Looks like Blizzard is announcing a new game....

[Section8]

WoW is nothing, because every class can solo... so everyone does.

 

[Lyric Suite]

WoW is nothing, because every class can solo... so everyone does.

You can't solo in instances though, and that's where the best stuff can be had. Also, ironically enough, soloing is where the game yields the best rewards in terms of quests or story telling. Infact, for a big chunk of your character's career the game almost plays like Baldur's Gate. It even includes a story line of sort, which i don't think most other MMORPG ever bothered with. If they focused more on that aspect of the game rather then waist their time on the inevitable mass raids WoW could have actually been a fairly decent RPG...

 

[Lurkar]

WoW has a storyline? Don't make me laugh. I've never seen a setting more filled with plot holes and general idiocy then in that game. Hell, the guy in charge of "lore and story" at one point had to publically apologize because he forget the storyline to his own game which was sitting on his own damn website. And instead of FIXING the giant gaping plot hole, he just shrugged and went along with it.

As for soloing and instances, how the hell is it a good thing that the game is constantly driving you to solo and then shoves you into a group and says "Ok now, you be good!"

And finally, I have never seen a worse player base in my life. The morons at the ESF forums look like geniuses compared to some of the stupid shit at WoW, where we can see all the glory of fourteen year olds mindlessly repeating memes from 4chan, thinking it's the very height of creativity and wit.

 

[Kingston]

Korean Blizzard site has a dude in an armour weilding a sword... looks like a paladin?

http://wwi.blizzard.co.kr/

 

[Fez]

You mean the guy in black and white in the background? That's just a character from a WC3 FMV.

 

[Lyric Suite]

WoW has a storyline? Don't make me laugh. I've never seen a setting more filled with plot holes and general idiocy then in that game.

I'm not talking about the setting you jack ass, i'm talking about a plot-line spanning through out the game involving specific quests and even several scripted events, which generally speaking are rather tricky to pull off in a persistent online set up. The entire thing is then wrapped up with a set up to confront the main baddie of the game (that dragon thing, whatever it's fucking name was). I don't recall many MMORPGs who did anything of the kind. As far as i know, WoW is the first of it's type to offer a pseudo-single player experience. As i said, it reminded me of BG in a way. It wasn't much, but it was a step in the right direction.

As for soloing and instances, how the hell is it a good thing that the game is constantly driving you to solo and then shoves you into a group and says "Ok now, you be good!"

You can either solo or play in a group, at your discretion, it's not 'driving you' to do anything. If you plan to solo, but still want to compete in equipment, you can work as a crafter, grinding for resources (before you say anything keep in mind that some people enjoy doing this, and no, i'm not one of them), and if you manage to keep your crafting skills on par with your level you can pretty much avoid every instance of the game and still compete with the others gear wise.

If you chose to participate in the multi player experience, you can do instances, the difficulty of which (and the relative reward you derive from them) depending on your level. A lot of people simply wait until they are high enough to skip the challenge (though at that point the reward also becomes less appealing), but if you do them as soon as you meet the requirement, and assuming you have a competent team to play with, they can actually be quite challenging and entertaining (gasp). The higher the challenge, the greater is the amount of team work and actual tactic required without having to turn the whole experience into a frustrating time sink.

And finally, I have never seen a worse player base in my life. The morons at the ESF forums look like geniuses compared to some of the stupid shit at WoW, where we can see all the glory of fourteen year olds mindlessly repeating memes from 4chan, thinking it's the very height of creativity and wit.

Most multiplayer games are like this. I don't think it can be avoided, much less when the game is so popular. I guess it helps if you have a group of skilled friends to play with (which i did. It's a matter of fact, it's the reason why i decided to try WoW in the first place), but if you look hard enough you can find a small niche of decent players to team with.

I don't think it's a bad game as far as the genre goes. The most impressive aspect of it was the art direction of each area, which was distinctive enough to give you visual clues of where you were at any given point, and the fact each race had it's own set of areas (all the way to level 60) to play in was pretty cool.

 

[made]

The dragon "endboss" is called Nefarian.

Much of what LS wrote holds truth. WoW was an amazing game at its release, particularly if you were a warcraft fan and new to MMOs. Now, over 2 years later, the magic is gone. It can still be exciting, but it essentially boils down to doing the same things over and over again to aquire loot. Everything in WoW revolves around getting constantly new gear to upgrade your character one way or another. Some people enjoy that.

 

[Lyric Suite]

I stopped playing before Battlegrounds was even released, so i don't know in what state the game is in at the moment. To be frank, i don't get how people can play any game for any extended period of time, but whatever floats their boat.

All in all i think i liked WoW better then Diablo. Some of the classes were actually more interesting (the warrior in particular was quite brilliant), and the fact they were all meant to actually complement each other in a team added a dimension Diablo never had, at least that i can remember.

The only real gripe i have with the game was traveling. Man was that a fucking bitch. Thank god i had some decent people to play or socialize with, else i would have gone out of my mind in the first two weeks. I liked how they tried to compensate by making all areas extremely concentrated in content and critters, but having to travel all over the fucking place to do end game instances was just too much. I think it's one of the reasons why i quit in the first place.

 

[The_Pope]

If it's not starcraft 2 or a new IP I don't really care. The rest wouldn't even get me to bother with a warez download.

 

[BigWeather]

As for storyline I thought City of Heroes did a decent job (for a MMO). They had chains of missions that formed story arcs that slowly revealed bits of the backstory. Also they had larger taskforces which I didn't care for quite as much but also had a fair bit of lore.

 

[DarkSign]

WoW's plot sucked. CoH was too damn repetitive. LoTR online is more of the same. EQ2 banked on player interaction and failed. DAoC got old quickly. EQ1 innovated but everything good must come to an end.

A Starcraft MMO could be cool, if, as people are discussing, it had a real strategy element. Make it like Shadowbane, with tactical and strategic reasons for building and extracting resources, and you've got the beginnings of a winner. +1 for not having elves.

 

[Zomg]

The idea that Vivendi would allow anything other than another DikuMUD money factory if they make an MMO with their best IP is a laugh.

 

[Kraken]

Small update: http://www.starcraft2.com now redirects you to http://www.blizzard.com.

 

[Koby]

The idea that Vivendi would allow anything other than another DikuMUD money factory if they make an MMO with their best IP is a laugh.

This following tidbit is a year old but I think it is still relevant to this topic, and at the very least an interesting snippet to read.

http://mmorpg.qj.net/All-Blizzard-Franc ... /aid/55958

 

[Atrokkus]

This following tidbit is a year old but I think it is still relevant to this topic, and at the very least an interesting snippet to read.

http://mmorpg.qj.net/All-Blizzard-Franc ... /aid/55958

No, it's not. Read the news more often: Blizzard denied that afterwards, saying that Vivendi presenters had a fuckup of some sort and the posters were clearly not designed as intended.
So all that "omg its gonna be mmo" talk is BULLSHIT.

There are far too many reasons to believe it'll be a proper Starcraft 2 RTS than not. Observe:

1. When Starcraft: Ghost was still in development, the FAQ on its official site had a very good question: "Is this Starcraft 2?", and the answer was - "NO, it's a separate project. There will be Starcraft 2, but later."

2. Blizzard was hiring experienced WC3/SC players as play-testers for balancing RTS gameplay. That's just self-explanatory in-your-face proof.

3. www.starcraft2.com now redirects you to www.blizzard.com. (thanks for heads-up, Kraken)

4. Starcraft: Ghost is cancelled. And I bet my kidneys that it's not going to be revived anytime soon.

5. The announcement will be held in two days' time from now, during a major Starcraft/Warcraft tournament event, Blizzard World Invitational, which will take place in South Korea (sic) and most of the leading progamers will take part in the event. I really doubt Blizzard are insolent and dumb enough to announce something OTHER than Starcraft 2 in such circumstances.


None of other game/genre options have as many reasons in their favor as SC2. Sure, there is still a chance of something going wrong, but it's negligeably slim.

 

[Lyric Suite]

There's two days left. Let's just wait, shall we?

Hats off to Blizzard if it is indeed Starcraft 2. It would be about time they quit fucking around.

 

[BigWeather]

I really hope it's Starcraft 2. Then they can get that out of the way and start cracking on Diablo 3.

 

[Lyric Suite]

^ What's with the Diablo3 obsession? Every where i go everybody hopes for a sequel to that series, arguably, the worst Blizzard has ever done. Last thing we need is more successful action-RPGs...

 

[made]

Ye, best thing about it were the FMVs.

Actually, the best thing in all Blizzard games are the FMVs.

 

[kingcomrade]

Maybe for W3 and D2.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

D2 was cool I liked it much more then the first one.

As for FMVs, meh, the WC3 ones were actually lame for the most part. Nothing beats the Broodwar intro

 

[kingcomrade]

Yeah the WC3 ones were pretty boring. As for the Brood War intro, I didn't like it all that much. The dialogue in the first part was total cliché and the actiony second part seemed artificial. I liked the SC movies, though, because they were short instead of trying to be super awesome and epic like in WC3.

There's no way in the world D2 is better than the first. D2 is just too easy, for starters, the gameplay was less interesting because of big open spaces and removal of the tile system, the skill tree basically turned D2 into a statistics-fest where your whole build is pre-planned, stuff like that. Liking D2 better than D1 is like liking Fallout 2 better than Fallout.

 

[Kingston]

^ What's with the Diablo3 obsession? Every where i go everybody hopes for a sequel to that series, arguably, the worst Blizzard has ever done. Last thing we need is more successful action-RPGs...

Well, the diablos were the only good action rpgs.

D2's FMVs were pretty fantastic.


Any thoughts on who is developing Starcraft2? The original devs?

 

[Volourn]

"EQ2 banked on player interaction and failed."

No. I interatced with your mum on EQ2 so it didn't fail. R00fles!

 

[BigWeather]

Yeah the Diablos are pretty much the only really good action RPGs on the PC. On the console you could add a couple more, at least in the last gen -- though the current gen is sorely lacking in them.

The FMVs were awesome, but more than anything they do such a bang-up job on the music. That probably explains some of my love for Ultima -- loved that music.