Asyria Wrote:My answers to your sister, with all due respect.
1 and 4: Learn and adapt. I come from WoW and it took me a mere 2 days to find myself perfectly comfortable with the default settings, using keyboard alone. They're not working on mouse, because the mouse is kinda useless. Every hardcore mmo player will tell you that. I used to hear it all the time in WoW and I always stubbornly stuck to using the mouse... In FF XIV, I barely spare it a glance.
Regarding the mouse, not entirely true. Most computer MMO's targeted at Asian gamers focus on the mouse to the exclusion of the keyboard. Playing with the keyboard in Lineage II, for example, is all but impossible.
I happen to agree that the mouse is unusable, and the keyboard controls are not sufficient to make up for the lack of precise targeting options. When i can spam <tab> and I'm standing in front of a quest NPC... and the reticule never switches to that NPC, there's a problem.
Quote:2- Upgrade your computer, that's all there is to it, really. You can't blame the game for being slow if your specs do not match up to the recommend ones.
A modern gaming computer should not be limited to playing the game at half resolution, with all the options turned all the way down. It looks atrocious. And yet, that is what I (and others) are stuck with on their less-than-a-year-old alienware computers.
Quote:6- If you have a good enough computer, the game plays as good as you can hope for, even better considering that "it's only beta" and all that stuff. I barely find any lag, except in the most populated area, but this is something that happens even in mmorpgs that have had years or refining. The graphics are beautiful, the details are breathtaking, you can even see every piece of equipment on your character, down to jewelry!
I have found the lag to be unbearable within the UI. The graphics might be nice if you can turn them up, but see the point earlier. If they're good, they're great. If they're not... the game looks like a pixelated mess from the early 90's.
Quote:The UI is extremely simple and easy to navigate, it's just -different- than what us westerners are used to and some people have this retarded idea that different makes bad. It's as simple as hitting the Home key to call the menu, and navigate it with the arrow keys.
The UI, compared to any modern MMO (from any country), is terrible. It's aimed at console users, and it shows. Having to build macros to switch jobs? Not knowing when you're done casting? Having no meaningful way to get information about mobs around you? A nearly impossible to navigate map (Coming from Limsa, trying to find the exit, took me several 10's of minutes of exploration just to get the map to show the exit). It's bad, bad, bad. And there's nothing anybody can do about it (unlike most other modern MMOs which allow customization).
Targeting a console as a platform is not a bad thing, unless it's done to the exclusion of playability on the PC, such as has happened here. When you have to pull out a controller in an MMO to make the game feel like it's designed to feel, something was done wrong.
Quote:Combat is smooth, no boring auto-attack, leaving the player fully in control of the action, and it's just the right pace. No button-mashing and no crawling either, like we seen in early videos that leaked on youtube. The only thing to slow you down in a little is a Stamina gauge but it fills rather fast.
I have found it to be a ton of spamming the same attack button (spamming, since you don't know technically when you're ready to cast it again, and need to press it often to not miss out on a swing timer), occasionally switching to another button. It's the reason that auto attack exists, and why Conan combat was so unpopular.
Quote:Gathering and Crafting all are their own mini-games, which is much enjoyable and a lot less boring than just clicking and waiting forever for that progression bar to move (ugh!), again putting the player in control and involved.
This is an improvement made dozens of times previously (as early as EQII that I have personally played) and doesn't add a lot to the crafting experience. But that's just my opinion.
Quote:All in all, the immersion is fantastic and the only time you're not actively doing anything is when you autorun or read stuff.
Perhaps to you. To me it feels like busy work (and I find that so far there's a lot of time where I'm doing nothing but running around and reading stuff).
I would add an 8: sub-twitter length chat lines, 9: Silly typos in quest text for the newbie quest lines, and 10: place and character names that look like a 5th grader pounded them out on the keyboard.
Number 11 might be personal, but I'm kinda tired of the NPCs treating my character, the hero of my story, as a complete moron who just fell off the short bus. I can all but hear them tittering "F'ing n00b" as my character walks away.
