Raff

Maybe yeah, but I didn't even know Reach was coming out this week because I'm too cool.

Balls. Was looking forward to it. October is way too crowded for this game.

Just remembered that Namco Bandai bought D3 last year. Apparently they no longer operate D3 Europe as a label, it's all under NBG Europe. Hope we'll still get it!

I don't see what the fuss is about. Welcome to 2007 people.

+1 for Shadowrun being brilliant, killed by idiotic marketing focus on the irrelevent cross-platform/vista nonsense. Probably would have done best if there was no PC version at all. As far as I remember you didn't have to pay to host it on PC, there was a regular dedi server setup parallel to the gfwl thing.

That screen looks identical to the final game apart from minor gui changes.

It's all buy it now so the good stuff is already gone.

A reload button would be nice too...

Finally!

Runs very badly on my PC, it's choppy in every possible way other than the frame rate which is numerically OK. Tried various settings, no luck. 3.4ghz Intel C2D 4GB ATI 4870 1GB Win 7 64 Lucky I'm only really trying it out of morbid curiosity.

I hate nouners and nouning. Use of the words "gaming" and "gamers" make me squirm. I'm a player, I play games, just like I read books. I hate the sound of the words. I associate them with tacky marketing and lifestyle-oriented material. I hate that they are synonymous with gambling. Within games, I really hate bad barriers. Like when they block off a corridor with stacked furniture that anybody could get past, or a little ridge that anybody could hop or scramble over, or put a switch behind a pit that needs a 2x2x2 block pushed into it rather than reaching over and pressing the switch. Level designers need to get out more.

Can somebody explain to me how making the cross part stick out a bit will fix the laborious feeling and failure-prone d-pad? It may well fix it but the major nelson video just says that the shape is different...

I've always felt that shoehorning plots into MMOs is absurd, but people keep doing it and sandbox games are getting stuck in an indie niche. Almost every new MMO seems to be selling itself as a single player game, to an audience who always play MMOs alone for 30 days then quit, then start lapping up the bullshit on the next one. The result is a grindy poor man's Bioware game with a subscription fee and a drip feed of additional pisspoor 'content'. 'MMO content' is an oxymoron.

A shame, although I never really heard anything but bad things about these guys and their publishing relationships... I bought a game called Xyanide Resurrection for PS2 out of curiosity once that they developed in-house. It crashes at the Save screen without fail.

Those things exist to generate naff publicity don't they? That's the impression I get when I read press releases about games being awarded stuff like 'First game to have time travel gun' (not a real example).

They put out a nice video today for environmental sounds: http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=251965 There are probably less than 10000 subscribers but they seem to have money coming from somewhere. They're doing their third EVE style 'expansion' (a big patch) this summer and have a big 'Darkfall 2010' project for the end of the year which is supposed to have DX11, new character models and animations, new UI, loads of new items, dungeons, prestige class system and a million other things... Darkfall continues to be the game that you can't describe without sounding like an advertisement, but sadly you can't recommend without a dozen caveats and warnings.

Darkfall seems to be doing fine. I'm not at all suggesting that APB should be a full loot, no tutorial, hardcore thing, but Darkfall does show that large numbers of players can interact in an open world with proper shooting, physics, collision and vehicles etc. If a mainstream mmo can pull that off I think it could be huge, APB sidesteps it and has absolutely no magic as a result.

The concept of an open world gta-style city with hundreds of players in two factions mucking about with cars and guns is hugely appealing. This game does not even try deliver that at all, it goes for convoluted matchmaking and different types of zones and other such rubbish, with a load of social and customisation fluff to try and make up for it. Instead of actually developing the technology to allow an open world sandbox action MMO (e.g. Darkfall).

In other laugh-or-cry MMO news: http://www.massively.com/2010/07/01/war40k...rs-wow-players/

The phrase 'Action District' sums up perfectly what is so wrong with this game. I played the beta and was appalled by the principles and structure of the game. Funny seeing people complain about how the shooting and driving feels, stuff I ignored because the lag was so bad.

Max level PvP in AoC is -taking on the zerg alliance in Keshatta Oasis (a PvE zone with a player defined 'duel spot' area that is fun to wipe with a small group). great fun for a while, gets old fast. -minigames (premade always beats PUG, population so low that premade v premade almost never happens) -bi-monthly battlekeep sieges (depending on the likelihood of the opponent all logging in their caster alts and insta-winning) -Whatever underdeveloped thing they add to the actual PvP border kingdoms once every 9 months in an attempt to clear up keshatta, and then never fix Yeah, except that in AoC you can set your vulnerability to 6am and still guarantee 48 defenders by joining a zerg or nolife alliance.

They put it on youtube finally

A guy just invaded and somehow managed to completely break my weapons and armor with some spells I never knew existed. So I couldn't really do anything and died losing 6k souls and having to farm up about 15k to fix all the damage. :P/

It amazes me how Game is ALWAYS totally empty 90% of the year and then totally packed around christmas. They'd probably make more money if they functioned like those bargain book/shoe shops that are open for a month and then go 'out of business' for the rest of the year (of which there are at least 3 in my town). retailol

Guild Wars' model works because it's a game with extremely broad appeal, a flexible/cheap to run infrastructure and the boxes have boobs on them. It wouldn't work with every MMO, especially not niche games and games which simulate a complex seamless and much more interactive world which for me is the key element that makes an MMO exciting to play. Different models suit different games. WoW is at critical mass and they can do whatever they want, this is hardly even relevent to the rest of the MMO genre. I don't think the star pony issue is a big deal for other games.