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I have to wonder what people are thinking when they spend thousands on a game that they have to know will eventually shut down. This isn't World of Warcraft, which will last multiple more decades. Neverwinter has maybe, what, 10 years left before inevitable shutdown? Maybe these people just have such a large disposable income where it doesn't matter.
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May 10, 2023 18:21
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I said come in! posted:You could pay money to get caught up, but each expansion comes out to like $800 - $1000. And a new character costs around $6000 to be caught up with top tier gear for the newest content. i was down with the whole 80 -> 20 max level thing but losing all my enchantments and realizing that i had tons of lvl 9s that couldn't be traded into the antiquities trader for credit towards the new ones was the killer. full stable of mythic mounts, max companion bolster, and i'm still like 10k item level behind where i need to be to run any of the fun dungeons. brutal. it sucks because i love the combat system and it's a blast to play, but at this point i'm just killing poo poo to kill poo poo and run juma bags and what's the point i did get tyranny of dragons to auto-complete when they changed the adventure structure which was pretty sweet but that wasn't even close to enough barnold fucked around with this message at 18:30 on May 10, 2023 |
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May 10, 2023 18:26
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Cardboard Fox posted:I have to wonder what people are thinking when they spend thousands on a game that they have to know will eventually shut down. This isn't World of Warcraft, which will last multiple more decades. Neverwinter has maybe, what, 10 years left before inevitable shutdown? It's whales with too much income, but I wouldn't discount the desire to be a big fish in a small pond. Six grand is practically cheap for several years of people being jealous of you (from your perspective) when people are spending 100k on a sports car for the same reason.
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May 10, 2023 18:32
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For those who participated in the M&M stress test, this is a nice peek into the sausage factory: https://monstersandmemories.com/updates/update-31-stress-test-results  Ashurbanipal posted:someone should make a monsters & memories thread 
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May 12, 2023 14:26
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I got a note thar I had a free 7 days sub on WoW so I took it and dropped in. And it's funny, I think I understand why WoW took me in more than FFXIV did. It's because it's story is simple. It's not that it's childish or boring (although it's stupidly cartoonish at parts), it's that you can basically tell who everyone is just by looking at them. The first mission I got was Windrunner telling me to go with this sketchy looking guy to rescue a prisoner from the alliance. You meet up with two other people at a bar and plan the heist. Don't know who these people are or what relationship they have to me, but it doesn't actually matter because "we're mission impossibling a prisoner" is all you really need to get it. It's not like FFXIV where you spend 5 hours doing quests to revive someone who comes back and a grand reveal and my "can't remember coworkers names, not going to remember some fairy from 30 hours ago" brain just gets lost in the plot. Does that make me a brute with a small brain that can't do big plots? Maybe, but at the same time I think the simplistic storyline fits better with the design of MMOs where you can have weeks, if not months, between major plot beats if you are running raids instead of doing the "main quest".
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May 12, 2023 14:43
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it gets to be a little too much. Shadowlands, which it sounds like you're in the intro to, is pretty derided for just how lovely that simple story actually gets, even compared to how bad WoW's writing normally gets, to the point where the writers start reaching back into WC3 and Arthas' story again to try and gently caress it up too lol. It's nice that it's simple for the most part, but even if it was as barebones as they could possible make it, Blizzard can't write a third act to save their goddamn lives. They really should have gotten whoever was in charge of the initial story and especially Revendreth/Daddy Denarius/Castle Nathria to run the whole thing because the expansion as a whole nosedived the moment they started focusing on Zovaal himself. Dragonflight, the new one, has been pretty good, and remains as simple as ever. The major viewpoints this time around are the dragon aspects who never know poo poo and the new race of demi-dragons who also don't know poo poo so the simplicity is kind of charming. Gameplay-wise, it's the best WoW's been in years. Interested to see how they gently caress it up this time. I think the FF14 story is fantastic and I much prefer it to wow's jangling keys and flashing colors, but there's room for both imo. Sometimes I just want to see some jangling keys. I don't think I'd be nearly as invested as I am in FF14's story if I wasn't there from the beginning. Along the same lines, I don't think I'd hate WoW's writing nearly as much as I wasn't there from the beginning...... Babe Magnet fucked around with this message at 20:12 on May 12, 2023 |
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May 12, 2023 20:01
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I'm torn on is FFXIV did as good a job as I thought since I loathed EW and thought it massively botched the landing in some critical ways. EW basically made quit XIV because of the story, the gameplay has largely gotten better even if some classes are starting to get over simplified. The best long form/live action storytelling I've seen has been from Mihoyo in their gacha games of all things. Honkai Impact wrapped up their main story after five years and it was an incredibly satisfying end to a story that was contentiously punctuated by incredible emotional story beats. With Genshin impact they did something I found really ballsy and just published the stories outline before the game even came out with the Teyvat Trevails trailer and have been sticking with it with the two regions added to the game thus far. I found WoW's biggest issue storywise, beyond just how stupid it could get, was that none of the characters ever felt like characters, they were a coat rack with some verbs on it that you hung your own idea of who they are as a character onto. Which just made them doing anything with them unsatisfying because of how thin they could be. Like the actual amount of dialogue even a focus character like Sylvanas got in Shadowlands is ridiculously small compared to say Zenos.
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May 12, 2023 20:16
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A big part of what makes WoW's characters not really feel like real characters is that for years now, Blizzard has constantly either churned through or reassigned authors who all have vastly different ideas of what a character should be, even in the middle of expansions, in the middle of their defining story archs. Like 10 people wrote Sylvanas in the past 3 expansions, and it shows. A really funny (and annoying lol) example of this was during Cataclysm, when they were building Garrosh up to be Big Bad Warchief and planting all the seeds of him being too big of an ego to control (which imo actually payed off in a fun way in Shadowlands, one of the few story beats I like a lot but that may be my bias towards Garrosh in general) so that he could be the villain of Mists, they would have different writers handling the storylines of different zones. A lot of these zones would have important character moments for Garrosh, such as Silverpine showing how he's not interested in alternative methods of conquest like resurrecting the dead and all that. One of these zones was Stonetalon, which had him show up, dress down, and execute one of the zone's main story characters for having you murder civilians and non-combatants and generally doing dishonorable terrorist poo poo. Which was odd, because you're generally doing dishonorable terrorist poo poo in his name everywhere else. People generally seemed to like this sort of thing since it made him seem like less of a one-dimension villain and waste of a potentially fun character that had risen to prominence in Burning Crusade two expansions prior. But this was quickly deemed "non-canon" by the Blizzard writing team because what actually happened was this character moment in Stonetalon somehow made it to live on accident; because of the way Blizzard writes characters and stories, it was possible for whoever was supposed to be in charge of reverse-engineering these dozens of short stories into one hodge-podge of a narrative to simply just... miss it.
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May 12, 2023 20:59
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I think it took one or two years to go from Sylvanas having an internal monologue about how she didn't want to be Warchief to her revealing that actually her becoming Warchief was part of her evil plan all along. And I think it took exactly one expansion for a major retcon from pre-WoW games that didn't really matter until, like, five expansions later. I love WoW lore in spite of the storyline, which is kind of sad. Eimi posted:I'm torn on is FFXIV did as good a job as I thought since I loathed EW and thought it massively botched the landing in some critical ways. EW basically made quit XIV because of the story, the gameplay has largely gotten better even if some classes are starting to get over simplified. The best long form/live action storytelling I've seen has been from Mihoyo in their gacha games of all things. Same, kinda. I didn't loathe EW but it definitely wasn't the great ending for me that it was for so many other people.
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May 12, 2023 23:17
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Hellioning posted:I think it took one or two years to go from Sylvanas having an internal monologue about how she didn't want to be Warchief to her revealing that actually her becoming Warchief was part of her evil plan all along. One day we'll figure out what the hell is going on with her. We went from "debatably the horde is more moral since they are a council of races treated equal in a tribal society rather than a human-centric autocracy, despite their perceived lack of civilization" to "I'm Sylvanas, I'm going to do evil things, but for a good reason! Next expansion will vindicate me! Oh wait the reason was evil."
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May 12, 2023 23:53
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barnold posted:my one true love was Neverwinter but they changed the game a lot and even as a fully-kitted endgame character I am no longer powerful enough to do any of the new content, and the biggest rewards are restricted to weekly events. I just can't be hosed to log in only to play for like 30 minutes and then have to wait another week for the counters to reset and there ain't much else to do in the meantime. RIP getting rid of the foundry was a huge mistake. having a miniature version of NWN's authoring tools you could make silly poo poo with was the only reason I ever tried that game.
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May 13, 2023 00:04
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Hellioning posted:I love WoW lore in spite of the storyline, which is kind of sad. this is pretty much I feel, yeah. When it's good, it's real good, but it's not often. the biggest lol of sylvanas' whole deal was that one cutscene (spoiler since someone's going through it right now) where, after giving zovaal exactly what he wants, she triumphantly tells him that she "will never serve" and he's just like "alright cool" and restores the part of her soul that makes her feel bad about all the stupid poo poo she's been doing and bounces She seems to have a problem with grey dudes that glow blue.
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May 13, 2023 00:19
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Catgirl Al Capone posted:getting rid of the foundry was a huge mistake. having a miniature version of NWN's authoring tools you could make silly poo poo with was the only reason I ever tried that game. I thought I read somewhere that they only had one guy on staff who understood the back-end for the foundry and when he hit da bricks they couldn't keep it running
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May 13, 2023 00:26
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blatman posted:I thought I read somewhere that they only had one guy on staff who understood the back-end for the foundry and when he hit da bricks they couldn't keep it running that just tells me how little they cared about supporting it in the long term and makes me even more sad
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May 13, 2023 00:37
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blatman posted:I thought I read somewhere that they only had one guy on staff who understood the back-end for the foundry and when he hit da bricks they couldn't keep it running Between WoW firing all its writers and NWN firing the one guy who built the foundry its been Chaos for us gamers sadly. Outside the MMO world Arkane Studios released Redfall, which was 100% not an Arkane game after Deathloop, Pray, and Dishonored were such great games. It seams like studios just don't care about writers even when they are the reason for their success. What's really fun is that Hollywood just hosed around with writers too and found out they more or less keep Hollywood going since at the end of the day a movie is a story. I can say for sure that a game is a story too. Some day studios will learn, or a few will anyway. Pay your people a real wage, keep them around if your gonna build something that lasts 20 years so ideas can be kept straight and the fans stick around. Or not because some investor who has no idea what's going on but wants a quick buck tells the CEO to fire all that costly staff I guess. <-- Still sore at EA for killing so many studios
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May 13, 2023 04:32
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My problem with World of Warcraft's story was the presentation. For example, I got to Dragonflight, and the game seemed to assume I already knew who Wrathion was and was deeply invested in him. I still do not know who Wrathion is. Same with a lot of characters. If I didn't already know who a lot of them were via internet osmosis, I would only have the vaguest idea of who some of them were and almost no idea who the rest were. I feel like WoW kinda fell apart from a narrative standpoint when they decided that faction heroes should play a larger role in the story but put all their characterization and stuff in the novels. I even remember during.... I can't remember which expansion, when someone complained at Blizzcon about how the Alliance seemed like they weren't doing anything and the Horde had all the attention, one of the Blizzard guys said "We're doing a lot of cool stuff with the Alliance in the novels". Now, I like a lovely scifi/fantasy tie-in novel as much as the next guy, looking across the room I have a couple of Warhammer Fantasy and 40K and Battletech and loving Doom novels, but I shouldn't have to read the novels to understand what's going on in the game. Ultimately low on my list of reasons I'm not super-interested in the game, but present. FrostyPox fucked around with this message at 19:33 on May 13, 2023 |
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May 13, 2023 19:12
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Yeah, parts of Wrathion's in game story are limited to what class you play or were removed. He first appears in Cataclysm, but you need to play a rogue to encounter him during that expansion. His role in Mists of Panderia got removed completely for whatever reason. I think to keep the legendary items he gives out "prestigious". He wasn't in Warlords of Draenor or Legion. It's very scattershot.
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May 13, 2023 20:43
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OhFunny posted:Yeah, parts of Wrathion's in game story are limited to what class you play or were removed. He first appears in Cataclysm, but you need to play a rogue to encounter him during that expansion. His role in Mists of Panderia got removed completely for whatever reason. I think to keep the legendary items he gives out "prestigious". He was in Legion, actually! In an alternate version of the past (or future?), in the Deaths of Chromie scenario/challenge mode thingie, just chilling outside the Black Dragon area and "observing". I have a hazy and possibly incorrect memory that there's a place or two where he's chilling in whelp form during WoD, too, watching the
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May 13, 2023 21:00
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WoW's storytelling was about as solid as you could have expected up through the end of wrath. not great, but it all feels like what you'd expect someone to imagine if you'd told them in 2003 "hey they're releasing a game in a couple of years that's kind of like everquest but it's based on warcraft 3" cataclysm, mists, and warlords were goofy but fine. still attached to prior warcraft lore enough that you could read the quest dialogue and not feel completely in over your head. everything after that i have had very limited exposure to but dipping in for free trial months every once in a while it all just seems really uneven. more ambitious, and when it works it works, but when it doesn't it really doesn't.
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May 13, 2023 22:01
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I checked out of WoW's story when the Emerald Nightmare they'd been teasing and "trying to get right" for ages happened in a book and we got "it was all taken care of; this guy's back, this guy's dead, this guy's a bad guy now, go fight Ragnaros". That place was cool, but still felt cheated. I think that might have actually been my last thing before leaving the game entirely, I know I didn't pick up Pandaria. Yes, I know they apparently went back and did it (again? First time was only a setback?) in-game, too late.
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May 14, 2023 01:06
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ny'alotha being a single patch was a joke
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May 14, 2023 19:15
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https://twitter.com/embracergroup/status/1658135316270657536?s=46&t=IW0MSOWK0Lh4VsB3wVLoOA
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May 15, 2023 16:54
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and yet somehow LOTRO will be better, as old as it is
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May 15, 2023 16:58
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Didn't Amazon already scrap development on a LotR game?
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May 15, 2023 17:02
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I do wonder how they plan to differentiate it from LotRO. Different time period? Just try it disconnect it from the books/movies even more? Like I wouldn’t hate just having Middle Earth to run around in and get up to my own fun rather than following behind the Fellowship or whatever.NeurosisHead posted:Didn't Amazon already scrap development on a LotR game? The company they were partnering with for the rights to the IP was sold and they couldn't work out a deal with the new owner. So it was cancelled but not because Amazon wanted to or anything.
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May 15, 2023 17:03
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Wasn't SWG forced to shut down because Bioware was making another Star Wars MMO and it was impossible for both to exist at the same time, or something like that?
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May 15, 2023 17:06
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Amazon Games, fresh from a disastrous mmo launch with New World: "It's be better this time, baby, trust me"Cardboard Fox posted:Wasn't SWG forced to shut down because Bioware was making another Star Wars MMO and it was impossible for both to exist at the same time, or something like that? It was already on its last legs but that was the nail in the coffin, yeah. CuddleCryptid fucked around with this message at 17:11 on May 15, 2023 |
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May 15, 2023 17:08
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Anno posted:I do wonder how they plan to differentiate it from LotRO. Different time period? Just try it disconnect it from the books/movies even more? Like I wouldn’t hate just having Middle Earth to run around in and get up to my own fun rather than following behind the Fellowship or whatever. They'll use their shows aesthetic over the movies. So it'll be copying from a terribly unpopular show that looks worse than the old movies to follow up a game that was messy at best from a studio that's yet to really post a dub. Good luck
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May 15, 2023 18:08
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Looking forward to following the next absolute dumpster fire that is an Amazon MMO. A++++++ would shitpost about again.
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May 15, 2023 18:17
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We've had one, yes. What about second LotR MMO?
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May 15, 2023 18:19
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Anno posted:The company they were partnering with for the rights to the IP was sold and they couldn't work out a deal with the new owner. So it was cancelled but not because Amazon wanted to or anything. I don't think it was IP rights, I think that the developer was bought by Tencent and Tencent and Amazon couldn't come up with an amicable profit split. I have been saying for 2 years that if Amazon really wanted money, they would take New World, fix the technical issues with duping and whatever else and then reskin it as their LOTR prequel and kick it out the door. Kind of surprised it took them this long. There's no way this won't just be a New World reskin. It's already confirmed to be the same dev team. Maybe people will stick with it longer than they did with their prequel https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2023/04/05/why-the-rings-of-power-was-a-huge-flop-that-most-people-never-finished/?sh=1eb22727d34a Cutedge fucked around with this message at 18:47 on May 15, 2023 |
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May 15, 2023 18:43
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I'm an idiot and I'll buy and I'll probably really enjoy it for two to six weeks and never touch it again
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May 15, 2023 22:48
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Cardboard Fox posted:Wasn't SWG forced to shut down because Bioware was making another Star Wars MMO and it was impossible for both to exist at the same time, or something like that? A deal to make both exist at the once would have easily worked out imo, had SWG not been a massive disaster. But by the time TOR came out, no one was playing Galaxies. So it made sense to just go ahead and kill it.
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May 15, 2023 23:01
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Yeah at that point the NGE had burned the existing playerbase bad and hadn't drawn in many new players so it was on borrowed time, anyway
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May 15, 2023 23:02
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Cutedge posted:I have been saying for 2 years that if Amazon really wanted money, they would take New World, fix the technical issues with duping and whatever else and then reskin it as their LOTR prequel and kick it out the door. Kind of surprised it took them this long. There's no way this won't just be a New World reskin. It's already confirmed to be the same dev team. I think that was the plan all along, New World felt like a rough draft of the big IP mmo they wanted to do
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May 16, 2023 00:07
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SOE desperately tried to get Lucasarts to let them keep running SWG. They delayed the announcement of the sunset at the last minute to make one last plea but LA just wasn't interested. SWG was pretty dead at that point, but it only takes 67 thousand subscribers to make a million dollars a month when they are paying $14.99 apiece. While SWG was never the game it really could have been, I still reject SOE/LA's premise that "no one wants to be uncle owen" and if they made a SWG style LOTR game, I'm sure you'd have a poo poo ton of people who would want to be hobbit weed farmers.
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May 16, 2023 00:21
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I'm a pumpkin man, myself.
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May 16, 2023 00:31
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just lol if lotro has to shut down because of new-lotro and then new-lotro only lasts a year
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May 16, 2023 00:50
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Cutedge posted:SOE desperately tried to get Lucasarts to let them keep running SWG. They delayed the announcement of the sunset at the last minute to make one last plea but LA just wasn't interested. SWG was pretty dead at that point, but it only takes 67 thousand subscribers to make a million dollars a month when they are paying $14.99 apiece. i contend that star war is at its best when there's no laser wizards. just rear end in a top hat droids and seedy cantinas and cool ship battles. so yes, i absolutely want to be uncle owen.
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May 16, 2023 02:23
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I made clothes for people in SWG and spent most of my time hanging out in my tailor's shop and spoke to customers who wanted to talk to me. I think there are plenty of people who would like to do social or Sims-style stuff in an MMO. Look at the effort people in FF XIV make on their clothing or how many people you see just hanging out in the big cities of some games, or the buzz around Palia which seems to be largely about making your house look nice. Also there's nothing to stop a game allowing you to be Uncle Owen and also allowing you to shoot stormtroopers/rebel scum when you prefer.
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May 16, 2023 16:00
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