Bay 12 Games Forum

Dragon's Prophet main website

A good video overview of gameplay and features by TotalBiscuit

Dragon's Prophet is a free to play MMORPG in the vein of Tera or Neverwinter with a focus on attack timing, character placement and timed evasion. It also has a unique pet system; Dragons are more than just a placeholder in the title. Every character regardless of class will be able to tame and summon a dragon ally, and there are several dozen different dragons of various species to collect, each with it's own stats and skills. These serve a dual purpose, both as a mount for the player and an ally for combat.

The game also has some pretty robust character development. Despite only having four classes to choose from, each class has a wide range of skills to pick and choose so you can develop your own playstyle. You also get free stat points each level to invest directly into the character's base statistics to allow even more diversification and letting the player fine-tune their build.

Of course, there are more selling points I could go over but I'm sure there's a dozen different people who have written up something better than I could hope to post here, so let me go over a couple things about what might turn you off from this game:

• The cutscenes and general story elements are fairly bad. The opening scene has the voice-over talking over itself at some points. Personally I don't mind this kind of stuff, I tend to skip story elements in MMOs.
• Questing is standard MMO fetch fodder, if you've played any recent MMO you know the deal.
• I haven't been playing long but from what I gather there isn't much end-game content. This seems to be a pretty common trend in MMOs lately, but the game is still new and there is content in development. However, if you level fast or spend a lot of time playing... Expect to run out of things to do unless you really enjoy collecting/training dragons
• The servers don't appear to be hugely populated for F2P MMO standards. I believe this is because the game simply didn't get much media coverage despite being published by SOE.

Armored Core 5 is being released this Tuesday (3/20/2012) and I figured I should probably make a thread to drum up a bit of interest. Wikipedia sums it up better than I could:

Developers claim that Armored Core V will rely more on tactics and using the geography of the level rather than high-speed finger work. This harks back more to the original PS1 games, especially the first, as many levels were set within city type environments and were more tactical as a consequence. A notable difference will be smaller mechs (5 meter tall, as opposed to the 10 meter mech from the previous releases), which will allow more varied, "three dimensional" stages. Reports from the developer suggest a greater emphasis on stealth as a result of the size change, which allows the mech to maneuver between alleyways and buildings for cover.

The online mode will feature five-on-five team-based battles, with each side battling over specific objectives on a persistent world map. Additionally, one member of the team will be designated as a commander (called an "Operator"), whose job it will be to oversee the larger battle and issue orders to the other team members. A special interface is being designed by the developers to facilitate this.

Here is Namco Bandai's AC5 page which is honestly a bit lacking, and I would also like to point out this video for a bit of gameplay footage and a more inside look at some of the multiplayer features. (Warning: Commentator is kind of annoying)

I don't think "depression" is quite right exactly but I couldn't think of a term that better fits how I feel. I'm not particularly unhappy yet I'm finding that I can't find pleasure in doing any of the things I normally enjoy. There's a stack of games sitting in my room that could easily translate to a month of pure entertainment, and they aren't even sub-par games. They're games I really want to play, but half the time I can't bring myself to start one up, and if I do then playing them doesn't bring nearly as much joy as I would expect (Not that I'm expecting pure and utter bliss, my expectations are still reasonably low). It's a similar situation with other forms of entertainment- Books, television etc. The only thing I can seem to do is listen to music. So the majority of the day I'm listening to music while aimlessly browsing the internet, or excercising. Lots of excercising.

It isn't a particularly bad situation. It just feels rather... empty I suppose. Whenever I'm doing something I can't seem to bring much emotion or feeling to it, just this sense of neutrality or possibly apathy. Like I don't quite care, or circumstances don't really hold any meaning. Originally I intended to just write this out and see if it brought any bit of enlightenment about how I feel or what I should do- It didn't, so I figure I'll just post it and see what happens. I'm seeing a therapist and all that jazz, so I guess I've got that covered.

This is a topic for people that have several games they would like to play, but aren't sure where to start and would like some opinions on what games should take priority. I realize this is a very subjective thing since everyone has different tastes in games, but I personally have a chronic bout of crippling indecision when faced with so many choices, and I figure maybe someone else might too. I figure I'd give it a try and see if it works out.

People are encouraged to post their own list, and offer opinions as well. Feel free to add comments on what you prefer to play. Also maybe keep your list down to stuff you know you would like to play; I'm not sure about this rule yet though.

I'll start it off. I'll add in some RTS games but they are generally low priority for me, tell me if one has particularly noteworthy story/gameplay worth experiencing.

• AI War: Fleet Command
• Amnesia: The Dark Descent
• Aquaria
• Breath of Death VII
• Cthulu Saves the World
• Dead Space 2
• Deus Ex: Invisible War
• Fable 3
• Gothic series- 1 through 4
• Hitman series*
• King's Bounty: Armored Princess
• The Last Remnant
• Mass Effect 2
• Prince of Persia series
• Supreme Commander 2
• Thief: Deadly Shadows
• Torchlight
• Trine
• Tropico 3
• X series
• Zeno Clash

* I know I've played the first Hitman, and probably the second.

This thread is intended to apply to any game where competition between players is a factor. I've been playing online multiplayer games for quite a few years now. Platformers, First person shooters, MMORPGs, I'll give anything a try if it provides some interesting gameplay aspects. A year or two back I was banned from my first MMO for using an anti-idle macro that I scripted in about five minutes (It was one of my first attempts at scripting anything) in AutoHotkey to farm items while away from my keyboard. I'm not here to whine about that, though.

Online play has become a large basis for a lot of games for the past few years, and in every one of these games comes opportunity to shave off those few precious seconds for every repetitive action you take, via automation. It can come in a variety of forms, but I can't think of anything that doesn't boil down to saving yourself some time and effort. First I would like to list a couple examples that I feel people would commonly encounter.

1. The Bot. It's the guy you see in the same area, killing the same things, day after day after day. That's a really narrow and imprecise description, but I'm sure everyone knows what I'm talking about.

2. The shortcut. In most FPS' you can jump. Sometimes you can duck. Sometimes you can duck while jumping. It doesn't seem like much of a difference, but having a smaller hitbox while moving in midair can be an important technique for gaining the edge over competition. Timing and hitting an extra key can be a pretty big strain on your hand when you're already hitting two or three at a time. A simple tweak will turn it into a single key for both actions, timed to perfection. This applies to every single action in the game; Why press one key for every action when you can combine actions into groups?

I was thinking of adding one or two more, but they are pretty weak examples and I feel these two represent the extreme sides of scripting; One is full on automation of gameplay while the other is a simple little tweak to simplify something you are doing anyway. Finally, I'd like to bring "gaming grade" mice and keyboards into the equation. One of the most common features in these components is that the keys and buttons are fully re-programmable, and often come with a scripting tool built into the drivers. Use of 3rd-party programs is against the rules in most games, and the fancy $60 keyboard you just bought will often fall under this rule depending on how you use it.

The prevalent botting in MMOs is commonly seen as a festering wound on the community, but how often is this the case? I've never played a game where I felt this was directly harming my experience in some way, but I'd like to hear about some other people's experience with this. Everyone has a limit to when these things are acceptable, and when it steps the border into "cheating". My limit comes down to abuse of the game in question; Aimbots in any FPS, or abusing a glitched skill in an MMO. What's your limit, and what do you find acceptable? Do you think automated players in an MMO can ruin the game in question? Any thoughts on how game makers can accommodate player scripting while minimizing abuse to core gameplay? And finally, if well-respected manufacturers (Razer being the big name here) are making it easier for everyone to access these functions, to what degree can game moderators denounce it as "unfair"?