This Week In MMO 48: Divesting - Gamebreaker.tv


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Written by: (Twitter @gamebreakertv - ) | May 23, 2011 10:25 am

36 Comments

ATARI is selling off Cryptic, what does it mean for Champions Online and Star Trek Online? More Guild Wars 2 news and info including the new engineer class, and more!


  • Wilies

    FIRST

    • Odeezee

      tsk, tsk it’s called Oakheart Rubi. now you have to get it tattooed on your arm so you don’t forget next time, haha

  • http://highlatencylife.com/ River

    I felt naked without a chicken hawk.

    • Jasmine

      I know your pain. I feel that way every morning when I look in the mirror.

    • Ruby

      I want Ruby to be my mom

  • Fey

    http://www.guildwars2guru.com/forum/love-hate-in-betweeni-t16948.html
    A little window into the world of the GW2 community. The majority of people like it or are neutral about it. What we have is a very vocal minority, as well as the initial reaction. People have already calmed down a bit, the language used is no longer so rough. Yes, there is some aesthetic discord among the Engineer, but I think it all still fits the theme. People are also only looking at it from that standpoint. Very few have asked what that blinking light might do, I think it’s a great tell to where the mine is and telling which is yours and which is your enemy’s. Another thing that people complained about a lot was Jump Shot, calling it cartooney or wild coyote esque. Thats just complete BS, imo. When looking at the other abilities on the Engineer and on the other professions, it fits mechanically and stylistically.

    Every profession up till now has been released as a very tight package. The Engineer is a bit of a mish mash of things(mechanically and stylistically), but that’s really mostly from people who aren’t a fan of the concept in the first place. I think these people just had an image of what they wanted GW2 to be, but ArenaNet just doesn’t want to do your standard Sword&Sorcery setting.

    • Tom

      Gary, I understand your dream of one day being able to throw rocks in an MMOG, turns out you can in GW2! “A player might encounter a boulder in the world and, upon picking it up, find that his skills have changed so that he can now throw that boulder” from an old post on guildwars2.com. Some other cool environmental weapons: “An elementalist with a boulder can not only throw it, but can launch it into the air, causing it to rocket down from the sky with the impact of a meteor…Breaking a barstool over the head of a rowdy bar patron can yield a chair leg that can be used to great effect as a club” as well as a jar of bees (can be thrown), a lizard egg (eaten for health or thrown), a bottle of rum (stolen off of a pirate – also thrown), and a rabbit (apparently you’re not able to throw this one). Either way, there’ll be plenty of throwing of things to be had.

      Re the physics convo, I think one of the coolest things is if you fire an projectile at a baddy, and another baddy gets in the way of it, it hits them instead. So this means you can actually hide behind allies, rocks, walls, and even your own shield to avoid taking projectile damage. Not sure about trees like Mike said but I hope they’ve changed it or will change it before release.

      Love the show, keep it up and more GW2 chat! PS Rubi is right about the GW2 community, they’re awesome but they’re pretty much the cyberspace equivalent of torch-and-pitchfork-wielding villagers.

      • Steve-O

        Mediocre Products
        If companies that were pumping out mediocre products haven’t gotten the message that working that business model is probably the quickest way to bankruptcy … Trion should have utterly and completely buried any thought otherwise… They put out such a great product from the get go from what I consider to be a (previously) no-name company. It was polished, played on several aspects of already successful MMOs, and added their own flavor to the industry. They are a shining example of what gamers expect from launches and game-play from the start. So to me, the bar has been set.

        Not all of the companies need unimaginably deep pockets to make this work, MMO players are incredibly unforgiving when it comes to bad launches or unpolished gameplay. Couple that with repeated rocky launches and unpolished gameplay..

        Cryptic had it coming.

        GW2
        Holy crap that was deep! lol.. I’m with Mike and GG on this one. Not to touch too much on real world but we’ve had gun powder for an awful long time… maybe the barrels are filled with C4 instead of gun powder ;)

        Character Creation
        I think more than anything, the size of your character has the most affect on me. Having a special nose/eyes/chin I mean 99.9% of the time you’re never going to see it. The other .1% of the time is because you are zooming in and looking at it. At least with height or width of your character you can SEE that all the time with how much taller/fatter/smaller your character is compared to the people around you..

        • jmcgrath

          Not a good episode. Please be more informed about the game your talking about (STO in particular) before you talk about it. At least, thats what I would expect from this type of show.

          • jmcgrath

            Just to follow up on my comment (if allowed through to post), some of your comments were valid, like the instancing and the game engine’s origins in their other title Champions Online – but your guests had no informed knowledge of the current gameplay in STO in particular, such as the changes that have been made to address the launch issues and the current featured episodic content the developers are putting out.

            Thank you.

          • http://www.guildmag.com Malchior Devenholm

            Rubi, tell Gary we don’t bite in the GW2 community. Some people are a little more passionate than others, but the core community doesn’t just straight up dislike a feature just on their personal preference. The GW2 community is very rational, friendly, controlled, but they are also very independent and will openly voice their opinions on certain design choices.

            There are a few trolls who try to shoot the game down in any way possible, but overall, the community is highly supportive of newcomers :)

      • BlockedUser

        “we have guild wars 2 news, so we need you!”

        best part of the episode.

    • Toby

      I really like the new way of picturing quotes, while Gary reads them out. But it would help to have them more readable (Font, kerning, formatting, etc.). Right now they almost confuse more than they acrually help. And sometimes I feel like Gary has problem reading them aswell. If he actually reads them from the same slide as shown.

  • Jacob

    Environmental weapons can be used by players. A player could pick up that same rock and use it as a meteor. When I heard that part I figured I should share my insights =P I can’t believe your GW2 expert didn’t know. Also, the tree elemental is an Oakheart.

  • Forge

    You guys should really have played through STO a little bit before ripping on it. There have been some pretty awesome improvements implemented over the past year, and there are more on the way.

    • Kar Vastor

      No sry but i have a lifetime in STO and the game is still crap, almost no engame content what so ever, bugs all over the game, PvP is the biggest joke, veeery small content updates, a forym run by Atari were everypost that is not made a fanboy will be deleted and the forum user banned !, fact. Every patrol on fed side is the sa,me with kill 5 enemys, way to much instancing everywere. Servers and systems have lag because the game engine is build in a way that doesnt suit a MMO. The biggest enemy the borg in the game is a joke, cryptic dont have a clue how to keep players in the game after they lvl up because there is nothing to do, the KDF faction is a joke with only 8 missions ! with the all powerfull C store greedy as hell were 98% of all content is made for feds only, fact. I hope the game has to shut down soon because STO cant survive alone on those 7000 trekkie lifetime subs alone after TOR is out.Say what you want but that is the truth.

  • Pingback: Keep it Gangsta! « A High Latency Life

    • Jasmine

      I feel like this picture really represents Gamebreaker.TV.

  • http://www.guildmag.com Malchior Devenholm

    BTW Gary, “Steal” is one of the core skills of the Thief. Every mob in GW 2 will have a loot table of stuff to be stolen, and the thief can use any of the items from that loot table as a separate skill.

    Also, Steal can be used in PvP to gather different environmental skills from an opponent. An example given to us is if a Thief stole a shield from a Warrior, he wouldn’t just hide behind it like a Warrior, but instead throw it out like a disc for a ranged attack. :)

    • Pyrofox

      Seriously? That’s just awesome.

  • Dennis

    hey everybody! STO does suck ok! dnt lets these obese haters fool you

    • Zhanny

      I LOVE Ruby! She is smart, sexy and gives very good feedback and comments.

  • Aidan

    Let me preface this, been a fan for a while and usually impressed with the work you do, however, I do have this to say on the subject of Atari and Cryptic;

    Am not big into CO or STO, but guys, give them a play if you haven’t played them in a year. If as you say, “play MMOs”, you know how far a game can change in a year. This seems surface reporting based on first impressions, I’ve had a look at the Atari financial report and it paints a very different picture than what is being said, they are shifting a marginally profitable company (yes I said it, they are still recouping the development costs) in favour of an instant cash injection to help clear their own debts as they look to refocus their company OUT of the MMO marketplace and into the more facebook and app based games.. I will also gladly stake my Masters Business degree on it.

    In GW2 the Engineer looks good, check out the STO Engineer, turrets, bombs mines with LEDS, they are all there.

    Pick up the environment and throw it? Check out Champions, it happens there, very basic yes, but its there.

  • Disain

    Thanks for a great show! Awezome hosts :)

  • Andrew M.

    I played Trial of STO and i liked the space combat, the avatar combat was wierd and slow and i think it should be more of a side-mini-game instead of half the game. And introduce more space things.

    On the GW2 side of things i think there are a couple of things that could be changed to improve: Add more shiny copper to make it stand out as steampunk (ex: http://graphicsworkshop.net/blog/Images/dantescostume.jpg or http://www.friedpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/steampunk-monocle.jpg ), add more detailed and intricate patterns instead of too simplistic/wooden. And all the things that didn’t seem to evolve from 1 like gunpowder kegs or alchemical flasks could be replaced with dynamite and keronice glass bottles (aka molotov cocktail) respectively. Concepts remain the same and just change the names to more of type “industrial revolution” things.

    On the character creator i didn’t like it because i had the feeling of “everyone is different than me but everyone looks the same”. The problem with it is that such creators have the same art style for everything and all we do is to change the sizes. To be fairly honest i prefer the WoW style of character creator: every race/gender has a very distinct sillouette and style and we can change the most visible things such as hair, skin colour and facial features (bearb, piercings, tatoos). There are different faces but those little details arent as important and meaningful as the bigger ones. What i would like to see is different body types such as Fat, Slim, Bulky, Muscular, Short, Tall, etc…

  • Dont Want Spam

    Do you people actually play the games before you talk about them? You guys were wrong or acted clueless on every game you mentioned in this episode. Some of the GW comments about the first game were wrong as well. And trying to say DCUO server merger can’t be because of low numbers is bad reporting. Log in to DCUO and look at all the servers showing “LOW” 24/7. Right now Sony’s blunder is giving free play to even people who only beta tested. Oh did you so-called “reporters” not know that?

    Before the next show go and actually play the games before you film so you aren’t using outdated material.

  • lyck

    Rubi is cool

  • http://n/a Everlast

    Rubi and Shawn are both great for Guild Wars 2 news, they really do know their stuff. I say bring em whenever u have news of Guild Wars. I like how TWIMMO is shaping up, and it keeps me with knowledge of good FTP games.

    Right now im about to try this new game called Pirates of the burning sea. If you guys know if its really worth to download please tell me.

    It would be great for the show to send jasmine to Arenanet HQ and get some of the latest news on GW2! (I liked alot when she went to interview Trion staff).

    Also you guys can make a countdown of the hottest MMO news in the month or the hottest games or letdowns. I look forward to hearing your reviews and analysis. It has been this show who has kept me away from buying a PS3 and playing also FF14. You have saved me some money!

    • Jasmine

      Awww thank you! I’m glad you liked my Trion tour. I would looooove to invade Arenanet if they would let me. :D

  • Infamous

    Oakheart Ruby! ugh.

  • Klarum

    Rubi’s voice is damn sexy!

  • Ordegar

    Ok here we go:

    STO is a “megaserver”; why Chris didn’t mention that I don’t know. It’s one of the best things about the game; if it wasn’t, there would be servers that are ghost-towns or they would have had to merge. As it is now, it always looks full of people. Also, with a megaserver you don’t have to worry about getting on the same server as your friends, or worse yet, finding out your friends plays on another server but you’re both almost cap level or have 10 characters.

    GW2 is an action mmo; you can’t even target team-mates. You have to aoe heal them, for example. Fighting is all about keeping yourself moving; no more target, stand there and spam attacks; rather you have to double-tap dodge, or actively block with your shield, or just run out of the way of stuff. I think the Tera people know this, and are afraid; very afraid. And they should be. GW2 is so much beyond what Tera is trying to do. So they are screaming about their game to get attention. For me, it won’t work. I won’t even bother with a beta of Tera.

    Vindictus is all about using the environment; they even show you in the tutorial how to pick up stuff to beat on enemies with. One class can even use rubble to make a golem pet, though it’s also not really an mmo; more of an mco (multi-player co-op online) like GW1.

    Technology evolves, it doesn’t just pop up suddenly. Having a mix of gizmos from different eras in the Engineer’s arsenal in GW2 makes sense. Some people actually still have telephones with the curly cord connecting the handset with the cradle, and the cradle plugged into a phone jack in the wall; while they also have an Android computer / telecommunications device in a pocket. A friend of mine even has one of those telephones from the 1800s with the mouthpiece on the wall and the earpiece that you pick up to answer the phone, and it actually works, though you can’t dial with the little crank. The artwork for the Engineer’s gadgets do need more detail though; H.G. Wells type steam-punk themed stuff is supposed to be intricately decorated as well as intricately designed for functionality; with shiny brass framing, and carved wood and/or inlay. The style of the Mesmer in GW1 reminds me of that style, elegance bordering on flashy.

  • Kellexx

    Just so you know, Sony got targetted by hackers because Sony threatened people for hacking their PS3s. Basically, one day it was fine to use the OtherOS and you could get away with hacking your PS3. Then the next day, you weren’t allowed to use the OtherOS, Sony was suing the guy who made the PS3 “jailbreak”, and they threatened to sue a lot of other people. That is what started the rage against Sony. The Anonymous-spawned group OpSony started the DDOS attacks and everything just took off from there. The lawsuit(s) got dropped, but the rage kept going.

    With regards to Tera redefining the party, they were trying to say that instead of tank+healer+dps groups you’d want tank+healer+melee+ranged. However, I played the KOBT and what I found redefined the party was the fact that you don’t need a tank. All my dungeon groups were just healer+dps(melee or ranged; didn’t matter). You can pull it off in that game, which is something I really like about it. This might be different for end-game.

  • Zeroxin

    That was my poll that fony saw on MMORPG.com!!! Woooh! I’m famous!

  • PJ

    lol, you kids are such haters…

    BioWare is doing the same “OMG SOMETHING NEW” thing with their bullshit story angle.

    And Rift never claimed to do anything new, because they didn’t do anything new at all.

    ROFL…

  • Chippy

    Height in GW1 effects the critical strike chance of arrows in guild wars1.

    Also you were talking about exploiting the environment, if you had ever played GW1 PvP you would know that u can dodge arrows and projectile spells by ducking behind walls or strafing the projectile.

    Also you can throw rocks.

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