Adams_BJ
Russian warship, go fuck yourself
+2,054|6785|Little Bentcock
It's good
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+640|3882
I rather get shot with a tazer than play a MMO.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+640|3882
This game murders $2000 RTX 3090s. What a fascinating innovation in PC gaming. Games that break hardware.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6935|PNW

That's actually gotten my interest. I wonder if it's because there are a lot of very high res and high poly assets, or because the engine is not well optimized.

New games should be pushing current hardware at max or even moderate settings. Progress, y'know.

e:

oh, murders literally. did they even test this?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/ … pe-of-gpu/

Nice capstone for Bezos' space trip.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+640|3882
It only affects a very specific brand of video card. It can be reasonably be argued that the issue is the GPU's manufacture's fault. But the fact that this game blew up a GPU, and that has almost never been done before, is still a bad look.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6935|PNW

It will be interesting to learn of the cause, and who will ultimately pay for replacements.
Adams_BJ
Russian warship, go fuck yourself
+2,054|6785|Little Bentcock

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

It will be interesting to learn of the cause, and who will ultimately pay for replacements.
It was soldering issues
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6935|PNW

Weird, I wonder what New World was doing that other games weren't that triggered that, or just did other failures during different games/tasks go largely unreported.
Cybargs
Moderated
+2,285|6879
games shit now and dead.
https://cache.www.gametracker.com/server_info/203.46.105.23:21300/b_350_20_692108_381007_FFFFFF_000000.png
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6935|PNW

Heard the exact same thing from Steam friends. What happened?
Cybargs
Moderated
+2,285|6879
really bad grind all the quests were basically the same "go kill x, y,z gather xyz" and you stay in the same area for too long so its really repetitive. no real end game and amazon keeps fucking with game item stats to placate peeps. oh and they had to keep shutting down the in game economy (no store or gold transfer) cos people were literally copying and pasting money.

so much hype but failed very badly.
https://cache.www.gametracker.com/server_info/203.46.105.23:21300/b_350_20_692108_381007_FFFFFF_000000.png
uziq
Member
+492|3615
making a genuinely good MMO has to be the toughest genre to really crack.

how disheartening that a company with the infinite funding and largesse of an amazon couldn't even do it. they threw a helluva lot of resources at this project over the years.

that said, it sounded like it suffered from a fair amount of development bloat and drift. it seemed almost aimless. they put so much effort into some systems and then totally neglected the fundamentals of others. combat, questing, character progression: c'mon guys.

this is why blizzard knocked it out the park with warcraft. movement and combat, thanks to their engine, felt really, really responsive and good. it makes it much easier to spend 2,000 hours of your life grinding or treadmilling for coloured pixels when the actual game feels good to play.
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,813|6269|eXtreme to the maX
Is there a book on gameplay design?

Pong and space invaders are still hard to beat
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
uziq
Member
+492|3615
one of the lead developers of world of warcraft's vanilla early days actually released a crowdfunded book on this recently, riding the hype of the wow:classic relaunch.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wh … ft-diary-0



the MMO genre and development/publishing industry has really been shaped by the success and subsequent hegemony of WoW. we have basically had to endure a whole decade of 'WoW alternatives' that tried to reinvent the wheel and purposefully diversify against their 'trad-themepark' model. none of them have basically stuck. most dissatisfied MMO players are still doing the usual zombie march from short-term MMO to MMO, most of them thesedays being put out by korean publishers ... which are the absolute quintessence of trad-themepark grinds. major 'alternatives' like guild wars 2, TERA, or wildstar have either died completely or only enjoyed modest success.

afaik a few games have their respective niches. elder scrolls online, the latest final fantasy MMO(s), guild wars 2 probably still, too. but none have nailed that magic recipe that hooks people in.

WoW:classic was the best and only thing to happen to the genre in a decade. literally spent 4 months replaying 15-year-old content. the genre is seriously in the doldrums. from a business perspective it makes so little sense for developers/publishers to take the immense risk nowadays. an MMO requires years of heavy development and a huge amount of infrastructure to work smoothly. a publisher can rake in 10x more money nowadays on mobile games, cash transactions, or the latest franchise sequel to CoD/BF/whatever.

Last edited by uziq (2021-12-16 04:30:16)

unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6935|PNW

Dilbert_X wrote:

Is there a book on gameplay design?

Pong and space invaders are still hard to beat
Holy moly, Dilbert, the game design content on Humble Bundle alone would probably collapse a bookshelf if printed.
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6935|PNW

Cybargs wrote:

really bad grind all the quests were basically the same "go kill x, y,z gather xyz" and you stay in the same area for too long so its really repetitive. no real end game and amazon keeps fucking with game item stats to placate peeps. oh and they had to keep shutting down the in game economy (no store or gold transfer) cos people were literally copying and pasting money.

so much hype but failed very badly.
I think what kills a lot of these for me is the grind. Some people enjoy it, but others just don't have the time. There's tons of games with pleasantly generic fantasy storylines out there that I just can't get into with about the 40 minutes I'll give it a first chance with. Another thing that kills it for me is when the suits see dollar signs and start butting in with microtransactions where they don't really belong. PASS.

- Conan Exiles was fun for a bit until I realized I wasn't having fun spending most of my time chopping trees and mining stone, and transporting both to and from storage because building materials are used up so quickly.

- Path of Exile kept rejoggling the skill tree and leaving me with a character I'd need to respec again, with an equipment and gem setup that may no longer be remotely meta.

- 7 Days to Die in recent Alpha 20 barely gives you enough farm produce to craft replacement seeds unless you absolutely max the skill, and the current drop rate for books is maybe 1 every 50 bookshelves, which you'd be lucky to find on one city block. Terrain gen is broken, so lots of servers had to reset after about a week in. Waste of time.

I think the sweet spot for a game is being easy to jump right into, learn and start being competitive in, but hard to master, and punishing to 100%. Something for both the casuals and the Koreans. Not that all games have to aim for specifically that to be successful?

I really don't think the bricked NVIDIA cards helped New World much. That was way more scary than just ending up with a mildly glitchy game with wonky balance.
Cybargs
Moderated
+2,285|6879
what made it worst for new world is that the servers kept having issues and have constant maintenance. there's no microtransactions in new world. it's fans are giving it a lot of excuses like "oh shouldve been subscription model, theres no moneys in this model!" - the game literally died within month from launch lel.

don't get me wrong, new world is pree easy to jump into and learn, but there really is no middle game or a real end game. yeah at the end you get nutted items but then... that's it. the faction/pvp gameplay is just circular, there's fixed terrirotires and then once one faction dominates too much people start quitting.

they had a nice idea if you leave "pvp on" you get bonus XP, but then its worthless if you're lower level as you can get popped by higher level players.
https://cache.www.gametracker.com/server_info/203.46.105.23:21300/b_350_20_692108_381007_FFFFFF_000000.png
uziq
Member
+492|3615
getting ganked by higher level players out in the wild is part and parcel of the fun of MMOs. it’s the driving motivation often times for the senseless grind: i waste 2000 hrs of my life versus your 250 so i get to smite 4 of you n00bz at once and teabag your corpse.

i am highly in support of level (and gear) scaling. no-lifers should inspire fear and awe, on a fairly steep gradient of time investment:pwnage.

people like you used to get called ‘care bears’. go re-roll on a PvE server you little bitch. ROFLMAO boom! headshot!!!
Cybargs
Moderated
+2,285|6879

uziq wrote:

getting ganked by higher level players out in the wild is part and parcel of the fun of MMOs. it’s the driving motivation often times for the senseless grind: i waste 2000 hrs of my life versus your 250 so i get to smite 4 of you n00bz at once and teabag your corpse.

i am highly in support of level (and gear) scaling. no-lifers should inspire fear and awe, on a fairly steep gradient of time investment:pwnage.

people like you used to get called ‘care bears’. go re-roll on a PvE server you little bitch. ROFLMAO boom! headshot!!!
xD but there isn't really a risk v reward benefit. its like 10% extra XP to leave on PVP flag... which most people don't. it ends up being a numbers game like eve, people only end up with real fights if they overwhelming numbers.

ironically the game rewards dying... its cheaper to die and respawn at settlement than to walk all the way back etc.

Last edited by Cybargs (2021-12-16 20:30:59)

https://cache.www.gametracker.com/server_info/203.46.105.23:21300/b_350_20_692108_381007_FFFFFF_000000.png
Cybargs
Moderated
+2,285|6879
https://preview.redd.it/tf918lyky5181.png?width=1648&format=png&auto=webp&s=36dad2cfed097f99a58325c52784d7be3ac859d8

lmao
https://cache.www.gametracker.com/server_info/203.46.105.23:21300/b_350_20_692108_381007_FFFFFF_000000.png
uziq
Member
+492|3615
it's always lulz to see someone fuck up an established concept so badly, but this is actually the continued death-knell of the genre.

future investors and publishers are going to look at those above graphs and decide we need another LoL or fortnite clone, or a mobile card game.
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6935|PNW

Cybargs wrote:

what made it worst for new world is that the servers kept having issues and have constant maintenance. there's no microtransactions in new world. it's fans are giving it a lot of excuses like "oh shouldve been subscription model, theres no moneys in this model!" - the game literally died within month from launch lel.
Yeah, some suit will look at this and think "hmm, better make sure our game has micro."

uziq wrote:

getting ganked by higher level players out in the wild is part and parcel of the fun of MMOs. it’s the driving motivation often times for the senseless grind: i waste 2000 hrs of my life versus your 250 so i get to smite 4 of you n00bz at once and teabag your corpse.

i am highly in support of level (and gear) scaling. no-lifers should inspire fear and awe, on a fairly steep gradient of time investment:pwnage.
I actually quite enjoyed the Age of Conan model where a bunch of noobs could band together and gank an upper level player. Best memory of that game was a bunch of us lying in wait with our crummy bows like Robin Hood's band of Merry Men to take out some troglodytes who'd been terrorizing the starting area all day. Glorious victory for the peasant revolt!

‘care bears’
People still get called that in some survival games, lol.
uziq
Member
+492|3615
i played AoC on launch, way before it went F2P and entered into its own death-spiral. the game promised an awful lot and delivered very little, especially after the first 20 or so levels. it was almost comical. the starter and tutorial zone had so much polish, oodles of voice acting, a rich and engaging storyline, meaningful character development, etc, and then ... plop. you were sent out into a world that was every bit as denuded and empty as the most basic F2P asian MMOs. grind, grind, grind.

the combat system was neat but way too clunky to ever work in PvP. especially considering that often times players would have a noticeable latency and client-server lag. trying to execute intricate combos, often involving spatial positioning, with 100ms+ of lag was lulz. and to think, that one of the main selling points of the game was a much-vaunted guild-vs-guild siege system, involving massive player battles. lmfao. the engine and net-code could barely handle combat between 2 opposing players, never mind 200.

insanely ambitious for its time when you consider it was one of the first games to roll-out with shiny new DX10 (or was it DX11?) graphical features. it genuinely looked very good for its time; but, again, adding hardware stress to an already stressed engine/netcode was ballsy beyond belief.
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6935|PNW

Had it at launch, but I didn't maintain the subscription. Might have been grumpier about its weaknesses if I'd decided to go on for about a year. Look at me though, talking positive about a subscription MMO I only played for the first month. I imagine if I went onto an MMO forum with the topic search "what killed Age of Conan," I'd see what you wrote among the answers. I also heard "lackluster mid and late game content" from a buddy who played it, stages I never quite got to as I enjoy taking my sweet time getting around to actually doing things in RPGs.

Still though, point's that it was a super satisfying gaming experience to be able to put down upper level bullies with a bit of teamwork and planning. I think there should always be an opening for something like that, down to an Achilees' Heel in in a set of mystical armor if necessary.

In Battlefield 2, you could be the ace pilot of any given match with an X:0 kill-death, but still get sniped out of the cockpit.
uziq
Member
+492|3615
there was basically no endgame content on launch. even the higher levelling brackets were devoid of the most basic questing content. essentially just zones peopled with high-level mobs. for the hardcore forward-wave people who rushed the content, the upper rungs of levelling consisted only of monotonously grinding out XP on the zone mobs. there was nothing to do.

it's pretty standard for games to launch without an endgame raid (AoC didn't have any functioning high-level dungeons, and the much-talked-about large-scale PvP system took like 2-3 months to patch in). AoC launched only half-complete, though, and banked a lot on the hype and wishful thinking of its player community.

so many 'WoW killers' or 'MMO disruptors' have banked on this same energy. people want there to be another WoW-level phenomenon so badly that they'll stick through a shit game for at least 2-3 months after launch. i've lost count of how many MMOs i've sunk time into, all the while knowing that they're probably going nowhere and won't ever live up to pre-release hype.

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