@ErrorOperator: Paint. Yes, that's exactly what came to mind when I saw it. Not only does the page not look official in the slightest -- I had to squint to get the logo to come into focus. No doubt some whimsical fan threw that up in order to watch a community rise from Facebook and flog the idea to death.
Halo 4. Maybe we'll see it with the next-gen of Xbox console. ξ
Can houses/structures be built atop cave entrances? I've seen doors and the like, but only those that open horizontally. I think it would be amusing to generate basically mine-entrance airlocks.
Also, I haven't seen if the game has ladders/ropes. Since most of it appears to revolve around jumping, it might be useful to make some sort of stairs to go up/down into particularly deep shafts. But I suppose that's only useful if a shaft gets visited repeatedly (more than three times I guess) in any given game. ξ
Because having that constant monthly income is literally the holy grail. I think a lot of companies are willing to accept the failures and keep trying because if they can do it and get some of that WoW money it will make it all worth it. Also someone has to usurp WoW, at some point, nothing is forever.
I think that the primary drive that produces this sort of ecological predilection for what I'd call MMO megafauna is here. Games with giant paying player bases like World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, and EVE Online can only exist in small numbers because the resources of players, player time, and player money is inherently limited. All contenders to the throne of megafauna do so by attempting to take on the same model of the ones that exist: vast game worlds, arching backstory and narratives, and lots of reasons to bring friends in. Right now, to unseat a player like WoW it takes putting roots deep into the same regolith.
As for the rest of the fauna, they're seeking to dominate niches that have some sort of substantive lack of time or money. As a result, they're trying their best to offer a basic game that casual players with little money can get into and then they put up cash shops and premium content that's relatively cheap per-player but provides social benefits to paying that cheap amount. Five bucks for a luminous halo? Ten bucks for a horse made of brushed bronze to wow my friends with and make them jealous? Sure! I can do that.
I think the only thing not yet played out by the vast free-to-play MMO game mill right now happens to be ad supported games. Probably because there's a poor understanding of how advertisements could be thrust into these games. Although, substituting a little gamification theory (i.e. people are willing to part with some pretty sensitive information for achievements, badges, and pixelated-cute-things) a free-to-play MMO could both provide marketing companies vast demographics about their player base and deliver targeted advertisements to well defined audiences. The sociology of privacy and anonymity aside, this is definitely the direction that companies like Zynga are going with casual game markets.
Right now we have this: Four huge pay-to-play companies in the top tier with giant populations; a couple smaller play-to-play franchises in the next tier who are trying to be top-tier who burn out and fizzle; and finally the last three tiers are full of free-to-play games who use constant content, and freemium models to pull in players and separate them from their money, and there are a multitude of these games constantly churning out competing for their various niches. In fact, while there may be a lot of MMOs across the vast plain of the bottom-most tier, there are actually a dominant set of umbrella publishers like Perfect World Entertainment who control 5-10 MMO properties each.
As players come and go, the strata will shift and different models will emerge and die; but right now it looks a lot like a pyramid with the megafauna standing supreme at the top and the little guys feeding from the thickly populated but time/money limited audiences. ξ
Access club what? I thought it's gonna be a free demo.
Preorders get access first. Because nobody understands the point of a demo anymore.
The vanishing rara avis of the customer demo for play before pay seems to be slowly going extinct. I would prefer to be able to play-test a game before I buy it, perhaps I'm just frugal that way. Instead, I hear that most companies are relying of heavily tiered marketing campaigns to push their product rather than letting people go hands-on with teasers.
Can someone in the games industry PLEASE bring back the Badlur's Gate: Dark Alliance Series? That game was the shit as far as loot crawlers go and dare I say as good as Diablo 2 on PC. Not only that but it looked even better than most current gen games and that's just sad.
After reading many of the issues people are having with Daggerdale and the criticisms in review, this is exactly what I came here to say.
A revival of some of the classic designs that just-worked would be nice in the face of changing technology. I'm a little shocked that Daggerdale shipped with so many apparent bugs, however, it didn't seem to rise with the amount of hype of something that would get pushed out the door too rapidly. But, then again, gaming industry mojo and all that. ξ
@ESREVER: I am trying out Eden Eternal right now. It has some interesting mechanics and a free-to-play model, but it stands up a lot like a standard Korean-grinder style fantasy MMORPG. The biggest thing that sets it aside right now happen to be the class-system, which involves starting with a basic fighter/mage and then unlocking new classes (with a vast archetype system) as the character levels. Also, I hear tell there's player-built towns in the game, but I haven't seen them yet.
As for my suggestions, I know it doesn't really fit the "preferably 3D" entirely, but it does have pretty spiffy armor models albeit in the confines of a simplified cartoon feel and that's Spiral Knights. It's also a bit grindy, but it has an excellent community, it's full of roaring guilds who are trying to edge out every element of the game, and the mechanics are simple enough to make the game socially complex. It's not precisely hardcore friendly, which is interesting; but it's brilliantly casual friendly (in fact, the free-to-play system almost discourages hardcore except for players who want to pay.) ξ
Grim news to say the least. Tucson area? I sometimes live about 100 miles away from there, my grandparents used to have a house there.
The next worst part about this story is the amount of spin being thrown at it by the police organization involved in the botched raid. They're latching onto anything and everything they can to turn it in their favor. Even the acknowledgement that the victim could not have fired his weapon came as an almost begrudging statement in the face of having to release the evidence that his safety was set--possibly to get in front of media jumping on them for an undisciplined contagious fire incident. The Pima County police are certainly playing it close to the vest right now and this Huffington Post article reads particularly hostile towards the, both for the behavior of the SWAT team and the political spin and propaganda their union is basting on the local media. I especially like that the search warrants were sealed four days after the botched raid. The police organization involved also tried to chastise local and national media for doing their jobs -- basically picking a fight with them. From the facts available, that hostility seems warranted.
Right now the facts are thin and some are being obfuscated by the police department involved; we probably won't know much about this case until it goes to court filings and the public record. ξ
You can get hacked by joining a game server? What? I feel so out of touch with technology right now.
It's a Red Queen race between malware developers and antivirus vendors. Of course, with the ease of getting an exploit through holes in certain browsers...we don't even have to go into how easy it is sometimes to get people to download suspect executable files and run them just to get "access to a server." Social engineering will ruin the day for every security mechanism coded into our computers for millions of years, no doubt.
@DAFTPUNK, tried out LavaSoft's Ad-Aware? It's been pretty good to me while troubleshooting staff computers for nonsense like the standard malware that can sneak through the firewall (and my best efforts.)
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