23rd September 2010, 5:39 PM
Quote:Nope, I have never played it before and only heard about it recently.
And you're the one with the "common knowledge" thread? Pretty ironic there...
What are you going to say next, that you haven't heard the song or something?
<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/0OzWIFX8M-Y?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/0OzWIFX8M-Y?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>
Or that you think the Tower Defense genre comes from anywhere other than the Starcraft fan community? Even Wikipedia somehow gets that one completely wrong...
Quote:Tower Defense games began in 1990 when Atari Games released Rampart.[6] Early tower defense games later began to appear post-1997 in minigames for other platforms, such as Final Fantasy VII. By 2000, maps for StarCraft, Age of Empires II, and WarCraft III were following suit.[7] The first standalone tower defense game for PC was "Master of Defense", released on November 7th of 2005.
Um, no, it started with Starcraft maps, and then spread to Warcraft III later on.
As for FFVII... what? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96_FV60pARE That is not tower defense, your units can move! That's a "units only" RTS, like Myth, Ground Control, etc, except much simpler.
The Rampart comparison is an interesting one, though. TD is definitely very different from Rampart, but perhaps they were inspired by that, a little, I'm not sure... it does have enemy units attacking you and static defenses. Obviously though, the details are quite different. On that note, that made me think of NetStorm... I don't know if I'd ever thought of that, but there are some slight similarities there too, how many RTSes have no moving attack units, only towers? NetStorm is the only one I know of. And NetStorm has bridges you build in the sky with Tetris-like pieces, a little like the walls of Rampart... wow, I wonder if that was an influence, seems quite possible.
Anyway, I don't know where TD came from, other than that it started in Starcraft. Could be any of these, could be none. I don't know what the first TD map was, but I'd be interested to know... the oldest TD maps I have on my hard drive are from October '01, but I'd be surprised if it doesn't go back before that for sure.
Anyway, to my actual point, as I said in that thread -- people can't be expected to know all things, acting like people are stupid just because they don't play the same kinds of games or watch the same kinds of things as you do is silly. They're just uninformed about your interests, like you obviously are about Blizzard RTSes.
Quote:And my problem with Guild Wars is that it's mainly a party-based games, but it doesn't really make it easy to create a party. That's something that Vindictus does really well, getting a party set up and joining a party is really easy and simple. More MMOs should do that, although Vindictus' nature does allow it to streamline things a bit more than some.
It used to be easier to do that in GW than it is now. I do think that I liked Guild Wars the best when there was only one campaign. One effect of adding the three additional campaigns (Factions, Nightfall, Eye of the North) is that the userbase fragmented, so that fewer people were in each area. I didn't have to sit around for long periods of time back then, waiting for a group, like I would now... there were always plenty of people around in mission zones wanting to play. One thing that changed was the added campaigns.
(On that note, the first campaign, Prophecies, is my favorite one. Second would probably be Factions, third EotN, and last Nightfall. I know Factions was probably the least popular one, but I liked it.)
The other thing that changed was, with Nightfall (the second addon), the Hero system. GW had always had Henchmen, AI allies who follow you around and fill your party if you don't have other humans to play with or want to play alone, but Heroes were a whole new level, you have much greater control over them -- you can assign their skillbars from your account's unlocked skillset, give each of them specific move orders, and more. Some basic movement controls for Henchmen were added at the same time, too, to make using them easier as well.
The end result was that suddenly, it became much more possible to solo a LOT more of the game. Groups are still best (or nearly required) for the harder parts, but huge amounts of the game can be soloed by anyone with Heroes and Henchmen. And that's why overall, I think that adding them was sort of a mistake... I always liked exploring exploration zones on my own, with just henchmen, but always did missions with other people. After Nightfall was released, that often became impossible simply because of how many fewer people were still looking for groups.
And it's kind of annoying, because the game really is more fun with player groups, particularly for story missions... exploration is more fun solo (or with someone you know) because you don't really have a goal, but in the story missions, it's more fun with other people. Partially losing that hurt the game, particularly for someone like me who has never played the PvP side of the game that much; apart from occasional plays in the Random Arenas, I've barely touched the rest of the PvP side since launch. In beta I did play the Hall of Heroes sometimes, but after launch that gradually became the domain of strong guilds only, and I was never even remotely in one of those, or interested in joining.
Even so though, it's still easily the second best PC game of the last decade, after only Warcraft III.