I've played this and it seems like it would be a lot of fun. It looks fantastic. The bots don't really participate that much, so you have to have other humans around. There only seems to be one server online, and it's often empty. Sigh...

Worst run animation in a game, ever. Bar none.

As for an extra $1/month to prevent griefers... nice try! Look at how many people spend HOURS online tweaking their cheats or just being general assholes to other players.

I think you might be right for a lot of people out there, but let me make an analogy with locking your doors at home: If someone *really* wants to break into your house, they will, no matter what you do. But locking your doors might dissuade your average filcher. They are looking to diminish a very specific problem, and this is probably one of many ways.

Regarding storage, you're totally right. But their maintenance costs don't solely consist of a 40 GB hard drive.

Yeah, gamers are whiney, and they all think companies are trying to ream them. But in this case, they are right.

If something's not worth paying for, don't pay for it. I think their claim that it's a solution (of arguable merit) to their cheating problem is valid. --yrns

So I'm being told by Square that creating a character under a rival nation and dying repeatedly can ruin the central feature of the game and that a fucking dollar is going to be a barrier between good play and breaking the game?

They probably (no duh) expect a pretty large user base. If they let you have 3 free characters, and the rest were $1/month, pretty much everyone would have 3, so their database size would triple. I highly doubt 1 player = 1 row in a SQL database. 1 player consistutes a large amount of data for any RPG, MMO or not. By charging a nominal fee they're keeping their costs lower, and increasing revenue. I say "nominal" because, for the people who actually play with multiple characters, $1 is nothing. That's $12 a year. I spend $12 on lunch.

Now, for a company just starting out with their first MMO game, you're going to want to do everything you can to get people to play your game. That probably includes not charging your players extra for *anything*. Square, on the other hand, knows that millions of people out there love Square and Final Fantasy games, and they'll handily pay anything just to get their hands on it.

It's called business. This is also called the "business high-road post" in your sadly typical "why all game companies are out to ream their customers" thread. --yrns

Hey, so this means that if you're mining, you can't defend yourself? You'd have to hire people to watch you? That certainly sucks...not only do you have to mine your way to a better ship for 10-15 hours, you don't even get the satisfaction of a little combat while you're doing it.

And I thought grinding away killing rats and bats until I hit level 10 in EverQuest was bad. At least I had the satisfaction of swinging my Scimitar and blasting off a few spells.

When you first start out you get a civilian weapon and miner, so technically you could defend yourself. You aren't in much danger in a high security area, except from other players, but that's unlikely.

It does not take that long to get a better ship. It can happen very quickly, especially if you're working with other players. I, for one, would set you up with a better ship and equipment right off the bat if you seemed like a nice person, since both of us would stand to gain from the additional manpower - especially for combat, but for mining as well. --yrns

Nope, they'll have to be mounting weapons on their ships and carrying ammo in their cargo holds instead of mounting mining lasers.

It's possible to use mining drones (however inefficient compared to mining lasers) and fill your slots with weapons, or vice-versa (scout drones and mining lasers). Also some ships like the Tristan have launcher-only slots, which you can't put mining lasers on. But by and large if you're mining, you only have mining equipment fitted, and even if not, you're just going to run at the first sign of danger. --yrns

This comment was edited on May 7, 05:14.

It was multiplayer and for the record I had a lot of fun with it. The problems were with modem players primarily, and not all of them. Broadband and LAN games were great for me. I'm not arguing here with "sucked", only "badly".

Yep, it's "flak monkey". I don't know how many in a row it is, but it's quite a few - maybe 10. I got it for the first time on Friday on Oceanic.

For a minute there I thought this had to be the worst title for a game ever, until I realized there were no ships in the game...

John who?

Just a little side note here, if you didn't know already: Massive Development (http://www.massive.de), who made AquaNox, is not the same company as Massive Entertainment (http://www.massive.se), who made Ground Control (an excellent game). I'd hate to see the latter company take any blame for AquaNox. --yrns

I agree. Ghost Recon is one of my favorite games from the last year. It is totally unlike R6. If you're tired of the Clancy branding, fine, but the games stand up on their own.

The closest they came to a scam was Covert Ops, but in my mind all the sequels and expansion packs were gold. --yrns

I can hear Drewbacca moaning in ecstasy from across the East River. --yrns

"... and this time he has beefy black boner." Correct me if I'm wrong. The foreign language previews are always the best.

In R6 games (haven't played Ghost Recon yet) you can mantle up stuff, so there's no need for jumping.

But if we're lucky they'll have some nifty jumping puzzles at the end of Ghost Recon and a smattering of ammo-filled crates to smash. One can only hope. --yrns

I will reserve judgement until after I play the demo tonight, but it looks very similar to the previous incarnation. Long live Bungie. I liked Myth II, but I still have nightmares of midgets exploding in my ranks. --yrns

I simply can't wait to play this game. The planning stage from earlier R6 games was a love/hate thing (the hate part coming into play during the action phase), so I'm not sure if I'll miss it or not. I hear the enemies actually miss this time around! --yrns

As far as the fracturing goes, they've moved the old PU forums wholesale to a different URL and kept all the users and threads. If even some large fraction of those users continue to use the forums at Beyond Unreal, I'd classify that as a successful salvage operation. Otherwise those people would have split off into the hundreds of other Unreal forums out there.

Note all the mods and clans that had hosted forums at the old PU forums have all moved over to the Beyond Unreal server.

GSI's explanation of the situation is here: http://www.forumplanet.com/planetunreal/topic.asp?fid=3703&tid=331740. --yrns

If you're a GameSpy 3D user, you should give it a try. --yrns