That's it, I'm broken.

[HereComesPete]

I'm rather tempted, I loved the combat mechanic and apparently they've thrown in a load more voice acting bits.

[spoodie]

Speaking of AoC, apparently Rise of the Godslayer is actually rather good.

On the strength of the apparent goodness I reactivated my account for a free 10 days and ended up playing other things until that expired. However AoC looked like the MMO with the most promise and it dared to be different.

[friznit]

The hard bit of designing any immersive multiplayer game is getting people to stay logged in long enough for the collaborative stuff to work (including pvp). There're three sides to it: organised multiplayer time such as WoW raids, Eve fleets etc; the ad hoc 'drop in' multiplayer stuff such as contributing to joint projects (filling the guild bank, building the AoC village, mining asteroids in space); and enough solo content to give you something to occupy yourself when you have no mates [online] - grinding rep, sorting out gear, fixing up ships, generating personal income for example. Getting the balance right is what contributes to longevity in an MMO. WoW is a popular MMO ironically enough because there's a shit load of solo content, all of which provides the illusion that you are actively improving your character for future collaborative play, thereby providing a driver to keep you logging in, which in turn generates the activity for all the other parts of the game to work.

I think too many MMO's miss the point: they think taht by providing an environment which would be awesome if there were 1000 people playing will automatically encourage 1000 people to play. It doesn't, cos you only have 1000 people playing during the organised multiplayer time and at all other times they have nothing to do, so they log off and the game dies - or at best becomes a deathmatch game with monthly subs.

So for your MMORTS or FPS to work, they need to have plenty of solo content to keep you occupied until the other guy is ready to go head to head. Quite hard to manage that in an RTS I should think.

[Dog Pants]

The guild content was appealing to me because it gave you more of a living player built community even when the other players were offline. I feel the pinch of being limited to solo content more than many, and I think every MMO that's failed recently has been down to a lack of it.

I could see an RTS working like that though. World of Warcraft is as much Warcraft 3 as it is anything else, and (apparently) the hero based RTS stuff in the Frozen Throne expansion was pretty good. Not a huge leap from that to an MMORTS.

[Thompy]

As I have some concerns over WoW:Cata, I posted the following some where else and thought I'd ask the same end question here:

There's basically one thing stopping me from getting Cata at the mo and that's lack of persistant open world content.

Granted WoW never really has had it, but the game was at one time fresh, my gaming dream come true infact, but now I find little to no enjoyment from running the same heroic or killing the same boss over and over, so I need that extra content to keep me happy.

Take WotLK, the zones are there almost purely to facilitate the leveling process. Done all the quests? No need to venture back, aside from a few dailies that grow old fast. I'd like to feel that every time I log on I could go out into the world and just accomplish something, have some kind of mini adventure. Just a quick example: bring back elite mob areas, make them hard, have a kill chain system for increased loot quality ala FF12, and have treasure spawn if you spend long enough there. More quest lines, not just dailies, but quests of epicness, instead of just focusing content patches on the next raid dungeon.

There's other stuff too, professions are still pathetic. Sure they're important to maximise your character's stats, but where's the fun? Where's the challenge? But the above is the biggie.

I have no doubt Cata will be the best iteration or WoW yet, more refined, more polished, and I will have fun for the first few months, but I'd rather not start it knowing I'm going to be feeling the same about it as i do about WotLK now. I haven't been following news on it much recently, so maybe I've missed something. Is there anyone out there that can put my doubts to rest? Because essentially I'd love to play it.

[Dog Pants]

It's a fair point. I think that's partly what Cataclysm's about, revisiting the old world, but like you say it's not going to offer much once you hit the level cap. It's nice that they're adding new content to those leveling, but end content is still almost a meta-game. I'm not sure what I'd use as a solution, but I like the idea of elites to go back and batter as part of elaborate 'treasure hunt' quest chains.

I also agree about crafting - it's just another grind. Until you max it out you're unlikely to find anyone to buy your stuff. So you just grind the materials (incidentally most of the time, luckily), make x amount of whatever levels your skill the fastest, then sell it to a vendor for a fraction of what it cost to make. WAR looked as though it had a better idea, but by the time I stopped playing the economy still wasn't at such a point where crafting was anything but hugely impractical due to lack of resources you just couldn't get on your own.

[spoodie]

Thanks, you've put me off WoW again. I got all excited about Cataclysm and reactivated my account. I've now cancelled renewal. Levelling a warlock was quite fun, for a while, but not good enough for it to get in the way of more engaging games.

[Thompy]

Aw, well don't get me wrong, WoW is fantastic, and everyone who has at some point enjoyed it should give Cata a shot. I still think it will be the best thing to happen to WoW yet, but having come from a hardcore play style I don't want to start and then feel underwhelmed. For a more casual player it should be awesome, and having said that, I doubt I'll be hardcore again given that I'm going back to college for 2 years, so maybe I should try it

[Dog Pants]

This ^. I'm still looking forward to Cataclysm. It looks like they're really gearing it more to our style of play, letting us have a crack at the top level content without having to get all hardcore. There's rumours of allsorts of new stuff too, which may or may not be true, but I'm sure there will be plenty of stuff to play about with. However, the flaws inherent with Warcraft's whole design aren't likely to be fixed by Cataclysm, if indeed they could be fixed without turning the game into something else entirely.