What game will this beautiful community play now?:)

[fiach]

So, my question to to this beautiful community is: do you know any other really really great story based games?

Planescape : Torment

Baldurs Gate 2

Star Wars Knights of the old Republic

Half Life 2

[komissar]

Planescape Torment and star wars Kotor and Kotor 2 are both real masterpieces.. I would add Arcanum - of steamworks and magical obscurae...

[calel]

Ah Arcanum, Tim Cain the visionary.
I'll add to that Fallout 1 and 2.

[maccer16]

fall out 1 and 2 are great cant wait for fallout 3 and fallout online

[browserice]

I've tried LOTRO, even bought it. Wild horses can't force me to log in again. There is a fun rant on Team Spirit's forums that I agree with. Unfortunately. LOTRO doesn't have anything to do with (my experience of) Tolkien's books.

I bought it last week, playing a dwarf and I was under the impression that all players would at one time see or be part of the Tolkien's book. It would be ashame if it wasn't but then again, how can they keep recreating the same Tolkien's events for all players that happen to come too early or too late ? Quests are done in a way that even if someone else just did it 5 min before you, when you get there you can still do it (even the guy that comes in 5 min after you). At least in Ryzom, it was different (or I felt it was different then this).

After playing 3 days, I am following the followings a bit annoying :
- placing yourself in combat position against an enemy can be tricky but you will not miss any shots unless the enemy passed through you and is now in your back. You can even be sideways and still hit it.
- I am still very early in the game (level 8) and some of the missions were pretty long just to get there or just finding the objective. Some didn't have detail enough to find it (ex: find Nos guy west of road of Valey)
- just found out yesterday that in order to create a successfull armor, one item has to be created by another profession. If I learn that other profession, I loose my original profession and all its point. Recommanded solution in forums is mostly "create an alt char with that other profession and mail your items to it).
- so far, community in-game isn't very helpfull, its the usual me, myself and I. No one talks to each other in the game or even salute each other. A lot of talks in the general chat channel but when asked questions, 1 out of 8 got a reply.

LOTRO may not turn out to be the ideal game I thougth it would be but since I do not know many MMO/MMORPG and since I am not a Guild or PVP type of player, I guess it will have to do (I did pay for it afterall so might as well play it for a while and see where it leads me).

Side note, for a couple of months now at IBM where I am doing a contract, I've been somewhat getting involved (on my free times and on my own) into Virtual worlds and looking at different Virtual Worlds/game engines/platform engines and it is starting to itch to create my idea of a Ryzom type of MMO game. Of course doing this would take time and that is my main problem now. But it would be fun to do.

[boinged]

Age of Conan launches on the 17th/20th/23rd May (depending on pre-order and territory). Here is some info about it from my beta experience and general info.

It has a very story based feel - the quest dialogues are more like those in KOTOR with different replies available, although these mainly add flavour. There aren't a huge amount of quests which I felt was a problem with LOTRO. There is a main 'destiny' quest line which you will need to supplement with side quests, or grinding if you prefer, to meet the level requirements. I'm reading through the original stories and they often bring my thoughts back to the game so it's very well done.

Combat revolves around combos - activate a skill then hit the correct direction keys within a quite forgiving timeframe to fire off the skill. There are also some instant cast skills and spells. Melee skills use stamina as does running.

There's full collision detection and weapon reach is important so you have to manouver around mobs sometimes, you can even hit unshielded areas of them for more damage.

Healers get involved in the combat too and it's not possible to keep people at full health. Instead you apply heals over time with a couple of emergency use skills. My healer is more like a healer/nuker hybrid but there is a healer/melee hybrid too. All classes should be able to solo from 1-80.

Every character can stealth although there are penalties for the non-rogue classes. Rogues can also perform stealth attacks: critical hits from stealth which can do a lot of damage if you hit an unshielded area, like their back. Stealth is dependent on light levels so gameplay can actually change at night and in dungeons.

Equipment doesn't give a massive bonus like WoW. Crafting and harvesting are quite simple and do work similarly to WoW/LOTRO though. One cool feature that was recently explained about was the gem socketing system. Only crafted items will have sockets, much like Diablo, and putting different gems in them will give different bonuses. The Gemcutting profession processes gems so there's some craft class interdependency. Gems will drop from mobs and uber gems will drop from raid bosses. I think this is a great way of rewarding raiding yet keeping crafting useful.

There are outposts! Two different kinds: Player cities which are built using harvested resources and cannot be attacked. Kind of a guild hall that you have to build and can upgrade. There was talk about these getting attacked by NPCs but the devs have gone quiet on that one.

Citadels are similar to Ryzom outposts. They are fought over by guilds in sieges who can invite friends to help up to a certain population cap. There will be siege weaponry and already there is one (pre-order) mount that is useful in attacking citadel walls.

The player cap should keep fights fair once it is reached. Also, the defending guild gets to pick attack times within a reasonable window. So no 3am attacks. If multiple guilds want to attack in the same slot then it goes to the one with the most pvp points that have been won in pvp minigames such as capture the flag, deathmatch. Love them or hate them, they add something different to do. Levels are equalised for the minigames, not sure about equipment.

There are no factions. There are 3 races and 12 classes although each class feels like a hybrid of a couple of 'standard' mmo classes and can be further customised with feats, aka WoW talents.

The setting is dark/low fantasy in a brutal world. It's the first MMO with a mature rating so you will often see bodies on spikes, piles of corpses, severed limbs etc. Occasionally you will perform a fatality move (or have one performed on you) which is a particularly bloody finisher that gives a short buff. There is topless nudity and most outfits are the standard skimpy MMO type.

The graphics are of course amazing as it's a next gen title. I'd say somewhere between LOTRO and Vanguard. The world is zoned and instanced (when there are too many players in a zone) though but it is hoped that instance caps will be raised and zones merged as the engine is refined post-launch. Zone size in the starter areas still seem pretty big, perhaps something like one of the larger Ryzom regions.

There are PVE and PVP servers - the PVP outposts and minigames are available on both, it's just that most of the game world is FFA PVP on the PVP servers. Controversially the official roleplay servers will be PVP only. EU copies of the game cannot play on US servers but if you can buy a US copy then Funcom won't stop you.

Personally I feel it has taken the best features of Ryzom, WoW and Vanguard and I've preordered. Hope to see you there!

http://community.ageofconan.com/