:))))

massassian til I die



Yeah I like LR and I have a bunch of their indie game releases, but almost all the replies to that tweet are people thinking they're doing remasters for modern systems and it's kind of heartbreaking haha

Same. Fallout 4 was already a disappointment and I didn't like the direction of 76, so it was a pass for me.

I feel like tacking on Battle Royale modes was already a meme a year ago, shoehorning it into FO76,when everything about Fallout is pretty much incompatible with that style of game, is the silliest decision I've seen in a while.

I prefer BOMBERMAN 64

Hmm, I just watched a video of Fortnight, and tbqh I can't see how this is any better than Battlefield 1942, either in terms of graphics, complexity, or hilarity of shenanigans. It honestly looked wonky as ****, a chore to play, and with an extremely ugly and garish color palette. I'd even rather play CS 1.5.

well duh CS is good

I'll play an outdoor shooter once technology can render foliage at reasonable distances. Until then 'sniping' in games will always be about spazzing out and dancing on hills until one person gets luckier than the other.

If you can't make DF or Shadows of the Empire work with an XBox style controller I don't want to see it.

Some interesting stuff from Jedi Fallen Order's behind-closed-doors E3 demo (c/o Waypoint and random tweets):

- People feel like the footage they showed undersold the game
- Stuff in the footage that looked like a cutscene (e.g. AT-AT sequence) was player-controlled
- Combat is parrying- and stamina-focused and similar to Sekiro (not as hard as Sekiro)
- Levels are (somewhat?) nonlinear
- You have a ship that you can use to travel to and from planets at your choosing, with NPCs on it that you can spend time w/
- Areas of planets will be gated by abilities/items that you gain later in the game, Metroid-style
- Hub areas with NPCs/story content (not sure the extent of this)

I thought that was interesting b/c they did make it look a LOT like a linear TFU/Uncharted-like. There's more to it, although it sounds like they aren't trying to reinvent anything (good imo)

It looked more like GoW4 to me and that basically confirms it

Why a hub world? Set-up for DLC?

Gotta have a loot treadmill to pad out the game and distract from the shallow content. Can't have a loot treadmill without a town to sell **** at.

Slot machines sure are addicting.

Activision-Blizzard is remaking Modern Warfare now on top of already remaking WoW. What does it suggest when they're remaking two of the biggest mid 00's hits? Maybe they're losing older players and want to bring them back in.

Because God of War 4 had one.

WoW started losing players to vanilla server emulators. People do not like Cataclysm+. A vanilla wow “remake” is both something the fans desperately want and a bona fide shot in the arm for the game, because Cataclysm was so bad that rolling it back is an upgrade.

I remember, I was playing at the time it was released. The previous expansion was already trending south by the end in terms of how people played the game, and a lackluster expansion on top of other game-killing features made me quit 1 month in.

Everyone I know who used to play WoW is hyped. Everyone. It's a whole movement right now. Never experienced hype for a game like this in years, and it's all just repackaging old content.

WoW has never particularly appealed to me, but I will probably resub for vanilla to reminisce about a simpler time when WoW didn’t have as many poop jokes.

I tried out a vanilla private server, and I think many people have, err, "****-tinted glasses" when remember vanilla. It's not a hard game at all and is not nearly the time sink people remember it to be. It's ~100 hours to 60, which is not much time for an MMO. Though not many of us have even that kind of time. But yeah, for how much everyone calls it a broken game it comes across fine to me.

Edit: I found out that the two most upvoted posts on r/wow history are the announcement of classic wow and this salty thread. I think this says everything which needs to be said lol.

https://ogn.theonion.com/ignorant-man-who-has-learned-nothing-from-history-excit-1835585566

^ Big ouch

I don’t think it’s the ...? level up time, or even the gameplay changes that people want rolled back. Cataclysm has a materially worse world design. Besides migrating from a gentle hand theme park model to an aggressive one, they changed the look and character of every zone. Before Cataclysm those areas were largely/entirely left alone, so if you were nostalgic for those areas you could always reroll and experience again. Now they’re gone.

That’s the stuff I think people are really looking for.

I’ve had this same discussion with Asherons Call players. Pretty much every long term player is breathlessly nostalgic for the 1999 version, but there were massive QoL improvements introduced after that. So why? I think it’s because they had a monthly patch model that caused major changes to the game, most of which were unpopular. People want to go back to a cohesive and well planned world.

That's certainly part of it, but people also now despise the endgame. I heard someone calling it a "dressed up Skinner box" and describing end game as little more than playing a slot machine, and they're insulted by it.

Anywho, my complaint was more registered at people who think vanilla WoW was some kind of terrible time sink, or terribly designed game. It plays much better than you'd think for 2006 game. People who actually like WoW today reregister these complaints ad nauseum.

before burning crusade came out people were grinding molten core for epics 24/7

Yup, game was like crack. Blizzard for a long time gaslighted fans about how bad classic was so they'd stop demanding what they wanted, and the rubes repeat those lines.

Doesn't matter what actually happened, which as we know WoW was the marriage and job destroyer.

Hmm

^^ um no

Which direction offends you more?

I thought what made that early period of the game so exciting was that none of the third-party tools that automate the game yet existed, nor most of the online resources that tell you where everything is and what everything does, and also none of the content designed for grinding that made it feel as if the game had some kind of definite objective, not all the optimized character templates that made characters so powerful that much of the low-level content wasn’t worth engaging with anymore because it wasn’t challenging — before all that, it felt like a sandbox world, there for you to explore with no real defined purpose, but all those elements made it much more rigid and took out all the magic.

I mean, even that, fact that it was an entire virtual world, with thousands of people in it, was pretty exciting all on its own, when you put it in perspective and remember home primitive the technology was at the time.

You're welcome to your own opinion, but I respectfully suggest that you may be misremembering a few things:

Drain macroing was already widespread by November 1999. ACExplorer dropped January 2000, SplitPea officially released in February 2000 (although most had the alpha sooner), ACTool mid-2000, Decal was released within the first year and widespread by end of 2000. This stuff all happened incredibly fast.

CoD had everything documented for the base game pretty much at release (thanks in part to the official strategy guide) and kept pace with updates at most within a few days. ACExplorer (as mentioned) automatically fed from the CoD database.

This is part true but mostly false. The major XP grind dungeons were introduced in June 2000, and they fundamentally changed the character of the game by encouraging all players to grind monsters to level infinity.

I'm not sure that's a huge improvement over the base game, though, which was ultimately powered by camping high tier chests for random loot. If you don't believe me, please look at a list of release dungeons and quests - with very few exceptions, the reward is a random chest pull. A part of me really likes the purity of this design but ultimately it's just grinding too.

Min-maxed characters weren't powerful at low levels. You'd always take some combination of 10 end, str, quick - often all three - which gave you no HP and no way to run away from enemies. The most aggressive mage templates at the time didn't get meaningful offensive magic until mid-20s.

Launch low-level content was capped level 6. By the time any of these characters were powerful enough to survive launch content, they were too high level and weren't even allowed to complete it. Beyond that, the content wasn't extrinsically rewarding (as previously mentioned, your reward was usually just a chest pull - often not even a high tier chest); it was very far out of the way once most of the launch outposts were destroyed/replaced with training academies; you were too high level for that content by the time you finished an academy even if you wanted to do it; and unlike the 'modern' starter town quests and the society quests, none of the off-grid starter quests were properly maintained, so even if you were low level enough to get in the monsters outside were certainly too powerful for you to handle, and the monster weenies had undergone many years of tweaking and rebalancing, so the monsters inside would obliterate you too.

Which, I think, hints at what I said before: people really stopped running these quests because the game changed. Partly because the players started playing with it differently, but mostly because the developers changed the game to the extent that it wasn't really feasible to do them.

But mostly the changes. Before Sudden Season the game was very loose and self directed. Sudden Season introduced a strongly linear story-based quest (Lost City of Frore) which, while really cool at the time, was a radical departure from how quests and dungeons were designed before that. The developers shifted from providing dungeons for the purpose of exploration and chest pulls, to story/quest dungeons for the purpose of killing a boss at the end.

I'm not arguing which approach is better. I'm just saying it's different. Asheron's Call in November 1999 was a completely different game from Asheron's Call a year later, in all the ways that really mattered.

That's all true, but doesn't offer a satisfactory explanation for why future games were able to recapture this magic while providing nothing more than Asheron's Call on paper, even though Asheron's Call clearly lost the script within a few months of release.

I mean, if nothing else blowing up Arwic pissed off a lot of players.

I was prepared to concede that my comments may have reflected my personal experiences. After all, I didn't start playing until early in 2000, and it took a little while for me to discover all that stuff. So even if those things existed, I was in blissful ignorance of them.

But after you've laid down the timeline, I'm not sure I want to make that concession anymore. Those first few months of the game were exceptional, and I think it is because, for example, BSD and Lugian Citadel (which came out in the same patch, IIRC, although obviously BSD was much more effective for grinding) didn't yet exist.

I don't think any other game came anywhere close. Granted, I didn't play a ton of MMORPGs. I only tired EQ (very briefly), DAoC and WoW (ok, and also AC2, but lol), but none of them came close. I think part of what made MMORPG so magical for me was that it was my first MMO. I think a lot of people who played AC from near launch to the end (and, presumably, are still playing, although I haven't followed the emulator stuff at all) ultimately stuck with it for that reason more than any other.

You should concede: it's what I've been saying, they took the original game and within the first year they'd whittled it down from something great to something thoroughly meh.

"I think it’s because they had a monthly patch model that caused major changes to the game, most of which were unpopular. People want to go back to a cohesive and well planned world"

The TL;DR is they threw in BSD, OHN, HoM, Lugian Citadel etc. in June 2000 to help players grind up to the next set of linear event quests. The game went to utter dog****. Complete opposite of a cohesive and well planned world.

I remember some launch-era starter dungeon outside of Shoushi that capped at level 6 (and was deleted when they rebooted the starter dungeon, or perhaps even before that), fighting with my first ever gimped as hell character when I had no idea how stats worked, getting merked by Drudges. It was so suspenseful. The stakes of getting killed and losing the leather armor that I bought at the store for 800 pyreals or whatever it was seemed like incredibly high stakes, in this new sort of world where you had a character that you could keep playing through respawns and logins. Like, even that was such a novel and fresh gameplay dynamic for me, having only played FPSs online up until that point (and really only JK).

Eeeeh, my intention wasn't to really register sharp disagreement with you in the first place.

I did think a lot of the arcs were actually pretty cool, though. It took them a little while (a few years, in fact) to really lose the thread such that I lost interest (although the first arc was still the most intriguing). I was able to participate in a lot of the monthly quests even thought I was only playing on weekends and didn't at any point have a char that was considered high level.

None of the Shoushi starter dungeons were deleted. Shoushi was preserved as one of the surviving three starter towns. One of the small dungeons (a cave) was converted from a portal dungeon to a... well, a cave. The rest of the dungeons were upgraded over the years and their levels caps increased. The same applies to Holtburg and Yaraq.

The other starter towns were not updated, and their quests are basically uncompleteable without using an emulator/cheats. Three of the Osteth towns were completely destroyed within the first year, along with all of the content involving those towns. At least one more beginner friendly town was destroyed in following years; probably more, but I quit playing so I don't remember for sure. Overworld and uncapped dungeon spawns were upgraded haphazardly, beginning a few months after release when all of the carefully hand-placed region and biome specific monster spawns were bulk replaced with defined level regions. For example, at launch reedsharks preferred watery areas, with normal reedsharks in swamps, sandsharks on beaches, and mattekars in snowy areas. By the end of the first year they were distributed uniformly.


I could sadly go on for a long time talking about all of the stuff they did to destroy Asheron's Call's character as a game. They put real effort into this.

(This is fresh for me because I fairly recently used an emulator to visit all of the dungeons, ca. 2006 or so. The launch dungeons feel completely different. In many cases there are whole tilesets and aesthetic styles that they abandoned in favor of others; for example, there's a launch dungeon that switches from a fairly generic dungeon to a creepy fleshy semi-organic shadow dungeon midway through. Later shadow dungeons are all just black stone with some red lettering on the walls. The Tumerok dungeon visual style was similarly abandoned.)

Huh, that's pretty interesting. I have a vague recollection of seeing the shadow dungeon you're describing. Some of the later designs for Virindi dungeons were so... blah. Somewhere between a Tim Burton movie and a Japanese game show.

The best Virindi dungeon is Sylsfear, because you don't even realize it's a Virindi dungeon. Which is pretty damn appropriate.


Edit: At launch Sylsfear had a bunch of banderlings up top, then as you worked your way down you got to tuskers, and at the bottom is a laboratory full of equipment and some elemental enemies. Hidden in a room near a laboratory was a level 100 virindi observer, nigh unkillable in november 1999 when the highest level characters were 40, and with a name that was apparently supposed to mean something before they flooded the entire ****ing world with virindi observer+tusker slave spawns for some reason.

To add to this, by way of reminiscing: there was a point early on where suddenly being trailed by an Ash Gromnie while running through the mountains was the most frightening thing that could possibly happen to you. Those things could really mess you up, and leave you with a corpse that was basically impossible to recover. The stakes felt so high! Eventually, though, those creatures either became a mere nuisance or so weak that they didn't pose any threat at all. It seemed like a lot of the game was designed with the idea that all chars in the world would be level 15 at most with really gimped templates. Once that wasn't the case anymore, and the player base moved beyond that stage, you were left with world that was dotted with creature that weren't worth engaging (until they changed the distribution of creatures, but it didn't really improve much).

I guess one of the coolest things about AC was that the devs designed a world that was so complex that they couldn't really anticipate how it would be used and how the player base would alter it. I think that's especially true with templates. The element of users discovering things about the world that the devs didn't intend is a really fascinating aspect of the game. The trading economy is a good example of that, too.

Maybe AC isn't unique in that regard, but WoW seemed significantly more limited in how it allowed the social elements of the game to shape what it was like to participate in the virtual world.