Global Chat: Updates galore edition
Welcome to this week's Global Chat! We love hearing what you have to say at Massively, and we love it even more when we can share the best comments with all of our readers. Massively staffers will be contributing some of their favorite comments every week, so keep an eye out every Sunday for more Global Chat!
Global Chat this week is all about updates, updates, updates! Game developers all over are turning their eyes to the future, and it shows in their communication with fans. Developer plans have sparked a lot of fan feedback -- and even discussion about fan feedback. Follow along after the jump to see what everyone's saying in this week's Global Chat!
Age of Conan lead dev Craig Morrison jumped into the comments section of this week's Anvil of Crom. The column subject this week was fan feedback, and Craig had this to say (in part): "It is an unavoidable aspect of MMO development, in particular in games that cater to many different playstyles. Someone will always think you made the wrong choices... and in fact, for that person (or group of people) we did indeed make the wrong choice... but for someone else it ('it' being any given change under discussion) was a good change that improved their enjoyment of the game." He had much more to say beyond that, and quite a few Massively readers replied. Check out his full comment and the discussion that followed in the original column.
Perpetuum made waves with its insurance fraud scandal, but the developers are ready to look forward. Last week, they revealed their plans for the game's future, and our commenters had some things to say on Perpetuum's continuing similarity to EVE. Massively reader tk421242 outlined some of the more noticeable similarities and differences: "It lifts many mechanics from EVE and utilizes them just with mechs instead. A few differences that I have noticed that stand out are the lack of a true autopilot mode and the way in which skills are trained. In EVE you can of course set a course that is a long distance away and just autopilot to it and go do something else. Granted, you can be attacked, but it is still a nice thing to have when wanting to run some laundry or something. In Perpetuum I have not seen that feature. You can point and click on the map and move to a spot or just autorun, but my mech several times has gotten caught on an object and just became stuck until I returned. Granted, I have only played Perpetuum for about three weeks, so if there is an autopilot and I have not discovered it yet, forget I mentioned it.
"The learning of skills differs from EVE -- you have the timer and you place skills in it to learn them in real time but with the 24-hour cap. In Perpetuum you earn points in real time as your account is active, and skills have a cash plus point cost to train up. This is nice if you have to go away for a few days and come back; you have some skill points to invest then. Just minor differences I noticed, and like I said, not an expert on the game. I do think some of their audio is better than the audio effects in EVE. The missiles also look really nice when they launch, especially a volley of three or more at once." If you'd like to jump in with your thoughts on the game or the planned updates, check out the original news story.
Has Dungeons and Dragons Online been flying under your radar? DDO's fifth anniversary is coming up, and Turbine has a pile of updates planned. As part of our fifth anniversary column series, we interviewed a handful of players who recently joined the game to see what they love, what they don't love, and in particular, what brought them into the game. DDO player Cam Neely (no, not that one) describes his introduction to the game: "I was playing a different F2P MMO based on microtransactions, one I really enjoyed for a while but decided to drop cold turkey because the base was becoming more and more e-peen-focused (driven by whoever was willing to drop the most RL cash) and all 'new' content was very cookie-cutter and formed to drive microtransactions. I had read some good reviews about DDO and Lord of the Rings Online. It was a bit of a toss up between the two at the start, but quickly I found myself playing more and more DDO. I think the first thing about the game that drew me in was the customizations of characters that the game offers. The rest of the interview has plenty of details on the ups and downs of DDO from a new player's perspective, so if you're not familiar with the game this is a great time to take a look!
Global Chat is the weekly feature that's all about you, our readers. Every Sunday we collect the best, funniest, and most thought-provoking comments from the Massively readers and round them up into Global Chat for discussion. Read over them for yourself, hit the comment button, and add your own thoughts!
