SuperOz

I'd like to make a late suggestion to this:

Updated and unique tilesets for both Fort Trident and The Crucible. These are meant to be state-of-the-art headquarters for both the Phalanx and Arachnos, and currently they both just have...well...bleh maps, especially the Crucible, which is just recycling Tyrant's old lair.

Please?


S.

Thanks for the responses! I have the settings as high as they'll go (FSAA I have been told and have discovered is the thing most likely to drop my frame rates, and I lower that), and I still get the fuzziness.

And I did notice that, Sam! Water reflections are just downright amazing and seem to reflect everything...would there be some technical restriction on doing that for buildings?


S.

Hi all. I'm running a nicely high-end system at the moment with a ATI HD 5770 card I bought especially for Going Rogue, and am loving the game as I come to tweak my Ultra Mode settings for best play.

However, I have noticed that when I check out reflections in buildings, the images are somewhat vaguer than I was expecting and have seen in other images posted by people. I'm wondering if this is an issue with my monitor, graphics settings (I have Ultra Mode nearly maxed out) or something else.

Just a curious query here.


S.

Disabled.

Thanks for this link; I've passed it onto several of my friends now, some of whom I only stay in contact with through Facebook. I feel a bit more secure now, thanks again.


S.

If you thought Stallone's Dredd was good, you clearly have never read the original comic.

Lots of reason why this sounds superior right off the bat.


S.

Okay, thanks for that....I don't find there's any issues with my gameplay at all (and now the NDA is lifted, I can say I experience the same on the Beta), so I'm pretty happy on that score.

I'll happily play under these conditions because the video card isn't even getting warm running Ultra Mode. I love the thing already.


S.

I finally got my Radeon 5770 card! Woohoo! It can crank Ultra Mode up to the max, and even when I checked my framerates in some areas (it gets as low as 12fps in some areas!), it still seems to play incredibly smoothly with very little to no choppy framerates.

What's going on here? Is it a case of my net speed or that Ultra Mode is still kind of 'dense' to get super-smooth framerates?


S.

Oooo. What'd you do on the production?


S.

I have to nominate the Freeway chase scene from Matrix: Reloaded. Even though the film itself has a number of flaws, this scene (I should point out the clip edits out some dialogue, focusing on the action, which I think is a good thing in this case) is just a sheer adrenaline rush. Every time you think it's over, it ramps up another notch. Plus, flying guy in a trenchcoat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLtbQLv9-NA

Edit: I just watched this...it's truly heart in your mouth type stuff, and the music never ever lets up. Probably one of the finest sequences of its kind.

S.

We can only hope, my Lord.


S.

I live only an hour away from where they'll be filming down at Movieworld...we've had a good history of projects with actors down here. It might be minor in terms of television, but Jessica Alba worked and lived here for two years while doing the remake Flipper tv show and we even got the over-the-top Street Fighter movie. Even the John Cena movie Marine was shot down here. Currently the non-Doctor Who related K-9 films within about ten minutes' ride by bus from my house.

There's plenty of rainforest no more than a couple of hours away, so there's tons of locations they can use. Speilberg must've been won over when he produced Band of Brothers: The Pacific out here. I'll give shout-outs if I hear about production around my area.


S.

Too recognisable. How many times can you make Atlas Park burning believable, anyways?

But I've found some alternatives...can anyone recommend other burning/damaged maps to suggest a big battle or something?

S.

Out of a handful of maps where you can illustrate some genuine damage to the environment has taken place, this was one of them. I wanted to go back and use it, but according to Paragonwiki, this was taken down last year...

Was there any explanation for why and if it'll come back at all? All that really remains now is Inferno's and the burning Arachnos lab now....


S.

Hello all.

I was wondering about this the other day after had an opportunity to look over what's coming to us in Going Rogue, and looking back over what's been done in the last eighteen months.

Many things that people had wondered about ever being done have been; weapon customisation, the ability to walk, the ability to customise the colors of powers, some alternate animations for said powers, and the long-elusive ability to completely change from Hero to Villain and vice-versa.

I got to wondering what might be left, and given the graphical upgrades given to the game (and cleverly so, I might add), I thought the look of characters would be on this list. And by that I mean to bring them up to par with what we're seeing in Praetoria and a comparability to what we've seen in more recent games such as Champions Online.

Now, I've read plenty about the limitations of the game engine but I've also seen what's been coaxed out of it and possibly been added to/overwritten. But I also don't pretend to know what the defined limits of such things are. So what am I talking about here?

I'm talking about such things as more visually impactful costume parts as we've seen in such things as the Valkyrie, Cyborg and even Roman sets. These tend to have a more three-dimensional aspect to them and are enhanced by reflective surfaces and so on. If there was one thing I appreciated in Champions Online, it was that parts felt like...well...parts. Not just daubs of paint or patterns, but objects of substance that gave depth and complexity to the character. But how far can this go?

Hand in hand with that are such things as asymmetrical costume options. Many is the time I've been frustrated in coming up with a 'damaged' or 'incomplete' costume look only to find I must replicate portions of that look. Sometimes heroes aren't all consistent looking; sometimes you may well want that Hulk 'torn shirt' look or 'partial cyborg' look. Is this beyond the game engine?

Lastly there's the issue of the bodies themselves. When Soldiers of Arachnos became available to play, it struck me how much smoother proportioned and natural the body skeletons looked. I still jar now and then at the angles I see on our characters' bodies, even though they are still incredibly well animated. Is this an insurmountable hurdle for the game to overcome, though? I don't know enough about such things to venture a guess, though again the comparison to what we're seeing in Going Rogue suggests that this can be done.


I'd really be interested in what people's feedback is here, especially those with more knowledge on these things than me.



S.

First tick, no Americans writing the screenplay or directing. No offence to the Americans, but JD is very much a British creation.

Second tick, getting an extremely talented character actor like Urban (who won't mind disappearing under the helmet for the entire shoot, given his ability to disappear into parts).

Third tick will be a good studio backing it up.


S.

Oh well. I coughed up anyways...well worth the money!

Listening to it now, and I'm thinking this is the soundtrack to some new movie. Awesome stuff.

Should add that if you listen closely, there are snippets and passages that are very much City of Villains and Heroes.


S.

I'm a little confused; I haven't used iTunes before (Amazon won't let me buy from outside the US), and there's a price discrepancy between what I see on the iTunes page and what I see in the iTunes store. For some reason, the tracks change from 99 cents to 1.69, pushing the cost of the album from 9.99 to 16.99. I checked to make sure, and based on currency conversion, I should only be paying about 11 dollars Australian. So where's this change to the cost per track?


S.

Well, I note with appropriate cynicism that they're not implementing RealID 'at this time'.

I'd bet good money that they're not giving up on the deals they've synched up with Facebook and whomever else they got lined up to do the 'online gaming community' stuff. You don't go to that extent, make an announcement like that and then just go 'oh, all that money we spent and all those deals we made? We'll just scrap those.' Sure, it might happen sometimes, but it really has to be in the company's best interests to do so (BP, I'm looking at you).

They won't back off from this, like have others have already commented. Cryptic felt the backlash of the players over paid expansions, but I again would bet good money the sharks will be circling again to say 'well, now it's been a year and now you should pay for a paid expansion'.

Watch this space, I say.


S.

Having come back to this for the first time in a while, and I'm finally getting ready to bite the bullet and upgrade my video card. For reference, I'm running WinXP 32-bit, on a Gigabyte P-55-UDR3 motherboard with 4gig of DDR3 memory, a nvidia 9800GT video card, and a 600W Thermaltake power supply.

I believe my power supply is more than enough to handle all the way up to the recommended nvidia 260/ATI 5770, but is my system going to be enough to handle say a generation lower (250/5750) and give me full results? There seems to be some negligible differences as you go up in cards, and I'm wondering where the breakpoints might be.

Any help would be appreciated.


S.

Even after all the furor over this...I don't think Blizzard is going to back down. It's likely that the deals have largely been signed and delivered already with whomever they're collaborating with (in this case, it seems Facebook, the South Korean government), and they see themselves as enough of a juggernaut to survive people leaving.

And let's be honest...with as many players as they have, it'd have to be a mass exodus to really hurt them at this point.


S.

I'm honestly of two minds about all of this, and both stem from the same source, which is about anonymity and the internet.

The single biggest complaint I've ever heard about being online and people's behavior is that their anonymity empowers them to be abusive, to get feelings of superiority and generally be anti-social, bigoted and indulgent of whatever sense of empowerment being online (especially in MMO's) give them. When someone doesn't know your name or where you live, it's a shield. Let's not be disingenuous here. Anonymity is a iron-clad guarantee that you can say pretty much whatever you want, how you want and you won't get any repurcussions from it.

So now we have a situation where that is threatening to be stripped away and the floodgates of complaint are being opened. Now, the initial impulse I had about this was to say 'fantastic! People will be in a position to be responsible for what they say and be held accountable for their actions.'

And I do think there is some argument for that. I was literally talking the other day to a friend (whose name I do know and we met online) about just this topic and we agreed that tirades or opinions expressed online can be done in a way that you would never do in the 'real world', because of their very nature. So what's that saying about people? That the online world is where we can unleash the worst of our nature to be as racist/sexist/abusive/bigoted that we can be? I don't think so, because there's equally a number of people who are mature reasoning adults who want to find a community (an equally inherent human desire).

After that, the other part of my mind thought 'Well, isn't this essentially a forced invasion of privacy?' Instead of letting the community of World of Warcraft police itself, Blizzard appears to have decided that they need to instead, and removing the veil of anonymity is the way to do it. And I totally agree with other posters here that in the day and age of internet stalking and even murder, it's a potentially dangerous move.

Here in Australia, an 18-year old girl was murdered because she was lured to her death by two men posing as part of a natureist movement on Facebook. It was a graphic reminder of how someone's identity was targetted by someone else for a horrendous crime.

I'm not saying it could happen on World of Warcraft, but at its worst, the game has been associated with suicide, parental neglect, self-harm and abuse, theft and murder. They're incredibly evocative stories that obviously generate the worst impression people can have about gamers and their personalities. Now you have an oncoming situation where if someone takes a percieved offence online that they'll act upon it.

I think the users using the aforementioned pipl site (however well-intentioned they could've been) took a dangerous tack. But arguably it cuts both ways; what's to say Blizzard wouldn't do the same to a player they considered a 'risk', and release their information to authorities?

I'm lucky; I searched myself on pipl and got two hits, neither of which revealed any information I wasn't comfortable about sharing already. But this is Pandora's Box to me. I frankly doubt the WoW community will be as responsible as Blizzard hopes, and I doubt Blizzard is being as responsible as the community hopes.

What I do hope is that if nothing else, this causes people to think a bit about what they say and do online, because I think being able to speak your mind openly and freely is a privelege we take forgranted and we can abuse it too easily.


S.

It's really great to come back to this thread I started and see such robust discussion going on. Thank you to all those who have posted so far!

The main thing I seem to be getting from the responses though is that it's not so much time to move on from Recluse and Statesman so much as it is to grow them up a bit and give them some moral complexity, which is interesting given both the T for Teen rating for the game and the upcoming release of Going Rogue.

Is it just that this playerbase in particular or the broader audience have started to see beyond the black and white perception that used to linger about superhero themed stories? If so, I'd probably be pointing at Dark Knight as one of the major tipping points. Not only did it financially succeed, but it also scored an Oscar for the late Heath Ledger. And it was genuinely morally complex. A true grown up comic book story.

So if we are 'moving on', what should we be moving on to?


S.

I can never keep track of birthdays....nonetheless, happy birthday!

I hope the day finds you relaxing or at the very least, being efficient in delegating duties.


S.

Hello all.

As is my wont, I tend to give topics a little bit of thought before posting. In this case, with Going Rogue only a month and a half away I've had cause to wonder about the backstory/meta-story of the game.

It's quite easily the case that for the first four to five years of this game that the end of the Rikti War, and the ramifications of it were the focus of the stories around this game. The lore, the Rikti War Zone, all of that were gearing towards telling this story.

Then with Midnight Hour (taking us into time travel) and now Going Rogue, it seems like the focus has shifted to Praetoria particularly and indications suggest that the meta-story is going that way too. The Endgame System at the very least has some part to play in the area (which is good, because I'd like to see Praetoria get as much time to be used and explored as possible) with only speculation suggesting we may see the Rikti homeworld and so on.


So where does this leave the story of Paragon City and the Rogue Isles? While it's unlikely and probably not doable to have the War Walls come down, it does feel like that story has stalled significantly. I'm not saying all mobs and bad guys should just disappear, but I think most would agree that zone makeovers such as what happened with Faultline could and should happen to advance the game's story. I wonder if that'll be the case.

The same is probably more pointedly true for the Isles. The Destined One storyline plays out at 50, isn't really continued in the VEAT storyline and the Isles have become their own little city-state. I keep wondering what Recluse is going to do in response to Praetoria, or if he will at all.

Don't get me wrong; each one has built on the other. CoV built on CoH, and Going Rogue clearly builds on both of those. I just hope it's not at the expense of forwarding the stories of both to showcase the new and shiny.


S.

Happy Birthday, Matt.

Hope that the day isn't being too stressful, that what you have planned is fun and that there are many more.

And that you'll consider going all Tony Stark on Posi's armor....boy must be jealous.


S.