Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[The_Explorer]

Ignoring his own self created controversys...

This was one of a kind. The only way this could be improved upon is if you had actual citizens roaming around like in simcity instead of mostly just standing there not doing much. That was the main thing for me is the...game felt kinda static but at the same time living? Was kinda weird. Reminded me of being inside the Twilight Zone but in a game. Kinda creeped me out too much. It wasn't the graphics or anything like that...it was...the game bordered too much on everything static...but trying to be immersive and real. The only thing I can think is how fake the npcs felt. They just stood around staring at you with empty creepy as hell eyes and just standing there...like mannequins...that is it...and I have a severe phobia of mannequins...and that was how every npc felt like.... But...felt immersive at the same time...except that...

[Sensei]

Oh yeah- and let it be immortalized in this thread, that every single new player accidentally killed, and then butchered, the tutorial character, before even completing his dialogue. Because why WOULDN'T you try left-clicking on him? Then, you probably picked up his skin and used it to make the flag you need to found your first city.

In any other game this would have been changed- make the tutorial character invincible, or make the controls to talk to him more obvious, maybe an "Are you sure?" pop-up before attacking him. But this didn't fit Haxus' idea of immersion, or something, because I'm pretty sure he could easily have fixed this if he wanted to.

[deoloth]

I had fun with the new ship designer but... it really made ship building take longer and more complicated. I actually loved the old designer, even though people complained about it, and was sad to see it go. I can say the same about the old tile system for city building as well. The new ship designer could have been good... but it really sucked spending 11+ hours to building a ship only to discover a movement issue that was not apparent in the preview design option. Not to mention you really could not build a quick ship with the designer, every design felt like a slog to get working.

I hope to see hazeron, or something similar to it, in the future. It was really a unique game.

[JWNoctis]

Hahaha. Oh man, the guy really went off the deep end after I quit the game. I just browsed the forum for a few minutes out of curiosity and saw the thread about sex. He added nudity and sex to the game right before working toward a steam release, giving his steam listing an adult rating stating that it contains sex.

That's just special.

...

Now I'm just glad to remember it as it was, a neat if somewhat clunky and very laggy city builder - spaceship designer - some-kind-of-4X combo.

Sometimes it's good to let go indeed.

[The_Explorer]

In a lot of ways the dev for hazeron reminded me of the LoL dev...tbh I thought they were the same dev when I first got into LoL till I looked it up lol. I thought the hazeron creator decided to make another game...xD...both set in their ways and want to make the game they want to make no matter the cost. And both kinda act the same really. And funny enough, both games are/were some the most unique games that were and are out there. Nothing like LoL really around, guess that one game Ymera or whatever it is was based off of it but its not the same. And not really anything quite like Hazeron, especially with the city builder stuff on top of what it had.

Still to this day I have yet to find a galaxy sized city builder Just hazeron

[The_Explorer]

Other unique games that are long dead or kinda around in some way...I imagine this kinda fits in this thread since hazeron was so unique

Anyone ever play a game called Lands of Hope (or Forlorn Online as it became to be called toward the end. No not the junk steam game he made, he never could replicate how good the original was lol)? It was still the only browser RPG that was like it, had an incredible indepth housing/dungeon building system and outside of Runescape, was probably the biggest and only browser game I ever liked. Not just the building system, but had the best pet system to be seen in a browser game let alone most games in general...nothing ever came out again like it. Sadly got pretty pay to win toward the end, but besides that, was really good for a long time.

Asheron's Call is alive through emulators...but no one still has made a world as unique as Asheron's Call. Like, still the best npc enemy ever (for me) is the Olthoi and it truly was a diablo loot system that was done extremely well. And if anyone played during Bael'zharon event...an actual GM played as Bael'zharon and the whole thing was just amazing. Granted, I dunno if I could go back to such an old MMO even if it is still around. Tbh I did try to get into it again a year or two ago, but the control system is too archaic and I quit.

Guess SWG would be the same in that there is yet to be a star wars MMO or an MMO at all like SWG, I still play emulator(s) for it, but one of a kind for an MMO/especially a star wars one.

Anarchy Online...well this one is probably a given. Okay so its not dead, but any funcom game is a dead game lol, they abandon all their games (except conan exiles) and leave them to die so its pretty much dead. Still outside of funcom being a dead heap of a company, AO after it fixed its launch issues was probably one of the most unique MMOs ever played and no MMO around like it. I guess I'll throw in city of heroes as a side note along with AO, but there are some superhero MMOs around and I didn't think it was THAT unique outside of theme/setting, but unique enough to get a mention. I still loved CoH so nothing bad about it, but not really as unique as people make it out to be imo, maybe for the time it was. But yeah, as far as AO goes...that game was pretty awesome.

Istaria/Horizons...well I mean...the only playable MMO with a dragon...AND...its....still updated? UPDATED FOR DECADES AND DECADES? Yeah dunno, the company who started it is still updating it...surprising I know lol. That makes it unique in itself just because the game is kinda small community wise. Or maybe the community took it over, not sure, pretty sure original people kept going the whole time which makes it unique in itself. Its also the extremely rare PvE based sandbox (mostly sandbox) MMO, alongside Ryzom...every other single sandbox MMO or anything vaguely sandbox is just a gankfest MMO (update: Istaria is ran by volunteers, so community ran pretty much. Pretty neat)

Hm...I'm sure there are a lot more unique MMOs out there. Neocron is one, but I never got into it. There is Planet Entropia, which before you say anything, is actually extremely good if you play it as a normal MMO with a 15 dollar "subscription" fee, ignoring its a casino MMO...its actually good, though more like second life than anything else as the MMO I only enjoyed because of the community/social atmosphere. Also the community in planet entropia is probably surprisingly the most friendly (but not creepily overly friendly) community I've ever seen in an MMO...dunno how that happened lol. But literally never experienced in an MMO such an amazing REAL community where there wasn't any douches, gankers, harrassers, trolls or people pretending to be nice to you and overly friendly, just completely normal people lol, probably only reason I enjoyed my time in PE...but that makes it pretty unique to me.

[Paul]

Most of those older games that were so fun when we played them are kind of boring now that we've seen newer graphics and mechanics, even if the newer mechanics don't actually feel better when we think back to compare them. The newer games might not have the spark that makes them as good as the old games, but it's hard to go back to the old graphics and clunky interfaces.

I played a lot of MMOs in my youth that I have fond memories of, but most of them would probably suck if I tried them now. I know I don't have the time to play like I used to haha. Back when I played Shadowbane I played the game like it was a second job, which it almost was with trying to lead a guild and herd all the cats to do stuff.

I knew a guy who tried to get me into Entropia repeatedly while we were in college together. I tried it a bit on two or three different occasions but the whole barely disguised casino thing was a no go for me. He had put a ton of money into the game and had a space ship and was running a taxi service and escort services or something in addition to other stuff. He had actually quit his IRL job to play the game more and claimed he was making a living on it, but I remember doing the math based on the numbers he was telling me and the guy was making slightly less than minimum wage in his state and making up the difference by playing like 100 hours a week. Even after we graduated he didn't try to get a job with his degree and was still doing it for at least a few years while we kept in touch. I'm surprised the game is still around, that was a long time ago. I wonder if the guy is still doing that - IDK how to even contact him this many years later, but it would be hilarious if he's still a virtual taxi driver after so many years.

[The_Explorer]

Most of those older games that were so fun when we played them are kind of boring now that we've seen newer graphics and mechanics, even if the newer mechanics don't actually feel better when we think back to compare them. The newer games might not have the spark that makes them as good as the old games, but it's hard to go back to the old graphics and clunky interfaces.

I played a lot of MMOs in my youth that I have fond memories of, but most of them would probably suck if I tried them now. I know I don't have the time to play like I used to haha. Back when I played Shadowbane I played the game like it was a second job, which it almost was with trying to lead a guild and herd all the cats to do stuff.

I knew a guy who tried to get me into Entropia repeatedly while we were in college together. I tried it a bit on two or three different occasions but the whole barely disguised casino thing was a no go for me. He had put a ton of money into the game and had a space ship and was running a taxi service and escort services or something in addition to other stuff. He had actually quit his IRL job to play the game more and claimed he was making a living on it, but I remember doing the math based on the numbers he was telling me and the guy was making slightly less than minimum wage in his state and making up the difference by playing like 100 hours a week. Even after we graduated he didn't try to get a job with his degree and was still doing it for at least a few years while we kept in touch. I'm surprised the game is still around, that was a long time ago. I wonder if the guy is still doing that - IDK how to even contact him this many years later, but it would be hilarious if he's still a virtual taxi driver after so many years.

yeah, most of the older ones I mentioned I probably wouldn't want to go back to. SWG is fine (at least to me), but the others...for me at least its not the graphics, but how it controls and everything. SWG controls fine, but like trying to move in Istaria or AC make it a no-go for me.

As for Entropia...yeah, I did end up stopping after a few months. But I do give it praise for the community. The underlining casino to it kinda took away too much, but still treated it as a 15 dollar a month MMO never went in caring about money at all. 99% of the people who go into entropia treat it like some bitcoin MMO and play it for money instead of the game. Which I guess is how its intended, maybe didn't play it the way its intended lol.

[se5a]

It kind of felt like he was trying to turn the game into a second life clone or something. the whole sex thing was just... yeah I dunno. and the new char designer mad that even more horrifically weird.
He was pretty egotistical too, in that he couldn't look at what other game programmers were doing and use those ideas to solve his own problems.
I mean, the old designer could have been enhanced with some sort of NURBS, or Bézier or something for the outer skin, and it would have been more than fine. the new designer was also stuck in the old 3d modeler tech which made it hard to use. I ended up doing all my designs in openscad and porting them. still a painfully long winded process though, and yeah always took a couple of iterations of building them and using them to find all the "bugs" in the design, and even then there ended up being little annoyances with the design that you just couldn't be bothered fixing.

[Gabeux]

Obligatory yearly Bay12 Hazeron meet-up. Awesome. 

I played it a bit before it went down. Got a whole empire going by myself with high quality materials while using ship designs from everyone else but me, because I couldn't be bothered learning the designer. Took me a couple hours just to be able to learn how to modify other people's ships properly. Lag wasn't so bad and fun was had, but I dropped it as hard as I went back into it..it gets very chore-y when you get a few planets, and I didn't go after playing with others, which made the game boring rather quick.
A couple months later I was very confused that the game had vanished, yet again.

Hazeron story and history is wild.

[Mattk50]

You can't really play an MMO where the community management is like that though. You just cant have game masters sending you threats in DMs and randomly deleting your stuff because you fought back when they or someone in their empire attacked your city. You also can't have a dev who goes on insane tirades about how his wife hates his playerbase. The bizzare political views are bad but even if you just look at how he ran the game itself there was no way that was going to work out.

People just drastically underestimate how important it is for the devs to be decent people for the health of "MMOs" (the old definition).