Honest Bender: The last few MMOs I've tried really lacked polish. City of Heroes was rough when it was released. I don't know that I've ever seen such a crap UI. TOR was a bit better but still very clunky UI, crap crafting system, shallow end game.

You want an MMO with some meat on its bones? Try Aion. Now there was an MMO! Great UI, really fun classes, wonderful graphics, interesting back story, and a really fun dynamic end game.

Man... maybe I'll go look into Aion again...

/Or EVE.
//Nothing tops EVE.

I was an Aion player from beta up until about 8 months ago. I put up with the hellish grind on several characters, played the deeply flawed PvP, the horribly lopsided abyss and forts, the pointless dailies that had to be done to keep up,and the endless running of the few good instances it had. Now you are treated to all of that plus home upkeep, pet feeding and interior decorating. All that and the most important thing, the never ending plant watering!

The only reason I played that game so long is that I truly enjoyed the legion I was with. When Aion Sims edition came along, most of us bolted.

If you are a heavily invested player of Aion, then by all means continue if it is what you like. However, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who's never played it before.

That game will be next on the NCSoft chopping block, at least in North America.

/still look over the awesome cliffs of GW2 and wish for wings, though

Spaced Cowboy: wippit: HulkHands:

Creative Assembly (Total War) got the rights to PC games for Warhammer, so I am VERY happy. Total War: Warhammer!

I would live with a decent RTS version of 40k, as long as they have all the races and are true to their stats.

As to the MMO/FPS concept, you need to allow for more than just the base Marine/Ork/Eldar. Include the option to be a LIbrarian, Tech Marine, Terminator, Scout (just on the marine side). Could even have character who are vehicle specialists. Be fun to be a guy driving a Lemus Russ.

Or be the most holy of broken units, the Wraithlord.


/but I stand by my WAAAAAAAGH.

The first Dawn of War was a great 40k RTS. The sequel, not so much.

As for the Creative Assembly acquiring 40k rights...

[www.reactionface.info image 308x313]

They acquired Fantasy Battle rights. 40k is still very much in the hands of THQ.

/liked DoW2
//Space Marine was cool too but peer to peer multiplayer killed it on PC
///Blood Ravens table top army because of DoW2

meat0918: ThatBillmanGuy: Can they please shut down Star Trek Online now? Sick of the "buy our new $20 ship of the week" with no game to actually play with it, unless you call endlessly blowing up five of "insert bad guy here" a game.

I got to 50 before I'd even completed a single major quest line. Never did finish any of them except the Klingon War one were you get to witness the Klingon dude singing as he flies to his doom and glory.

Star Trek Online does feature some enjoyable story content. It just does not feature very much story content. At all.

Dimensio: meat0918: ThatBillmanGuy: Can they please shut down Star Trek Online now? Sick of the "buy our new $20 ship of the week" with no game to actually play with it, unless you call endlessly blowing up five of "insert bad guy here" a game.

I got to 50 before I'd even completed a single major quest line. Never did finish any of them except the Klingon War one were you get to witness the Klingon dude singing as he flies to his doom and glory.

Star Trek Online does feature some enjoyable story content. It just does not feature very much story content. At all.

It's a nice single player game with the option of doing multiplayer.

I never grouped for a story line mission, only for PvP and whatever those little fight the Borg instances were.

theurge14: For the love of all that is pure and good can someone somewhere please make a true WoW killer. That 8 year old dumbed down and cartoony piece of crap needs to be put down in the most urgent way.

Why? can't you just not play it?

corronchilejano: Thorak: The trinity of tank/healer/DPS, for instance, isn't necessary

Someone should try addapting the L4D motto in an MMO: Creatures doing lockdown attacks that only other players can help you get out of.

There are missions/raids in the new Everquest expansion that do that, a group member gets encased in crystal, and the rest of the group has to break them out for example.

Probably shutting down another North American development studio.

My guess, GW2 will continue for a while but will be developed from Korea (like Aion).

/not playing Aion much anymore anyway
//Secret World is kind of fun!

So this has absolutely nothing to do with being unable to login to GW2 all last night? (I'm assuming, since noone's panicking in this thread that it's back up. Blocked at work, so can't tell.)

Jclark666: So this has absolutely nothing to do with being unable to login to GW2 all last night? (I'm assuming, since noone's panicking in this thread that it's back up. Blocked at work, so can't tell.)

Game was back up by 11:30pm pst last night. Just a longer than usual maintenance I think last night.

kroonermanblack: More piss mongering from people upset at the closure of CoX, is all I read there.

They aren't going to shut down the flagship product they spent millions bringing to bear, at least not for a year or more. And it's really just incredibly stupid to say so because they took away CoX.

I still don't get why, unless they thought it would force people to buy other games or content or something more profitable, but I can't see how that would even be possible since CoX was a steady and reliable revenue stream with little cost.

Because like someone above said.. morons.. twats (and some other slangs) run these companies. I work in the software industry and am dealing with something similar. My main solution is EOL, has no replacement path for customers, had very little competition, has functionality that is required by law for certain types of companies. The development costs have been greatly reduced and the software is stable. It is a cash cow (albeit a very small percentage of the entire company revenue) but they killed it off. They would have been better off slashing the seat price in half, doing no development and keeping a skeleton crew for support and making 10's of millions more over the next few years until it became completely obsolete. 

Point is: Companies sometimes make decisions that make no sense. And make less sense when they are heavily in the black.

ThatBillmanGuy: Can they please shut down Star Trek Online now? Sick of the "buy our new $20 ship of the week" with no game to actually play with it, unless you call endlessly blowing up five of "insert bad guy here" a game.

But Dan Stahl proclaims it awesome! If he says it, it must be so. Surely he wouldn't lie?

Mike Chewbacca: Flying Code Monkey: Probably shutting down another North American development studio.

My guess, GW2 will continue for a while but will be developed from Korea (like Aion).

/not playing Aion much anymore anyway
//Secret World is kind of fun!

Again, NCSoft isn't ArenaNet. GW2 hasn't been affected by this in any way. The article, despite saying it would post updates, hasn't posted the update from ArenaNet stating this had nothing to do with them.

Yeah, there's been nothing unusual going on with the GW2 devs. If anything, they've been ramping up to add more content, especially with the Christmas update next week.

I laugh at the thought of GW2 being taken up by Korean developers. NCSoft is purely the publisher of GW2, not the developer. GW2 is perhaps the farthest away you can get from a Korean MMO anyways. Hell, WoW is more similar to Korean games than GW2 is.

meat0918: Dimensio: meat0918: ThatBillmanGuy: Can they please shut down Star Trek Online now? Sick of the "buy our new $20 ship of the week" with no game to actually play with it, unless you call endlessly blowing up five of "insert bad guy here" a game.

I got to 50 before I'd even completed a single major quest line. Never did finish any of them except the Klingon War one were you get to witness the Klingon dude singing as he flies to his doom and glory.

Star Trek Online does feature some enjoyable story content. It just does not feature very much story content. At all.

It's a nice single player game with the option of doing multiplayer.

I never grouped for a story line mission, only for PvP and whatever those little fight the Borg instances were.

I agree with another poster that the character creation is awesome. And I like the Excalibur, Venture, and I love the Odyssey class designs. Buy as for story, there was only one real mission that didn't feel like bad "shoot em up" Star Trek fanfic. There's a romulan episode where you get locked in prison and have to fight your way out, then ru across the desert, avoiding the air patrols. Then you had to build a beacon out of a crashed starship in a canyon to contact your ship to escape the planet. That was the the first time the game felt like how a star trek game should be. The rest of it is just kill kill kill. My character has racked up more kills of borg, klingons, etc... Than every other star trek character ever shown on screen. Which is fine for playing a Klingon, but there's no variety except for that one mission I described.

But, if you view it as Star Trek Digital Dress Up with other players, it does that just fine.

Honest Bender: The last few MMOs I've tried really lacked polish. City of Heroes was rough when it was released. I don't know that I've ever seen such a crap UI. TOR was a bit better but still very clunky UI, crap crafting system, shallow end game.

You want an MMO with some meat on its bones? Try Aion. Now there was an MMO! Great UI, really fun classes, wonderful graphics, interesting back story, and a really fun dynamic end game.

Man... maybe I'll go look into Aion again...

/Or EVE.
//Nothing tops EVE.

I've tried to get into EVE several times, all unsuccessful. I think if I had been playing from the start it would've been okay, but trying to come into a game that's so evolved at such a late stage is difficult. Especially when you're solo. I've known a lot of good people throughout various MMO's and such over the years, but keeping track of any of them is damn near impossible, much less getting them together to go into a game.

Anyways, my last foray into EVE consisted of me researching exactly how I wanted to, well, research. After I figured out what I was doing I got to where I could do the missions and make some cash, but that got old and repetitive quickly. So then I was staring at the countdown timer for my research that I could in no way speed up. If you could make that go faster in a meaningful way it'd be a lot different, but being told you have to wait days or weeks or even months to do anything other than exactly what you're doing now is dumb to me. And to get to where I eventually wanted to be would take a year or more of RL training time? Sheesh.

I mean it's cool you can set it and forget it sort of, but that doesn't entertain me when I load up the game, ya know? Not gonna pay a subscription fee so I can train offline when I'm handcuffed while online.

Games for me at least boil down to three states of entertainment. Visceral, Creative and Story. Visceral is stuff like Borderlands where its tight action and intense gameplay. Creative is stuff like Minecraft where you can just create what you want and express yourself. Story is stuff like Mass Effect where its so well written that you WANT to play it. Sadly I don't think GW2 is any of those things for me. It pains me to say this because I was a huge fan of the original Guild Wars and was seriously looking forward to GW2.

[Visceral]
I don't expect GW2 to be an intense combat game. Its an MMO after all and the original Guild Wars was very much point and click. The combat is fun but unless you are HEAVY into the PvP scene it gets old FAST. The PvE NPC AI is a complete joke, kite everything in circles = Win. Oh and giving an MMO player less than 20 skills to customize is like giving a shooter player one gun for the whole game. Unless your Valve that does not work out well.

[Creative]
GW1 touched on the creative element because you had skill builds. You could literally mix and match hundreds of skills and come up with your own flavor. I understand that its hard to balance a game like that but it was fun finding ways to break the system and be creative. GW2 takes that away in favor of ease of use which when it comes down to it is BORING. All the skills and classes feel the same with little to no variation. I get that they wanted to break up traditional grouping in MMOs in favor of crazy big pick up groups but its just not that fun. While the combat in GW2 is better than GW1 with the loss of the creative aspect it just gets stale. (and NO, the ability to add trinkets to your armor does not count as a creative aspect, neither does the grindy crafting)

[Story]
GW2 fails in the story department, I like branching stories but there are literally very few fleshed out characters anywhere. Its Prophecies all over again, EotN did story better than GW2 and that's a major set back. I almost never feel like I'm doing anything worth doing, its just going through the motions. Since your basing personal stories only partly on your actual character then you have to make sure your secondary characters are AWESOME (see Mass Effect). Its an MMORPG which means you need story to carry it. I know its hard to tell a story in an MMO environment and make it be personal but you HAVE to use secondary characters to reinforce it. The human campaign for example is one that I have played the most of. You meet Logan Thackery with no drama, no intro, no backstory you just know hes some dude who meets with you from time to time and shows you around. HE. MEANS. NOTHING. That's the problem, nothing means anything unless you care about it. I can't blame the writer I know this guys work and its great, he knows how to create interesting characters (read 'The Ice Age cycle' hard to get cause its out of print). So I have to assume the horrible story decisions were based on game mechanics.

If it had a truely compelling story or if it allowed me to be creative (like with builds) I would play it. I don't expect and RPG to be visceral so theres no issue there really. Having thousands of hours put into GW1 its just really sad that GW2 is so boring. I respect that there are plenty of people enjoying Guild Wars 2 but I am just not one of them (as a side note, almost none of my large original GW1 alliance now plays GW2 because of the aforementioned issues).

//The Elder Scrolls MMO is probably gonna blow.

The dev team is heavily made up of Kesmai veterans.

hammer85: I would love to see a Dark Souls MMO.

With permadeath and town invasions.
*evil laugh*

AKA Joker: Games for me at least boil down to three states of entertainment. Visceral, Creative and Story. Visceral is stuff like Borderlands where its tight action and intense gameplay. Creative is stuff like Minecraft where you can just create what you want and express yourself. Story is stuff like Mass Effect where its so well written that you WANT to play it. Sadly I don't think GW2 is any of those things for me. It pains me to say this because I was a huge fan of the original Guild Wars and was seriously looking forward to GW2.

[Visceral]
I don't expect GW2 to be an intense combat game. Its an MMO after all and the original Guild Wars was very much point and click. The combat is fun but unless you are HEAVY into the PvP scene it gets old FAST. The PvE NPC AI is a complete joke, kite everything in circles = Win. Oh and giving an MMO player less than 20 skills to customize is like giving a shooter player one gun for the whole game. Unless your Valve that does not work out well.

[Creative]
GW1 touched on the creative element because you had skill builds. You could literally mix and match hundreds of skills and come up with your own flavor. I understand that its hard to balance a game like that but it was fun finding ways to break the system and be creative. GW2 takes that away in favor of ease of use which when it comes down to it is BORING. All the skills and classes feel the same with little to no variation. I get that they wanted to break up traditional grouping in MMOs in favor of crazy big pick up groups but its just not that fun. While the combat in GW2 is better than GW1 with the loss of the creative aspect it just gets stale. (and NO, the ability to add trinkets to your armor does not count as a creative aspect, neither does the grindy crafting)

[Story]
GW2 fails in the story department, I like branching stories but there are literally very few fleshed out characters anywhere. Its Prophecies all over again, EotN did story better than GW2 and tha ...

Well said. WvW was a huge step in the right direction in my opinion, but it's just not enough on its own. Intricate and in-depth builds are necessary for character investment, or else you feel like just another nameless face in the crowd casting the same shiat as everybody else. I'm really surprised that so many of the lessons that should've been learned from previous MMO's (and MUD's) just weren't, or the wrong lessons were taken away. I mean Camelot had RvR forever ago, and it wasn't until now it was really brought back in any decent capacity. It still has very little impact on the game overall, but it's a step in the right direction. Yet GW2 still manages to be boring, so will the next MMO that comes out just be like eh, GW2 had WvW and people said the game was boring...I know, let's just instance all the PvP and make it not matter to the overall game in any meaningful way! That's what WoW did and they print money, so it must be the right thing to do.

So tempted to try EVE again for like the fourth time. Such a daunting prospect though. If they'd just make it so doing a mission or something would take time off from the training I think I could get into it. When my character advances the same whether I'm logged in or not is just silly.

Or Darkfall. I actually played that when it first came out, but it was so horrible. People auto-running into walls to grind up their skills, a single mob camp that everybody was at. When I went out exploring I found some city or something that was being built by a huge guild who chased me off into the completely empty space that was the rest of the world. Wheee.

RedPhoenix122: Goddammitsomuch

This.

Love me some GW2.

Not concerned for the well being of GW2 in the least. Have already spent so much time in the game, if it closed tomorrow I would feel I spent my money well. Vast improvements would be made just using some of the concepts from GW1 such as hard modes and master content (explorer is not hard mode) and an embark beach. Additional variety to the characters as GW1 had would be nice; thinking like additional dual skills similar to thief dual wield.

I really think a Planetside style "hot zone" indicator would be good, with reduced waypoint costs, increased rewards, and notifications for a mass of events being spawned to increase traffic in certain regions. I've had good luck with people in the majority of events, but I'd like to know what is going on where, and some waning hours have been obviously lonely play time.

They were bought out by Bain Capital.

This actually makes me concerned for WIld Star.

A new sci fi mmo, blah blah, you know the drill. It's probably not going to be any good but it might be.

The Incredible Sexual Egg: With news like this I'm glad I decided on The Secret World instead

Agreed!

Few points worth making...

1) NCSoft does have the power to shut down Guild Wars 2 (but they won't)

2) Guild Wars 2 is a big money maker for NCSoft and their only North America game making any money

3) NCSoft is trying to get out of North America and focus more on Korean games and sales

So, Guild Wars 2 is safe for now. It will not have the lease City of Heroes had though, and as soon as it hints to be losing steam, NCSoft will dump it so they can use the money on something more Korean.

I played SWTOR - like many other people I raved about the questing and stories being told. I enjoyed that your companions had personalities and backstories of their own, sometimes they could betray you, sometimes they fell in love with you.

I understand that one of the biggest gripes about the game was the poor multi-player options at max level, what really confounded me was that they didn't allow for a continued single player story at max level. I reached a goal, became something (Jedi council, Sith lord, etc) and then pretty much the world build up around me stopped progressing or involving me at all. I could have patiently waited for group endgame bosses to fight if I was given a story to keep me invested, but I do understand that writing all of that for 8 different classes is probably asking too much.

MadSkillz: I can't play these games anymore. I'm 34 and spent the better part of 14 years playing these, as someone on here referred to it, 'skinner boxes'. Grinding for junk, playing games compulsively. It's like I've been asleep this past decade. I have to get on to finding a GF and starting a family, before it's too late!

You're just trading one grind for another.

/remember to buy her some diamonds at level 10 ...

Meh headline says "Hope you didn't buy Guild Wars 2" but I already have gotten well over 100 hours of playing time out of it. Decent enough investment even if it shut down now.
I'm doubting they'll be affected much anyways. With the price flux on Gem it seems they are making a fair bit of scratch, and it sounds like their huge early year update for 2013 is going smoothly.

amoral: theurge14: For the love of all that is pure and good can someone somewhere please make a true WoW killer. That 8 year old dumbed down and cartoony piece of crap needs to be put down in the most urgent way.

Why? can't you just not play it?

Because as long as people keep defaulting back to WoW because "well all my friends still play it" we can't have good things elsewhere.

Theseus: I played SWTOR - like many other people I raved about the questing and stories being told. I enjoyed that your companions had personalities and backstories of their own, sometimes they could betray you, sometimes they fell in love with you.

I understand that one of the biggest gripes about the game was the poor multi-player options at max level, what really confounded me was that they didn't allow for a continued single player story at max level. I reached a goal, became something (Jedi council, Sith lord, etc) and then pretty much the world build up around me stopped progressing or involving me at all. I could have patiently waited for group endgame bosses to fight if I was given a story to keep me invested, but I do understand that writing all of that for 8 different classes is probably asking too much.

*Insert bounty hunter rage*

The latest armor tier did me in.

ThatBillmanGuy: Can they please shut down Star Trek Online now? Sick of the "buy our new $20 ship of the week" with no game to actually play with it, unless you call endlessly blowing up five of "insert bad guy here" a game.

This, oh god(s) all mighty THIS! ^

BumpInTheNight:
suck it Minnesota! That chunk just reads as very strange, why would you narrow it down to one particular city. Isn't this game on the internet?

Maybe I'm missing a joke here, but Minnesota City only has a population of 204, I don't think there will be much of an outcry.

Sargun: Subby's a farking idiot because this doesn't affect ArenaNet at all. NCSoft has almost nothing whatsoever to do with GW2.

Except they own it. NEVER trust publishers, not for one second ever.