If AC went free to play with a cash shop, I'd play. I have a ridiculous character. I just can't justify subscribing when I only play once or twice a month. The new land textures make me laugh though. It really makes the low res rocks and stuff stand out.
I think it'd be a good move, but it'd have to correspond with a graphical update. I think it wouldn't take much, just pull a Nintendo and aim for a slightly cartoony look.
They'd also need a networking patch if they were to take that route. Their support forums are full of people having issues connecting to the game, I think because of how out of date their network code is. Every posts from their support staff ends up being "bridge your modem" which is god damn stupid.
Wait. What? They added another new race? Interesting. Though I would have preferred something more classic AC like Lugians, Tumeroks, or hell, even Drudges. I would totally come back and play a Throwing Weapon Drudge, just because.
The new ground textures do look pretty nice though.
Wait. What? They added another new race? Interesting. Though I would have preferred something more classic AC like Lugians, Tumeroks, or hell, even Drudges. I would totally come back and play a Throwing Weapon Drudge, just because.
The new ground textures do look pretty nice though.
Lugians, Tumeroks and Drudges were all fantastic to play in AC2.
Seg on
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AngryThe glory I had witnessedwas just a sleight of handRegistered Userregular
edited June 2010
when did you play as drudges?
i miss my juggy. ac2 had the funnest classes. horribly balanced, but a lot of fun.
i miss my juggy. ac2 had the funnest classes. horribly balanced, but a lot of fun.
Drudges were a preorder bonus for the AC2 expansion I believe. Or something like that. I never did play AC2 much.
Yes they were preorder and then a month after the expansion went live they were available to everyone. They had two paths they could put points into, one that involved using a head bash and I think the other involved eating bugs.
edit: I stopped playing AC2 about a month after Turbine announced they were shutting it down.
Why did AC2 die, anyway? I remember reading announcements for it and thinking the screenshots were very pretty, but since I was on the shittiest of dialup at the time (not to mention lacking a credit card and income) I wasn't really into MMOs at the time.
It wasn't really anything like AC , it had the same world, and live content updates each month. Each race had a "class' tree kinda like Wow talent tree. you chose the attacks you wanted and went from there. At a certain point you got to spec in a prestige class like lugian juggernaut or luggian berserker. I loved the game and would of kept playing. The reason it died was simply imbalanced classes , and lack of certain content.
They had a bunch of interesting quests , the main one i rember was the armor quest. Running around a drained lake trying to collect thigns while also avoiding death unelss you had a group. i have nightmares about running around a hill looking for pyreals on the ground.........i spent the better part of a day or more collecting them but the armor was worth it.
Draeven on
Morskitter wrote "Spikes, choppas, tentacles, magic? Can't hold a candle to Sergeant Pimp here."
Why did AC2 die, anyway? I remember reading announcements for it and thinking the screenshots were very pretty, but since I was on the shittiest of dialup at the time (not to mention lacking a credit card and income) I wasn't really into MMOs at the time.
The in game chat died due to Microsoft's servers shitting themselves.
Microsoft refused to allow Turbine to fix it for over a year.
Let me repeat that, just in case you missed the epic dick move:
For over a year, you could not talk in game. And Microsoft refused to allow Turbine to fix it.
BTW, Microsoft was also working on a (now dead) MMO called Mythica to replace AC2 at the same time. They were intentionally trying to kill AC2 to drive people to Mythica.
From what I understand, part of the terms of the settlement was MS gave Turbine the AC/AC2 IP, and killed Mythica.
This is also why combat macroers in AC1 were so bad for so long -- Microsoft did the math and decided X combat macroers paying for accounts at the same time were worth Y people quitting cause of them.
I was completely unaware of the chat bug, i knew that the chat would go out for pierds of time but was unaware of the chat issue. I didn't start playing untell turbine took full control.
Draeven on
Morskitter wrote "Spikes, choppas, tentacles, magic? Can't hold a candle to Sergeant Pimp here."
People who were playing the game during the period where chat was fucked up had me under the impression that they were busted for a couple months and not a year.
The expansion was good for a couple months but WoW taking a bit over 50% of the AC2 player base, and the expansion not really recovering any of them for more then a couple months was what did AC2 in. AC kept going because its playerbase was much deeper then AC2s, and there are people who went back to AC when AC2 finally shutdown.
Well, to be honest I didn't go through it first hand, AC2 didn't grab me during the beta and I got distracted by work/school/etc back then. I finally bit when AC2 Legions came out, and, yeah. Depressing.
I do wish they'd try an AC2 free to play server, but the initial investment's probably too high.
or a combined , you play ac and ac2 you can get a single sub for 15 bucks, or even do it where if you buy ac ou get to download ac2 for free, or vice versa.
Draeven on
Morskitter wrote "Spikes, choppas, tentacles, magic? Can't hold a candle to Sergeant Pimp here."
or a combined , you play ac and ac2 you can get a single sub for 15 bucks, or even do it where if you buy ac ou get to download ac2 for free, or vice versa.
AC2 Had a really story driven system from what I remember. I played at launch, never got too far into things, but I remember the whole thing of the quests was to figure out why the world was totally deserted and destroyed.
seabass on
Run you pigeons, it's Robert Frost!
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AngryThe glory I had witnessedwas just a sleight of handRegistered Userregular
edited June 2010
ac2 had an amazing 1-30. tons of really interesting quests that you worked through.
30-50 was awful. from 43? to 50 literally all you did was try and kill some stupid dragons in one zone. the single raid instance was virtually impossible.
I would thik they never got the chance to do squat with AC2 given its short shelf life.
A reoccurring theme with Turbine, which is really sad. I have to wonder what would have happened if they had hired a Graphics Design Intern to make a new retail box every 6 months or so, with all the monthly updates on the CD.
KiTA on
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AngryThe glory I had witnessedwas just a sleight of handRegistered Userregular
edited June 2010
oh and the chat thing wasn't a year. it would cut out randomly for like 2 months.
AC2's biggest flaw in my mind was that it wanted to be a raid style mmo first. Then they forgot to add the raid parts. I always felt like that someone wanted this to be Everquest with AC's IP. I can see that someone wanted a much more "group" oriented play, but the freaking cut out the single player balls in the process. You really had a hard time fighting one equal level enemy sometimes, forget 2 or 3 at a time.
After 40 it became like this
Lets see, REGULAR landscape monsters that can 3 hit you, better bring a healer, and a tank, and dps. Tank to take an extra shot or 2. Healer to try and heal the random attacks of the monster, and dps because while the monster can 2 shot the healer, your going to have to spend 5 minutes killing it.
Any of the vault sections, better have a trifecta again. Or at least one healer and lots of dps.
I didn't help that no one knew how to build a good system to allow combat to not be 123 your dead unless you have a healer. I remember many a fight after 40 that was just the monster randomly smashing folks and your healer just had to be good enough to keep on top of it. It was always just chaos.
Lets see other probs
Oh that tank that can somewhat heal itself (lugian reavers i think), nerf it right out the door.
Item magic archers, o lo lol, a class that can actually kite? Nerf it. No? you want the the other classes buffed instead? hahahahah. (I was an item magic archer, i was one of the few people who could actually fight anything with a good chance at success, and yes im bitter).
All the skill based combat was gone. Holding a choke point so only 1 or 2 monsters can hit you? gone. Dodging arrows or magic? gone. Landscape to absorb those missle attacks? No luck there either.
Portal and lifestone ties required there own skill points above and beyond picking up item magic. I don't know a soul that picked those up because those skill points were so desperately needed elsewhere. There was no room at all for that kind of luxury skill.
I remember they nerfed just about anything, with only one or two buffs anywhere. Seriously, the game should have been in beta for another year.
Despite the problems with needing a group to advance in any way after 40ish, people still hit the freaking 50 level cap in a month or two. Guess what wasn't there? Thats right, anything resembling content. This is a common reoccurring theme to this day with any new mmo. Its what killed Earth and Beyond, and hurt Conan badly.
Combat kinda resembled DAoC combat in that you could get badly screwed by the random number generator. What i mean is that "even" con monsters had about a 50/50 chance of wrecking your shit no matter what you did. What did this mean to me an AC 1 player? ANGER AND RAGE. Being able to take on hordes of monsters is a keystone of AC.
Oh and the GOD DAMN BROKEN CHAT SYSTEM. Talk about BS. Thats one thing that CANNOT BE TOTALLY BROKEN, and it was for the majority of time i played that game.
Im trying to think of the good things I experienced with the game and im really coming up short. The vault stories were really cool. And I like the idea behind the experience system, even if it was poorly implemented. The graphics were technically great, but I didn't really find them appealing.
Oh I really dug the item creation / gathering process. It was a little tedious, but it was a pretty good system.
The only thing this game had in common with AC1 was the name in the title and the IP stuff, monster names city names and places. Every scrap of combat and general game mechanics was gone. I really have no idea who they were trying to appeal too. It just seems that they managed to alienate alot of the fan base when AC2 went live. At this point I want to blame microsoft for a lot of those problems. But I saw a lot of the same problems with the DDO launch that are similar to the AC2 launch. It seems that they finally started getting things right with LOTRO. But sadly by that point WoW was out and after playing the LOTRO beta, I didn't really find the appeal in it to give it a proper run.
Shows how much I got into that abomination of a game, I guess. My brief time was spent slowly discovering I was investing in a gimped skill tree and then saying "fuck this."
So, Gear Knights. My dream of a speced Bow/MACE/Melee/Magic D/Arcane template have finally materialized. Too bad the Gear knights take up 30% more screen real estate than a regular character. Oh and more clicking! Your armor has to be converted to be any use to you, and if you want to to give it to someone else you have to unconvert it. 2 more unnecessary items in your pack.
I wonder what their gig is, adding all these extra races? Just something fun to do? Or perhaps now that they have the tech, they're adding in things they wanted to add in years ago?
I wonder what their gig is, adding all these extra races? Just something fun to do? Or perhaps now that they have the tech, they're adding in things they wanted to add in years ago?
Bingo.
I pop in and out of AC still, there is a lot of drama in the game. Solclaim has a really close knit community and I managed to piss a lot of people off.
It goes like this. I UCM'd and meta/power gamed my way to level 250ish. My character is a pure swordsman. Life/Item/Spec creature. Full epic cantrip covenant suit, and 2 packs full of max stat swords. I have every quest sword, every rend, and every bandit sword possible. Max tinkered on max stats. It took a lot of macro'd hunting and trading and a terrible amount of time to reach that point. But what did it get me?
Invulnerability. When I do play for a few weeks I've been known to solo quests people take groups on. I've soloed hard harbinger, the 180+ arefalle, and aerbax. People got irate at me when I stopped leading quests or being exclusive as to who I would take with me. I don't get invited on colo runs anymore because I pissed off everyone by bringing a sword and rares that let me one shot everything in the last room.
That's right folks, the people on Solclaim hate me because I made a good melee character, and geared him correctly. I've got a mule with every single slot filled with max MMD stacks, another mule full of MFK's....all with one character.
I never really understood it, but oh well. The last time I played I was in a 180+ aerfalle group (just for fun, I like the quest). 7 people. We get to the last room with 40 minutes left on the clock (you have 1 hour to do the quest), everyone dies within 10 minutes. No one listened to me when I was trying to explain how to glitch her and her minions so you only get hit by one thing....and everyone died.
I stood there for 15 minutes and glitched her in the door, then killed her. I got the reward while everyone else was screaming in general chat to me to leave so we could re-do the quest.
Perhaps it's the fact that I don't really take shit from anyone, I'm a lone wolf, and I ignore those who beg me to do stuff for them...
I do give out a ton of crap to people who ask nicely though. Hell, I outfitted one of my few friends in the game with a full epic suit once tailoring came out. And hooked up a newbie with 5000 MMD notes, and a full no-req major suit and weapons....but still, I am the scourge of Solclaim.
I kind of want to go back and make a Gearknight, I always thought they where cool. When the hunting spot came out for them I must have farmed it for like 4 days straight of macroing (they dropped MFK's and top tier loot, and I could 1 shot them with a lightning bandit! Plus, they could never kill me with spec healing and my suit.). Sadly, I could never bring myself to make a new character. Crusix is just to perfect, I'll never attain that kind of perfection again.
Every time i see this thread now the words "RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE" echo through my head.
I hope the other races don't suck up so much screen real estate like the gear knights did. The lugians are the same basic shape though so you they will probably have the same issues.
Posts
The new ground textures do look pretty nice though.
Lugians, Tumeroks and Drudges were all fantastic to play in AC2.
i miss my juggy. ac2 had the funnest classes. horribly balanced, but a lot of fun.
Drudges were a preorder bonus for the AC2 expansion I believe. Or something like that. I never did play AC2 much.
Yes they were preorder and then a month after the expansion went live they were available to everyone. They had two paths they could put points into, one that involved using a head bash and I think the other involved eating bugs.
edit: I stopped playing AC2 about a month after Turbine announced they were shutting it down.
It didn't help that they basically announced that AC2 was dead within what, a week of the expansion?
They need to figure out how to advertise.
They had a bunch of interesting quests , the main one i rember was the armor quest. Running around a drained lake trying to collect thigns while also avoiding death unelss you had a group. i have nightmares about running around a hill looking for pyreals on the ground.........i spent the better part of a day or more collecting them but the armor was worth it.
The in game chat died due to Microsoft's servers shitting themselves.
Microsoft refused to allow Turbine to fix it for over a year.
Let me repeat that, just in case you missed the epic dick move:
For over a year, you could not talk in game. And Microsoft refused to allow Turbine to fix it.
BTW, Microsoft was also working on a (now dead) MMO called Mythica to replace AC2 at the same time. They were intentionally trying to kill AC2 to drive people to Mythica.
From what I understand, part of the terms of the settlement was MS gave Turbine the AC/AC2 IP, and killed Mythica.
This is also why combat macroers in AC1 were so bad for so long -- Microsoft did the math and decided X combat macroers paying for accounts at the same time were worth Y people quitting cause of them.
The expansion was good for a couple months but WoW taking a bit over 50% of the AC2 player base, and the expansion not really recovering any of them for more then a couple months was what did AC2 in. AC kept going because its playerbase was much deeper then AC2s, and there are people who went back to AC when AC2 finally shutdown.
I do wish they'd try an AC2 free to play server, but the initial investment's probably too high.
AC2 Had a really story driven system from what I remember. I played at launch, never got too far into things, but I remember the whole thing of the quests was to figure out why the world was totally deserted and destroyed.
30-50 was awful. from 43? to 50 literally all you did was try and kill some stupid dragons in one zone. the single raid instance was virtually impossible.
A reoccurring theme with Turbine, which is really sad. I have to wonder what would have happened if they had hired a Graphics Design Intern to make a new retail box every 6 months or so, with all the monthly updates on the CD.
After 40 it became like this
Lets see, REGULAR landscape monsters that can 3 hit you, better bring a healer, and a tank, and dps. Tank to take an extra shot or 2. Healer to try and heal the random attacks of the monster, and dps because while the monster can 2 shot the healer, your going to have to spend 5 minutes killing it.
Any of the vault sections, better have a trifecta again. Or at least one healer and lots of dps.
I didn't help that no one knew how to build a good system to allow combat to not be 123 your dead unless you have a healer. I remember many a fight after 40 that was just the monster randomly smashing folks and your healer just had to be good enough to keep on top of it. It was always just chaos.
Lets see other probs
Oh that tank that can somewhat heal itself (lugian reavers i think), nerf it right out the door.
Item magic archers, o lo lol, a class that can actually kite? Nerf it. No? you want the the other classes buffed instead? hahahahah. (I was an item magic archer, i was one of the few people who could actually fight anything with a good chance at success, and yes im bitter).
All the skill based combat was gone. Holding a choke point so only 1 or 2 monsters can hit you? gone. Dodging arrows or magic? gone. Landscape to absorb those missle attacks? No luck there either.
Portal and lifestone ties required there own skill points above and beyond picking up item magic. I don't know a soul that picked those up because those skill points were so desperately needed elsewhere. There was no room at all for that kind of luxury skill.
I remember they nerfed just about anything, with only one or two buffs anywhere. Seriously, the game should have been in beta for another year.
Despite the problems with needing a group to advance in any way after 40ish, people still hit the freaking 50 level cap in a month or two. Guess what wasn't there? Thats right, anything resembling content. This is a common reoccurring theme to this day with any new mmo. Its what killed Earth and Beyond, and hurt Conan badly.
Combat kinda resembled DAoC combat in that you could get badly screwed by the random number generator. What i mean is that "even" con monsters had about a 50/50 chance of wrecking your shit no matter what you did. What did this mean to me an AC 1 player? ANGER AND RAGE. Being able to take on hordes of monsters is a keystone of AC.
Oh and the GOD DAMN BROKEN CHAT SYSTEM. Talk about BS. Thats one thing that CANNOT BE TOTALLY BROKEN, and it was for the majority of time i played that game.
Im trying to think of the good things I experienced with the game and im really coming up short. The vault stories were really cool. And I like the idea behind the experience system, even if it was poorly implemented. The graphics were technically great, but I didn't really find them appealing.
Oh I really dug the item creation / gathering process. It was a little tedious, but it was a pretty good system.
The only thing this game had in common with AC1 was the name in the title and the IP stuff, monster names city names and places. Every scrap of combat and general game mechanics was gone. I really have no idea who they were trying to appeal too. It just seems that they managed to alienate alot of the fan base when AC2 went live. At this point I want to blame microsoft for a lot of those problems. But I saw a lot of the same problems with the DDO launch that are similar to the AC2 launch. It seems that they finally started getting things right with LOTRO. But sadly by that point WoW was out and after playing the LOTRO beta, I didn't really find the appeal in it to give it a proper run.
(dear god this a wall of text)
Bingo.
I pop in and out of AC still, there is a lot of drama in the game. Solclaim has a really close knit community and I managed to piss a lot of people off.
It goes like this. I UCM'd and meta/power gamed my way to level 250ish. My character is a pure swordsman. Life/Item/Spec creature. Full epic cantrip covenant suit, and 2 packs full of max stat swords. I have every quest sword, every rend, and every bandit sword possible. Max tinkered on max stats. It took a lot of macro'd hunting and trading and a terrible amount of time to reach that point. But what did it get me?
Invulnerability. When I do play for a few weeks I've been known to solo quests people take groups on. I've soloed hard harbinger, the 180+ arefalle, and aerbax. People got irate at me when I stopped leading quests or being exclusive as to who I would take with me. I don't get invited on colo runs anymore because I pissed off everyone by bringing a sword and rares that let me one shot everything in the last room.
That's right folks, the people on Solclaim hate me because I made a good melee character, and geared him correctly. I've got a mule with every single slot filled with max MMD stacks, another mule full of MFK's....all with one character.
I never really understood it, but oh well. The last time I played I was in a 180+ aerfalle group (just for fun, I like the quest). 7 people. We get to the last room with 40 minutes left on the clock (you have 1 hour to do the quest), everyone dies within 10 minutes. No one listened to me when I was trying to explain how to glitch her and her minions so you only get hit by one thing....and everyone died.
I stood there for 15 minutes and glitched her in the door, then killed her. I got the reward while everyone else was screaming in general chat to me to leave so we could re-do the quest.
Perhaps it's the fact that I don't really take shit from anyone, I'm a lone wolf, and I ignore those who beg me to do stuff for them...
I do give out a ton of crap to people who ask nicely though. Hell, I outfitted one of my few friends in the game with a full epic suit once tailoring came out. And hooked up a newbie with 5000 MMD notes, and a full no-req major suit and weapons....but still, I am the scourge of Solclaim.
I kind of want to go back and make a Gearknight, I always thought they where cool. When the hunting spot came out for them I must have farmed it for like 4 days straight of macroing (they dropped MFK's and top tier loot, and I could 1 shot them with a lightning bandit! Plus, they could never kill me with spec healing and my suit.). Sadly, I could never bring myself to make a new character. Crusix is just to perfect, I'll never attain that kind of perfection again.
Sorry, that was my AC rant.
It was? Shit, my apologies! I was trying to explain how the community acts in the game these days, perhaps it didn't translate well.
No, it translated perfectly.
I hope the other races don't suck up so much screen real estate like the gear knights did. The lugians are the same basic shape though so you they will probably have the same issues.