True Fantasy Online May Be On Track for Xbox 2 23
German site GameZone is running a piece discussing the late, lamented True Fantasy Online. In it they mention that the Xbox MMOG may be released on the Xbox 2, based on commentary from the president of Level-5. From the article: "Now these hopes are affirmed by the level 5-Praesidenten Akihiro Hino, because in the Japanese Dorimaga said it that according to its estimates True Fantasy Live one on-line one could nevertheless still appear."
Lineage 2 (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know what it's like for other MMORPGs, but Lineage 2 makes me feel.... icky. First of all, there's client stability and overall design that just seem poor. Sure, it looks good but there are several weird in-game glitches that make me wonder just how qualified the people at NCSoft are. These issues range from playability issues to client stability. Playability is not so bad, just a few minor glitches like monsters getting stuck and all that.
Client issues are a bit worse really, with the client regulary crashing on me for no good reason at all. The game often freezes as well, has weird graphic glitches that can lock up my entire PC and I get sudden disconnects for no real reason. All very annoying. While L2 boasts about having hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers, it's pretty evident that none of the monthly money they get go into development of the game, except perhaps a sequeal which would only serve to bring in more money.
I've heard stories about most MMORPGs being like this; the game appears to be nothing more then a poor release based on a proven addictive concept along with pre-existent competitive ( sometimes hostile ) player behaviour. The actual client or storyline doesn't really matter just as long as these two elements are in there. The question is, though, why the hell would anyone want to pay for such lousy services? I mean, I play L2, sure. But I do so on a free server at no cost at all. I don't pay a single cent for this worthless client I'm stuck with and the actual server runs on donations from the users.
But despite this and the fact that at least some people agree with me on this, MMORPGs keep popping up like bad weeds. Is it just a fad like all the "* Tycoon" games we had?
( On a different note, heard Slashdot solved the issues about the 503s and generally atrocious performance lately. Maybe they even decided to stop banning my subnet the whole damn day! Anyways, giving this a try again, so here goes... )
Re:Lineage 2 (Score:3, Interesting)
Anybody who learned about Pavlovian conditioning in Psych 101 understands why the system of nearly-random rewards makes these games so addictive, and why you eventually realize that you are not really having fun, but playing out of compusion. When people reach that point, they either quit, or decide that the company they keep while on-line is pleasant enough to stick around in spite of not caring much about the game itself.
Re:Huh. (Score:0, Interesting)
First off, the menu is opened with the minus key on the numpad. Because, whenever I think of keys to use in programs, I think "the minus key on the numpad," instead of something sane, like escape. Except that escape is always "cancel current action" in that game.
So let's get into that. There are basically four sets of keys you need to access anything in the game: the numpad's minus key, the enter key to access options, the arrow keys to navigate the menu, and the escape key to leave a selected option or close the menu.
Put your hands on your keyboard such that you can press both the enter key and the numpad's minus key. (Keep in mind that the minus key near the P key doesn't count. It starts the chat interface.)
You'll wind up, most likely, with your right hand over the numpad's minus key and the enter key, and your left hand doing the arrows. So you select something, and now want to close the menu. You'll have to move your left hand across the entire freaking keyboard to close the menu by hitting the escape key.
This behavior could not be changed. About the only thing you could do was switch the keyboard into "laptop mode" which would move the menu onto keys available on a laptop. (Which is nice, because my laptop doesn't have a numpad.)
The best part about the main menu, accessed by the minus key, was that there were two of them. You got to the first one by pressing minus once, and then pressing minus while the menu was up would toggle them. The logout option was on the second menu, of course.
The mouse could be used to select things by clicking on them, and you could then activate them by pressing the enter key. You can move using the mouse, by dragging with the right mouse button. But instead of moving in a sane way, this starts you moving at a speed and spin relative to the distance you moved the mouse, which is so intuitive that no one does it any more.
There's so much more than can be said on how horribly designed FFXI's UI was (enough that it effectively became a MUD with pretty graphics because typing
Because the newer model PS2s have built-in network adapters (for the uninformed, previous Sony's hard drive and network adapter were bundled together) and you can use any external hard drive with them.
Dead wrong. (Well, the new PS2s do have network adapters.) You cannot use any external hard drive with the PS2. In fact, you can't use just any hard drive with the PS2. You can only use the special Sony-formatted hard drives - which Sony has discontinued.
Anyway, there's so much wrong with Final Fantasy XI that listing it all would be a freaking novel. It's far easier to list what they got right: