Recent content by forensic

What we are expecting is 1. good gameplay that builds on EQ and Vanguard 2. good lore/world building Everything else can be mediocre, but if they deliver on these, they can be successful with a small audience. The lore sells the world which is why people still play tabletop D&D to this day even...

game looks fun, could be the p99 killer

Normally I would agree with you but their financial situation is pretty clear. They aren't operating under the typical bullshit of Vivendi and EA. They're a profitable indie studio. Profitable businesses don't suddenly close. Mass layoffs (usually 10-30%) in a subsidiary indicate that...

They laid off three (3) people. Two programmers, one animations artist. Hardly a death blow.

Thingol ruled Beleriand from Doriath. The House of Hador were his subjects as were the lords of Nargothrond. They called him the Lord of Beleriand, the King of Doriath, and sometimes the High King of the Teleri. He was much less epic than Finwe High King of the Noldor because he had never seen...

They can't use those because those are from The Children of Hurin, The Unfinished Tales, and The Silmarillion. They only have rights to the three Lord of The Rings books. Thingol ruled Doriath. It would be awesome if someone made an MMO set in the First Age.

They don't have rights to that IP. They can't touch anything outside the LOTR triology

I still play LOTRO and have played through every class. They are still releasing expansions. Gameplay is still awful but its possible to overlook anything when you like the world. Same reason people still play EQ or wow. A lot of people still play UO.

Video games are about feels. I played GW2 briefly when it came out... it seemed like a marginal improvement on wow for being 8 years later. In the 8 years between 1996 and 2004 we went from Duke Nukem 3D all the way to GTA: San Andreas. Am I expecting too much? The revolutionary MMORPGs are...

wow pretty aggro. You missed my point cause you just assume I'm another Pantheon dupe. I'm arguing that you have to compare games to their contemporaries, not to the past. The Realm has to be compared to 1996 games like Super Mario RPG or Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. The Realm is a pretty good...

The genre must be competitive with counterpart single player rpgs to be respectable. This genre is not even close anymore. pre-wow era: 1995-2005 Final Fantasy, Baldur's Gate 1/2, System Shock 1/2, Diablo 1/2, Icewind Dale, Ocarina of Time vs. The Realm, EverQuest 1/2, Ultima Online, Asheron's...

And if you want to make the "but wow is so popular so it must be good" argument... FPS and sports games are more popular than RPGs. They're different genres. WOW and clones changed the experience so severely that its like a new genre... maybe a more successful genre... but not as fun for those...

TravelingTomTom != TomTom. But even TomTom had built in ability to use other people's coords. It just didn't really matter that much because leveling in wow was so fast and people tended to enjoy it more than EQ. I agree that QuestHelper didn't ruin wow in 2004-2005. It ruined wow in 2007 and...

I personally know one author who, in late 2004, wrote a quest guide script that would take you from waypoint to waypoint showing you an arrow on your screen just as QuestHelper does today. You didn't have to look at the map just follow the dumb arrow. This was never shared outside the guild. It...

It wasn't long after. Before QuestHelper there was TravelingTomTom. This was in 2005. This stuff just didn't get popular until TBC. The best ones were private and never made public. The main reason they weren't made public was because the people who made them thought that Blizzard would...