Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
General: MMOs on BBC
Szark
News ManagerMember Posts: 4,420
Over the past few months, BBC News has recognized the increasing popularity of MMOs by running an increasing number of stories about MMOs on the technology section of their site. In past weeks they've taken a look at World of Warcraft. This time around they take a look at some of the competition, including Age of Conan, Lord of the Rings Online, and Star Wars Galaxies.
With more than eight million subscribers, World of Warcraft dominates the online gaming market but some strong rivals are gearing up to take it on.
Gaute Godoger, game director at Funcom, said succeeding was important for the health of the online gaming world.
"The industry so needs competition to World of Warcraft," he said. "We need other strong games that can make people understand that there's more to it than WoW."
Funcom is developing an MMO based on the iconic hero Conan who was originally the creation of US author Robert E Howard.
Mr Godoger said Funcom was trying hard to make Age of Conan stand out when it launched in October 2007.
The whole tone of the game would be darker than many others to reflect Howard's vision of a corrupt lost age of Europe, he said.
This means it is likely to have a very different audience.
"It's for adults," he said. "We did not want to be a teen-rated game, we wanted to have the possibility of making a game that takes the licence seriously."
Read the full article here.
Comments
They sure did a good job butchering his last name.
It sure does give me the distinct impression that the people writing the article have no idea what they are even writing about.
"By jove, it's seems there IS something to these Internet Video Games! Blimey, we better write a bloody article about it before the yankees at CNN.COM do!"
.....................................
...but time flows like a river...
...and history repeats...
-Leader of "The Fighting Irish" in DAoC on Hib/Kay-
Bless the Beeb, they try to move with the times and always seem to get it wrong.
Another couple of hours (or even justa few minutes) research on the old internet and they might have had an article that was at least worth reading.
Love the PR spin on SWG, notice that they do not mention anything about the player base, only that many people try it out all the time (but how many stay?) and that they have some die hard players that "[...] will not play anything else [...]". So basically, new people coming in, few that dont have lives and spend 20h on the keyb (and hence could not possibly play anything else) and that is the player base for SWG...
Also the game has been "tweaked" a bit... a bit... yeah... New Combat System, that's all I'm going to say...
and the part about how players form their own characters during play to create something unique, yeah, that is also gone, so that is an outright false statement...
"[...]With that done, Mr Neri said, Lucas Arts had plans for a series of updates which included a beast master expertise system that would let players train and breed pets in the game.[...]"
also something that was in the OLD game and worked pretty good, only to vanish in the NCS...
BBC writer Mark Ward should have researched a bit more than just spew back PR lines.
------------Sig------------
http://www.seepyou.net/blog
Ok......
ok i'm not the one to judge but anyways here we go...
"Galaxies launched in 2003 and has been tweaked a few times since as its creators realised what people wanted to do."
As Star Wars fan i had to try this mmorpg and yes i liked it alot when it came... it was fun and there were nice goal at the end even it was only a rumor at the beginning... be a jedi! well when 1st jedi was born players started to "grind" alot of those holocrons and different skills... yes all those 32 different skills were usefull... then they made radical changes to game and ruined it as my opinion. ok seriously ppl played SWG for over year to archive what they wanted to be and pvp was nice, smooth and there were lots of different kind modifiers in it... not only items or your own skills on keyboard. But then they destroyed the whole game and i mean it, they removed almost all classes and skills and worst thing to those who archived jedi status... they made it so that you were able to make jedi without doing anything except clicking "create new character".
For now i dont trust SOE anymore and not going to play their games anymore because what happened to SWG... and yes VG has nice rumors also going on what i've heard.
P.S.
boycott SOE for ruining great games(tho no need to if you dont want to)
Quoting people doesn't make you clever, in fact, it makes you all the more stupid for not bothering to read the quotes you post in the first place.
BBC: In pictures: Gamers and their avatars
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/04/technology_gamers_and_their_avatars/html/6.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/05/technology_online_gamers_unmasked/html/5.stm
It's not propaganda, it's just lazy reporting.
It's like a reporter asked to write an article on up and coming musicians and bands and then writing about Elvis and the Beatles because they have sold so much.
There's a section on the Beeb's website, under contact us, where you can explain why you were unhappy with the article. Simply put outside of the gaming magazines there are no specialist reporters who know anything about this 'field' and thus they just tend to go with easy not indeapth when they get this assignment. Either that or his son plays these games