That was truly, truly cool.[/quote]
How the hell do you view that movie? I installed an xvid player and it’s sitll only playing the music.
Fuck Windows. I’ll probably have to wait till i get home and wtahc the cursed thing on my Mac.
Think it’s DivX.
God, I can only imagine how long it took to get some of those shots right (espcially any of the ones having to do with the SM pets).
We used this codec at the show:
http://www.xvidmovies.com/codec/
And we also answered the Immortal question - “How many developers does it take to install a codec ?” (more than 5)
-Walt
That was truly, truly cool.[/quote]
How the hell do you view that movie? I installed an xvid player and it’s sitll only playing the music.
Fuck Windows. I’ll probably have to wait till i get home and wtahc the cursed thing on my Mac.[/quote]
I downloaded DivX 5.2.1 and installed it. (Mind you, the download I got from the actual DivX website didn’t want to install for me, so I had to google the same filename elsewhere: DivX521XP2K.exe )
That was truly, truly cool.[/quote]
I dunno. I know that it’s impressive demonstration of timing and some of those shots must have been hard to get, but I can’t get past the fact that it’s a rock ballad set to footage of a fantasy-themed MMORPG. Featuring what seems to be a gnome or an imp or a Keebler elf or something. It’s very nature screams wonky parody, but it’s not trying to be funny. It’s like having an all clown ensemble perform The Importance of Being Earnest.
Yeah, I watched the thing (finally, thanks for the xvid link) but wasn’t blown away. Sure, it’s powerful, and brought a slight tear to the eye, but the little blue dude just looked so… silly.
I dunno, I don’t play DAOC so I guess it’s lost on me.
The Fette’s Vette video from Galaxies tickled my funny bone much more, even though it wasn’t as well done as this was. I’d watch Fette’s Vette again and make my friends watch it, but this was just a little too somber.
Still, the best editing I’ve seen in an MMO Machinima. Kudos.
It definitely has an element of absurdity to it. Kobolds are funny. It also has some jokes you probably had to be a DAOC player to get (for example, some players repeatedly re-summon pets until they get one they like, purely for vanity’s sake).
I think what I found cool is the fact that given that the kobolds are funky looking and blue and polygonal to hell and back, it still managed to bring a tear to my eye and tell a cohesive story. Transcending above the medium and all that. (Much harder to do in something like an MMO than with, say, the Unreal Engine where you have far, far more control. Saw an interesting Matrix-esque take-off in the CoH engine, but that has some very rudimentary controls a-la Unreal when generating the movies.)
I loved it. Part of the neatness is putting Kobbies in a serious setting. The sappy ballad I liked too, being a sucker for female vocalists, but the editing, synching and all was also very very good IMO. And the inside jokes worked as well (I have several toons on Mid/Pel, though they’re so low I’ve not played with the guy who made this).
I wish I had that sort of patience and talent.
The vid did show how dated DAoC"s player models are though. Catacombs can’t come soon enough Copper (hopefully it’s more SI like then ToA like though :P)
I thought the exact same thing.
“Damnit, this would have looked so much better with the new models”
Ah well.
And yes, Catacombs is much more in the SI vein - new design team and philosophy - lots of new folks in the expansion team (My first paid expansion for example)
-Walt
Catacombs will help make them a lot nicer, no doubt, but I don’t think Camelot’s models now are any worse than WoW’s are in the beta.
Wife and I watched that vid last night and we both thought it was really cool.
WoW fools you into thinking its models are better than they are (which is a good trick, and a sign I think of good art direction and talent rather than technology per se). They are colorful, exaggerated, and flamboyant. They are not high poly, and their animations are weird, and often buggy in the beta. But overall it carries off a good look.
I still like the look/feel of Camelot. The setting, the muted tones, and the IMO great textures they use make of for a host of polygonal sins.
Oh hell I didn’t know that. Who’s gonna take care of live now?
I miss the old days where I’d get you and your minions to fix random mob and zone problems :P
Well, if you look at the new models compared to the old ones, you’ll see what I mean (this is a small one, you can find larger more detailed ones around)
Anyway, DAoC’s don’t look horrible during normal gameplay, they’re just old looking when compared to what you’d see in your average FPS
Please don’t take this as an attack on you, Walter… just a gripe with Mythic sillyness.
I always think it’s funny that Mythic treats new frontiers and the housing area as expansions, and even calls them ‘free expansions’ in their PR. They aren’t expansions. They are mandatory downloads. The whole idea of an expansion implies that it is optional. While expansions in a PvP MMO will probably never be TRULY optional, you simply cannot play the game without new frontiers or housing. Housing is the commerce hub of the game and where your guilds are centered. New frontiers is a replacement of the old frontier content with new content that no one likes.
But I guess stuff like “oh yea, we gave our customers two free expansions in the last year” sounds a lot better. Quotes from ‘Matt Fior’ in a recent IGN interview:
Our last expansion was actually a free expansion called New Frontiers, and that was our RvR overhaul. We basically went back to basics, figured out what it was that players liked and didn’t like about RvR and made changes based on that.
Except nobody likes new frontiers, the “free expansion” that took away the content that people actually liked. Every single person in my guild has said they wished for the old frontiers back. I have seen polls where people were asked if they could play on a server with the old frontiers, would they? And the response was overwhelming that they would play on an old frontiers server in a heartbeat. For that matter most players have said they would prefer to play on a server without Trials of Atlantis as well. The time just after Shrouded Isles was launched was truly the golden era of the game.
We decided for the expansion after that, we didn’t really want to mess with RvR, because…players are really passionate this game, they’re very passionate about RvR, and they really don’t want to be upset too much by changes that just keeping happening and happening.
I see. Why mess with something broken beyond repair?
Sorry about all the hated here but I think I’m nearing the end of my ‘come back to camelot’ experiment. I’m almost level 50, got some artifacts and ML’s and starting to do the end-game thing… but it’s just nowhere near as fun as the level 25-39 game. The battlegrounds for levels 1-24 have stupidly overpowered siege so it’s all about clicking the fire button on your ballista - boring. The level 40-44 BG sucks and the keep fights in the real frontier suck. I’m playing an assassin, who’s role in old frontiers would often involve climbing keep walls and making hit and run attacks on the defenders. Now, only 1/5 of the structures in the new frontier have climbable walls, and those that do now have special guards that are designed to kill stealthers. So basically all I do anymore is be a PVE whore because there’s nothing to do in the frontier.
Oh hell I didn’t know that. Who’s gonna take care of live now?
I miss the old days where I’d get you and your minions to fix random mob and zone problems :P[/quote]
Jen - aka - BardicGoddess - is our Line Producer - Live, working for me. Ultimately it’s still my responsbility, but she’s wonderful.
I always think it’s funny that Mythic treats new frontiers and the housing area as expansions, and even calls them ‘free expansions’ in their PR. They aren’t expansions. They are mandatory downloads.
We put about the same amount of development money into the free expansions as we do the paid ones - so that really defines it from our end :)
-Walt
I realize that you put money back into the game that way, but lots of other developers do that too and don’t mislabel it an expansion. Was Darkness Falls an expansion? How about the monthly Asheron’s Call 1/2 updates? How about various Anarchy Online updates that have advanced the story and added new content? How about the addition of FFXI’s Dynamis zones?
What draws the line between the normal updating of content that MMO players expect and an expansion?
Its different at each company. In the case of AC1/2, if we ship to retail, it is an expansion. If we have a special team over and above the live team to do a set of features outside of the monthly updates, internally we call it a booster pack. Everything else is part of the monthly episode downloads.
Who cares if it’s called an expansion, a widget, or a floozle? The they’re still free updates to the game. Calling them free expansions is definitely good PR, and it’s not hurting anyone as far as I can see. Someone who’s never tried DAoC is definitely likely to be more interested in trying this older game when they hear it has some newly updated gameplay elements.
Wanting to go back to the way things were before NF? That’s the interesting part.
Can you revamp core gameplay in an opt-in fashion? If you could, would you even want to?