Enough of you clicked on my Examiner page that they decided I was overpowered for Baltimore. I am now the national MMORPG Examiner thanks to you people, so the link has changed. It’s now http://www.examiner.com/x-5353-MMORPG-Examiner
The elderly beagle you’re helping to support expressed her appreciation by horking up a wad of hair and carpet fuzz in the fireplace this morning. I do not know what this means.
*I* thank you, and in words, not disgusting fluids.
The latest post is on Darkfall, and what mass market MMO players have to mentally do in order to have a prayer of enjoying it. I am still not entirely convinced. I really enjoyed DAOC PVP, and being able to enter that kind of environment on *my* terms. Having that choice taken from me (or rather, having my last free choice being the one to log in to that environment at all) just doesn’t appeal. The people who want to love Darkfall loved the original UO… but I think most of the people who tried it were entirely turned off by the experience. The Ultima series had a tremendous following when UO launched. It could have been a heck of a lot bigger than it was. And I honestly don’t think UO would still be alive today with so many dedicated fans if the team HADN’T gone carebear.
But that’s just me. YMMV.
Does that mean I need to change my feed? /laugh
Congratulations on the virtual promotion!
Yay! You win!
I dropped a token comment on the examiner to up your hit count… I’ll expand some here.
First, I’ll also echo a congrats on the new title.
10 print “congraz”
20 goto 10
Now, Darkfall.
- Mentioning Darkfall cannot be done without a lot of amazement. The fact that Aventurine (there is no “d” in there name…) managed to bring this game to market largely on their own terms is outstanding. Very few game companies have done that in the last few years.
- There are a lot of really great ideas in the game.
– no classes. You want to specialize, specialize. You want to generalize, generalize.
– Mob AI is amazing. I’m not sure if they managed to pull together everything on their design sheet but what I saw in beta was new to me. Mobs that actually had some idea of preserving their life or using group tactics. It was definitely refreshing from the same old get too close and suden agro of other games.
– no auto-targeting. At first I was unsure about this feature but in gameplay it made the game very unique and somewhat enjoyable.
- To not be labeled ‘Fanboi’, the bad shall now follow
– idiotic griefing wanna-be badboys.
– The alignment system that allowed the above idiots to abuse the game systems. This was a real let down for me. Nothing turned me off the game more than some idiot who could abuse the game systems to remove any chance of my gameplay with no consequences to the idiot. Worse was the idiots claiming it was there right to do so since it was a sandbox game.
– lack of polish in crafting and harvesting. Even though these systems should be in the good section since you were able to craft almost every drop in the game, at beta the crafting/harvesting systems were standard boring time and money sinks. Very unfortunate.
– Forced first person perspective. Another unique idea to gameplay but this only forced many people to run around with a weapon drawn to get the limited 3rd person view. The first person view wasn’t overly horrible but I did find myself with a weird sense of vertigo several times while trying to move around the game world.
– did I mention the mentally challenged 12 year old wanna be griefers?
/shrug. Dunno… Overall, I hope they succeed. I hope that some of the innovations are used in other games. I don’t think I’ll be playing Darkfall until some of the kinks are (hopefully) worked out. I guess I’m still in MMO burn-out from DAoC.
Congratulations! Do you think the examiner would consider making the feed more than a one-liner? Wowinsider.com has a great example of a partial feed that does a good job of converting my clicks to the full article.
Cool! Nice one! Grats.
Glad to see you writing a bit more often then here as well as I love your sense of humour and keen insights.
In the immortal words of Homer, “Woohoo!”
(Yes Simpson, not the dead Greek writer, silly)
Yay! Great result…
I assume it is still OK to continue to follow your feed now that you are NATIONAL MMORPG Examiner?
And lo there came a great woot. /woot
I second that woot – woot!
Your story from the Examiner got picked up by massively.com.
More clicks we hope!
Sanya, you may want to let the web monkeys at the Examiner know that even though I subscribed, it has not been not sending me emails.
Good for you! Glad to hear things are on the up.
Despite what some very vocal commentators say, the majority of players like a degree of choice in their MMO game. Sometimes that choice is as simple as “to PvP or not to PvP today?”.
Also, I see I’m out of the seven you love, but will accept being one of the top twenty who who will stop and say hello to should we pass in the halls (in a virtual way).
We love you too