The Leo wrote:

kou_urake wrote:

ThePigeonKing wrote:

I don't think players should do cinematics if it means potential story leakage. No sir.

Agreed.  We all want the cinematics back... but this isn't the way.

Did you 2 even read the suggestion?

Yeah - its still players making the cinematics. No go.

   Well I've never been a man of many words (as indicated by my post count), but I've played MxO since Beta, and I feel the need to say a few words now.

  I was amazed by this game when I first saw the trailer on the Matrix dvd and still when I actually started playing it. We had ingame AIM, a MP3 player, Movie character likenesses/voices, awsome cinematics, a very unique combat system, an awsome story, live events, and a very large and vibrant Dev team.

  Slowly these things were taken from us. First AIM was removed (no big loss there, thought it would have been a nice tool for story progression), and interlock combat was dumbed down (or rather removed in my opinion, the joined animations were not in my opinion what made interlock). All these things were removed when SOE bought the game from Monolith (who truthfully didn't have a clue as to what they were doing in the first place.). These things were acceptable though because we were told then (like we are now) that these losses would eventually make the game better.

  Next to go were the actor likenesses ( Most like Ghost and Niobe were due to other companies already owning the 3D likenesses) Slowly but most unnoticably the voices of the character began to change as well though the new voices were just as good so that was no big issue. Though while this was all going on our Dev team was being "cut back" to an almost unfimiliar shell. Then things like bug fixes and major issues began running rampant without being addressed..(Like floating static objects in the game world, unbalanced classes, broken animations, Vista incompatibility, and 8800 series incompatibility.). Though to be nice the remaining QA dept. Did TRY to fix some of these things, but mostly were relegatated to fixing typos in mission text...Now some will say that there are "work-arounds" for the major issues like the Vista problems and the 8800 lag, but I say to them it is not my hardware that is at fault, we pay for a working game. Players who paid $50 for a game and then $15 a month for service should not have to use a "work-around" for it to funtion, and sadly these issuse have not been address in a timely manner.

Then while our Dev team was being mangled by SOE, the linear evolving story began to suffer..The loss of the Sentinel...the loss of net based puzzels/websites (though the AB team has renewed some of these features), and instead of being linear became a revolving loop of ...This is the new bad guy for the next 6months to a year...He is trying to destroy/harm the Matrix you must stop him, this though was interrupted by the renewing of the war, and then quickly the Matirx returned to buisness as usual... here is your bad guy for the month...But on an upnote we do still have our live events, though they do not sparkle like thay once did, due to the cut backs on our beloved DEV team.All the while we were told by SOE and our DEV teams that these things in the long run would help to make the game better.

 Now we lose our cinematics...the only link some of us players had to the story, (because lets face it unless your a high school kid you're not going to be able to make it home at 5pm EST to make it to a live event.). And now we are told as we were back then after losing so much and seeing no real improvements..the loss of the cinematics will in the long run make the game better...

  I'd just like to say to the DEV team you guys are some of the best I've ever seen you've been fighting an uphill fight since the beginning. Datamine is proof of that and I salute your work on it...though in my opinion resources could have been directed elsewhere had you just made Downtown a free for all pvp zone, and upped the taps and spawns.

Now on to a fwew summary bullet points..

THINGS REMOVED

-AIM

-INTERLOCK

-UNIQUE CHARACTER/VOICES

-99% OF OUR DEV TEAM (and with it the "feel" of the Matrix in the story and quality.)

-QA TEAM

-CINEMATICS

-95% OR OUR PLAYER BASE

THINGS RETURNED FOR OUR LOSSES

-DATAMINE

-MASSIVE GAME BREAKING BUGS AND LINGERING "SMALL" ISSUES...

It truely makes me sad to look at that list, I love this game or did....It use to be the highlight of my day to get home from work and jack in with the other Broodies, and the large community, but both have disappeared along with most of the games features. I mean if I wanted to play by myself, grinding missions in a nearly empty world, with a mission only driven story. I'd play one of Acclaim's free mmorpg's, atleast there they have regular content updates, large DEV teams, and are nearly bugless. Sure these games make most of their money from adverts, but what does it say about MxO if we can't even keep ingame advertisers?

This brings me to my final topic...What exactly are we paying for? As far as I can see it is this...

 -A stagnant game world, reskinned equipment (using the same models over and over), no variety in activities..(either you mission, mine, pvp, or stand around)

Now what does a Free to play MMO offer?

- Reskinned equipment, endless grind with nothing else to do and a vague overall story driven through mission grind.

Those two lists look pretty similar to me, and it saddens me to see how far MxO has fallen, in the beginning the game was 100 times more than what it is now, but still we are told that we must sacrifice what little we now have so that the game can become better...So I ask SOE we have paid our sacrifices in content so when do we "get blessed" with this elusive "better"?

It is rediculous to think that we are paying for a game that has been stripped down to nothing more than a fighting simulation, and we say thank you when they remove even more content with the promise that this is the price we must pay inorder to improve the game.

Now I know it was stated that the story would continue in Live Events and now in the Sentinel, but for those of us that can not attend lives events that leaves us reading one incoherent piece of a short story a month for $15, and that is just NOT acceptable. That would be like authors charging you by the chapter to read their book....And what if we have to unsubscribe for a while and the Sentinel is replaced with a newer version...When we come back are we suppost to jump around asking what happened while we were gone?

 And now to the comment that MxO was not shutting down...Do you really believe that if the hand full of active accounts dwindles below 1000 in the next year or so, that SOE will continue to fund (what little they do now) this game....I say no they wont, but they may not shut down the servers, they will just leave players in a DEV-less, broken world with an unfinished story in the hopes that another notch in their game belt will lure some station access players to purchase a "game".

Seriously I don't see MxO making it until its next anniversary, though SOE may be nice enough to allow this little community drama to play out until then if just to give us a nice send off, but I doubt they care that much.

Thanks for reading my novel..

V

Vedren, that's the best reply I've read on this thread /salute to you Sir!

Agreed.

/phormalcurtsey

I go away for one weekend, ONE WEEKEND, and this game goes to pot. Party resulting in Syntax blowing up, no more cinematics, I mean come on!

Why did we ditch the cinematics? Is it money? Is it that the higher-ups just don't want it? For crying out loud, they're one of the most enjoyable things about this game. Now where do we look do for an introduction into the chapters? The Sentinel? Right, right... *sigh* A bluepill newspaper telling us redpills about major threats to the Matrix.  Storywise, that just doesn't make much sense to me.  I'm super PO'ed that they're getting the axe.  I mean, do we not even get a cool ending cinematic if we're pulling the plug on them?  Or are those two wireframed yahoos cavorting around the last gasp of our cinematics? 

There better be something good about Chapter 10, because this Producer Letter is scaring the *poop* out of me for our community and this game.


Remind not to take the weekend off ever again.  I might come back and they've moved our servers over to The Agency (where they've taken everything else from us to).

ArchDuke wrote:

I go away for one weekend, ONE WEEKEND, and this game goes to pot. Party resulting in Syntax blowing up, no more cinematics, I mean come on!

Why did we ditch the cinematics? Is it money? Is it that the higher-ups just don't want it? For crying out loud, they're one of the most enjoyable things about this game. Now where do we look do for an introduction into the chapters? The Sentinel? Right, right... *sigh* A bluepill newspaper telling us redpills about major threats to the Matrix.  Storywise, that just doesn't make much sense to me.  I'm super PO'ed that they're getting the axe.  I mean, do we not even get a cool ending cinematic if we're pulling the plug on them?  Or are those two wireframed yahoos cavorting around the last gasp of our cinematics? 

There better be something good about Chapter 10, because this Producer Letter is scaring the *poop* out of me for our community and this game.


Remind not to take the weekend off ever again.  I might come back and they've moved our servers over to The Agency (where they've taken everything else from us to).

Pff you're just jealous you missed the blow up party. =P

And as I said earlier in...hm I think it was this thread, maybe not...the Sentinel is not coming back to try to do what cinematics did. It's still the Sentinel.

ArchDuke wrote:

I go away for one weekend, ONE WEEKEND, and this game goes to pot. Party resulting in Syntax blowing up, no more cinematics, I mean come on!

Why did we ditch the cinematics? Is it money? Is it that the higher-ups just don't want it? For crying out loud, they're one of the most enjoyable things about this game. Now where do we look do for an introduction into the chapters? The Sentinel? Right, right... *sigh* A bluepill newspaper telling us redpills about major threats to the Matrix.  Storywise, that just doesn't make much sense to me.  I'm super PO'ed that they're getting the axe.  I mean, do we not even get a cool ending cinematic if we're pulling the plug on them?  Or are those two wireframed yahoos cavorting around the last gasp of our cinematics? 

There better be something good about Chapter 10, because this Producer Letter is scaring the *poop* out of me for our community and this game.


Remind not to take the weekend off ever again.  I might come back and they've moved our servers over to The Agency (where they've taken everything else from us to).

Pff you're just jealous you missed the blow up party. =P

And as I said earlier in...hm I think it was this thread, maybe not...the Sentinel is not coming back to try to do what cinematics did. It's still the Sentinel.

   If I may ask then...What is going to pick up the slack that the demise of the cinematics leave if not the sentinel? If we don't get a static (non live event) formal introduction to new events, most players will not be able to follow the storyline....We are use to having to piece the details of the story together from riddles in the Sentinel and other sources (ie missions), but to hinge the story on a one time event is not the answer...because players want to see the story unfold before them not come here and read a posted summary and screenshots just to know the current state of things.

Perhaps a new type of Archive mission could be implemented, one that "replays" the high points of a live event to a player or group of players...These reenactments would ofcourse lack interactivity other than fighting and clicking the npc's to "talk" to them, and would also be shorter in time frame. For example if Flood called the mervs in to combat a force of accleterated exiles at a sensitive point in the system..Flood's dialogue and the combat could be reasonably reenacted in mission format, and with it another added bonus...Players of all servers could enjoy the lives events no matter their server of origin or timeframe...Also the oppertunity for more archive rewards...

V

Lack of a cinematic means I won't really be looking forward to patch day anymore.

Rarebit wrote:

ArchDuke wrote:

I go away for one weekend, ONE WEEKEND, and this game goes to pot. Party resulting in Syntax blowing up, no more cinematics, I mean come on!

Why did we ditch the cinematics? Is it money? Is it that the higher-ups just don't want it? For crying out loud, they're one of the most enjoyable things about this game. Now where do we look do for an introduction into the chapters? The Sentinel? Right, right... *sigh* A bluepill newspaper telling us redpills about major threats to the Matrix.  Storywise, that just doesn't make much sense to me.  I'm super PO'ed that they're getting the axe.  I mean, do we not even get a cool ending cinematic if we're pulling the plug on them?  Or are those two wireframed yahoos cavorting around the last gasp of our cinematics? 

There better be something good about Chapter 10, because this Producer Letter is scaring the *poop* out of me for our community and this game.


Remind not to take the weekend off ever again.  I might come back and they've moved our servers over to The Agency (where they've taken everything else from us to).

Pff you're just jealous you missed the blow up party. =P

And as I said earlier in...hm I think it was this thread, maybe not...the Sentinel is not coming back to try to do what cinematics did. It's still the Sentinel.

 

   If I may ask then...What is going to pick up the slack that the demise of the cinematics leave if not the sentinel? If we don't get a static (non live event) formal introduction to new events, most players will not be able to follow the storyline....We are use to having to piece the details of the story together from riddles in the Sentinel and other sources (ie missions), but to hinge the story on a one time event is not the answer...because players want to see the story unfold before them not come here and read a posted summary and screenshots just to know the current state of things.

Perhaps a new type of Archive mission could be implemented, one that "replays" the high points of a live event to a player or group of players...These reenactments would ofcourse lack interactivity other than fighting and clicking the npc's to "talk" to them, and would also be shorter in time frame. For example if Flood called the mervs in to combat a force of accleterated exiles at a sensitive point in the system..Flood's dialogue and the combat could be reasonably reenacted in mission format, and with it another added bonus...Players of all servers could enjoy the lives events no matter their server of origin or timeframe...Also the oppertunity for more archive rewards...

 

V

I suppose it will be mostly Live Events that have to pick up things that might have been handled in cinematics before. And we've been doing story-critical stuff in live events for quite some time now; I try to have the main points of things that happened in a critical live event mentioned in the next critical mission, but yeah, anyone who hasn't been checking out the live event posts, or asking other players in-game, will have been missing a lot of the story detail.

Even if I could crank out all the missions that would be necessary to do it, there's really no way that the mission system can recapture what goes on in Live Events. When I plot out each new subchapter, I very specifically divide the action up between things that the mission system can handle, and things that Live Events can handle, so they can complement each other. Each of them does things that the other can't.

EDIT: Hm, I could also mention that when I was writing out the next year or so of story over the holidays, I sketched out the mission/event highlights for each subchapter, leaving the cinematic parts blank (at that point I wasn't absolutely sure we wouldn't be able to do cinematics of some sort...I had some insane idea before Christmas of speed sketching them myself =p). I came back to fill in the blanks for what would happen in cinematics, and found that I'd already covered the real dramatic points in missions and events. I don't know if that might have been a subconscious adjustment or what, but I think it's definitely a sign to me that now that I have a year's more experience telling the story through missions and events, it's much easier to see how we can bring the plot into the game itself, instead of having to rely on essentially out-of-game cinematics. So I'm really not worried about being able to tell a story at least as exciting as we've had to date without cinematics. It would be really cool to have cinematics to provide highlights, and yeah you don't get cool animation and sound effects from a Live Event post, so it does take more effort to absorb what's going on, but lack of cinematics won't cripple the actual storyline itself.

You do have a fair point about the critical missions. I know for a fact that a number of people don't run them anymore (I'm pointing rather excessively at Goligoth for one) and when I was with the cyph's I wrote a few mission summaries on the faction website and people like Goligoth liked them as it helped with the story as there are points and little details that you only get from them.

I do have a wondering though about how live event reports can possibly be made easier to get through though, as if people are wanting to get information off them you do have to sit there and read through the mass of screenshots, it's never fun

You know how people have been positive about the large scale events during the anniversary? Are there any thoughts to do them every now and again? I'm sure people wouldn't mind a gap between normal live events and/or release of missions if there could be big events again. Oh and I know that you get over a certain number then the servers start having a mental breakdown but they're still great