Starting to get...

[Laeris]

Oh there's penalties to said behavior as well. 5 murder counts and you go red. Reds can't go into towns. They are free kills for everyone else and when they die, they take a major statloss penalty which takes them from hero to scrub instantly.

Sure, it can be a drag getting PK'd but it is the kind of game that makes you aware of yourself. There's danger everywhere. Mobs, even with a powerful toon can kick your butt just fine. Other players can attack you or ransom you on sight. It's a game that rewards diligence and skill... It's not a game for the faint of heart.

In very simple terms...it is UO pre-Trammel. If you liked Felucca, you'll like MO. If you liked Trammel, you'll hate MO. If you like EVE, you'll like MO... if you love WoW and play on PvE servers... you'll hate MO.

[Laeris]

Wow laeris, that sounds great! A game that rewards the absolute worst PvP actions. I can't believe everybodies not playing it.

Well, IMO, PvPers in most thempark MMOs aren't really PvPers. It's a mini game with no true conflict. There's no penalty for dying other than a simple corpse run. Players in Mortal can be jackholes, but there's consequences. This is why you don't see PvPers from games like WoW and Rift over there... it's because they can't handle actual PvP.

You know, the one where they jump a lowbie but the lowbie only looks like a lowbie and pulls out a huge 2H axe and kills both of them... loots all their stuff and feeds their tongues to his pet rabbit. They then have to spend the next 20 minutes getting new gear while the guy who killed them kicks their head around town like a soccer ball to ridicule them.

That's the kind of stuff you do in Mortal. It's a wildly different game than Rift. I love Rift too and I won't be choosing one over the other here. Like I said though, it isn't a game for everyone.

Mortal supposedly has an expansion coming in the next 2-3 weeks or so that is going to address a lot of issues... but as it is right now... I hate Mortal's UI and avatar design. Supposedly these are getting a huge update. We'll see.

[Altira]

The problem with Rift is it lacks the "cool" factor. Like when I saw EQ2 for the first time, the voiceover work, and cinematic approach was very cool. It was inspiring. GW2 is taking the same approach. MMO's should be advertised as a movie, with characters and a story that inspires, and with the added bonus of being able to feel like a part of that story playing the game. Watching the voice actors do their thing for GW2, hearing it in the game, I really appreciate that and it adds a lot of depth to the races and makes them very appealing. The voice actors act as representatives for that race, each with distinct personalities. I can really relate to a few of the races after that, more than I ever could from simply reading lore about the race.

It comes down to one word.. IMMERSION. I don't really get much of that from Rift.

One of Rift's biggest failings is it doesn't build on its great graphics, particularly racial models. Voice acting is limited and not that great, and there's no animation when characters speak. Wardrobe feature was added not too long ago which was overdue, and new clothing/armor graphics are being added slowly. But the worst is in 2 years there's been no option to change facial features, hairstyle, etc. Like other MMO's have had for years now. Rift should not only have that by now, it should have new hairstyles, tattoos, jewelry, and many other ways to give your character a new look.

So IMO Rift isn't failing because it copies from games like WoW, it's because it's not copying enough. Ideally, a new MMO should have all the popular features of previous MMO's while offering something new.

[the_real_seebs]

Two years?

And wardrobe "not too long ago"? It was 1.2, as I recall.

I dunno. I find it pretty immersive. Turn the graphics up, wander around enjoying the scenery.

[Laeris]

So IMO Rift isn't failing because it copies from games like WoW, it's because it's not copying enough. Ideally, a new MMO should have all the popular features of previous MMO's while offering something new.

You do realize that if this was reality (and it isn't), that there would be no reason whatsoever for anyone to play GW2 the instant TERA came out. There would be no reason to play TERA when TSW came out. There would be no reason to play TSW when World of Darkness comes out.... etc .... etc.... etc.

That's because what you said says that every MMO that comes out should have all the new stuff... but with +1 additional "thing" that makes it different.

I dunno, to me that is what a game's developmental life cycle should do. Launch >> evolve >> keep the good >> add some innovation in steps. One MMO needs not patently copy another every. Single. Time. There's certain things that are genre defining... but there is only 1 MMO that offers race/faction changes in the AAA market that I know of. It's hardly an industry norm.

Voice overs are hollow content. They're cool the first 2-3 times you hear something. The problem with them is that they're static and they cost about around $800 or so per hour for an average staff VO actor and facility, staff, and studio rental time to record... of which they might get 2 or 3 sound clips of actual use per hour. You can pay the average staff writer on an MMO 2 weeks salary to write readable content for the same price.

Therefore, games that offer extensive voice overs run at a much higher overhead when adding new content. Content is added much slower because the same actors have to be reserved and scheduled. Then, you have big problems if a key actor or actors decide that they don't want to do it anymore.

What you get in the end is a hollow system that sounds nice... but allows for a means of slower content updates and a longer dev pipeline. Look at SWTOR. In its first 4 months, aside from a very small handful of bug fixes, they only released one very minor content update (what amounts to a world event in Rift). A large part for the slow updating has to do with the extensive VO coordination that goes on there. SWTOR subscribers have had to pay almost 5 months worth of subs for similar updates Trion delivered in the first month Rift was live. A huge reason why is because of the voice overs.

I'm not against voice acting, but in MMOs, it ends up being a gee-whiz type of content that rarely if ever meaningfully evolves. It is too expensive to update and maintain outside of small clips. It's fine for single player games but MMOs and their stories evolve. When you have too much VO acting, you have a much slower dev pace. It's basically like an enormous ball and chain for MMOs. Just 1 hour of voice acting can pay for a mid-level coder's weekly salary. The tradeoff, like with SWTOR, is often tempered with less dev staff in lieu of more voice actors. The end result is less QA time, less updates, longer time for bug fixes and great voice overs to listen to until you become tired of hearing the same dialogue options over and over.

[SanguineDeath]

Game is free just pay a sub like EVE Online. Now, I warn you here and now... the avatars are a bit ugly. The armors look good though... but it is the most in-depth MMO crafting system I've ever seen. For example:

http://www.mortalonline.com/forums/6...ce-charts.html

Click on the steel spoiler button. That's all the crap you need to do to make steel. Lot of work

And what I mean by getting hurt while crafting... I mean while you're out harvesting, people can sneak up behind you. They can rob you, kill you, cut off your head, skin you and make porridge out of your skin and head and use other parts to make weapons and skin-suit armor.

^ seriously.

This whole cannibalism thing is really disgusting. Makes you wonder what goes on in the heads of the devs who came up with this sick idea...

[Laeris]

It's simply a sand box game. You can literally do anything you want. Do you want to bake a loaf of rye bread? Go for it! Do you want to make a loaf of rye bread with some extra ingredients being granum powder (dirt) and venison teeth? Do it! How about... do you want to make a loaf of rye bread with your standard rye flour and water... then toss in some wood chips, full grain leather, and explosive nitre?

Well, you can!

Everything in the game that dies drops a corpse. Every rock can be mined, every mineral can be crushed for compounds. There are no fixed recipes for anything. You can make a style of armor... say plate or laminate armor. Then, you pick what it is made of. Bone, teeth, skin, leather, scales, metal, WOOD, or any combination you can think of. Obviously, some materials are useless. An elf skin armor set will offer next to no protection. Wood armor isn't much better but Tungsteel alloy armor is very nice.

You can for example, make a heavy weight bronze set of armor. Normally, it would be very difficult to wear because of the weight of the metal. You can add in lighter things for secondary materials in order to lighten it up. For example on shields. You have a base material, a frame, and a coating. The base material forms the overall durability of the item. So, let's use a good wood. It's light and can be durable. The coating adds damage resistance. Let's dip that in molten cuprum (kinda like copper). Then, the frame is mostly decorate... so let's add some dark wood. I now have a gold shield that shines very nicely with a deep wooden inlay.... but is about 1/3 the weight of a solid cuprum shield.

The heavier things are, the slower you move as you become gear encumbered. A person in heavy plate with a heavy shield will be encumbered at least 40%. Sacrificing a little durability for weight can end up making great resistant armor only encumber someone by 20% or so.

The other thing I like about it is the horse system. Mobs in the game all have random personalities. A gazelle might be aggressive where one right next to it might be cowardly. You attack a third gazelle and the cowardly one will run away while the aggressive one will come to help his friend. Horses work the same way.

Horses have stats. Run speed, strength, constitution, dexterity, etc. There's several types of horses ranging from mongrel horses (slow, crap horses), steppe horses (faster and more hardy than mongrels), donkeys, desert Horses, chargers and more. No one horse is alike. They have unique patterns and personalities. Some horses want to run all the time. You spur them and they take off and are difficult to control (a hot horse). Some are boneheaded. You can spur them 10 times and they might walk. Some hate people and others are afraid of bushes or darkness. Some horses have a more bounding gallop (which makes horse archery hard) and others have a smoother stride.

All horses are taken by animal tamers in the wild and they are then sold to other players. Nothing in Mortal Online is vendor made aside from the most basic starter gear and overcharged crafting supplies.

But ya, some of the stuff you can do is pretty gross. If you get killed, you can go back and loot your own corpse... and roast yourself on a spit and make jerky and eat yourself if you want. If your horse is lousy and it makes you mad... you can kill it and eat it too. You can kick fishermen off into a deep lake and watch them drown from being weighed down by gear and inventory weight.

There's also player housing (you have to build the house yourself) and territory control. I haven't done any of that stuff yet. It's all very cool though.

[Aphophis]

This whole cannibalism thing is really disgusting. Makes you wonder what goes on in the heads of the devs who came up with this sick idea...

WoW had cannibalism aswell, it was the racial ability of the undead.
Of course, it wasn't anywhere near to how they implemented it in MO

[Kaelthun]

NOTE: I think I went off-track quite a bit. Should you not want to read the wall of text than you can feel free to just read the bottom 3 paragraphs. I'm expecting TL;DR here but I don't want to waste the 20 mins it took to write this up by throwing it into the void :P

I find myself noting a number of things related to the "this MMO is WoW in a new jacket" statements that litter the posting portfolios of many a webbernaut:

1. WoW streamlined a lot of existing features, making them accessible. We can argue forever whether this was a good thing for the genre / industry / communities but it has generally been good for the individual players. There is more fun to be had for more people it appears. There is also more outrage and heavy reactions to change - but we'll get to that.
2. The features that they took, streamlined, implemented and then tweaked for their community are things we now want to be standard. The game has its failings, and the company certainly, but things like the massive effort they made to reduce queue times for LFD and the conception of LFR are no small feats. They've also changed the way we think about these types of content (big impact there).
3. World of Warcraft is, in my opinion, an enjoyable game to play outside of all the politics that come with having such a large group of people do the same thing. The elitism, community, GearScore debacle, pandas and whatnot don't take away that this is a very polished game and a monstrous effort to maintain a high standard of development for the better part of a decade. As far as that goes, I think the game holds up really well to it's successors in terms of meeting player expectations.

But these are things we can usually, in broad strokes, agree on. They're things that can be debated but a lot of us will come to the same conclusions: features are cool, big impact on the industry and high level of polish. So where does all the outcry come from? I think a lot of it (not all of it) can be attributed to these factors:

Many gamers that now feel disappointed with the genre have been in it for ages. A lot of us have grown up on these games or spent at least a decade playing them. Do anything for a decade and you're bound to have a number of gripes about what you've been doing. Going from adolescent / teen playing these games into adulthood and perhaps even into our senior years is going to have a significant impact on how we see these games. An important point to make is that I'm not even that old but the first games I played were things like Street Fighter, Mario and the early Kirby games (not counting all the LCD baseball simulators). There are at least 3 "generations" of gamers that came before me that remember things like Pong and Asteroids (and maybe even things like Rogue, but let's not dwell on that :P). You know, the arcade quarter counters ;)

Games used to be few and far between, even when the NES and SNES became popular (some of you will know this as the Famicom). PC was a platform that was around but for me it didn't do much in the way of gaming for me until I hit age 8. By then I'd been gaming for 3 years or so. From there, the PC took my fancy and all of it was single player. Mid-90s I first played stuff like Quake and Diablo online. For me, things didn't get serious with online gaming until UT99, followed by Diablo 2. From there I've been playing online almost exclusively. I haven't really played much single player stuff except for in between MMOs.

Now, the thing to take away from that is that if you think about it, someone born in 1995 who starts gaming around age 5 like I did will have started out with the following things available to him/her:

• Dreamcast (1998)
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dreamcast_games
• Playstation / PSX (1994-2006)
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Playstation_games
  
• Playstation 2 (Late 2000)
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...tation_2_games
  
• Xbox (Late 2001)
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Xbox_games
  
• PC games (check the dates)
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Windows_games_(A)
  
• Nintendo 64 (1996/97)
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_64_games
  

Oh my days that's a lot of stuff. Think back to what you started with, especially if you're age 30 or over. Think about how all of the stuff listed is in full 3D as well. Think about how that changes what you think is an interesting game, what gameplay you enjoy, what you expect, etc. The fact that everyone argues isn't some result of everyone just hating everythign - it's because we're literally coming from completely different perspectives. If a fully 3D MMO is the result of a long heritage of gaming for you, the feature set is going to be interpreted very differently by you from someone who came into gaming with that kind of technology there from the get-go.

I find that going into being a more responsible adult that's looking towards things like starting a family, knowing you're never going to have a 6 week holiday without calling it unemployment and possibly owning a house (yeah, right) colours my view of what an MMO is supposed to be and support. I would say it biases me massively towards a different kind of game design from what I thought at 17/18/19 to be a good concept.

With that in our back pocket, look at WoW. I mean, really look at it as a game - not the demonized massively played hard-hitter in gaming that it is. Just look at it as a game. Take in all of what you see and look at RIFT. Carbon copy? Hardly, but if you want to look for similarities and bum yourself out then you are free to do so.

List of glaring similarities between EQ2, WoW and RIFT:
Guilds - They exist in both.
Raids - They both have them.
Gear tiers - No way! It exists.
Dungeons - Yep.
Reputation grind - Sure do.
World divided in realms - check.
Instance PvP - Uhuh.

But that's the feature set. That's what came with the game from the get go, it's what you bargained for when you bought the game. RIFT implements a certain type of MMO. It took an existing framework that predated WoW, determined its feature set by way of looking at what was viable vs. what the developers thought would make a compelling game and they set out to do that.

If you wanted a different feature set, you should have looked at other games. Not trolling. Maybe you thought RIFT would implement a different kind of game then I don't really know what to tell you. Sorry, it implements a traditional modern MMO with raiding as the focal point of endgame and PvP as a secondary activity. It sports a large world that is generally static save for expansions (including EI) and your character will pretty much be the silent protagonist type of hero. It is true that many modern MMOs implement this same model (at least the AAA titles seem to) but for me that merely means I stop comparing on that core feature set.

Instead I look to RIFT to provide IA, difficult quest lines, raid difficulty (HK, srsly), dynamic events and a more flexible approach to talent trees. WoW, conversely, has great queue times, quick and easy dungeons, more environment due to be around longer, LFR for accessible raiding and an upcoming expansion. Good ideas shouldn't go to waste because of playground politics. Fishing and survival are fun additions to an already grand Telara - getting bent out of shape to the point where you're looking to leave seems a bit much. But then, it's your money and your time.

Again, I don't think RIFT copies anything from WoW as such. I think that answer lacks nuance and doesn't give the developer enough credit. Developing a game is hard to do and Trion has been very forthcoming with their community involvement. Implying that they blatantly copy and sit around like high school teenagers looking for the answers to their upcoming test is a little curt, if not worryingly disconnected from what a developer's job looks like.