wow, having acid trip flashbacks. dogs with snouts as long as their bodies. buffalos without faces and eyes on their horns. its like a bad trip through fun land.
they can forge metal to make guns, harness energy for energy weapons and yet...live in tents.
one thing that sticks out, something i think alot of "free to play" games focus on, is the complexity of their skill based advancement. eve comes to mind. doac is another one. they seem to think that the majority of gamers want to sit down and figure out the cookie cutter fromula for the perfect leet dude like they did in UO so long ago.
i am willing to bet the geeks who write the code are infantly excieted about being able to maniplate everything down to the finest detail even to the point of making which skills or spells you do get more potent than the others AFTER you have chosen a skill tree path AFTER you have chosen a class.
if they put half as much thought into the actual combat as they do in the effectiveness of each and every facet of being able to fight, they might have discovered, like eve, like eq2, and like all over button smashing action, that it was missing something fundamental to keeping people engrosed.
fun.
target, click attack, scroll through gee wiz buttons to find that perfect combination that makes the monsters red bar go down faster than your red bar.
or if your watching tv while playing because even the evening news is more entertaining, forget the gee wiz buttons. speck everything into hitpoints and hitpoint regen, like you do with every game launched since UO, and just hit attack and wait till the sound effects tell you its dead while you channel surf.
the developers seem to think the "fun" is all about specking your toon with the infanite ability to define each and every little action down to the minutest detail.
and that may be "fun' for them.
the other 12 million gamers are still gona play WoW.
just another geek game designed by geeks for geeks. it isnt even a good mainstream gamer playform to build from. the graphics are too poor.
specking and pvp. making either one of them the focus of the game is the surest way to make a game "free to play".
Warhammer is next. it wasnt DoAC,s bugs that made it a tiny little nich game. it was the basic focus that the developers mistook for "fun". specking, respecking and pvp. pvp is fun for about an hour. after that, even with large scale pvp, for most gamers it is just....boaring. something to do while channel surfing. thats also why pirates of the burning sea, shadowbane, planetside, Aserons call(now dead), EVE, and anarchy online are all.......tiny little niche games.
but the first 20 levels in all of them are fun. well most of them. AC2 and this little thing, ryzon pretty much suck from the very beginning. even Tabula Riza did a better job.
oh, yea. be still my heart.