Oblarg

Total Annihilation. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP2spT0TwCw Simply glorious. Best RTS music I've ever heard, and the battle detection system that governed which music played was equally brilliant.

Are you capable of doing anything other than strawmanning?

Also, I truly hope they let players turn off those voices during the space combat. Not sure how many people will want to put up with the game telling them "good job!" in an annoying voice whenever they kill an enemy.

They should have just pulled a KotOR and put that little turret minigame whenever you travel between planets. That would be a great mechanic, right guys?

Easy to get into, did a very good job with keeping incentive to play even alone while still maintaining an emphasis on player interaction, good narrative pacing through quest-based phasing without compromising the fact that each player is not supposed to be a superhero. The overall framework for the game is very good and probably the result of careful design. That said, the implementation is lacking at times, as the raid content gets incredibly repetitive. Competitive pvp is a joke, and they've gutted their most fun battlegrounds and keep adding new ones instead of breathing new life into the old ones. PvP balance is incredibly bad as it is based largely on abilities that also must be balanced for raid content. Increasing simplification and changes to stat systems are a nuisance and of questionable benefit. Talent trees became very cluttered and same-ish in WotLK, though at least they're making an attempt to fix them in Cataclysm. Hybrid versus pure class balance is wonky as **** and Blizzard is constantly changing their vision of what it should ideally be. It's clear why no game has supplanted it. It's still not the best game ever. I cancelled my account recently, and may reactivate it for cataclysm if I hear it's any good. No real point playing now - I have 18k gold on my toon, with no intentions of leveling alts before Cataclysm and no new content to tackle.

I did not say it will sell crazily at release. I said even if it does, it won't matter, because from what has been revealed the actual content looks like crap and won't be able to hold any players. So what you meant by that is that we won't know until right before release - I disagree completely, because enough of the design decisions have been revealed to see that the game is clearly trying to be a single player RPG with a monthly fee. I've stated why that's a crappy design goal that will result in a flop.

Do you want to clarify this statement then, because that is where this whole thing started. No, because that didn't contradict I said earlier. Your statement did.

That's a far cry from your other statement. Perhaps you'd like to clarify what you meant?

That's actually what I've said the entire time, so, uh yeah. What was your point again? "What will matter is the flood of previews and reviews before launch." Certainly doesn't sound like it was your point.

You don't seem to get it - it's not about initial sales, so reviews and bad press have almost no meaning in the long run. It's about the quality of the game - even if you sell two million copies, if only have two hundred thousand subscriptions a few months later because the game is crap then it's a failure and a loss.

There were a great many people in WoW who said they'd drop it to go to Vanguard, too!

Also, what a disturbing topic for a song - an old man, locked in an attic, going insane? How do people come up with this stuff?

I think all the information released thus far makes it look pretty ****ing bad, yes.

Does anyone here even know what a strawman is? Nothing I said was a strawman. Volo's entire post was. And it's not just my opinion that the gameplay footage we've seen so far looks pretty crap - it's an opinion you'll find all over the place.

Morons spouting strawmen instead of offering any legitimate refutations make me laugh even harder, believe me. There's a reason no one takes you seriously, Volo, and it's not because everyone on the forum other than you is an idiot (though it might have something to do with your apparent quote button allergy).

Realism is nice - but I'm not exactly expecting that much. Comically moving characters or ridiculous shooting are however not what I expect when I buy a game... especially when it is a game where You are going to sneak and shoot a lot ... If the story really is good, then it is sad that game was released so unfinished. Could you elaborate on your problems instead of throwing around the same four or five meaningless words over and over again? "Comically moving characters" is not a legitimate criticism, nor is "ridiculous shooting." The shooting worked fine for me.

It's been pretty obvious that SW:TOR is going to flop for a while now - it may have had potential to do well (note I say do well, not be good) early on, but what they've revealed looks like a gimmicky mess.

This is quite possibly the most moronic thing I have read in the past month. Congratulations.

As if the first game's DLC wasn't absurd enough. Wasn't going to buy the game anyway, so I guess it doesn't matter, but I'm afraid this is a sign of things to come - at this rate, simply buying a game will only give you half of the content. If they pull this **** with ME3, I might simply stop buying BioWare products.

I'd say the comments are more scary than the news article itself, but that's usually true for any news outlet regardless of bias.

The Bioware defense squad is out in force! Well, OK, mostly one guy. Nothing wrong with paying subscription for a single player game, so long as enough new content is being provided in return. The quality of that content is in doubt though. Your monthly subscription fee in an MMO does not mainly go towards new content.

Most people don

Utter bs. Yes, you can have a million heroes running around. It's your personal context. It's called instances and phasing. They've been around for a while now. You can single handedly save the world/galaxy/whatever. Then they go into their instance and they do it, too. This isn't new. Even WoW had countless instances and quests that aren't raids. All important events were not exclusively in raids. You can handle a narrative outside of raids in an MMO. In fact, it's been done. The conflict you think exists is an imagined one. Maybe this revolves around your idea that MMOs are about being a part of a large universe of other players. Increasingly, many of them treat the universe as just the meeting ground. The other players influence on your narrative is unnecessary. The logical extreme of phasing is, if you think about it, a single player game. Player importance and number of players in a given game world are inversely related - the more important any given player is, the fewer players you can logically have in the same game world. Once again, BioWare wants to make a single player RPG that they can charge a monthly fee for. This has been clear to anyone who listened to the original dev interviews. When the universe is "just a meeting ground," the universe is just a lame excuse to charge a monthly fee. Most of us noticed that it would be awful long before then. You're right about the art direction, although art direction was never one BioWare's strengths (ME1 was a nice exception, but they decided to **** all over ME1's fantastic art direction in ME2 anyway).

The ultimate goal of the "casual" playing which you can do alone in WoW is to gain benefits in interactions with other players (either through PvP, raiding, etc). The main purpose of character building in a single player cRPG is to move your character through the plot. The two are fundamentally different ideas. Adding to this is the fact that everyone in an mmo has to be "equal," to some extent. The player cannot be a big hero, because then you'd have a million big heroes running around, which dilutes the importance of your character's actions. The best you can hope for in MMO narrative is for each player to feel like they're playing a small part in a large event (which is how it was done in WoW, with a few exceptions made for hardcore raiders who did get to be the big hero at times). This, however, is a completely different approach to player involvement in the narrative than what KotOR (and other single player cRPGs) are based on - BioWare knows this, and knows that a large part of the enjoyment in KotOR came from playing the big hero, and thus has tried to combine two essentially incompatible ideas - that of the player being important, and that of the player being part of a large universe of other players - for the purpose of allowing them to make an MMO (which is much more profitable than a KotOR3 would be).

It has? How? The design goal is flawed. They want a single-player RPG that they can charge a monthly subscription for, so they inevitably ended up with something that looks like a clunky half-cRPG half-MMO monstrosity. Color me stupid but I don't see what you're proposing the problem is. MMO's share many features of single player RPGs? No, they don't - MMOs are fundamentally different than single play cRPGs because the emphasis of the game is on interaction with other players and character building rather than on moving through the plot. BioWare knows that their fanbase wants an in-depth single player story, because that's what the KotOR series is based on. However, they also need to include some MMOish aspects to justify charging people $15 a month to play it. The result is a cluster**** of incompatible ideas.