Poe

Death penalties should be harsh and an item sink in games that are trying to create a living and breathing world with a dynamic economy. Full loot death should be in most sandbox games. Success should be measured on your character's impact on the world and the ridiculously high priced items you could afford through the money you acquire, not the amount of time you spend knowing a certain item drops off a certain mob.

Death penalties in theme park games that focus on the next big instance or encounter should be smaller. The difficulty from these games come from the advanced tactics and teamwork required to complete a scripted event and not from the death penalty. These games should have either a small out of the way event(corpse running) or gear being degraded.

The less the death penalty the more ways there should be for a player to measure himself against other players. This is where I think most theme parked games should have records for instances for guilds and groups that complete them in a certain amount of time, on a certain difficulty, or last a certain amount of time. This then shifts the exciting aspects to being competitive against other players to get the best score instead of the possibility of dying with a harsh penalty.

I'm a big fan of story driven MMOs but only if the content that they add over the course of the game isn't purely top heavy. If every expansion or addition to the game is going to be geared towards end game then people will just totally skip all of the story driven elements at the beginning of the game and not pay attention to it. Because if story driven games have a heavy end game then new players that enter the game a year or more after the release will feel the game is just one big single player game with a multiplayer end game.

Hopefully The Old Republic will be an amazing story driven event from the very beginning of logging in and be able to mix needing groups to progress the story from the very beginning until the end. Then as content is added they can add more things to the top game but also side quests and side chapters that will want players to create alts so that the front side of the game will always be nice and populated without people rushing through.

The issue for me is that F2P games are becoming ever so cunning with their website layouts. Free Realms has next to no information on the actual game itself on the main page. You have to hit Game -> what is free realms? -> use side bars on the right to find out extremely vague information of what the game offers. So, most people that go to the website and hit the new player button first. It takes about 4 steps of choosing what type of character you want until it hits you with a create username screen.

Basically what I am saying is that 8 million accounts on Free Realms means nothing to me because they are basically forcing you to create an account to find out information about the game. It is just a clever trick to boost up the amount of accounts they have as a way to advertise the game.

I play single player games for one reason only: the story. If they create a single player game based off a MMO and the story is good, then I will play it. I will not play it if I have to grind for hours and hours like a MMO though.

I'm looking to get into Darkfall in the next month or so. As an old UO player it seems to have a lot of similarities. Can anyone shine a light on how deep and integral to the economy that crafting system is?

Would love to see a new AAA title that is isometric. Everquest felt epic when it was first person view only. 3rd person is the standard these days and it is fine but I miss the immersion and scale of the world that first person felt and the depth that isometric can have.

I don't trust Cryptic at all and will never play a game of theirs.

Just remake UO please.

OooOo CHOOSE ME! :D

Loved the crafting and exploration of this game, shame the combat was boring. I'm tempted to play again to see all the things they have added to crafting though.