AllenJB

Neocron. (If you can call it running - it's free to play, but only because their payment system is broken and the latest set of patches, like 3 years in the making, had to be immediately rolled back) No idea how why the servers are still on, but they are.

I would find the key game that launched EA into the big time, go back and trash it. I don't know off hand what that game was -we may lose a real gem. But, I wholeheartedly believe that the loss of one gem will easily be countered by the massacre of the game studios that has been EAs career being averted.


Option number 2 would have to be going back to the point where Reakktor killed Neocron 1 and steering them in a better direction. I think I'd have to think quite hard about exactly what point this was tho. Off the top of my head, I think it's when they locked all the GRs down, making it much harder to jump into op fights, so they ended up being far too short and far too one sided.

Stage 1 Player: Please vote for whether you want J. to be a Male or Female character

So the conversation choices shown won't match up to the resulting conversation then?

I disagree with the sentiment that MMOs getting worse "doesn't ring true". MMOs may be getting bigger, with better graphics, but they're also getting more static.

Gone seem to be the days of dedicated events teams who would help move the world forward and a storyline that moved the world along. These days I can level a character, and then do it again 6 months and the world will be exactly the same. Same government, same factions, same war, same reasons.

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how big the puzzle is or how nice the resulting picture, if it has too many similar pieces that never change and the resulting picture never changes, you can only do it once or twice before you get bored.

The problems with MMOs today, as I see it:
- Lack of user generated content - where have writable books (circa UO days), which allowed players to write their own quests or just write story content for others to find, gone?

- The world isn't zoned - I'm talking 3 senses here: Levels, "Maps" and Shards.

First there's level-based zones. I don't get the way all the level 40s are all in the same area. I think Neocron did this well, with content radiating out from the several population centers.

Then, there's the traditional zone lines that still seem to be popular for some reason. A number of MMOs have shown that there's no reason for these any more, so why do we still have them?

Finally, we come to shards. There's 2 issues here: rulesets and just plain old shards.

I don't get ruleset based shards (roleplay, pve, pvp). I liked how Neocron handled this, with the "Law Enforcer" that allowed those who didn't want to pvp to stay out of it while those who did want to could take it out and pvp to their hearts content, all on the same shard. While Neocron's implementation was flawed (mainly LE users in PVP objective areas), I believe those flaws were fairly easily solvable (disabled LE when near objectives). And don't get me started on roleplay shards. Why do you need separate shards to roleplay?

And then there's the issue of plain old shards. While I maybe get that there are some issues around number of avatars in a small area, etc, I don't think these problems are unsolvable - they may require some slightly immersion breaking forced rules (eg. 400 people in a given vicinty, but many games do this on multi-shard setups anyway). In my opinion, all MMOs should be one world, one shard.

The shard issue also has an impact on the other issue I have with MMOs: Nothing ever changes. All the storylines in MMOs now are fixed, NPC orientated, kill 10 rats style, and it's frankly getting just a little boring. Whatever happened to events teams running events with player controlled characters?

I want to feel like I'm living in a world that changes, not a world that's exactly the same as it was 2 months ago when I was levelling up my last character. There needs to be ongoing storylines with changes in political affiliations, faction allegiances, landscape, etc.

I think this is not helped by so many games being red vs blue these days - Neocron did it well with 7 factions, each with ongoing storylines building on existing lore and occasionally changing allegiances.

This game was way more fun in beta. You used to get the choice of which PvP mission type you wanted, allowing you to keep to mission types you found fun and avoid those you didn't.

There were also options to avoid premade teams and keep to your level which have disappeared - these were great for keeping the pvp games fun, in my opinion.

This has led to some matches ending up half empty 30 seconds in because some people would rather take the deserter penalty than be forced to play a mission type that's not fun, which obviously further causes problems with team balance.

HiRez have deemed that these problems shouldn't be fixed - instead they prefer to try to force everyone to play all the mission types because a relative minority were complaining that their favourite mission type wasn't launching new matches fast enough. Rather than fix the issues with those mission types, they just force people to play them instead.

As an additional solution to the voting issues, how about listing the top 3 runners up in each category, in order.

Next week: Why articles on "why rmt won't go away" won't go away

Neocron 1 (or Neocron 2 before the "balancing" that introduce 100 new armor slots)