New & Upcoming game discussion.

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wibod
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Re: New & Upcoming game discussion.

Post by wibod »

DrumsofWar wrote:Shadows of Amalur may be a good game, even if it's on the tailwind of Skyrim. I tried the 2 hour demo and the gameplay is Oblivion mechanics with a Dragon Age feel and a dollop of God of War quicktime gore events.

That's not a coincidence as the lead creator was the lead designer on Morrowind and Oblivion, but the best part is that the story came from R.A. Salvatore and the artwork is being done by Todd McFarlane of Spawn fame. The game has its flaws, especially the annoying crime mechanic in Oblivion, but it has some nice changes to make RPG combat more fluid.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOZ13_9- ... se&list=SL[/youtube]
What is this Shadows of Amalur you speak of?
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Re: New & Upcoming game discussion.

Post by IskatuMesk »

I got some time into TerA this morning before I collapsed into a heap of lard, so here's some beginning thoughts.

Graphics - The graphics available in the beta are not the highest res that will be available iirc. That said there isn't an MMO that touches this game so far. There's some clipping, but nothing like Western titles. Love the armor designs, monsters. Animations are pretty smooth all around. I think the render distance and LOD could afford to be pushed up since it's an Unreal game and I have insane performance. HKS made note of some stuttering which could be because he's still running a dual core. But he gets stuttering on a lot of games so I'm not 100% sure. Really looking forward to ultra detail textures.

This is an Asian game, so the graphics are naturally a step above foreign titles in style alone.

I've judge the graphics more when I get out of the starter zone.

Sounds - Standard fare so far. Much better than Western titles, e.g. blizzard, but not up to Lineage 2 standards. Dialogue sounds like a western game, e.g. not much emotion atm. I was hoping they'd have stepped up the monster SFX since K beta but not from what I've heard so far, though combat sfx is pretty damn good. I was also hoping they'd have stepped up the music since K tera too but no dice so far. I mean, it's decent, but I was hoping for John Debney. I guess I can't be too picky.

Gameplay - As I'll describe in my videos, it feels like Lineage 2 with WoW framework and a somewhat ARPG control system. I say somewhat because as I compare this game mostly to God of War, it is not as responsive as an ARPG. For this part I'll go in-depth.

I'm playing a Warrior currently, which is regarded to be underpowered in PvE DPS on TL from what I last read. I'm playing on a PvE server since I'm not interested in playing open world pvp with americans. HKS plays Archer.

As the game's servers don't seem to go through AT&T we don't get the ludicrous latency issues we get on WoW. So, hits and movement and stuff are all reasonable and function as you'd expect. Even though it's a beta only in one instance did I have server-side lag, and it could just as easily have been Canada being Canada.

Like the trailers and youtube videos suggest, it's an ARPG combat system. So, no statistical misses - weapons seem to have hitboxes. Including enemy hitboxes. This means that, yes, every attack is AoE and some attacks can hit targets in a wide berth or even behind you. Several enemy attacks have actually killed me because they hit me from behind him with a wide sweep. I think the game might even have Z axis detection on weapons - it's Unreal, of course - so the one flying enemy I encountered it seemed my attacks could much more easily miss him.

The enemy types on the starting island are fairly limited, you've probably seen them so far. So I'll describe the two major ones that aren't AoE.

There's Runekeepers, which have a dynamite toss ability and attack reasonably fast. I find that, as leather dps melee, avoiding their attacks can actually be pretty difficult. We were killing these guys when they had 5-6 levels on us, so keep in mind our damage and their damage was scaled accordingly. So, they had the potential to crit you for half your health. Avoiding attacks matters at that stage. Their basic melee attack sometimes comes in dual swings - the jump isn't enough to avoid both. This meant that it was more beneficial to play a little defensively like I have to in GoW, which means darting in an out and baiting attacks, then flanking. It's a welcome change over all the other rpg's in general I've been playing.

However, a handful of attacks/animations I have need to be cancellable faster. I have a sweeping AoE that currently is available out of my jump. If I jump and then use this attack I am guaranteed to eat damage from the enemy because I can't start moving again for quite some time, and jumping is rarely enough to avoid damage. So, I've died several times because I tried to attack after jumping with that ability. This is a tweaking kind of thing; you could probably bring control back faster with a backswing value somewhere. HKS tells me some other people whined about this sort of thing. So far it's not too colossal of a deal, I have to be less greedy. Unlike Aion, these combo attacks are available for much longer after their preceding attack. So, it's safe to jump, then run, then go back and use it. I'm just a DPS min-maxer so I tend to be greedy.

The second enemy type is the cliche big slow guy. Some of his attacks always hit behind him. All enemies of both types have this red eye glow kind of deal. Very Asian. You see it/hear it and it basically tells you "avoid this attack". Because at the level difference we were at, it hurt a lot if you didn't avoid it. Bosses and such will no doubt have very similar "signature" precursors to attacks. That's how these games work. The question is, will they overdo it like hotkey mmos e.g. WoW, or will it be balanced more like ARPG's?

Currently, this game seems to me to be like what Vindictus should have been. Vindictus was wholly and utterly disappointing once you got past the lolphysics hype. Mobs don't give much exp when killing them currently, so I suspect we'll have to start question soon (@ level 8-9 right now iirc). This is unfortunate. So far from what little I've seen, the questing is basically standard MMO fare. This can be good or bad - I heard it's fast to level, so it can't be too Aion/Lineage-like in terms of exp gain. But I'd prefer grinding to actually be viable in a game like this. I just like fighting over running back and forth. So, I think mob exp income should be considerably increased, since it's dropping off massively as we reach the mob's levels and we can't leave the island until 11.


HKS does more damage if he's closer to a target, which is kind of an interesting way of balancing ranged. Archers actually have quite a short range, and it seems like mages and such are the same way. This is the offshoot of ARPG balancing - ranged classes can be stupidly OP, even moreso than in normal MMO's, if you aren't careful. Currently, mobs rarely ever get the chance to even touch him, and he's never come close to dying. Meanwhile I've probably died at least a dozen times.

Both players can mine a node e.g. ore at once, both get credit, skill up, and experience. Why has it taken this long for this to happen in an MMO? It also seems you get bonus exp for being in a party but I'm not 100% sure. If this is the case, why has it taken this long for this to happen in an MMO? I think the last MMO that didn't punish you for being in a fucking group was Tabula Rasa. Think about it for a moment, and then realize how utterly stupid punishing group exp/drops is.

Any other mechanical things, like campfires, you probably already know about if you've been watching the game.

This is just a preliminary review, I'll post more when I've played more. Of course, the video will show all of these. Though the quality will probably suck since it'll be coming out of vegas (I'm cropping out a lot of unnecessary fighting and such).

/e

HKS informs me we are running the high res textures. I also discovered that parties cut exp in half.
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Re: New & Upcoming game discussion.

Post by IskatuMesk »

Tera, continued -

I am compositing a fairly lengthy video that shares some of my MMO genre thoughts in general (most are not very positive), with plenty of combat - both solo and party - as well as major BAM fight points. BAM's, being world bosses, are pretty strong. Supposedly you can solo them as certain classes, but as you will see, it would take forever.

So, with the extent of the beta being level 27 or so, you could consider the BAM fight shown in the video to be "end game" as far as the beta is concerned. There's a dungeon or two, and maybe another BAM somewhere, but this is the major fight I know about.

The critical thing to note about the BAM is that it's breaking the RPG stereotype of time-gated abilities; it has an actual AI. As you can see, our limited group composition made things very interesting, since we relied on kiting to kill it.

Being a Warrior, which is leather dps with "challenging" tank abilities (aka you can't tank at this point in time), I felt very useless in this fight. The spider knocks you down and does huge damage if you're in melee range when it moves around, sometimes when it's turning as well. As I discovered, this isn't the only boss that does this (the level 11 solo boss also does this). Of course, as I'm dual wield, I follow the cliche of sustained dps being the best dps. But I learned the hard way that I cannot sustain any dps on this boss because he's always moving. Perhaps, if we had a real tank and he didn't move around as much, I could dps him. Otherwise, I was there simply as a leech and contributed maybe 5% of his health in damage, taking many, many deaths in the process or simply waiting - out of combat entirely - for it to be attackable, upon which case I'd get 1-2 attack combos in and then have to run or die.

Outside of this, I rather liked the boss. It has the potential to be mobile, has a variety of both melee and ranged attacks, and is readily accessible. However, it doesn't give hardly any exp, and drops utter garbage. So, other than experiencing the fight, there's no real reason to kill him. I hope higher level BAM's drop end-game gear, or they'll quickly go the way of elites in WoW - ignored and useless.

Outside of bosses, I love that there's lots of big packs of mobs everywhere with fast respawns. WoW and other mmos have gradually moved away from having densely populated zones, but there's many regions in Tera where I can pull 10+ mobs. As the video demonstrates, killing them isn't too difficult, either. Even easier when you're playing as a Berserker.

As most people know me, I'm reckless and love big numbers. Well, the Berserker seems to suit me a lot more than the warrior. Slow, hard-hitting, and blatantly OP, the plate-wearing Berserker's 2handed axe does retarded amounts of damage. I'll let the video speak for itself when the time comes. Berserker is fun. You can also block, but you don't have the mobility of the warrior. I rolled a human instead of castanic for the Berserker, and I find myself regretting this because I came to love the attack movespeed racial the Castanic have. I think if I played this game in retail I can see myself maining a castanic berserker. While I hope to get some caster time in before the beta ends, my CTS and exhaustion have worn me very thin, and I have other commitments to get to.

So far, my major gripes about the game are interface related stuff, party exp cuts, and warriors seeming to be a bit underpowered. I could see myself playing this game, but as I explain in the video, I don't know what would keep me playing for a long time as I don't plan to pvp.
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Re: New & Upcoming game discussion.

Post by DrumsofWar »

This seems like it'd be a fun little diversion although I would kill a goat to see your opinion of Amalur.

Also, did you write this review? http://www.videogamessuck.com/modules.p ... =0&thold=0

If so, good job.
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Re: New & Upcoming game discussion.

Post by IskatuMesk »

Nothing about Amalur seemed appealing at first glance so chances are I won't be looking at it unless it goes for dirt cheap on steam ( as in <10$).

I am probably going to shove my extra Tera footage into a new XXE so I can dump some old video I have and clean up my hard drives. Brace for sleepy-but-amazing Mesk ranting.
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Re: New & Upcoming game discussion.

Post by IskatuMesk »

On second thought, I think the newest XXE describes tera better than any 2 hour long video could.

Basically; pixies, loli, gigantic axes, screaming.

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Re: New & Upcoming game discussion.

Post by Alevice »

Mass Effect 3 coming today.
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Re: New & Upcoming game discussion.

Post by IskatuMesk »

Darksiders 2 has DLC announced before it's even released.

I am second-guessing having anything to do with this game. This is getting really, really stupid. Fuck DLC and all the bandwagon cunts that abuse it.
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Re: New & Upcoming game discussion.

Post by Pr0nogo »

"We can finish our game later, and charge you for it."
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Re: New & Upcoming game discussion.

Post by Aiursrage2k »

Looking foward to maxpayne3. Rockstar keeps emailing me updates (because I am on the mailing list) but it seems like they are sending me too many updates and its starting to piss me off.
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Re: New & Upcoming game discussion.

Post by Lavarinth »

Faux static, the new trend in logos.

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- - Lavarinth
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Re: New & Upcoming game discussion.

Post by IskatuMesk »

So, I reconsidered not releasing a large Tera video and rebuilt my content from the ground up, settling on this. It shows mostly video from the latest beta event. Includes some thoughts on MMO's in general, plus inane and offensive banter. Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFU36pwAh2I
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Re: New & Upcoming game discussion.

Post by HelpMe »

Lavarinth wrote:Faux static, the new trend in logos.
You could use that for the TheBunker logo. It'd look pretty cool I think.
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Re: New & Upcoming game discussion.

Post by Taeradun »

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Re: New & Upcoming game discussion.

Post by mark_009_vn »

Lavarinth wrote:Faux static, the new trend in logos.

Image
It's not simply the logo, it's also the bloody friken graphic!
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