franklejp

Such a tease!

Actually, I think the new Skaven details are positive, she just isn't getting her point across very well even if she is excited about it.

I would love to see playable skaven too but it seems like they are sort of like player controlled mobile siege weapons with more versatility than the rams and arbalests. I see them as kind of like vehicles in Planetside. I don't have evidence of this but I gather they are much more powerful than players on foot but are limited in availability and accessibility.

So they are kind of like a player controled elite mob version of your player classes, spruced up to be a legitimate threat to keeps if left alone. This could be really good for WAR.

But the amount of effort they have put into orvr during its 2 years has been staggering. Which would lead one to believe that even that was horribly broken at launch.

At launch, people loved the scenarios and public quests and orvr had serious issues. So what did they do? They sunk all they effort into coming up with new rewards systems for orvr and it slowly got better.

The thing is, at times, orvr was fun at launch. There just was no incentive to play it because they made the idiotic decision to have diminishing xp and renown for killing the same people over and over work in orvr. That is the whole point of orvr is to encourage the troups to gather and kill each other over and over. Why punish for that? And the first new orvr systems continued to punish players for having chaotic fun by making them crazy grinds and again with drastic diminishing returns.

Diminishing rewards worked in scenarios because matches only lasted 10-15 minutes and the rewards penalties were reset. Unlike in the orvr where during the events, dozens of players would kill each other for 2-3 hours.

So if they had just given incentives like more tome event objectives for orvr, they could have saved themselves all the effort of creating new reward grinds and put that effort into consolidating PQ's and making sure that the pve quest lines were of comparable qualilty to areas like the greenskin newb zone.

Is WAR ever going to be more than a one trick pony? Good god man. There is a solid foundation for raiding and group pve content or even the hybrid pvp/public quests.

I understand your constant focus of orvr has let you think you are maintaining your user base. But the reality is you are clinging to one set of players while completely discarding the others. Even if they are smaller segments, which I don't buy, they are still significant.

You revamped and coalesced the new experience. I think WAR would benefit a great deal from doing the same to PQ's, and dungeons.

Hopefully in 10 years we will all be using the 4th generation Kinect or like technology so we can really bash some orc, gnoll and goblin skulls!

I hope we can do things like huddle to the ground under our shield to protect us from a trap that rains arrows or fire from above. Or perhaps take on 3 foes at a time by having one in a headlock, whose body is used to block the overhand slash of another, followed by a back kick that lands in the gut of the third and knocks him to the floor, winded.

Yes, the meek shall inherit the earth. The next wave of exercise crazes will be revolutionized by geeks! It started with DDR and Wii Sports. But that is only the beginning.

All kidding aside, I really hope someone has the resources to get the idea in the first paragraph done. The technology exists. People just have to use it for something other than gimmicks (fake dancing, fake band, fake sports).

You guys are neglecting what I think is one of the positive things to come out of eastern mmo's. They have hourly subscription plans. The norm overseas seems to be $6 for 100 hours which I think is a great way to encourage subscriptions to multiple mmo's. Its not as good a deal if you are hardcore in a single mmo but it can help out casuals and families. The hours don't expire so if you only play 10 hours 1 month you have 90 more hours to spread around any amount of upcoming months. If you do use up 100 hours in a month, just pay another $6 when you feel like playing more.

Its also a great way to try out some games for longer than the free month with the boxed copy.

And from a developers point of view, I'm sure $6 may not be $15 a month but its certainly better than $0.

I think the Agency is up there because it flipped my hype on it 180. I was not at all interested in it prior to e3 but now I'm pumped. For those that want Planetside 2 I think the Agency is only lacking the open world stuff that may be there but we haven't seen it. However, we did hear and see a lot about what it does have. The ability to set your own missions/goals that your team can take on or your friends can accomplish for you seems awesome. One of the devs said you can play the game just as an intel type guy and never fire a shot. The progression sounds like its more horizontal yet more vertical seemingly than Planetside. You can switch roles (recon, commander, suppressor, assault, gadgeteer) so you aren't locked into leveling up alts to fill out your group.

The Rifts: Planes of Telara stuff looks really interesting. I hope they follow through with the soul tree system for the classes. They are locking out some soul trees for the class archetypes (boo!) but I hope they have some variety such that a warrior can throw a fireball or a priest can whirlwind his two handed axe.

DCUO, I was in the boat that hoped that this wasn't a CO knock off and I must say I am really impressed. If you are at all interested in this, track down the E3 video that weren't previewing the PVP. The combat was way more action oriented and more like a console brawler than anything CO has put together. And that is not counting the awesome stuff your character can do using the environment. Sure you can pick up and throw stuff like in CO but the player in DCUO was jumping onto and bouncing off walls to avoid attacks and land powerful moves. This is not your mama's super hero mmo!

MMOers are so lucky in the coming up months. We have so much to look forward to: TERA, DCUO, Cataclysm, the Agency, R:PoT, SWTOR, Black Prophecy, Jumpgate Evo, LOTRO f2p, Dragon Nest, jeez the list goes on and on...

Not to jump on the train some more but another thing popped out from the interview. They can't even tell us a base set of races that are going to be in the game. They are implying Chaos, Orks, and Space Marines and alluding to wanting Eldar. But they haven't even commited to any right now.

As far as art direction goes, I think all of the above is true. Yes it looks great now. Yes it will look less cutting edge in 3 years. Yes, the game will have to make concessions to poly counts because of the PvP requiring massive and massive amounts of units on screen.

One thing that give me confidence is that this is Joe Madiera's company. He is one of my favorite comic artists and pretty much legendary. I can't imagine he's going to let me down visually.

The fact that this isn't due out til 2013 and the fact that they are using the "Darksiders" engine has soured my expectations a bit for this game.

I feel totally duped. I'm more inclined to believe that everything in that trailor was quick mock ups using 40K assets in "Darksiders".

The telltale sign for me is the WoW-style UI that pops in on top of footage that varies from Planetside-style PvP to HG:L PvE to flying and multi-seated mounts.

Like someone mentioned above, a lot is going to change in 2-3 years. The "action" mmo's TERA, DCUO and The Agency will probably have their first expansions out by then. Then there is Vindictus, Wild Planet and Dragon Nest rounding out the released action mmo's. Sure these aren't Warhammer 40k but everything that looks exciting and new about gameplay in that trailer will be 2 year old leftovers.

SWTOR will be out by then and we still have the unannounced mmo from Blizzard.

Thank god I'm not the only one. There is no need for grind at all. Look at Diablo and Diablo 2. People played and enjoyed those games for years. You can get to high levels in those games in ~25 hours but nobody complained because they were too busy making alts to try out new skill builds. It almost wasn't about attaining the perfect build, it was about developing the "perfect" build.

Sure the Diablo games had end game loot grind but that was optional. The route up to 40-45 in Diablo and 75 in Diablo 2 was grind free.

WoW could do the same thing except with quest lines. You can spend time finding the "perfect path" through WoW's different racial questlines. They'd just need to extend them past level 20.

I think Mabinogi's rebirth system would go a long way in combating grind too.