Author Topic: Seriously.  (Read 1132 times)

Harwen

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Seriously.
« on: March 30, 2004, 03:41:58 pm »
After testing Planeshift during MB and becoming exceptionally interested in the story, development and guilds of such I quickly became bored, like most of the members active during the time I was on. Bored not of the lack of fighting, any extra animations or features, but simply bored of anything being told, or changed. six months... not a single visible change to the pre-alpha client. Who wouldn\'t get bored? So I hunted for other MMORPG\'s to play while I waited for January. (Which was the blurry \"deadline\" or \"Expected release\" then) Very soon, I got 1.5 mbs dsl service from bellsouth, and , well the MMORPG\'s poured into my machine. Very few kept my intrest for very long, and  felt compelled to compare them to PS\'s promises and future features. Examples of such:

Priston Tale: What first attracted me was the cute style of play and beautiful graphics. The typically Korean style of character classes based on gender, faulty servers, lack of Dev support on or off the forums made it aggravating to enjoy after one character. This was just the peak, at abot level 40, leveling became nigh impossible, with disconnects that lost exp, tiring, repetative gameplay again, tiring, repetative gameplay, lack of items, lack of any other activity besides hack and slashing, kill-stealers, looters, an impossible skillpoint system made it frustrating and not fun. (safe to say I punched a keyboard or two) Delete. Uninstall.

What I want from it in PS, nothing at all. Waste of time.

Well, sure that was that, I went back to PS, checked ot he news, the forums and surprisingly after a month and a half, nothing has changed, no new news, not even many posts on the forums about new things... safe to say, i moved on.

FWO. Fung Wan Online. A MMORPG based on a chineese martial arts comic book. I started out loving it, its wide range of character models, its gender borders blurred and its PK system caught my eye and attention for about two months. From set out I was excited about their extensive website, with beautiful screens of the game, safe to say my video card was going to have some fun. Very nice, though once you hit level 40, leveling, gameplay and Skills, become useless, tiring, frustrating, boring, boring, boring and repetitive. The music becomes aggravating, and the Dev support is rather lacking. A few things that are good, the animations, clan system and the range of updates. They see a problem, they fix it within the week (though I pray for those who try it with a 56k modem). I wouldnt bother its p2p soon and at 17 bucks a month, I would rather shoot myself first.

Mu Online. Another RPG with gender bias in its classes. Automatic turn off. Strike one. Cool-looking uber-characters, interesting feature of leaning/sitting in chairs drinking alcohol....wait wait, the gameplay sucks, movement impedes with fighting, looting/hacking rampant, jerks steal your loot when you die even if you party with them, forgot to count the strikes...hmm...DELETE. What I want to see from that in PS, nothing at all.

Conqueror Online. Now this is better! Isometric perspective with 3D characters and gorgeous backgrounds, nice. Gameplay auto-attacking, basics nothing special there. Leveling, painful. Archers have the advantage since they can kill steal everyone off the screen and without taking any damage. Making all loot dropped, theirs for the taking, since you can\'t really loot. Unless you stand on an item until the time limit. (which happens alot with the super-rare items) Jerks. Everyone is a jerk. No one can be trusted here. Much less depended on, clans are exclusive clubs that only high-levels are let in, and PKing is rampant. Few good things, market trade system, where you dont have to be active to trade, marriage, houses which can be shared with your spouse, furniture, enemy and friend system, large maps (slow walking though) and free like PS, nice, but lost my intrest after the music and graphics became dull and boring. not to mention the quests being impossible after teh first 3. Item gemming system makes it almost impossible to buy a weapon at a low-level, forcing you to use a weapon far below your level. Though, weapon experience proficiency is a nice feature.

For now thats it. But what is the point of my post you say after reading my rambling droll....well my point is that all these games suck in one way or another. But...what they do is post daily screenshots. Let the commnunity that is not paying for the game mind you, that they are working on , they don\'t dodge deadlines or try to hype up their image by stuffing content into an ALPHA release. Infact, they add very little content at one time, but they add SOMETHING.

For the Devs to tell us that it wouldn\'t mean much to most of us that they are is sort of pompous sounding if not dodging any direct question a member is asking. I mean, we dont care what you are doing, as long as it sounds long and complicated and you show us a screenie that doesen\'t well, suck. I mean, woo hoo a magic shop, show us some wireframes, show us a scanned sketch on a bar napkin, show us another peice of source code so we don\'t have to go ripping though the sourceforge site for tidbits of nothing. Let us know you aren\'t just sitting with your hands under your bums during your spare time.

Oh, and it couldn\'t hurt to fix up the horrendous GUI and chat interface, I mean would it KILL ya to make /shout /s...and such....seriously even something as small as that tidbit of common sense would mean alot to people. I dont know about you new people who have their expectations curbed down to infinity negative, but I\'d appreciate a house door opened up to allow more interior than Kada\'s bar or Jayose\'s library. You dont have to put anythign inside of it, but c\'mon most of us could lagslip inside the houses anyways, why not open a door or two, give us a new npc to talk to, maybe a quest that actually took some, er thinking and wasn\'t so bugged. Not that I don\'t appreciate the project, but it would be nice. I mean, dont bother to have MB up there  if its just going to gather dust and drive away 100 people at a time. Ooh, I cant wait for the self-righteous flamers.
« Last Edit: March 30, 2004, 03:43:49 pm by Harwen »
 

acraig

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« Reply #1 on: March 30, 2004, 04:18:38 pm »
Well, I agree that we could post more news but Talad is the only one with control of the website.  I guess the other question is what exactly you want to know?  I can post more development news if that is of interest.  I cannot really comment/post on art stuff since that is out of my hands.  I just work with what they give me  ( which is the way I like it, believe me you don\'t want me anywhere near a paintbrush :)  )

As for updates we really want to have smaller updates.  But for MB -> CB it was not really possible.  There have been 3 VERY large changes that stop us from doing this.

1) Total re-write of the database/entity layer system
2) Total re-write of the gui system
3) New renderer in Crystal Space

Now all of these changes were going on at once so there was never a point where we could say \"Ok, this is stable enough to release\"

I am hoping with CB that things will be stable enough so that we can do 1) Do regular ( or semi-regular ) update and 2) Add new content.   Again the devil is in the details here.  

With MB we have sort of let the die off without much support since we don\'t have the man-power to continue developing on an \'old version\'.  

I know we are late on this release and we really appreciate the understanding that people have.
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Andrew
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Mordaan

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« Reply #2 on: March 30, 2004, 04:46:47 pm »
Quote
I know we are late on this release and we really appreciate the understanding that people have.


Ok by me.  I know we all want it NOW NOW NOW!! but better to have it complete and well done than rushed and buggy.  I for one am happy enough to keep busy collecting crystals until then.   ;)

Heck, maybe I can make the top 10 by the release of CB.   :P   I plan to start CB nice and rich!!

All hail the devs!!!!!   :D
--Overseer, Explorers Guild.

Wedge

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« Reply #3 on: March 30, 2004, 04:50:06 pm »
I don\'t know why you are comparing Planeshift to all those horrible Asian developed MMO games that are just trying to barely fix up a shoddy product enough that they can get some people outside their market to pay for it.

If youl\'d be happy with seeing bits of whats been worked in with the code, just look at the cvs history.  Nothing much complicated or confusing about that, I check it every few days.

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/planeshift/planeshift/docs/history.txt?view=auto

And if you look up Aineko\'s mods (stickied on the top of this section) to the current MB client, it doesn\'t look much prettier, but some significant updates to the interface were added.
Ninjas have feelings too.  Mostly they feel like dancing.



Harwen

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« Reply #4 on: March 30, 2004, 06:40:17 pm »
Woo hoo! Just the response I needed, thanks Acraig, and Wedge, Was comparing them to PS, not the other way around, those WACK MMORPG\'s get annoying.

And I wonder if ther could be some way for info to be added by each \"department\" of the dev team to the site? Like Talad asks someone what are you working on now, and bada-bing you got part of a news update, and so on. Of course if there\'s a better way that curently exists well, just a suggestion. Which makes me wonder, how are you guys?  :)

I like that page Wedge put the link for, I can spend hours just reading progress, more than enough for me, heck, a nice background and a crystal icon in the corner, that would make a great, in-elusive way for everyday people to get an idea of the volume of work being done on the game. Woo hoo, bed-time story material! :))
« Last Edit: March 30, 2004, 06:42:49 pm by Harwen »
 

Mage of Darkness

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« Reply #5 on: March 30, 2004, 06:59:01 pm »
OK i lost whole understanding of this topic i know it was first bout comparing and wanting to see soem updates but then i lost everyone   ?(  and bout seeing updates regularly i would love to see small things over time just like Harwen said so we know your not sitting on your hands (which is quite warm when its cold outside) just some sorta of knowledge that is easily assecible for people to see instead of having to go search everywhere!

upon entry leave your shoes.....dont want them dirty after i kill you = P

AendarCallenlasse

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« Reply #6 on: March 30, 2004, 07:03:17 pm »
The CVS is the page to check.  Everytime they fix/finish some part of PS it is posted on the CVS.  It\'s updated daily.  I check it every day to find out where they are.

Only n00bs don't quote themselves...
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Davis

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« Reply #7 on: March 31, 2004, 06:48:01 pm »
Quote
Originally posted by Harwen Oh, and it couldn\'t hurt to fix up the horrendous GUI and chat interface, I mean would it KILL ya to make /shout /s...and such....seriously even something as small as that tidbit of common sense would mean alot to people.

Does the name Aineko mean anything to you?

DevotedEternal

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« Reply #8 on: April 04, 2004, 07:13:01 am »
I agree with alot of what was said here.... but on the same note, It\'s kind of like Christmas, or a birthday, its better when you don\'t know what you\'re going to get. I mean, yeah, waiting sucks... but when it finally comes everything will be new :).

Cha0s

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« Reply #9 on: April 04, 2004, 09:59:59 am »
Harwen: I don\'t know if you have looked recently, but if you check the main news page they posted a short movie of Crystal Blue. Does that satiate your curiosity? :P
Cha0s
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Harwen

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« Reply #10 on: April 09, 2004, 01:28:34 am »
Hi guys, sorry bout late replies to my disgruntled posts, busy with IT school.  :rolleyes: But anyways, yes, I have seen the movie, yes, I have watched it several million times since I downloaded it five seconds ago, and yes I am happy. Very, very, very, very, very, did I say very? Happy. Only if my senseless blabber had waited a few days maybe I wouldn\'t have upset anyone  :P including myself,  :D . I never really expected a movie, especially one with a dwarf that can withstand several jabs in the throat and is invisible to monsters. Guess its about time to mosey on back to PS, and start pulling my hair in anticipation again. I love your sense of humor devs ( I missed the april fools joke as luck would have it) hmmm.....topic, gone....oh, yeah!

blah, blah, blah. Hope that got this back on track.