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Role Playing (Games) Quickies

Quickies Get Massive 48

Posted by Zonk from the they're-huge-i-tell-you dept.
More movement on the massive scale. WoW Players should be aware that Patch 1.7 was released today. It's a big one, with a new raid instance, Hunter changes, and the inclusion of a new type of server (Roleplaying PVP) available. Get downloading. City of Heroes has seen Issue 5's Release, with a new zone, new power sets, and a big tweak to the Blaster archetype. Late last week a whole bunch of new City of Villains Beta invites went out, and Gamespot has a rundown on the upcoming stand-alone sequel. Major changes are afoot in Everquest II's Producer Letter, with changes to combat, classes, items, NPCs, buffs, crafting, and grouping. Is it even the same game? On a final non-commercial note, CNet has news that the Second Life virtual world is now free to enter, with the Linden Dollars economy expected to prop up the costs associated with running it. Interesting. From that article: "Currently, Rosedale said, "Second Life" has 45,000 members and is growing at about 10 percent a month. There are now more than 16,000 acres of owned land in the virtual world, and new land sells for about $129. Users must pay a fee of about $25 a month to maintain their land. Thus, Linden Lab is earning about $400,000 a month without ever factoring in membership fees." Update: 09/14 05:50 GMT by Z : Cutriss rightly points out that I overlooked the interesting Ballista Royale update to FFXI. Additionally, a new patch for Dark Age of Camelot was released today, and the main site revamped for the upcoming expansion.
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Quickies Get Massive More

Quickies Get Massive

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  • I'll give it another shot (Score:3, Insightful)

    by QuantumG ( 50515 ) <qg@biodome.org> on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @07:56PM (#13552482) Homepage Journal
    Second Life is a shopping mall with no actual gameplay, but what the hell, I'll give it another go. Maybe I'll actually find someone this time who can show me the 1% of user created content that isn't shit.
    • Send Enabran Templar an IM saying "porcine masterpiece" once you get in-world. I'll hook you up with my robot avatar. Definitely isn't shit. :)
    • So is the web, and you're on it!
      Of course it has no gameplay, it's not a game.
      The whole point is that you have fun creating stuff.
      You know, vaguely like Lego blocks? Except you have a heap of different shapes, that are infinitely customizable, and a scripting language with which you can do anything, from simple doors and cars, to complex physics simulations, and massive distributed systems.
      Or, of course, if you're not the creative type, you can socialize and buy stuff, play house, attend events, have cybers
      • Ok, I've played it all day long. I'm still bored out of my god damn mind. What's worse though, I've come to recognise what the future will be like. When we all have access to programmable matter, the world will look like Second Life - a wasteland of absentee land owners dictating what you can and can't do on their land. You'll try to pick something up and the operating system of Earth will intercept your actions and stop you whispering gently into your brain "the owner of this object has not granted you
        • Did you get a cyber-slut from one of the bars? I remember reading about how big the paid cyber sex thing was in Second Life.
        • Most of the stuff I make in SL is given away for free with open source. It's up to the creator what permissions they put on objects.

          You have the following options to set on any object you create in SL:

          - Modifyable
          - Copyable
          - Transferable

          In the first year of SL, a sizeable portion of the content creators were quite willing to give away free and open source content. However, more recently, SL has attracted a lot of people who get involved with it just to make money. I have no real objection to this, but it
          • One option I did not see was the ability to make it so those taking a copy of your objects cannot subsequently turn off the allowed to copy bit. In a world where everything has DRM you need a share and share-alike license more than ever.
    • I think you either like sl or you dont.

      For creativity at its finest, check out the burning life sims this week. They will all be gone by the 19th though, so hurry up :)

      When you get there, you will be greeted by a wonderful giant chess board, playing out four famous games in sequence against itself, and it only get's more interesting from there.

  • If you're interested in the PvP/RP server.. (Score:4, Informative)

    by wuie ( 884711 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @07:58PM (#13552512)
    don't bother right now with it. The queues are already 600+ with people waiting for hours just to login and make a character. Blizzard limited the maximum size of the server's capacity so that starting areas won't be jam-packed. Wait a couples days or a week until making a character.
    • The game without land is free. You can get an account with a small amount of land (512sm) for $9.95 a month ($7.50/mo quarterly, $6/mo. if you pay a year at a time). That small bit of land is essentially free, as you can buy it with your "starter money."

      If you want more land, there is a tiered monthly fee structure beyong the normal fee. Land can cost you anywhere between $L3-$L5/sm. The $L is currently trading around $US3.50 per $L1000.

      Alan Palmerstone - SL resident since June 2004.
    • The title says about as much as saying "$25 a month, isn't a bit stiff for a web host?" (sic).

      You can get a free account which you can use to explore and create content just like anyone else. The free account is quite sufficient for all but the most full-control-obsessed land owning requirements.

      If you need to own land for your project, you can still keep your account free and rent land from other players (on negotiated terms), or you can upgrade your account to pay a monthly hosting fee to own land. You
  • Blasters were not the only ones to get big changes.
    Controllers for example had changes which siginificantly affect their play style. Controllers can no longer have multiple pets out, their area of effect holds last half as long and take twice as long to "cooldown" and damage dealt by controllers to targets that are held has been increased.
    Other classes have also had big changes and there are global changes to character defense levels and strength of PVE bad guys.
    There is a lot of speculation that these broa
    • Just looking through the release notes, and it says that they've reduced the number of targets for area of effect powers. This includers blasters final power (like nova) and also looks like it will nerf fire tanks (the biggest source of power levelling). This is huge.

  • I5 for COH (Score:4, Informative)

    by MagicDude ( 727944 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @08:33PM (#13552803)
    Issue 5 for City of Heroes has not gone over well with most of the players. Many people are very critical of the massive nerfing that took place with this issue across all of the archtypes (better known as classes). As well, COH is still lacking in any kind of end game content. Once you get the level 50, the only thing there is to do from there is to roll up a new character and start over. I believe this is the effect of what is probably COH's most unique qualities, no economy. There is no loot huntning in the game, which I think makes the game more enjoyable with no griefing or spawn camping or doing the same quest over and over again because the ending boss has a 2% change of dropping the legendary boots of butt kicking. Your only job is to go out there and bring villians to justice which is great. However, it doesn't provide your character with many incentives to get to level 50 since gameplay just hits a brick wall after that since there's no benefit to being lvl 50 in terms of making your character better. Most of the previous updates have added mainly low and mid level content, but many players are salivating for something like a lvl 50 only zone chock full of high end content, rather than your only option being to become a noob again and go do Lt. Wincott's Hollows missions for the 5th time.
    • Once you get the level 50, the only thing there is to do from there is to roll up a new character and start over.

      What? You don't consider running the Hamidon raid over and over again to be something to do?

      (OK, so neither do I)

      I think City of Villains should add additional higher end options with the base building, raiding and PVP zones. It remains to be seen however.
      I don't think World of Warcraft has a great approach for high end content either. The necessity to run the same dungeons over and over again to
      • The end-game raid content doesn't interest me much, but I'd pay a monthly fee just for the CTF Battlegrounds... so much fun, it should be its own game!

        (And if Blizzard were owned by EA ... it would be!)

    • Yeah, I've heard some people (I don't know if I'd say "many") complaining, too. Don't take this personally. Since "many people" are critical—not you—I'm giving you the benefit of a doubt that you're merely observing, not complaining.

      COH is still lacking in any kind of end game content. Once you get the level 50, the only thing there is to do from there is to roll up a new character and start over.

      (Insert standard lament about how people don't roleplay here, so I can move on to stuff that

      • > And what's so bad about rolling up a new character? (...) How can you make the most of those weird powers that hardly anyone else has?

        I did that a lot, rolling new characters (I had 2 level 50s and a 45, a few 30s, a whole buch of 20s, and a few more under 10, the total being some 35 characters). With Issue 5, many of the things I was planning and changing for my characters went down the drain with a nerf rock tied around their necks, because I was trying those "fun" and "unusual" combinations. The
    • And this is why I know of 1 account remaining in a former guild of friends of 8 RL players. Nerf nerf nerf your revenue stream. Not very bright.

      The pathetic thing is half their nerfs were to fix herding, which wouldn't have been a problem in the first place if the'd implemented collision checking while jumping as well as while moving.

      If you're a CoH player you'll have noticed when mobs run to follow you, they won't overlap, but when they jump they will. The CoH devs have come out and said "it is too computa

  • EQ2 (Score:2)

    by Shads ( 4567 ) *
    The eq2 changes are utter crap basically. I've been in the beta and early on they really seemed to listen once we got down to last 2-3 weeks the devs shut up and quit listening to the players. I wouldn't really call the game playable anymore for alot of classes. I'll be glad to be able to actually play the game again in a reasonable manor in the next month or so after they patch it 30-40 times to fix all the very broken stuff everyone in beta reported the past few weeks.

  • Second life may be free, but it still requires credit card information. And here I was all ready to sign up and everything.

    May not be an issue for most people, but if I'm not going to pay, I'm certianly not giving them payment information.

    -Adam

  • What about FFXI? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Cutriss ( 262920 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @09:35PM (#13553240) Homepage
    What is it with Slashdot and not covering FFXI? Every time there's a MMORPG wrapup, it almost always gets omitted from the newspost in favor of WOW (understandable), and then far less populated MMOs.

    FFXI has the North American Ballista Royale [square-enix.com] gearing up for team-based PVP tournaments which will eventually be held on a server-versus-server tournament level. A new update will be out in October that will add new zones and expand the functionality of the NPC buddies that were added in one of the recent patches, and a host of other new things. Also, with TGS right around the corner, everyone's expecting the official announcement of the new expansion pack, which will be included on the FFXI release for the Xbox 360.

    • Re:What about FFXI? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Dragoon412 ( 648209 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @10:59PM (#13553703)
      It's because FFXI is an evil, twisted, abortion of a game that's tanked miserably in the US.

      FFXI requires a degree of sadism and time investment (it can literally take hours just to find a group, and this isn't rare) that seems high even in comparison to Lineage 2. The economy has been utterly devastated by farmers, and encounters (and therefore groups, which are absolutely necessary - you can't even blow your nose in FFXI without a white mage to help you) are so demanding that you often won't be admitted into a group unless you have the absolute best equipment available. Which means either, A) competing with professional farmers, B), farming for gold for days to buy the most trivial equipment, or C) shelling out to the farmers on eBay.

      FFXI isn't covered because it's not a game, it's punishment in digital form; it's a damned job with no benefits and no pay. It's a game so slow, boring, repetetive, and frustrating that even old-time EverQuest players say "whoa, that's too much." "Playing" FFXI is like choing on tinfoil while a donkey kicks you in the nuts and a midget in a bondage outfit sodomizes you with a red-hot, spiked dildo.

      • Re:What about FFXI? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        This is NOT flamebait. If anything, this is glossing over the amazing turd that FFXI is on gaming.

        Everything said by the parent post is completely true. Everything.

        It's not popular in the US. It did tank miserably in the US and Europe. Groups do take hours upon hours to form. (And once they do, they usually rapidly break up [vgcats.com].) The economy is dominated by farmers. There was a Slashdot article a while back about them banning eight hundred farmers [slashdot.org]. This was news because they never had before. And they

  • Extra content, no monthly fee (Score:4, Insightful)

    by spyrochaete ( 707033 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @10:23PM (#13553478) Homepage Journal
    Let's not forget this week's Sorrow's Furnace [guildwars.com] update to Guild Wars [guildwars.com]
  • Its the "Raph" way to have to overhaul large portions of the game post-release. It basically has to do with the game being launched a year ahead of time. The same thing happened with Star Wars Galaxies.

    The formula is basically:
    1. Release game a year early due to market pressures;
    2. Overhaul entire game a year later;
    3. Don't profit.

    Buy-bye EQ2; the tendrals of the FSM do not bless you.

  • Progress Quest (Score:3, Funny)

    by KingSkippus ( 799657 ) * on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @04:12AM (#13555107) Homepage Journal

    Yeah, brag about all your games's updates. I'm just pissed that there hasn't been any updates to Progress Quest [progressquest.com] in, like, forever. :-(

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