PC Gaming = World of Suck

[Sol]

Sounds like they have made the same mistakes as every other MMORPG out there (Except for City of Heroes and Eve Online which to thier credit made quite different, if no less fatal, mistakes).

I'd really like to see an MMORPG with properly dynamic environments, ie. no instances, no killing the same creature or doing the same quest twice. Dynamic classes, a couple of games have tried this but the idea is to have a character will skills instead of a character of a class which will inevidably end up identical to every other character of that class. No "healers", they are boreing to play and yet people are forced to play them because they are so necasary in every single game. You can have characters that heal but not in combat. No levels just skills, I shouldn't be able to kick someones arse because they are 5 nebulous "levels" below me and I shouldn't have to go out and kill random shit so I can get these levels, it was a handy model for pen and paper RPGs and early computer games but now we have the technology to do better it's just that publishers don't want to spend a lot of money on a new idea.

Of course the game I'm thinking of would cost several hundred million dollars to make and probably take the best part of a decade... But at least it would be worth paying a monthly subscription for...

In other news The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion will be released this week, that should be a fun single player RPG.

 

[LiamC]

I'm hearing good things about Galactic Civizations II. They've ditched copy protection as well. GOD/Strategy game for those interested.

 

[Mercutio]

No "healers", they are boreing to play and yet people are forced to play them because they are so necasary in every single game.

Actually, I *like* to play healers. I have an Empathy Defender and an Empathy Controller at 50 in City of Heroes, a Thermal Corrupter at 40 in City of Villains (all at the limit for those games), and my DDO Cleric is my highest character there.

DDO certainly does have fun elements. There's an in-game narrator who plays the part of the Dungeon Master (on one particular mission, the DM-part is read by Gary Gygax) which goes a long way toward establishing the Pen and paper feeling, and unlike every other MMO, there's zero penalty for being in a group. There's also a huge amount of freedom of movement (you can dodge and even tumble out of the way of attacks, block or parry attacks, swim and climb ladders). But the "town" is lifeless, the setting is boring, grouping is god-awful unless you know everyone you're playing with, and the rules are only partially based on actual Dungeons and Dragons.

It's a very mixed bag, and I don't think it's worth $15 a month.

 

[Sol]

I know there are some people that actually enjoy playing healer characters but I've alwways just assumed that there was something wrong with them... besides even granting that some people like them the whole tank/healer/damage dealer/crowd control dynamic has been taken way too far... Healers can't be anything else because their position in the group is so reliant on thier healing ability, it gets to the point where characters can litterally bash each other for a half hour before anyone dies because they can heal themselves so effectively but do so little else. The in combat healer dynamic slow games down to a potentially insane degree. That's great for the companies charging $15-$30 a month for people to play but it sucks for the players because it takes forever just to get to the next miserly chunk of content...

I'm not entirely against healers in MMORPGs at all but not in combat, just have guys who can do first aid afterwards and scale up from there... But then that's just my opinion...

 

[Groltz]

Currently playing "Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth"

It's interesting, but I'm craving some better firepower and a scoped weapon for crying out loud.

 

[Mercutio]

The point of Cthulhu-related games is essentially that nothing you do really matters anyway. Even if you had a nuclear device, Nyarlathotep is just going to be radioactive and annoyed (well, more annoyed than usual). I don't think you're going to find a game based on Lovecraft's mythos with an FPS-like feel.

 

[Groltz]

Actually the FPS gameplay is quite good. At least OK, anyway.

The film effect they use in the game is annoying to me, though.

Some of the puzzles are enough to eat a tums over. :mrgrn:

 

[Mercutio]

I'm not entirely against healers in MMORPGs at all but not in combat, just have guys who can do first aid afterwards and scale up from there... But then that's just my opinion...

In City of Heroes, Healers don't just heal. They also buff up or debuff bad guys, and they have worthwhile attacks as well. The dynamic in that game is basically spending lower levels doing something that contributes immensely to the success of a group, while at higher levels you hardly need to heal at all because all the other stuff you do is so effective.

In DDO a Cleric wears the same armor as a front line fighter, and can use many of the same weapons. He can buff his attributes way past fighter levels, and the whole time he's smiting the bad guy with his +5 Holy GreatMace of Badassery, he's casting spells like ""Slay Living" and "Flame Strike". In a lot of ways that's the best of all possible worlds.

I think the healers = healbots thing comes from Everquest or WoW or DAoC or some other game I haven't played.

 

[Sol]

I think the healers = healbots thing comes from Everquest or WoW or DAoC or some other game I haven't played.

All three actually as well as a couple of others...

I guess the COH defender class is a setp towards what I'm talking about in that they aren't just healbots and having aa defender spamming heals on a tank will not win you battles most of the time, but COH had so little content that I just couldn't play it for more than a couple of weeks...

D&D cirtainly did a better job with clerics than most MMORPGs because playing a healbot on paper would be the most unimaginably boring thing ever... But most online games moved away from that because D&D based cleric classes would probably be considered overpowered and you'd end up with people complaining that "the healers tank better than tanks!". Weather this is something to blame on the game creators or the whining 12 year olds (ethier litterally or mentality wise) that frequently make themselves heared on MMO forums is a hard call...

In the end the healers=healbot generalisation is not all that unfair in that the MMO players of the world spend most of thier time and money playing games for which it is true. A couple of companies have made games that attempt to solve the problem in some way but the numbers would suggest that they havn't found a solution that most people are all that happy with...

But then again maybe people are happy with healbots...

 

[Mercutio]

...but COH had so little content that I just couldn't play it for more than a couple of weeks...

Did you play the same game I did? There are hundreds of great storylines in the missions you get in CoX. The only thing is, you have to stop to read them.

In the end, I gave up on CoH because the developers have added in all the bullshit timesinks that weren't in the game when it was new - crafting and skills - and pretty much every change that's made in the game is excused in the name of "PVP balance". PVP in an MMO is equivalent to anti-social behavior, something that should be stopped and punished.

 

[Sol]

I found that no matter how cool the description of any mission was the mission invariably ended up being;

Go to a randomly chosen entrance of type X, end up in an inside are chosen from about 3 or 4 apropriate to the entrance, a)kill everything, b)kill a specific boss character, c)use a specific number of items of type y.

Maybe I didn't play for long enough but I don't remember coming across a single mission which didn't follow that formula. Additionally any character of a particular archtype was almost always functionally the same as any other...

I think I probably enjoyed the character creation more than actually playing the game really...

 

[Mercutio]

And yeah, starforce does not attempt to hide it's presence...

And dredging up something old, here's someone who seems to have found Starforce spreading from one PC to other computers on his network.
I think that I want Starforce on my computers to about the same degree that I want a bad case of Herpes.

 

[P5-133XL]

And yeah, starforce does not attempt to hide it's presence...

And dredging up something old, here's someone who seems to have found Starforce spreading from one PC to other computers on his network.
I think that I want Starforce on my computers to about the same degree that I want a bad case of Herpes.

While technically possible and with the cavot that I have never delt Starforce, I am really suspicious of his claims.

1. You're telling that SF resides and loads from MBR
2. You're telling that SF occupies HDD partition tables
3. You're telling that SF spreads through network drives.


Writing files to every writable network drive would be too easy to prove and too noticable not to have been seen by others. If it is actually storing itself in the MBR and/or the partition tables the likelyhood that the process of installing the program would disasterously affect a certain percentage of installs is far too high that it would have also been noticed. Further, if it could be proven that the install deliberately affected those areas adversly, the potential lawsuit would not be to SF's benefit: The risk is just plain too high for this type of behavior to be intentional or likely. Thus I'm very skeptical about this claim.

 

[Mercutio]

On the other hand, there's a substantial truth to some of his other claims; the copy protection really does insert itself as a low-level device driver on Windows.
I'd like to see evidence of course, but it's worth following up - the list of complaints with regard to Starforce software, and the heavy-handed way that the developer has dealt with them, is well-documented in many circles.

 

[ddrueding]

I think I probably enjoyed the character creation more than actually playing the game really...

This has been true for me in the new LOTR: BFME II. You can now create your own Hero unit and use it in the RTS game. It really is a lot of fun. I remember spending hours developing characters in Neverwinter Nights, and still create characters for friends in DDO.

 

[Sol]

One more reason to hate Starforce that I've not seen documented anywhere is that if you have an Ext2 filesystem plugin running starforce will blue screen your PC.

It'd be nice if the new driver architecture (to the extent that there is one) in Vista stopped horrors like starforce from getting quite as far in to the system as they do now... It hardly seems likely to acomplish much else of any worth...
But I don't think saving us from horrible DRM schemes is really very high on Microsoft's lists of priorities...

 

[LiamC]

~~snip
...But I don't think saving us from horrible DRM schemes is really very high on Microsoft's lists of priorities...

High? I think they want to inflict DRM upon us. I can see why media companies want DRM, but they are taking away the de facto usage consumers have been used to for the past 30 years.

 

[Sol]

I am on occation guilty of excessively understating things...

 

[Sol]

I've been playing The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion for the last couple of days and so far it's been living up to expectations. For those of you who havn't played any Elder Scrolls games before they are RPGs with extremely open worlds. So you can go off, ignore the plot for a while, and just do something else...

It's almost the single player version of what I think a MMORPG should be... Highly recomended...

It's also nice to see that someone recognises the futility of puting copy protection on a single player game. There is no cd-key and you don't need the disc in the drive to play.

 

[CougTek]

There is no cd-key and you don't need the disc in the drive to play.

I think that just for that, it will be the next game I'll buy.

 

[Mercutio]

Command and Conquer: The First Decade looks somewhat interesting to me. I liked C&C and Red Alert and C&C2. I kind of like the idea that someone went ahead and modified those games to support a more modern platform. Especially when the games are actually, you know, good.

I think there's a pretty rich field of old games that could be polished up to work with modern hardware. I know I'd rather sit down and play Star Control or Dungeon Keeper or Eye of the Beholder or Total Annihilation than anything else I've seen lately.

 

[sechs]

The interesting part is that there's gold in them thar games, and you don't have to invest a lot of money to get it out.

 

[Mercutio]

Someone just asked me this, and I don't know the answer, nor care to soil myself with anything Blizzard makes:

Is it possible to run two instances of World of Warcrap on the same PC?

 

[Sol]

No I don't think so. Blizzard are pretty paranoid about anything that might allow someone to do anything they havn't specifically prepared for, in my opinion a sure-fire way to make your MMO ultimately boring, but I guess it's worked for them so far. WoW has some crappy spyware program that runs in the background and makes sure your not doing anything they think might be cheating, I'm pretty sure another copy of WoW would qualify.

 

[ddrueding]

For the record, I've been sinking amazing amounts of time into "The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion". It is really, really fun. I haven't enjoyed a game this much since, hell it's been a long time. Easily 150+ hours of gameplay, beautiful graphics, very involved storyline, huge flexibility on your character creation, etc, etc.

And best of all, it's a single player game. No n00bs fucking up gameplay, no worrying about finding people online that are fun to play with, nothing to stop you from using "hacks", "cheats" or "mods" if you so choose, no internet connection necesary, and (I was really impressed with this) no CD key at all. You just press install, and it does.

 

[Sol]

I found that eventually Oblivion does suffer from the same faults as Morrowind, your character is so flexible that you essentially become invulnerable long before you have time to explore everything in the world. Of course getting to that point takes an insane amount of time. I stopped playing once I was the master of every guild I could find but I might start up again when I get sick of the games I'm playing at the moment.

Speaking of which, The Battle for Middle Earth 2 is pretty good, as an RTS I count it second only to C&C Generals and it's expansion pack. It has actual strategy, cavalry that works like real cavalry and much less of the annoying hero issues of the first BFME.

Prey is also worth a look if you don't mind a really short FPS. Your character becomes basically immortal in the first three levels and if you keep at it you can finish the whole thing in 6-7 hours but the fun of running around on the walls and roof and taking on enemies in outer-body battles makes it worth considering if you have a local place that rents PC games, or if you don't mind the odd bittorrent...

 

[Mercutio]

I'm planning a "City of Heroes"/"City of Villains" gaming day at my local comic shop in the near future. The only thing that's limiting me at the moment is that I don't have six "good" graphics cards to use at the moment. I need to find an excuse to buy some x1600s or something.

ddrueding, how do you secure your gaming center PCs from obnoxious young people?

I figure that I'll put block pretty much all non-COH traffic at the switch, which should prevent Internet-related mischief, and I'll have them log in to a guest account to minimize their access to the system, but I'm wondering if I should take the steps of setting policies to do things like disable the taskbar, run option and/or control panel.

Also, I found someone's heavily customized "TinyXP" Windows installer a couple days ago. The CD image is 122MB. Supposedly it installs an entirely functional Win32 system (originally XP) with almost all the cruft removed; theme support, most of the network and admin tools, services etc. The idea is to have a Windows system which is tuned to gaming use. Has anyone tried anything like this?

 

[ddrueding]

I use an application designed for the purpose called CyberCafe Pro. The user never sees the standard UI, Instead only seeing their screen with a menu of approved apps on it. Login is dependant upon authentication with a server that has a database of users. This is significant overkill for a single day running a single app. I would just lock down the UI so that nothing is visible except COH/COV and remove all permissions from the account that aren't required to run the game.

I'd be very interested in trying that TinyXP install, if you have a chance.

 

[Mercutio]

Well, install time for TinyXP is about 1/4 of what a full install of XP is (6 or 7 minutes? Something like that). I tested it on an AthlonXP/2500 and a VMware guest hosted on an X2/4400. It also reboots in about 15 seconds and has an install-time commit charge of 57MB.
I was not prompted for a serial number nor asked to activate Windows.
I was able to install Firefox and Office 2003. Pretty damned spiffy.
Next I'll probably try loading up City of Heroes.

ddrueding, you can PM me if you need more info.

 

[ddrueding]

ddrueding, you can PM me if you need more info.

I would, but:

1. Mercutio has exceeded their stored private messages quota and can not accept further messages until they clear some space.

 

[ddrueding]

Nevermind, google is your friend.

 

[Mercutio]

The guys in my comics shop had an Xbox360 and were playing Dead Rising last night when I was there. I have never been jealous of a console title before. Why, oh why is there not a Zombies-trapped-in-a-shopping-mall game for PCs?

 

[sechs]

The money is in console games. PCs have too many different configurations to support, and you can charge more for console games.

 

[Groltz]

Download Evil Dead: Regeneration for PC.

It was somewhat fun/amusing

Then there's Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse but I haven't played it.

 

[Mercutio]

The money is in console games. PCs have too many different configurations to support, and you can charge more for console games.

Consoles also have suck-ass controllers, horrid UIs in-game, almost no in-game modding and grow stagnant very, very quickly. Plus, there's the god-awful squidmonster and snot bubble Japanese influences on everything.

 

[sechs]

I didn't say that wasn't true. Given that a lot of people who own consoles would never own a PC, let alone one that could play a reasonable modern game, says a lot.

 

[Sol]

I'm actually looking forward to the release of the Nintendo Wii... Sure it's a console with a dumb name but it looks like it could be fun. An importantly it's own kind of fun rather than a half-arsed bastardised version of a PC type fun.

 

[adriel]

2000 to 2006 in review.

The biggest surprise I've had in computer gaming hardware, is the longevity of the platform and the CPU. In 6 years of playing the most demanding PC games as they come to market, I've only had to update the motherboard twice.

#1
2000 - 2003: 440BX motherboard, 500 and 850 MHz cpus used.

#2
2003 - 2006 (and beyond): 865PE and 875p motherboards, 2.8GHz cpu in use

I'm very shocked that I have used the same CPU for the past three years. In fact I can expect it to continue strong into 2007.

The 2nd biggest surprise I've had has been the short shelf-life of video cards, pushed out of date by demanding games. I am now on my 4th video card, and as the years go on, the life of them continues to shorten.

#1
2000 - 2003: Diamond Viper V7700 Ultra
why it went away: was getting too slow.

2003 - 2005: Geforce 4 Ti4400
why it went away: fine with HL2 surprisingly, but itched for some more speed

2005 - 2006: Geforce 6600GT
why it went away: F.E.A.R.

2006: Geforce 7800 GS
retrospect: Should have skipped the 6600GT upgrade... it provided marginal felt performance increase over 4400Ti. I am lucky that the 7800 GS actually feels twice as fast as the 6600GT.

3rd biggest surprise is IDE hard drive capacity. Yeah, it may be the only mechanical component, but capacity has been able to double, double, and double again. I can time upgrades to where I'm getting twice the capacity, but on the same or fewer number of platters.

Coming in 2008: Dual-core, PCI-E. What platform is going to take the torch from 440BX, 865PE and 875P?

 

[Handruin]

Anyone watched the trailer for Team Fortress 2? I think it looks rather entertaining. I like the graphics style and the sense of fun in the game rather than extremly realistic looking people.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaF638MBSAE

 

[Mercutio]

I finally bought "Call of Cthulhu - Dark Corners of the Earth" but that happened the same day my monitor died so I haven't played it yet. It looks rather console-y but the manual mentions rules for morphine addiction and the effects of losing sanity.