Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

All I ask is that outside of PvP area"s, any quick travel ability should activate instantly. That is, there is absolutely no reason to have a 3 second cast time on mounts anymore in WoW. It"s just....a nuisance.

Wetlands weak? no way. that zone left a HUGE impression on me in beta.
Thandol span?
Leaving Loch modan, going through the tunnels down the mountain and ending up in the fens.

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it"s a matter of personal taste to an extent. There are some zones I love that most people seem to hate (BFD for one, I run it at least once on every character I play, I"m so in love with the atmosphere there it"s ridiculous), and I"m sure some I hate that most people love.

But I"m sure most people will conceed on various zones just being plain ugly, plaguelands is the big one for me, there isn"t a single part of it that"s any less than repulsive, and I think they could have done much better with the whole UD army theme.

Yeah, a lot of it is going to be personal taste. I think Zangarmarsh is one of the prettiest zones, some of my friends hate it.

Caliane lists Netherstorm/SMV as ugly, but I thought they were gorgeous and fantastic in effectively conveying the feel of dangerous areas on the edge of the map, barely held together after the destruction of Draenor. Color was used very well in all of The Burning Crusade, giving each zone a very specific atmosphere. I think the only zones I would call ugly in TBC are Hellfire Peninsula and Blades Edge Mountains, probably because I don"t like warm earth tones.

Agree on the Plaguelands being terrible, but it"s actually only because of the zone "mist" or whatever the proper word for it is (every zone has it to an extent) is this gross brown. If it were purple or something the zone would look completely different and still retain that hopeless feel.

Pretty much every Northrend zone looks great. You can really see how far they"ve come.

I"ll agree on Northrend, with the exception of icecrown and zul"drak. The rest are all fucking gorgeous.

Really? I love icecrown. Goes to show how subjective it all is I suppose. The sheer cliffs and massive undead army give me a boner.

I think maybe I was dissapointed because I was expecting some massive actual, you know, glacier, like we saw in the WC3 cinematics and instead we got Mordor. I mean I know they explained it and all that, but it still pissed me off.

Loved dragonblight though. Dark, creepy, desolate snowy tundra, running around there levelling my lock or priest while listening to some suitably creepy music like Lustmord is great fun.

But yeah, it is obviously hugely subjective. I loved Borean for example, and most people seem fairly ambivelant towards it.

Borean sucks and so does Dragonblight. Grizzly Hills is my personal favorite, but Sholazar Basin is easily the best zone in Northrend.

Grizzly Hills is ok, kind of bland, and doesn"t mesh at all with the general atmosphere of the game. Sholazar is an amazing zone though, I"ll agree there.

Azrayne said:

I think maybe I was dissapointed because I was expecting some massive actual, you know, glacier, like we saw in the WC3 cinematics and instead we got Mordor. I mean I know they explained it and all that, but it still pissed me off.

Loved dragonblight though. Dark, creepy, desolate snowy tundra, running around there levelling my lock or priest while listening to some suitably creepy music like Lustmord is great fun.

But yeah, it is obviously hugely subjective. I loved Borean for example, and most people seem fairly ambivelant towards it.

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I haven"t played wrath.
Is there a giant hollowed out glacier at all? Think Ice age, with the animals frozen inside the walls. If not, man they really missed out on a cool idea for a zone.

Worst zone design ever are zones like Nek forest and LFay in EQ2. I should never be able to see somewhere I want to go and not be able to get up over the 4 foot high ledge. Making someone move for 3 min to go around something just to move ahead 5 feet is horrible.

EQ2 The Sinking Sands fits into that category for me. The sand dunes that you have to run 5 minutes around to get over are greeeeaattt!

Zehn - Vhex said:

All I ask is that outside of PvP area"s, any quick travel ability should activate instantly. That is, there is absolutely no reason to have a 3 second cast time on mounts anymore in WoW. It"s just....a nuisance.

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It is probably expecting too much, but preferably it should be advantageous to fight while mounted. If I was sitting on the back of a giant lizard, most likely I wouldn"t dismount to fight an unmounted Orc.

- Disallow mounts in dungeons and the entire game won"t be mounted combat.

- Worried about players kiting high level ground mobs from aerial mounts? Give ground mobs ranged abilities and ways to forcefully dismount riders.

- Mounts should be more like Hunter pets, with special abilities, talent trees, gear, scaling, and the ability to fight autonomously, though with penalty.

Probably a pipe dream though.

Surprised Azshara hasn"t been mentioned as one of the more beautiful areas in the Old World artistically. A shame it wasn"t used more heavily.

A lot of the old world zones would be made 100% more awesome if you could fly through them. Azshara just pissed me off as a zone to get around in so I"m kinda glad there isn"t a lot of quests out there.

I"m not sure how I feel about mounted combat. While it makes sense for a warrior or perhaps an archer to be mounted, it kinda flies in the face of the more rogue and caster arch-types.

Though if you made the mount more then just a speed buff with a graphic, you might as well go full retard and allow you to pokemons that shit up.

Yep, making mounts that important would shape the entire game towards it. It"d be too much of a focus. I"m fine with them just being speed buffs, makes it easier to include super rare mounts without anyone crying too much about if they"re just cosmetic.

Zehn - Vhex said:

you might as well go full retard and allow you to pokemons that shit up.

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Pokemon MMO would be hilarious.

Since every MMO ever has fuckawful pet pathing issues.

I know someone mentioned this before as a rumor, but the press release finally came out:Gamasutra - News - 38 Studios Acquires Big Huge Games

38 Studios has acquired Rise of Nations developer Big Huge Games from publisher THQ. In the transaction, the Massachusetts-based developer-publisher receives all of Big Huge"s IP, tools, assets, tech and all its projects in development.

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I think this is the really interesting clip though:

The crux of the acquisition was apparently Big Huge"s proprietary RTS/RPG engine, which Close says will "accelerate" development for the online game based on the Copernicus IP. But he notes the engine will also support development in "multiple genres that are based in a shared world."

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Could we finally get an MMO with truly alternate (and fully viable) gameplay options? Unit based combat for army commanding or naval battles anyone? or city building/civic content that actually significantly alters the world? Or maybe they"re just referring to multiple, independent titles based in the same setting (although multiple titles that could interact meaningfully could be really interesting as well)? Ah well, I can dream anyway hehe.

if im going down im taking you with me!

Pretty fired up about the announcement, just too damn hard for me to be quiet this long!

Wanted to touch on a topic mentioned above, and hear feedback.

I would argue there are two ways for mounts to get in game. LotR which I think is horriffic, at best, and WoW, which I loved and now feels totally saturated with pets.

I love mounts, I love cool mounts, but there is a sweet spot I think in how you get them in, what they do, what they mean, and how much impact they have.

WoW"s achievement based mounts are fairly baller. It seperates the nubs from the hardcore with nothing more than a minor speed increase at best and some really nifty cosmetics.