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To whom I speak, it reaches.


Vaalix

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They need to add a social class to this game. Star Wars Galaxies did it with entertainers. The entertainers usually hung out in cantina's across the galaxy and provided buffs that augmented certain skill mods for a few hours. What this effectively did was bring people together in cantina's (social hubs) for 5-10 minutes every few hours. Normally you would see people chatting back and fourth through chat bubbles while waiting for the entertainer to finish the song or dance. It was a small thing like that, that we took for granted and seemed to forget to implement in our new games but it was a time and place where so many memories were had.. So many friendships formed through normal social interactions which is a hugely lacking in today's mmo games and a big oversight on developers end. To be perfectly honest though.. These linear theme park games are getting to be extremely pointless and boring. I feel the genre is dieing and will most likely continue to die until someone starts listening to the right creative minds, and I guarantee you they aren't working at bioware or any triple A developer studio.. If they are, they are most likely swinging a mop on the 3rd floor somewhere..

 

Sandbox vs Theme park vs a Hybrid of both..

 

Sandbox games normally on their own aren't that fun. The minute you mention "sandbox", people cringe because they don't fully understand that term nor what a sandbox really entails because from cradle to grave they are spoon fed and told what to think, how to think, where to think, whats Paris hilton wearing, who slept with who on Jersey Shore etc; which later develops into left brained narcissistic-instant gratification and simplistic bodies of biological mass. Or otherwise known as "sheeple". This all leads to a majority of human beings on this planet who can't intuitively generate a simple creative notion or thought. Its the same people who made it through the assembly line (school), that are all grown up and working in the gaming industry only because they could bare to sit through 12-15 years of being told how to think. The creativity was essentially beat out of them starting at a young age and it was only a few of us who survived. This game has plenty of theme park and needs a mass infusion of some of that old school sandbox designs; which to me is just freedom. I prefer freedom over liberty. You have liberties in this game but no freedom.. You have some liberties granted to you in the space version of this game but absolutely no freedom. We as North Americans like our freedom don't we? Well lets get it on with some theme park games that are heavily influenced by someone who can make it appear to be a sandbox at the same time.. I.E the hybrid sandbox/theme park mmo game design coming to a store near you well into the future, and most likely from the likes of Blizzard because they know their game design is dieing just like I know. Its 2012 people.. things are changing, and they are changing exponentially faster and faster every day. Do you know why time seems like its speeding up? Its because consciousness is speeding up. What was 60 seconds 10 years ago feels like 10 seconds today.. There is a reason for all this which is well beyond the scope of this writing, but I can 100% guarantee you all, this type of game design is dead.

 

Theme park = rails and liberties, sandbox = freedom. Mix the two together and you will have a hybrid offspring unlike anything ever known to hu-man.

 

I have to mention pre-combat upgrade Star Wars Galaxies at this point because its the only game to come close to hitting the mark with what an actual sandbox mmo game should feel and play like. I understand this game will never stray far from its current wow derivative, but they really have to re-think what they are doing here and mix some sand into this box or it will fail and fail very rapidly.

Sandbox games get a bad reputation because they are never done right and never seem to have enough funding or the talent behind them.

Swg essentially failed because of complexities regarding the hybrid class system and there was no theme park ride.. Or to put it another way, it didn't have the story and quests like swtor has. If sony would have mixed theme park with sandbox, swg would have been a juggernaut back in 2003. As the user base cried for months on the forums for more things to do (mainly quests and raids/group content), that is basically what drove them to push out a badly butchered version of 9 iconic classes and implement levels.. It was the worse thing to do but even worse than that was not rolling the code back.. That killed that game.

Had bioware effectively fused the sandbox and theme park rides together they would of had a wow killer and not just a perfect carbon copy of world of Warcraft which is what they currently pushed out to us. I've said it before and I'll say it again; people are getting sick of polished mediocrity. Yes WoW is a very polished and fluid game but its a very simplistic game with a simple graphics engine that runs well on just about any computer dating back to 2001.

And..

People will never fully understand or even believe why wow was such a massive success. I'm getting tired of explaining why because no one believes a company would put cocaine into coke or other addictive additives into their product. Well blizzard did. I personally consider it wrong, highly unethical, dangerous and potentially illegal but it involves brain washing. Not MK Ultra type stuff but something a little more low key so not to startle any unwanted attention. More accurately put, they use a technique called audio visual entrainment. Its quite obvious to the trained eye but not so much to the masses of uneducated gamers. You might be well schooled and some of you may have ivy league degrees but you are not an educated geographic no matter how hard you think you are.. But I digress.. One other illusion coming from "supposed" Blizzards success is 11 million subs.. More bs and lies. The Asian market uses time cards.. Each time card is counted as a unique user so its pretty easy to come up with some mythical numbers which just stirs buzz around the game and generates interests etc and so on. They are clever..

So we have companies like Bioware and Trion come along, who make damn near perfect carbon copies of wow (with minor variables) and can't understand why they dont have anywhere near the same success. Well, the above reasons are why and the truth is, unless they are willing to sell their souls, they never will come close to Blizzard.This is vast and complicated situation which schisms off in multiple directions, well beyond normal human comprehension. Its just a good thing I'm hear to think for you :)

 

So in closing.

 

The basic human condition is in a state of ill-being. despair and that of a ill-concious which is concurenttly spiraling out of control into a sea of nothingness.. Which only complicates the situation even further.

Edited by rakkiki
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Agree on nearly everything with you. But i can't feel about much liberty in swtor right now. Its a prison, a maze and after your done walking trough the labyrinth(in my case altough i reached 50, i played with pain so it was very fast) you just stop playing.

 

If they did and i said it also elsewhere a sandbox game with good strong gameplay, pve, pvp.

It would have been literally unlimited times better. Lucas should have thought of SWG 2 in maybe the old republic age or a new age were force users were present.

 

MMORPG´s are about dynamical content not static(story).

 

I can actually feel the direction MMO´s will go. Because its clear this is what people want.

Edited by Rigota
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I completely agree with this post for the most part. Although this game will likely stay on the path it is on, and I am getting enough entertainment value with it to play for a little while, I do hope a developer comes along to create this hybrid monster of which the OP speaks. I have been thinking this since I left SWG for WoW.

 

I think the idea of an entertainer buff is excellent, and a step towards helping build our community. That in itself would not take much to implement.

 

Friends I made in back in those days, that still play together talk about this sort of thing all the time. It's a shame that a massive majority of gamers today did not get to experience this sort of social experience in a game, as a large percentage started with WoW. I know there are still many of us old guys that go way back, but there are MANY that jumped on the MMO bandwagon with blizzard, and they are the critics of these types of posts most often.

 

Maybe someday...

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I have to mention pre-combat upgrade Star Wars Galaxies at this point because its the only game to come close to hitting the mark with what an actual sandbox mmo game should feel and play like.

 

If you're looking back on SWG with positive memories, you are going to be disapointed in any mmo in future. SWG was widely derided as the worst A level mmo ever to be released. At least the matrix online was put down early instead of left to rot

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I really don't get why so many mmo players don't like playing mmos? Irrespective of how DAoC or SWG did it half a decade ago Wow's staggering genre crushing success has pretty much washed everything else away.

Today mmo means leveling up so you can start gearing up to raid/pvp and get on the gear treadmill. If you don't like this system why do you buy and sub to games that use this system?

 

 

Specifically regarding the OP's post no on social classes. As a raider I don't like the idea of having to rely on a toon to raid (which lets be fair the social buffs would either be so strong as to be required or the whole class would be rendered moot) that can't even be brought to a raid.

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