My opinions

Boaal

Now I haven't played much recently, butt I have logged on every now and then. I  thought I should try and throw some of my opinions out there. 

 

This game, well it's old, lets start at that and work our way forward.  The original Torque Engine was decent in it's day, there was a nice bit of land you could tna round, but, as is still the thing with torque I gather, anything outside of the realms of FPS' was a considerably difficult task, often needing entire rewrites of the base code to make things work. However, at it's time it was probably the best low cost engine around - the free ones, mainly consisting of Crystal Space and Ogre, were pretty unknown or basic then. They've since come a long way. As has the torque engine, to be fair. Although the price tag has come a long way with it... And they're still clinging to the .dts format which makes everything aggravating to work with, but I digress. 

 

When I first started this game I had a great time. I sunk a lot of time into it, and it was definitely worth the £10 or so that I spent on it. The community on the game has always been fairly small, always been close knit, and this is a big factor of the enjoyment. The game has helped spawn off several other MMO projects due to Prairie games original Side project, a free general package which helped to create rpgs and mmo's in torque. There was always a lot help and good time in the player base and it was easy for newcomers to get into. 

 

The multiclass system was a big draw to the game, it was open and expansive and interesting. There was a lot of potential to be had. Aside from that, you had the monster templates too, which for a long time were little fun, because they hadn't really been factored into the stat points and skill points and everything else, there was a lot of drawbacks to them and they were incredibly underpowered, unless you played from level 1, which i think there were about three templates for that level range, and if you didn't have patience for the skeletons INCREDIBLY SLOW movement speed, and you did't feel like being a miniscule beetle, then you were screwed. They later fixed this, much to the enjoyment of the community. 

 

There was also the lure of the set up of PVP wars, which the game story had overlayed - a forces of light, vs the forces of evil, with some monsters in between, which later turned into a full side, just not one you could play from the start as, all doing battle. The problem with this was that after a while you noticed there really wasn't a war going on. The world felt quite stagnant after a while and everything was very 'rooted' and static. This was a rather nasty break int he immersion.

 

Now I'll go back to the tri-class system, because it was very noticeable after a while, that the system was majorly flawed. it worked, and it was nice, but have three level 100's in one character does something HORRIBLE to MMO games. It overpowers characters like crazy. You noticed this specifically after about level 20, by the time you'd got past the single, dungeon like level they really had that was challenging for it's level. basically after that you had a big world, but no sense of real danger or threat from the monsters.  if something hit hard, you just did what everyone did and used your spell class to kite it while using a haste spell from either the bard or the priest. Simple. And because all these classes were the same strength, there was no weakness in a character. You could solo the game, apart from specific monsters which were designed for groups of players, but were flawed int heir own way, and I'll get to that later. 

 

Basically the whole Massively multiplayer thing died as soon as you could solo everything alone, all you had to do was level up a bit. There was no challenge apart from levelling. The sewers were about the only part of the game which made people come together and form a team. At that level you didn't have the singular strength to deal with everything, so you relied on other people to back you up. Past that point, there was no need. And now I'll come onto the special monsters: they weren't instances, they just sat there, and they weren't special. they were the same templates, the same ai, the same ld monsters, but with a great big health and strength bonus. That was it. Himmolian Chask, the big bad end game guy, you sat there for HOURS just rooting and stunning while casters hit him.  Tanks were redundant, pretty much, because you just needed a speed boost to kill everything. It was boring. Really really boring. 

 

The easy way to avoid overpowering characters, whilst still allowing multiple classes, would simply have been to take a level in anyone of them at each level. Take a skill in that class at the level, etc. This would have given you the ability to make interesting builds, have some balance, and drawn more people together to overcome weaknesses in your character. Balance is important, nevermore so than in a MMORPG. And this was what really destroyed the game, the lack of balance, the lack of need to really play together, the lack of need for partying for 80% of the game. it was a TERRIBLE flaw. And still is. 

 

Furthermore, there were tomes and pots for stats and skills which allowed players to progress a stat or a skill into whatever level you needed it. And again that was fine, but it upset balance. Everythign came down to a huge lack of balance in this game. Whoever had the money to buy and ax their stats and stuff, had the power. That's the end of it. The long and short. 

 

Now Prairie games are coming out with an expansion, allegedly, though it's not really being bet on that we'll ever see it. But I would suggest that they scrap the expansion. Start working on a new game, something similar, minions of Mirth 2 if you want. Choose a new engine, Ogre is a good graphics library now, plenty of great looking games come out of there, same for Crystal Space. Personally i'd go for Unity, because it's pretty damn slick and offers multiple platform solutions easily, no sweat. I'm not sure if they'd have to go for the pro licence, which is pretty expensive, i grant, but I'd say it was worth the investment, it's a whole boat load easier to deal with than Torque 3D. You can build a big world that you like, without all the level loading and barriers in between which are pretty damned annoying, lets' admit., but like I said, dated engine. You can fix up the animations, fix up the collision detection, just fine tune stuff. I'd say you've already got at least part of the groundwork. 

 

Basically the game, as it stands, needs either to be put to rest, to leave stand until such time as time takes it's toll and everyone deserts it. Take away the tri hundred thing, it doesn't work. it's a nice idea, but it fails in practice. Miserably, might I add. There is potential in that company, they did a great thing with limited resources, hats off to them, it was great at it's time, but it's not going to get better without a complete overhaul. And that's just not worth it at this Stage, better to start again.  DO something with the idea of war you've depicted, fix the class system, fix the balancing, give the game a sense of community inside the game, not just in chat, but as a team, as a force, as characters. this nonexistant epic clash of  three armies was always  a big aggravation. Do something with it. Captureable points in locations, or something. make the war and struggle seem real. 

 

That's pretty much where I'm going to leave it. Hope it wasn't too incoherant and messy, but it's a little early int he morning and I should sleep.