robinj

I've been playing NWO since one of the beta weekends. The unofficial RP server is Mindflayer, RP community is http://www.neverwinter-rp.com. My account handle is @Robnar

awesome! Please don't name your first child Balandar. oh, and if the baby comes out near the start of june, he/she'll be right around my birthday and my nephew's :-p

Yeah, so I'm self-publicising myself but hey Some of you have most likely heard me mention in passing that I'm a software engineer. I'm not obligated however to discuss what I'm working on until official press releases. I don't work for a giant company like EA, Activitsion, ATARI, or SEGA but I still write games for a living. So without further adieu, here's the latest trailer from my company: http://www.ign.com/videos/2012/10/19/germinator-debut-trailer Rate it up! And if you have a PS3, buy it next month! (*cough*, releasing "Soon" pending the typical release cycles)

Gauls and Celts were known to fight naked... at least "modern views" have added scanitally clad armor to the censorship inauthenticity.

quoted for future use, not to be pessimistic.

is that the $80 option? if so I did...

I'm in that boat currently... I've logged into an MMO twice in the past 3 months, and that was DDO. Once to see if any friends were still playing (which they were), and the second time just to check out the druid class. I'm still on the fence about GW2 and whether or not I'll delve into it. Other than that I've been... *shockingly* socializing or playing some good old RPGs like Icewind Dale. The guild wars franchise as it now is doesn't appeal to me but the financials of it are intriguing. Some coworkers have expressed a dabbling interest in the game, so if they get on the bandwagon I'll direct them here.

For that matter, look at the Turbine model... grind for "favor" in DDO or LotR and you can unlock everything, albeit slowly. Pay $15/mo and you get (almost, as of very recent expansions) everyting.

the way I look at TOR is while someone like Zoeller takes responsibility for how a game turns out, it's more up to the entire design team to make sure a game is what it is. I'd be baffled if Zoeller himself personally said, "MAEK THE GEAARRZ HAS MORE PIPES AND HOZEZ!!!" to the art team. On the other hand, blatantly not knowing what people expected of "SWG2" does rest more firmly on his shoulders as a "lead." If he pushed for a "Jump To Lightspeed 2" HD remix, then well... I digress. Hope he doesn't start working on GW2.

the sad thing is, I was looking forward to SWTOR for several years... I was around for the betas of RIFT, saw it flop (not as bad as TOR, but still flop), and was hoping being backed up by BioWare it wouldn't be as bad of a bomb as RIFT.. The thing is, I can shrug off faults in games because working for the same industry I have a different view on what's really involved behind the scenes in making a game. In the case of a fully-voiced MMO developed by bioware, I thought they could pull it off quite well. They did, just.. most people (2,500,000 out of 3,000,000 apparently) who bought the game expected more... It's rather impossible to make a voiced game, none the less MMO, have end-game content that follows the same paradigm. The majority of the server population seemed to not really care about the voice-overs despite that being some untold sum of money was spent on that. I've seen budget breakdowns for games and I'd take an educated guess that twice the amount of time and money went into the voice acting and coding/level design to support those speach clips alone than anything else. I think we've all come to the conclusion that the end-game gear was not designed by anyone born beween 1970 and 1985 or whom have grown up watching the original star wars trilogy. On the other hand, having seen two "AAA" (supposedly) hyped MMOs with million(s) dollar budgets not succeed, I have a sour taste in my mouth about GW2 as well. I haven't logged into any MMO in nearly a month because nothing I have installed seems to offer anything interesting. I used to consider myself an MMO addict but shockingly I think TOR might've actually started to break the addiction. The only MMO I've considered playing again is DDO, but that's mostly because my old guild is still around and are always welcoming me back even if it's for one night a month.I doubt I'll see you guys in GW2, but at the moment I don't know. If you guys ever check out DDO, let me know. My old guild is a good group of friends who simply enjoy the game. We all have a bunch of characters of probably close to every level (1-20, x5)... Anyway, I digress.

It's an interesting article, but I'm actually rather surprised LotRO and DDO aren't on the list... So they don't have a million subscribers and didn't launch recently. Oh, and they don't make it a point to balance for PVP: You can have a tavern brawl and that's about it. They do however have what I think is a decent and economically sustainable business model. The games are free to download and free to play. An optional "VIP" subscription unlocks all "adventure pack" areas which usually includes a raid or three. Or you can buy them for a few bucks. I think every adventure pack in DDO is about $100. They do however have ACTUALLY WORKING PUZZLES!!!! in raids and some dungeons as well. And for that matter in the shroud raid (most popular), there's one section where everyone gets dumped in their own "cell" and has to solve the floor puzzle to get out. As for RIFT, I still want my $120 back from Trion. I'm still up in the air about GW2. Auto-scaling enemies makes for an odd "balance" of gameplay that ultimately results in the player feeling like he's not accomplishing anything anymore... A sense of accomplishment when you reach level 26 and get your new ability that makes killing those 25-27 mobs much easier is great until you run out of abiltiies to gain.

I haven't logged in for a few weeks and I got an email from "Vette" saying that she and my other companions can't continue the adventure without me, heh. Just as well though that we haven't been raiding because we had a deadline yesterday at work, made it by 8pm...

*bleep* *bleep* *bleep* *bleep* *blaaaap* ((translation: I completely agree.))

I never got in to the Elder Scrolls series... I'd say "They should make a Neverwinter Nights MMO!" but NWN2 had online stuff, and Dungeons & Dragons Online is coming out with a Forgotten Realms expansion... I'll stick with my Star Wars universe for now. I might delve into the Secret World some...

I have to level my jedi knight now to make a miraluken bounty hunter... that'll take me longer than 86 days