OT: What other games are people playing??

[Alneyan]

Lepakko said:
Ultima Online

I know I am too curious, but... Do you play UO on the official shards (OSI) or on private servers? I know I definitively spent too much time playing UO in the past, though that was on private shards.

[Gandalf Parker]

Alneyan said:
I know I am too curious, but... Do you play UO on the official shards (OSI) or on private servers? I know I definitively spent too much time playing UO in the past, though that was on private shards.

Ive been REAL tempted to get back into UO. Its the only Online world I really liked. But I played it at the wrong time. Not early enough for the best parts, and not late enough for private shards. From what I hear, everything I loved about it is still there and everything I didnt like is fixed by having access to private shards.

I was even debating that it might be a good thing to do with all this ISP equipment Ive got rotting in my garage. Do a nice little local shard.

[Aku]

I played Ultima Online for 4 years but quit because the game was turning to crap. UO was a badass game but as time went on it became drummed down so much. I am told now that you can bless an item for 100gp and it stays blessed until you die. I saw UO turning like the other mmorpgs so I quit and the community was degrading into children. Has it changed at all in the past few years?

[Aikamun]

Like these threads every once in a while. Have decided to leave MMORPG's behind. They have a community but minimal gameplay. Returning to strategy games. My Favorites are:

Dominions 2
Space Empires 4

Downloaded Titans of Steel, Anacreon 2, and the Chaos League Demo. Believe it or not, I am an old Blood Bowl fan. Threw out complete sets of Advanced Squad Leader, Starfleet Battles, and Car Wars but kept all of my Blood Bowl stuff. Shocked to see this game returning to computer.

I will weed these five games down to three so as to receive more enjoyment from the best.

Thanks again for the thread and info,
Aikamun

Editted: Instead of Anacreon 2, evaluating the Hyperion Mod for Emperor of the Fading Suns.

[KroolDeath]

This has been an interesting thread indeed. There is quite a mixture of gamers playing Dom2, which is a good thing. We've seen pure stragetists, folks who like multiple genres, etc. Its even given me some insight on some other games I might like to try that aren't necessarily mainstream so many, like me, may not have heard of them.

Keep em coming folks!

Krool

[Arryn]

Aikamun said:
Have decided to leave MMORPG's behind. They have a community but minimal gameplay.

That's one of my big gripes against them. Do any of them have any sort of real persistent universe in which a player's (or guild's) actions actually matter? Where there's a real, threaded storyline whose flow you can actually affect, instead of the typical scripted "events" developers occasionally throw in, which the game companies have confused with the concept of "content"?

[Aku]

I wish a mmorpg like that actually came out but comon I bet years will pass before one like that comes out.

Arryn said:
That's one of my big gripes against them. Do any of them have any sort of real persistent universe in which a player's (or guild's) actions actually matter? Where there's a real, threaded storyline whose flow you can actually affect, instead of the typical scripted "events" developers occasionally throw in, which the game companies have confused with the concept of "content"?

EVE-Online?

It's early days with EVE for me, and I can't devote as much time to it as the fanatics, but I have a clear impression that the game has a player-driven politics and a player-driven economy. For example, there seems to be a major war (or series of wars) between player-run alliances going on at the moment. The result is that ship and equipment prices have been rising for everyone over the Last month because demand is increasing (all those players needing to replace blown-up ships), while supply of raw materials for ship-building is decreasing (because miners are finding it too unsafe to get much mining done in the war zones).

Or, as another example, I've just been reading a series of Posts amongst arguing factions within a particular alliance, complaining that they're close to civil war. The military are saying that they're unable to fund their operations properly unless the miners pay some kind of tax on all their workings; the extremists amongst them are demanding that all the miners be kicked out of alliance space. The miners are complaining that the military aren't providing decent protection against pirates (player pirates, that is) or opposing alliances; and that it's not worth their while paying more tax until the military service improves.

The only problem really is that a lot of this isn't very well documented, so you mostly don't get to read about it in nicely packaged, polished story form. But there are attempts at both a player-run news service, and player produced propoganda videos, which are often a lot of fun.

The game developers also drop in a lot of their own story content, but it just feels artificial when overlaid on top of the rest of it.

Mark

[bleach168]

Arryn said:
That's one of my big gripes against them. Do any of them have any sort of real persistent universe in which a player's (or guild's) actions actually matter? Where there's a real, threaded storyline whose flow you can actually affect, instead of the typical scripted "events" developers occasionally throw in, which the game companies have confused with the concept of "content"?

That's how mmorpgs work. Unless it's a game where there is heavy pvp and politics like AC:1 Darktide, Shadowbane, or Eve Online, you're not going to be a factor in the storyline. Remember, you're one of hundreds of thousands of players so it's not likely any one single person will affect the storyline. There are reasons why the content makers don't even want you to affect the storyline.

[Arryn]

Bleach,

There were millions of people in the Rebellion (Star Wars) and while few individuals made a difference, collectively they did. In MMORPGs, even the sum total of all the members on a shard don't matter. It's not important to me that my own actions matter, but it's a pointless game if nothing that anyone does, even collectively in the thousands, matters.


Aku,

Having been in SWG from beta onwards, I can agree 100%. SWG is (IMO) the best MMORPG I've seen yet and it sucks. What that says about other MMOs I'll leave to your imagination.