I’ve played the Redcliffe assault about 15 times now attempting a 100% survival for important NPCs on hard, I chose a bad party and only have a save when the monsters were attacking from the river.

The problem is, the mayor Murdoch – an archer militia unit with very low defence, rushes towards enemies with melee weapons when they get close thus exposing himself to the onslaught. Furthermore, I think he had bathe in honey-mustard in the morning because the undead ignores even Sten who had threaten activated and used taunt, to go butcher mayor Murdoch.

It would just have been more sensible for Murdoch and his archers to adopt skirmisher tactics – fall back when its safe instead of rushing towards nearby enemies and then standing still like some moron, especially when the enemies just run by my entire party to attack him. With Sten using active threaten AND taunts!

So yeah…….. FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU, I hope an NPC AI mod remedies this.

“Take City of Heroes – at least that’s something that’s not a fantasy game.” Nice!

Sadly I think the more likely case is your guess; it’s simply to build a profile to help secure funding.

Either way, and despite my skepticism of the project, I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with.

The stated goal of making the process as transparent as possible is a great one, and I look forward to seeing what comes out of that – at the very least, it should have a positive effect on the state of the MMO industry, and on players’ understanding of how such games are designed and built. But I also fear that it could easily lead to an unscrupulous studio from another country with flexible IP laws swooping in to capitalize on the dividends of Undead Labs’ early work. Execution counts for a lot, but if your goal is to be first to market with a clever new idea like this one, you should be at least slightly worried about letting someone else beat you to the punch.

Also, it seems likely that the zombie fad will die out eventually, at which point a lot of the ‘oh cool, zombies’ buzz will have dried up due to how crowded the market is becoming. While I can’t say this from experience, there are definitely other titles out there that have had a similar problem (the Wizard 101 team mentioned at Austin GDC that they narrowly avoided ending up in a similar situation, for example.)

If it were me, I probably would have waited until I had a playable prototype to show off, so that I could harvest useful feedback and creative input from fans’ responses. After all, you only launch once [ http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/03/dont-launch.html ]. I’d guess that this announcement is a necessary step in order to get the funding/partners they need to build a high-quality title.

Regardless, I’m looking forward to see what comes out of Undead Labs. Go Jeff!

Choosing between a PC and a console is a concious choice that has some indication of what kind of a gamer you are. I can’t help thinking that those interested in massively multiplayer, immesive timesinks are the kind of people who naturally gravitate towards PC. A console MMO just seems so unnatural.

Though as you say, a lot could change in the next few years. We’ve already seen PC gaming take a few blows this year, and that probably wont improve with time.

Aion has been advertised from day one as a beautiful MMO to look at and this confirms it. It also add depth to the level of immersion, a subtle way to say “stay in our game and enjoy it”. And I hope they can indeed provide some sorely needed new social features, where play their social roles as much as their character. Just imagine if being Guild Leader or Officer actually “meant” something. (a bit like Strain’s MMOZ where cementing communities around holding a “home” is a key design aspect!)

And about Aion tanking, I don’t know the rumours, but I’m sure NCsoft does not have the luxury of staying still with their flagship. They HAVE to do PR stuff as much as they can, while keeping true to some of their core values. Doing nothing would immediately lead to being in danger of loosing customers, mostly those that look for these things (trailers, bits of info, etc.) but a bit everyone in the long term.

Honestly, I had a terrible experience with the closed beta (couldn’t play it basically! :/ ) but if they go in that direction, I’ll give subscribing a good thought. I’m careful about the grinding, but I bet that it’ll go down with time, as it did for many MMOs.

I had more issues with basic AI reactions to environment – for example, DOT AOE spells are useless as unsupervised melee will run into it instead of trying to avoid it and thus will be affected by friendly fire. Mob would commonly fry itself and take most of its allies with it with well placed fireball. Basically, AI seems to think friendly fire does not exist, with both disastrous and hilarious results.

all in all, it just doesn’t seem to be worth the money for how little content it provides. maybe i need to play it at harder difficulty, except the game as a whole gets pretty tedious above normal difficulty. the AI doesn’t seem to become much smarter, they just hit a lot harder and have higher hitpoints.