Tony

@EndynOmni He started the Metroid Other M puzzle for me... apparently I didn't have that before.

Hit a Blood Ghost for 15 HP and then was scared away. Thanks for nothing Reggie!!!!

@Foetoid Titan Quest is indeed excellent. It's on sale fairly regularly on Steam and I try to get people to buy it every time.

At what point to we start admitting that Itagaki, as weird as he is, was clearly making some damn good decisions and keeping Team Ninja/Tecmo projects on task?

It seems more evident than ever. I have no faith that DOA5 will be worthwhile.

I agree with the general point of this article. I mean, technically speaking, most of what people seem to want instead of leveling IS leveling. You're leveling a skill, you're leveling an ability. There's some meter that somehow increases and determines how advanced you are at something.

I actually like the implementation of this in Glitch probably more than in most MMOs. Learning a skill takes real world time, there are prerequisites and it's not tied at all to your actual general "level". You also can only learn so many at a time and the more things you want to know, the longer they take to do and to learn. To me this is a good stop gap solution. I don't know if it's the IDEAL solution, but it helps.

I like the concept of learning real skills that have real impact on the game. I like games where people need to rely more on the community and their skills to solve problems and move forward.

The thing about MMOs, particularly themepark MMOs, is that everyone wants to be able to do everything. People make alts to ensure they can do every bit of crafting themselves. They get mad if things are given away at an event and they miss it. They get mad if some title or questline is only available at the expense of another title or questline.

And I don't know what can be done about those sort of people. They work in direct conflict of giving people real "tasks" and involved skills in MMOs. These people automatically will not play these sorts of games and that's seemingly a significant amount of the gaming public at large.

These are not people who want to go find another player who runs a stable and trains horses for you. They want to toss a bunch of gold at a NPC and move on.

I don't think that's "bad", but I do think it makes evolving this genre extremely difficult and ultimately risky.

But I think the other hamper on this is simply time. People largely seem to want to do quests and feel like they're "progressing". To build out several full-fledged skill systems in a game (for example, an actual rewarding crafting system or the previously mentioned mount training, etc) that are more than "click this button and wait" is extremely complex and difficult and rife for complaint and issues. And, unfortunately, I imagine maybe many developers have decided this isn't as solid or likely to succeed as doing the status quo basic systems we do 10 times over in ever MMO.

@ironneko Except, for the main game they're pushing a pre-order for right now lol

@Remo Williams They used to just let you download the files from the site too. Is that not an option now?

One thing that I'm not big on is that people can rate games that aren't even out yet.

Maybe give that some sort of "anticipation" score if you really want to keep it, but I would hope that'd not factor in to review scores on the final games. It just skews things.

@Gibbeynator Ha, feel exactly the same. Nice post.

Haha, justifying those ridiculous memory cards that are essentially more required than optional seems more stupid than ever.

I really want a Vita, but I'm not going to pretend I like their proprietary garbage.