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No Guard? Just one planet? That's a tad disappointing. I'll guess we'll have to hope for expansion packs with space battles, then.

There are guard forces, and we've seen what looks like a techpriest character in play, but you're not going to be able to grab a guardsman and run around shooting at Space Marines. Would you really want to? It'd be terrible, so no matter what they were never going to be independant. This is a fine decision--the Guardsmen are little more than Cultists working for the Space Marines anyway, you're not going to get to use tanks.

If they include Guards it would be under the banner of the Imperium of Man, and trying to balance them as an individual faction would be impossible. This way they can say "Space Marines are the main dudes," and offer a few non-marine characters (such as that techpriest or whatnot) to round them out.

Adding the guard would just imbalance the game. "Four playable factions" sounds much more like four individual factions. Laughably, GameTrailers' interview dealing with the game used video from the new Space Marine game--IE, ultramarines. So it's confusing in part because the media doesn't have a lot of answers and is filling in a lot of gaps wrong.

No playable nids, focus on four factions, guardsmen as fluff troops off to the side like cultists--those are all good decisions by my account. I'm sad that we may not have playable tanks, but I don't know if that includes trukks and other vehicles, because we do see motorcycles. Are those unplayable too? If we have playable motorcycles do we have playable trukks? Or will Orkz get some biker boyz as well?

I'd be okay with that. I'd prefer Trukkz and other mid-size squad vehicles as playable and controllable. No playable tanks could literally mean no playable tank or big 'siege units', but that barely-armed transports are okay. So like, Bikes and Rhinos being playable? That'd be what I hope. They don't need to do anything but I'd like the idea of piling into one and going for a ride to the front. However, I do understand why they may not want to design the environments to support free-roaming vehicle access. Not only would it shrink all distances, but it might lead to issues like getting stuck in weird areas, so while it'd be fun to use them freely in "battlefield" zones, I do understand if the rest of the time they're simply Busses that ship you cross zone.

I see what you mean, but I'd still like to play as a Kasrkin or something--Mahreens never really appealed to me that much. But oh well. As for tanks, I wonder if they couldn't simply split up control, like in some other games--e.g. one player is the driver, a gunner for each weapon, etc. That could open up all sorts of possibilities.

Srelex wrote:I see what you mean, but I'd still like to play as a Kasrkin or something--Mahreens never really appealed to me that much. But oh well. As for tanks, I wonder if they couldn't simply split up control, like in some other games--e.g. one player is the driver, a gunner for each weapon, etc. That could open up all sorts of possibilities.

Huge latency problems with that. Fine for FPS multiplayer architecture; not so fine for MMOs. It's doable, but it would require quite a bit of sacrifice in other areas (such as strict region-locked servers, which can split up clans/guilds and prevent Aussies from playing).

vile mon-keigh, I desire the ability to travel the webways, and search out my destiny as an outcast before leveling up to join the brotherhood of the laughing god.

Then I will "Kiss" each and every one of you.

Brother-Captain Gaius wrote: Huge latency problems with that. Fine for FPS multiplayer architecture; not so fine for MMOs. It's doable, but it would require quite a bit of sacrifice in other areas (such as strict region-locked servers, which can split up clans/guilds and prevent Aussies from playing).

WoW has multi driver vehicles. The largest is the siege engine in IoC which has a driver and 3 gunners.

No issues.

Sharp-kun wrote:

Brother-Captain Gaius wrote: Huge latency problems with that. Fine for FPS multiplayer architecture; not so fine for MMOs. It's doable, but it would require quite a bit of sacrifice in other areas (such as strict region-locked servers, which can split up clans/guilds and prevent Aussies from playing).

WoW has multi driver vehicles. The largest is the siege engine in IoC which has a driver and 3 gunners.

No issues.

well at least on my realm/battlegroup Isle of Conquest is so laggy you can barely do anything (well at least was the last time I was there) regardless of where you are, but you're right that there's no special problems with the vehicle system lagwise.

Wow, a MMO actually made multi-user vehicles? Good for WoW! I know they're popular to shit on for being so cravenly corporate, but I like to see them following the money in such interesting ways. That's very good news--a proof of concept like that could be used in a game like this to much greater effect, especially if they shut out the howling masses for a moment to agree on making some instanced areas to house such vehicles. I'm all for open world events but don't instances help reduce lag somewhat?

I may be totally wrong. I simply assumed they did.

My biggest hope so far are that the 4 factions are still un-allied (even if that simply means they are started far enough apart that they don't battle often) and that melee is a bit freeform. I'd also love to drive those trukks and 'coptaz but I won't shed too many tears if that's cut.

Covenant wrote:Wow, a MMO actually made multi-user vehicles? Good for WoW! I know they're popular to shit on for being so cravenly corporate, but I like to see them following the money in such interesting ways. That's very good news--a proof of concept like that could be used in a game like this to much greater effect, especially if they shut out the howling masses for a moment to agree on making some instanced areas to house such vehicles. I'm all for open world events but don't instances help reduce lag somewhat?

Similar Vehicles are also in use at Wintergrasp (an "outdoors" (aka non-instanced) PvP area) and they work just as as fine as everything else, true Isle of Conquest(PvP "battleground"(read:instance)) and Ulduar (PvE raid instance) tend to have less lag then the main world (Wintergrasp is also close to Dalaran that's the main hub in Northrend) but players in vehicles don't suffer from that lag anymore then Mounted players (essentially a buff) or players on foot.

Covenant wrote:Wow, a MMO actually made multi-user vehicles? Good for WoW! I know they're popular to shit on for being so cravenly corporate, but I like to see them following the money in such interesting ways. That's very good news--a proof of concept like that could be used in a game like this to much greater effect, especially if they shut out the howling masses for a moment to agree on making some instanced areas to house such vehicles. I'm all for open world events but don't instances help reduce lag somewhat?

I may be totally wrong. I simply assumed they did.

They do, but one has to take into account where these events will happen. Wintergrasp for WoW takes place in a fucked up area, but they have limited the amount of people that can participate AND there are no more then 25 vehicles at most, so the strain is not nearly as evident.

My biggest hope so far are that the 4 factions are still un-allied (even if that simply means they are started far enough apart that they don't battle often) and that melee is a bit freeform. I'd also love to drive those trukks and 'coptaz but I won't shed too many tears if that's cut.

Fuck yes. Having more then Gud or Evul(Ugly or Cute as the flip side) as my faction choices would be nice fucking change

At least WAR dispensed with the 'Bad guys are ugly' side of things, but yeah, that's all too common.

Multi-user vehicles are doable in high-latency enviroments, since what you're doing is attatching the passenger players to the driver, and giving them some special powers they can fire from time to time. It should have no more trouble than the auto-follow feature, and it wouldn't need to deal with the following player's character, so it's even cheaper.

White Haven wrote:At least WAR dispensed with the 'Bad guys are ugly' side of things, but yeah, that's all too common.

I personally hated the whole "The Horde is evil" notion, specially when Blizzard seemed to cave in to it. All that character building and redemption of the Orcs in WC3 lost to the whine of fanboys. Besides, I think humans make excellent villians, we're so good at it.

Srelex wrote:Hmm. No sign of Eldar, Tau, or 'crons. I predict they'll shove those into expansions, for more moolah.

Admittedly it would be hard to do Necrons as a race. They are (on an individual level) faceless identical emotionless killing machines. Decent high end villians but not player charecters. Maybe a Pariah Class.

Zor

Oskuro wrote:Multi-user vehicles are doable in high-latency enviroments, since what you're doing is attatching the passenger players to the driver, and giving them some special powers they can fire from time to time. It should have no more trouble than the auto-follow feature, and it wouldn't need to deal with the following player's character, so it's even cheaper.

White Haven wrote:At least WAR dispensed with the 'Bad guys are ugly' side of things, but yeah, that's all too common.

I personally hated the whole "The Horde is evil" notion, specially when Blizzard seemed to cave in to it. All that character building and redemption of the Orcs in WC3 lost to the whine of fanboys. Besides, I think humans make excellent villians, we're so good at it.

You mean the poorly done "We're not really evil just misunderstood Klingon-alikes" bullshit they did? It's totally a cop-out for Blizzard; it's entirely possible to have villians that are sympathetic but, you know, still villians. Blizzard just proved that they are unwilling to have a POV character who isn't a good guy so they totally fucked over the awesome "Pirate Barbarian" image of the first two games in exchange for a lame attempt at noble savage.