling the new pipeline to improve game performance, as a spinoff they will have a free trial area. Killing two birds with one stone

2) They want a free trial to get new people. The trial can't have the same graphics problems as the main game or it will turn people away, so they're optimising it first. These optimisations may or may not ever make it into the paid-for game.

I don't think it's really in Sony's interests to do the latter part of option 2. Sure they'll sell a few more accounts but then those people will quit and create even more bad PR - the last thing SOE needs.

If you're optimising game assets then it's going to be quicker and easier to just do it with one small set. An optimisation is made, game rebuilt and tested, changes made, etc. etc. Some of these will be changes an artist has to manually do and these will take an age to get back in game (if ever). Batch changes that can be done with a processing script could be 'easily' reapplied to all release graphics, once there are no problems with Trial Island.

Even these batch changes can cause problems though - maybe part of a model is made the wrong way, maybe it uses a different size texture, maybe only 90% of the model can be safely bump-mapped with the new change :P So even these ones could take a while to make it back in game.

 So I'm going with (1) but I won't hold my breath.

This sucks, another original MMO bites the dust. Ultimately not enough to keep players interested but I'll concentrate on the good times instead...

It was a blast for the 12 months I played it. Driving round destroying everything, farming mats for crafting has never been so fun. Splattering pedestrians off your bumper and doing insane jumps. The endgame PVP was fast-paced and the tide could turn at any moment. Racing round flipping outposts, then screaming back to them when someone else tried to hack. Farming bosses for better weapons to kill the other player races faster or grinding the epics (didn't get so far in that one hehe). Top it all off with a close community and this is a real shame.

I managed to play a few hours of Auto Assault with a Playstation-style joypad. I could control my car, use a small set of skills and target the nearest mob which is pretty much what I do with the mouse/keyboard. However, that is quite a simple, arcadey game and even for anything more complicated like crafting I'd need to use a pointer which is a pain to control with a pad.

I share the same fear as other people - that my nice complicated GUI, possibly even the game, is going to be simplified to better fit a console. Graphics will need to work on a low-rez TV, not everyone has HD. Not everyone will have a keyboard and mouse either and I doubt it will be a requirement when so much more money can be made by allowing every console owner to play.

What's more worrying is that I don't expect console players to be as sociable, again due to the input device problems. Even with a keyboard/joypad combo it will be too easy just to not bother typing. MMOs have already become casual-solo-friendly, and when it becomes acceptable to not even communicate with others then you're just playing a single player game on a server.

A game-industry friend just leaked some info to me:

SOE plans to merge PoBS and VG servers as both games contain ships and sailing. Coastal cities like Khal will be able to go into contention if people grind enough faction, and become Faction PVP zones (normally all servers will be PVE). It has been revealed that Pirates are the mystery fourth race coming to Telon. Once things have settled down with the server merge, Sony will roll out a so-called New Game Experience to enhance play.

Now we're going to have people whining about SOE as well as whining at how much they hate the game they're still subscribed to.

What it will all mean to me? Less posts to read.

Well it was better than the last review

A lot of people here will play one of those games and they do cover both ends of the hardware requirement spectrum. If you're playing VG though, that X2 CPU is still pretty mid-range. I got this and overclocked it to 3.29GHz.

I'd like to see how a card like the M1 performs with a CPU like that. /flex