Zewp

Steam might be DRM, but in my opinion it's DRM done right. I can download my games from any location, I can always be assured of their download servers being online and giving me great download speeds and now that offline mode has been fixed, I can always be assured of being able to play my games whenever I want to. And then there's the specials. I've actually reached the point where I prefer having my games on Steam, simply because it's so much more convenient than any other distribution method. Thanks to Steam, I've gone fully digital. I haven't had a DVD ROM in more than two years now and about a month ago I took all my physical games and chucked them out. They were merely gathering dust on my shelf.

@Vagrant0, yeah, sadly the pursuit of profit has become a lot more important than the pursuit of making great games. Take SWtOR, they spent upwards of $200 million on development, yet it's nothing more than an elaborate WoW clone. :( And you must've misunderstood several parts of my post then. The dynamic events you're talking about are all based on timers. They happen regardless of what the players do and they do not affect anything outside of their tiny, immediate area. Not to mention the fact that you do not even need to fight the centaurs in GW2 when they start besieging the city, because you can just slip by them. The system I was talking about hinges entirely on player actions. The centaurs don't attack the city because a timer reaches 0, they attack because of the playerbases' actions. An example of the world-wide repercussions of this would be the city being unable to trade placed on its auction-house with players in other cities, or the price of health potions hiking up globally because of opportunistic vendors taking advantage of the war. My discussion was purely theoretical anyway. No MMO has incorporated a system like I'm talking about, and no MMO likely will, because it would result in a lot of maintenance and it would constantly have to be updated with new content in order to keep it fresh. GW2 makes use of dynamic events, not a living ecosystem like what I'm talking about.

Unless I missed a major part of the game, no, it doesn't. GW2 has small dynamic events that don't impact anything outside of their immediate area. I'm essentially talking about a living ecosystem that reacts to the playerbase's actions. GW2 contains no large-scale choice or consequence and the dynamic event system relies entirely on timers, not player actions.

That's if we're talking about dungeons, which I wasn't. I'm talking about Neverwinter's normal quests, which is separate from the dungeon content like in most MMOs. Many of Neverwinter's quests have their own instances which you cannot go back to once the quest has been completed. I also want to touch on the following, because I think it's a very interesting discussion; I feel Fallout New Vegas (and to a lesser extent, Fallout 3) handled choice and consequence really well for openworld games. A lot of your choices had the possibility of locking you out of certain content, which is something I enjoy in an RPG not only because it encourages multiple playthroughs, but also because it grants weight, impact and meaning to the player's actions. This is one of the key things that put me off Skyrim. After a single playthrough, I've seen 95% of the content available, so I have no will to play through it again. I really wish more open world games would incorporate C&C properly. :( This isn't 100% accurate. It is technically possible to implement player choice and consequence in an MMO, but it would require heavy use of instancing which isn't ideal for an MMO. It would either be very limited to minimize the amount of instances players are placed in, or it would have 1000s of instances for a variety of different decisions, which wouldn't be very feasible either. I'm sure if an MMO developer really sat down and looked at the possibilities properly, they'd be able to find some way to make it work, but it's a lot more work than making a standard, traditional MMO. Tabula Rasa allowed players to take over outposts for their specific factions, but sadly that was pretty much the extent of their choice and consequence. Choice and consequence on a large scale in an MMO might be very interesting, though. Imagine the entrance to mountain-ranges being blocked by a dragon, then when 100 players or so collaborate to kill the dragon, it leads to the goblins inhabiting the mountain ranges moving down into the valley and slaughtering everyone in it, meaning players have a harder time finding vendors in that area. Or after the playerbase has slaughtered a certain amount of centaurs, the centaurs decide to take up arms and assault the main city in the area, forcing players to either fight their way into the city or look for alternative ways to get in. These changes obviously wouldn't be permanent and would run on a kind of cycle, but it would be interesting to play an MMO in which the game world can change at a whim.

Then I guess you don't play any RPGs, huh? Because you just described every RPG, ever. Skyrim? Dungeons come down to you moving through a linear path filled with enemies waiting for you to come along and kill them. Baldur's Gate? Paths filled with enemies waiting for you to come along so you can kill them. Neverwinter nights? Same thing. Dragon Age Origins? Same thing. KotoR? Same thing. The Diablo series? Same thing. You'd also be pretty hard pressed to find a quest in those games that doesn't somehow involve killing something or collecting an item. The difference between Neverwinter and other MMOs is that in most other MMOs, like WoW, you've got certain areas filled with a certain type of enemy. Then you head over to a quest-giver, he tells you to kill x amount of y, you go to the area, kill those enemies and then come back to hand the quest in. In Neverwinter most quests actually involve dungeon crawling, where you follow a quest through a dungeon while the quests story keeps changing as you progress. And bollocks to STATIC UNMOVING enemies. If you'd spend 10 seconds in the foundry, you'd see that the game includes options for making enemies only spawn when certain trigger conditions are met, you can have them patrol areas, etc.

Scratch my suggestion of Rift. The game is essentially WoW with a few slightly different mechanics. What a giant waste of time.

All of you guys saying the game is broken; you did read that it's still in beta, right? There's still a lot of tweaking and balancing to be done. I haven't had a problem tanking as a warrior yet and my Cleric stopped having issues with aggro after level 15, when you unlock Soothe, which reduces the aggro from your healing spells. If I had to complain about anything at this point, it's that playing a cleric feels a bit like a waste of time. I very rarely actually need to heal people in dungeons. In fact, if they're all carrying potions, I become more or less obsolete. The only healing spell I really use is my AoE heal, which damages enemies while healing players. In fact, at this point I think the game so far has been way too easy. I'll have to check whether this is still the case at later levels, but right now it feels like I'm wasting my time with the cleric. I'm thinking of rerolling as either a wizard or a rogue. I was thinking of the GWF, but he looks a bit too much like a generic melee class.

No offence, but that's not true at all. Those types of quests exist, but they don't make up the entire game. The majority of quests involve dungeon-crawling, where you make your way through a dungeon while following a storyline. Like the one where you have to go looking for a dead guardsman and end up finding a necromancer in the sewers, who you then have to follow and kill. Or the escort mission where you have to escort a spell-scarred women while trying to stop her from getting scared and turning into a monster every time she sees enemies.

Very much F2P, surprisingly enough. Everything on the cash shop is, for the most part, vanity items. Except for the mounts, but mounts are mostly optional. Me and most of my friends in our guild played quite extensively and the only thing I bought from the cash shop so far is character slots.

That's pretty much what I was getting at in my previous post. Paying $15 a month for a subscription fee is quite a lot and ESO doesn't seem to do enough different to warrant paying that price. I might end up getting it when it inevitably goes F2P one or two years down the line. As for OP, raptr is currently having a giveaway for Rift + expansion + 30 days game time. It goes F2P in less than a month, but if you own Rift and it's expansion you get a lot of extra benefits that F2P subscribers don't get. I haven't played the game myself, though, so I can't comment on how it is.

So, is anyone else playing this? It went into open Beta about two or three weeks ago and it's actually remarkably good for a F2P game. It's semi instance-based. You play in large quest hubs that are sort-of openworld, then you also get quests which take place in solo/party instances. It's a pretty good combination. It also has a Foundry, which allows players to make their own quests and share it with other people, so the game content is virtually unlimited. I'm playing on Dragon, if anyone wants to join up.

I just have no interest in a subscription-based MMO nowadays. There are too many decent, free alternatives out there for me to pay $15 a month for it. Although I must say, subscription-based MMOs are often of much higher quality than others, as is evidenced by my strong dislike of GW2.

My username is roughly the sound a lightsaber makes when it is swung around, although that's not really why I chose it. I only realised that later when someone said it out loud.

I could never get into it. I found it supremely boring. The entire game felt like it was designed with 'quality < quantity' in mind. I enjoyed Sacred Gold a lot more.

I'm talking about the content, not the classes. GW2 herds you into certain content. In order to level up, you have to participate in a variety of content, unlike most other MMOs where you can decide which content you want to participate in. I can't choose to level by only doing quests, because there is not enough quests in the zone to level you up enough to get to the next zone. You also need to go run around a map gathering PoI and Vistas. If I'm trying to grind for mats to craft a certain item, I can't do that either because the game's anti-grind policy kicks in, essentially telling me I can't play the game like that, even if I want to. A lot of freedom that is taken for granted in other MMOs, is not available in GW2. I'm currently trying out NWN, and I highly doubt I'll ever go back to GW2. There's just no incentive for me to go back and judging from the fact that pretty much nobody on my friends list or in my 300 man guild logs onto the game any longer, I reckon I'm not the only one who feels this way.

Yes, I must admit, the game probably isn't for me. When I bought the game I was expecting a game where I would have total freedom to play the game the way I want to, like many other MMOs. What I got is a game where I get herded through content and get told when I have done 'too much' of a certain type of content for today. To be honest, I'd much rather play WoW. For all the faults it has, the game doesn't tell you what to do.

I found GW2 to be a major disappointment. I frequently encountered content-droughts while leveling, they try to force you to play in ways you don't enjoy and the 'end-game' doesn't even technically exist. To top it off, the end-game gear grind requires a lot of grinding, while the game's incredibly harsh anti-grind policy, Diminishing Returns, works against you in such a way that grinding is essentially impossible unless you're willing to spend 100s of hours grinding to get your Ascended gear. I recently went back to GW2 after not playing for a month and I was amazed at the loot drops I was receiving. Then out of the blue about 3 hours into playing my loot drops were absolutely abysmal all over again. Also, every time someone discovers an above-average way to make money, it gets nerfed so that your income slows down to a trickle again. Then there's also the fact that their bug-fixing practices are abysmal. I reported a serious bug in one of the main story quests in January. It's still there. It also has horrendous performance issues that have not been fixed since launch and which doesn't seem like it's going to get fixed anytime soon. You're much better off playing something like SW, although after finishing the game and all the quests once there's not really much incentive to keep playing it either. At least the game doesn't actively punish you for playing it the way you want to, though.

Oh hell no. If this was released by Bethesda I likely wouldn't have bothered playing it.

Yeah, I have no idea why it does that, but when I back something up I can barely watch a video or movie in VLC media player, and that's on a PC with 8gb RAM. No idea why it uses so much resources, but I avoid the backup feature because of it.

The backup feature is a bit clumsy, though. I find it almost freezes my PC when I'm backing something up, which is very odd as I've got a pretty decent PC.

Recently simply copying the game files doesn't always seem to work, because Steam apparently now stores install files which if not detected by Steam, makes it redownload the entire game even if the files are present in SteamApps. The easiest way around it is to keep your current SteamApps folder separate, install the game you want on Steam and the moment it starts downloading you pause the download, cut and past the relevant SteamApps folder into the new Steam install and then it should detect all the files properly.

Sorry, this is a bit of a late post to this topic, but I just want to weigh in my opinion here. I do not believe anyone is justified in receiving money for work that is not theirs. If it does come to pass that someone uses your content and monetizes it, could you not just add a clause to your readme to indicate that your work is not intended for commercial use, in which case he would not be allowed to sell it unless he creates the content himself entirely?

So, anyone who is actually playing this, is this worth the $20 price tag? I've been hearing a lot of worrying things like the game literally being a HD upgrade being sold as a HD re-release. Some of the mechanics such as unit pathfinding and the like are very dated in AoE2, and if it has not been updated for AoE2HD then I do not think it is worth the $20 price tag. So, what's the final verdict? Also, how is the netcode, because I've been hearing terrible things in that department as well.

It depends. A real sad ending can be good, but in the case of something like ME3, where the only sad part about the ending is how terrible it is, then no. :p

I'm honestly not quite sure what the issue with my post is? I was merely pointing out that the resources argument is no longer valid concerning discussions around DRM schemes such as Steam or Origin. Steam uses, at most, 100mb, and that's while running a download. Origin is a lot more lightweight and is likely to use a lot less. Considering the average PC gamer should be using at least 4GB RAM by now, an application that uses up 100mb of RAM really isn't all that serious. I was merely contributing to the discussion, which I feel is part of the purpose of a discussion forum. Unless the issue lies with my calculator comment, in which case I want to point out that I do not recall the use of witticisms being against the forum rules. I meant no offence with the comment and I do not see why anyone should have taken offence, much less why I should be reprimanded for it. However, seeing as I do not further want to derail this thread, I will conclude by saying that the allegations that Origin scans your HDD and sends all data found to EA are nothing more than conspiracy theories. Have a look at this post on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/lsoj6/still_thinking_eas_origin_is_harmless/c2vbjty Basically, what Origin does is scan for the existence of EA games on your system. I can actually confirm this, as shortly after installing Origin on my PC for the first time I received NFS Hot Pursuit. At first I thought it was free, but upon closer inspection I realised that the CD key on Origin matches the one I have on Steam, so it merely incorporated a game I had previously installed in Steam. Dunno about you guys, I dislike EA as much as the next guy, but that doesn't sound quite so harmful to me.